Thomas Osbert Mordaunt

Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730–1809), a British officer and poet, is best remembered for his oft-quoted poem "The Call", written during the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763:

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! Throughout the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name."

For many years, the poem was incorrectly attributed to Mordaunt's contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. Scott had merely quoted a stanza of the poem at the beginning of Chapter 34 of his novel Old Mortality.

One Crowded Hour, Tim Bowden's biography about the Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis, takes its title from a phrase used in "The Call".