As a student at King’s College, Cambridge before the war, Békássy competed with Rupert Brooke for the affections of Noël Olivier and was a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. When the First World War broke out in August of 1914, it was Keynes who helped Békássy to return to Austria-Hungary, where he enlisted as a Hussar. Battling against Russian troops on the Eastern Front, Békássy was killed on June 22, 1915, just four days after arriving at the front lines. He was twenty-two years old. His poetry was published in 1925 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in the small volume Adriatic and Other Poems.