Historic Central Junior High School in Lawrence, Kansas, (formerly Memorial High School) was built as a memorial to the former students from Lawrence who died in World War I. Inspired by an inscription above the school's stage, director Kevin Hart commissioned "All That They Had They Gave" as part of a project to highlight the history and memorial aspect of the school.
The lines above the stage (in bold below) are from a longer poem by Rudyard Kipling. A contemporary poet of the time, Kipling wrote "he King's Pilgrimage" about King George's journey in May 1922 to visit the WWI cemeteries and memorials being constructed in France and Belgium by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The king's journey was part of a wider movement in which tens of thousands of grieving relatives from the United Kingdom visited the war battlefields in the years after the Armistice.
