The Ode is taken from the elegy For The Fallen, by English poet and writer Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) and was published in London in The Winnowing Fan; Poems of the Great War in 1914. It was selected in 1919 to accompany the unveiling of the London Cenotaph and, like so many memorial traditions, passed into common use across the Commonwealth.
The fourth verse, which became the League’s Ode, was already used in association with commemoration services in Australia in 1921 and not only adorns War Memorials throughout the British Commonwealth, but is at the heart of all rites of the RSL.