"dice with death" antedatings

[Jonathan Lighter]

OED has this cliche' from 1941. The quote below is from Google Books, but WorldCat verifies the book's date:

  1912 Frank Fox _Problems of the Pacific_ (London: Williams & Norgate) 121: No men have finer nerves, greater courage. They must dice with Death for their lives, time and again staking all on their endurance, and on the chance of the next water hole [etc.].

  Be that as it may, the Irish economist and politician T. M. Kettle, who enlisted in the British Army in 1914, wrote a poem ("To My Daughter, the Gift of God") that still appears in anthologies of a certain sort:

  1916 T. M. Kettle _Poems and Parodies_ (Dublin: Talbot)15: You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,/ To dice with death...while the mad guns curse overhead.

  To "play/ throw/ rattle/ shoot dice with death" all (I think) can be found earlier.

  JL


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