As afternoon descended aboard the deck of the Duguay- Trouin, a French hospital ship anchored in Trebuki Bay near the Greek island of Scyros, Arthur Asquith and Denis Browne faced a decision. Their good friend and fellow officer Rupert Brooke had just died of a blood infection, the only patient aboard an eerily quiet French hospital ship awaiting casualties from what everyone agreed was sure to be a great battle, set to commence the following day. Asquith's and Browne's division was under orders to set sail for Gallipoli at 6 a.m.: ‘Our escorting battleships open fire on the Turks at 5 a.m.’

Both agreed that Brooke would not have wanted to be buried at sea, and decided to take him to the island of Scyros. They had support from on high; Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had followed Brooke's deterioration from London. He sent a telegram to Major John Churchill to encourage him to attend the funeral as his representative. He was too late, but Major Churchill wrote back, reassuring him that ‘poor Rupert Brooke’ had had a ‘most romantic funeral’. Even General Sir Ian Hamilton, responsible for overseeing the Gallipoli landings, paused to reflect: ‘Alas, what a misfortune! … He was bound, he said, to see this first fight through with his fellows’.

Churchill's private secretary and Brooke's close friend, Edward Marsh, had already contacted Brooke's mother, Mary, to inform her of the situation. In Rugby, she grieved the death of her second son; Richard, the eldest, had died of pneumonia in 1907, followed by his father a few years later. Mary's tragedy would soon be compounded when her youngest son, Alfred, was killed in action near Loos in June 1915, less than two months after the death of his by then famous brother.

Browne went ahead with another fellow officer and friend, Charles Lister, to Scyros with the digging party comprised of men from the Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division. They set to work on an inland grave nestled picturesquely in a grove of olive trees; ironically, Brooke had sketched sections of the hill where he was buried just a few days before his death.