COMING HOME: The coffin bearing Roberts was one of 11 brought back to an R.A.F. base in Oxfordshire last week
The flag that hung half-mast today
Seemed animate with being
As if it knew for whom it flew
And will no more be seeing.
The British poet laureate John Betjeman, who wrote those lines in 1966, lies buried in the graveyard of the 12th century Church of St. Enodoc in Cornwall. Just a few kilometers away, in the small town of Wadebridge, the flags are hanging low and animated for Sergeant Steven Roberts, who was 33 when he became the first British soldier to die in combat in Iraq....
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