ABSTRACT
The Great War found its Byron when, in 1915, Rupert Brooke succumbed to disease on his way to confound the Turk. Hankey, mortally wounded a year-and-a-half later, became the war’s Sir Philip Sidney. Like Brooke before him, Hankey was swiftly placed upon a literary pedestal, and presented as an incarnation of youthful self-sacrifice and forfeit of promise. A myth was fashioned for him, the origins of which lay in a frequently reprinted tribute from Strachey that inspired wide, if patchily accurate newspaper interpretations of Hankey’s life and death.
