Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915, but developed severe gastroenteritis whilst stationed in Egypt followed by streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. French surgeons carried out two operations to drain the abscess, but he died of septicaemia at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli. He was 27 at the time of his death. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros.[1][7][25] The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:[26]
I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.
Another friend and war poet, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, assisted at his hurried funeral.[27] His grave remains there still, with a monument erected by his friend Stanley Casson,[28] poet and archaeologist, who, in 1921, published Rupert Brooke and Skyros, a "quiet essay", illustrated with woodcuts by Phyllis Gardner.[29]
Brooke's surviving brother, William Alfred Cotterill Brooke, fell in action on the Western Front on 14 June 1915 as a subaltern with the 1/8th (City of London) of the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles), at the age of 24. He had been in France on active service for nineteen days before his death. His body was buried in Fosse 7 Military Cemetery (Quality Street), Mazingarbe.[30]
In July 1917, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby was informed of the death in action of his son Michael Allenby, leading to Allenby's breakdown in tears in public while he recited a poem by Rupert Brooke.
