John Maxwell Edmonds

John Maxwell Edmonds (21 January 1875 – 18 March 1958) was an English classicist, poet and dramatist and the author of several celebrated martial epitaphs.

His father was a schoolmaster and later the vicar of Great Gransden, Huntingdonshire, while his mother was the daughter of a self-made Cornish cloth manufacturer.

He was the author of an item in The Times, 6 February 1918, page 7, headed "Four Epitaphs" composed for graves and memorials to those fallen in battle – each covering different situations of death.

There has been some confusion between 'Went the day well' and Edmonds’ other famous epitaph published in the same 1919 edition of inscriptions:[2] When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrows these gave their today.

Edmonds was also responsible for translating into Greek elegiacs A. E. Housman's “Epitaph on an army of mercenaries”, a tribute to the British Expeditionary Force on the third anniversary of the battle of Ypres, which appeared in The Times on 31 October 1917.