For King and country

My great-grandfather, a career Royal Marine, was forty-three at the outbreak of the Great War. Being in the Royal Fleet Reserve he was called up, and I wonder whether this photograph was taken just before he left for active service.
I find the expressions in the photo fascinating. There he is, standing beside his elder son, both with ( to me anyway ) a look of resolution and pride.
Look at the two in front though. His younger son seems apprehensive about what's ahead of Dad.
And his wife, my maternal grandmother's mother ?
Not pride, I think. Just fear for her husband's future, and dread that her sons might grow up fatherless.
With great courage, he survived the war and came back to his family. It was the younger boy who was to die just five years after the war ended, when the merchant ship he was serving his apprenticeship on was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean.

Better viewed large.