When on 3 April 1943 he went down with his Halifax bomber during a Royal Air Force raid over Essen, Germany, Bertram Warr was twenty-five years old. The Times Literary Supplement, surprisingly, ran an obituary, which was as much a tribute to his pluck as it was to his poetry. Warr had published only one broadsheet of fourteen poems. Yet A Little Onwards (London: Favil, 1941), and only thirty-five other poems survive which are hardly enough to ensure him a lasting reputation.

As a poet Warr was often unsure of himself, struggling to handle themes without falling back on outworn conventions. The war poems are without the exhilaration of those of Rupert Brooke. They lack the irony and understatement of Robert Graves, the rich symbolic transmutations of Isaac Rosenberg, the vivid documentations of Edmund Blunden and Wilfred Owen, and the satirical finesse of Siegfried Sassoon. They are, however, faithful representations of...