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Shepperson Memorial

To make them give him information
On concepts, cults and copulation,
He does not like his fellow man,
And does the very best he can
To leave the awful folk at home
And in some far-off land to roam
Where he may find the noble savage
Ignobled by the white man’s ravage
Of gewgaws, guns and gonorrhoea.
And when he catches diarrhoea
Finds that he’s lots of time to sit
And ponder on the point of it.
And so this closely-closeted Crusoe
Parts company with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In finding that the social contract
Has been replaced by culture contact.

Lt. Shepperson in Burma with rifle in George Shepperson attending a
hand guarding a ‘captured’ coconut, 1944. Burma Star Association VJ Day
parade at Peterborough Cathedral.

During late August and early September 1944, at the age of twenty-two while
th
serving in Burma as a platoon commander with the 13 (Nyasaland) Battalion of the
King’s African Rifles, George wrote two most prescient poems: The Japanese Dead at
Tamu, Burma, 1944 and The Buddhas at Tamu.
The latter and shorter of the two poems reads:

“O Burmese Buddha brooding still, though Time has proved
The Great Tormentor with his scourge of war:
Weep not, though ruins rise where you have ruminated.
So goes the world. The patient plan and purify;
Destroyers come and all things putrefy.
Your kind must conquer. You must heal their wounds and salve
Their sores; must prove the purger of the age-old pain.
Brood on, and breed and build, to bring forth bounty
Of power, and Time become a liberator
Of life and love, hope build on more than hope, and men
Reshape their world and ways and life bring forth its beauty.”

These poems were undoubtedly stimulated by the horror of bearing witness to
hundreds of dead Japanese soldiers at Tamu, some sprawled around the bases of the
aforementioned stone Buddhas, as if frozen in some final grotesque act of supplication.
In a note accompanying copies of these poems, which George distributed to a few
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