Forever England (25 page)
Authors: Mike Read
My dear Jacques
You mustn't get excited. I asked Eddie about interpreters' jobs. He didn't seem to think anyone was wanted just now. He promised to keep you in mind ⦠One can't âgo and fight' in England.
Volunteers are admitted neither to the navy nor the army. If we join the Territorials now, they give you six months' training, and then let you garrison the chief ports and sea towns, if the Expeditionary Force leaves England â It
might
be worth doingâ¦
The village from which Brooke was writing was a major English sea port in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but by 1914 had not been ânext-the-sea' for nearly 300 years. Rupert's stay at Cley was, of course, dominated by the unnerving uncertainty of the future. To Frances he confessed, âThe best possible thing that could happen for her [Ka] is that I should be blown to bits by a shell. Then she should marry someone else and be happy.' In the evenings at Umgeni and Umtata, Rupert talked of the South Seas, his concern for Dudley Ward, who was living in Berlin, and Walter de la Mare, whom he declared was probably the best of his contemporaries. By day, he swam in the cold waters of the North Sea, which was a brisk walk over the reed marshes from where he was staying, and entertained the Cornfords' infant daughter Helena with his humorous antics.
Rupert was still at Cley the following weekend, writing to Cathleen Nesbitt on Saturday 8 August:
[T]he papers report that Dudley Ward had rather a bad time in Berlin. He nearly got mobbed ⦠Oh, my dear, I wish I were with you ⦠I feel dazed and troubled these days. The general uneasiness and tension of minds seems to take all the strength out of me.
On 10 May, his restlessness roused him into returning to London, where Eddie would have his finger on the pulse of the latest war news.
At the little Norfolk village, things were much the same. Frances
admitted in a letter to Brooke that she couldn't believe that Britain was actually at war, as âthe sea and the pebbles are so exactly the same'.
Today, Umgeni and Umtata remain the first port of call for the biting Siberian winds coming off the North Sea, and are among the first houses in the firing line when the ocean breaches the sea defences and races across the reed marshes. And here, coincidentally, lives Peter Ward, son of Brooke's great friend Dudley: a Cley resident now for over forty years.
B
Y
12
AUGUST
Rupert was back in London at Raymond Buildings with Eddie Marsh. From there he met and communicated with Eileen Wellesley:
I find myself in two natures â not necessarily conflicting, but â different. There's half of my heart which is normal and English ⦠what's the word, not quite âgood' or âhonourable' â âstraight' I think ⦠but the other half is a wanderer and a solitary, selfish, unbound and doubtful. Half of my heart is of England, the rest
is looking for some home I haven't found yet. So when this war broke out, there was some part of my nature and desires that said let me alone â what's all this bother? I want to work. I've got ends I desire to reach. If I'd wanted to be a soldier I should have been one. But I've found myself other dreams ⦠I feel so damnably incapable. I can't fly or drive a car or ride a horse sufficiently wellâ¦
Before heading back to Rugby to break it to his mother that he felt it was his duty to go and fight, he gave a reading of his poems at Harold Monro's bookshop in London. Perhaps it put him back in the poetic mood, moving him to write a poem from Bilton Road, which he intended to call âUnpacking', âContemplation' or âThe Shore'. In the end it would become âThe Treasure', published in
1914 and Other Poems
.
When colour goes home into the eyes,
And lights that shine are shut again,
With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries
Behind the gateways of the brain;
And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close
The rainbow and the rose â
Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them; as a mother, who
Has watched her children all the rich day through,
Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
When children sleep, ere night.
During the third week of August, Rupert was ill and in bed at 10 Downing Street, being looked after by the Asquiths, and getting up only to meet Henry James and Eileen Wellesley. After recovering, he caught a train to Great Yarmouth to see Cathleen, who was on tour, before retreating to London. Here he went to the first night of
Outcasts
at Wyndham's Theatre with Eddie. His favourite from
Hullo, Rag-Time!
, Ethel Levey, was in it, but Rupert thought the play foolish, apart from the fact that
New Numbers
was used as a prop on stage, much to his delight. He turned down an invitation from Ka to go and stay for the weekend, âthrough me you have been greatly hurt, and two or three years of your life â which can be so wonderful â have been changed and damaged. And I'm terrible ashamed before you.' He was still in touch with Noel, but there, at least, there was no broken heart, or so it would seem.
Eddie Marsh recommended Rupert and Denis Browne for a new unit that was being formed, the Royal Naval Division. The Division would comprise Royal Marines, the Naval Reserve and other seamen. Through his position at the Admiralty Marsh was able to organise things so that no interview or official forms would be necessary. Brooke and Browne were enrolled as sub-lieutenants of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve attached to His Majesty's ship
Victory
. By mid-September, Rupert was preparing for life at camp, which would be nothing new to him â and in a way he was looking forward to it. He wrote a self-deprecating letter to Eileen:
Oh I'm rather a horror. A vagabond, drifting from one imbecility to another. You don't know how pointless and undependable
and rather rotten a thing you've got hold of. Don't laugh. I know it's funny. But it's all true. Well, child, if you're happy with me; that's something, isn't it? I'm certainly happy with youâ¦
Similar sentiments were expressed in a letter to Cathleen, written at the same time: âCathleen, if you
knew
how much I adore you, and fight towards you. I want to cut away all the evil in me, and be wholly a thing worthy of you.' He also confided some of Churchill's war strategy:
Winston was very cheerful at lunch, and said one thing which is exciting, but a
dead
secret. You mustn't
breathe
it. That is, that it's his game to hold the Northern Ports â Dunkirk to Havre â at all costs ⦠so we may go to camp on Saturday, and be under fire in France on Monday!
Cathleen later recalled:
I don't think it was, in a sense, so much an escape, as an odd fulfilment that he didn't have to think about what he was doing with his life, because I think he took very seriously what one ought to do. He was a great believer in goodness and solidity, and he felt he hadn't been either a good or solid person. He exaggerated of course when he wrote, but so many of the letters I got from the South Seas in which he said âI need something to hold on to' and âI don't live up to myself ' and âI'm only half a person' ⦠strange things like that, which allowing for 50 per cent exaggeration, was still I think, a kind of not quite certain of where he was going.
On his penultimate day as a civilian, Rupert had lunch with Eddie and the new Poet Laureate Robert Bridges before departing from
Charing Cross with Denis Browne, Eddie seeing off the two new recruits to the Anson Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade. At the camp at Betteshanger Park, about 3 miles inland from Deal on the Kent coast, Brooke became sub-lieutenant in command of the 15th Platoon, D Company, with thirty-five men under him. Rupert's brother Alfred was also an officer, in the Active Service Battalion of the Post Office Rifles. Suddenly socialising, life, plans and romance were put on hold for everyone. Eddie was now at Winston's side for sixteen hours a day, all thoughts of a new edition of
Georgian Poetry
set aside indefinitely. At camp, probably as a little occupational therapy, Rupert worked on two sonnets that would subsequently be lost in Belgium, and wrote to Cathleen and Eileen. To the latter he described ârows of naked, superb men, bathing in a September sun or in the camp at night under a full moon, front lights burning through the ghostly tents, and a distant bugler blowing lights out â if only I were sensitive. But I am not. I'm a warrior â¦'
The call to action came on Sunday 4 October. The Battalion marched the 7 or 8 miles south to Dover, being cheered by the locals and singing the platoon's theme song âHello, Who's Your Lady Friend?'. They were to relieve the Belgians at Antwerp. He captured the atmosphere in a letter to Cathleen on his return.
After dark the senior officers rushed round and informed us that we were to be going to Antwerp, that our train was sure to be attacked, and that if we got through we'd have to sit in trenches till we were wiped out. So we all sat under lights writing last letters: a very tragic and amusing affair. My dear it
did
bring it home to me how very futile and unfinished life was. I felt so angry. I had to imagine, supposing I was killed. There was nothing but a vague gesture of goodbye to you and my mother
and a friend or two ⦠we stopped in the town square in Vieux Dieu; five or six thousand British troops, a lot of Belgians, guns going through, transport wagons, motor-cyclists, orderlies on horses, staff-officers, and the rest. An extraordinary and thrilling confusionâ¦
He and his troops bedded down in an ornamental garden, while shells burst around them and over their heads, before being ordered to relieve the Belgians in trenches at Fort Seven. They sat in the trenches waiting for orders, but eventually, the German bombardment having caused so much destruction, the order came to retreat. Rupert had to retreat without his kit bag containing field glasses given him by E. M. Forster, and draft manuscripts, as the local station at Wylrich had been destroyed, with his and most of the brigade's belongings. He was later to describe the retreat in a letter to Leonard Bacon, whom he had met in San Francisco:
Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and handcarts and perambulators and wagons, moving with infinite slowness out of the night, two unending lines of them, the old men mostly weeping, the women with white, hard drawn faces, the children playing or crying or sleeping. That's what Belgium is now: the country where three civilians have been killed to every one soldier ⦠half a million people preferred homelessness and the chance of starvation, to the certainty of German rule. It's queer to think one has been a witness to one of the greatest crimes of history ⦠It's a bloody thing, half of the youth of Europe blown through pain to nothingness, in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battlesâ¦
To Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg he wrote:
There's nothing to say except that the tragedy of Belgium is the greatest and worst of any country for centuries. It's ghastly for anyone who liked Germany as well as I did. Their guilt can never be washed away. I'm afraid fifty years won't give the continuity and loveliness of life back again.
He also asked Browne to try and send him a new pair of field glasses, as none were to be had in England. Browne himself did not have the money to help, but assistance came from the Marchesa Capponi, who forwarded a pair of her own to Rupert.
Back in London, Rupert, and Arthur âOc' Asquith, the Prime Minister's son, were taken by Eddie Marsh to report on the fall of Antwerp. Before returning to camp, he saw J. Hartley Manners' play
Peg o' My Heart
at the Comedy Theatre and attended a play reading at the home of Bryn Olivier and her husband Hugh Popham. It was his last known meeting with Noel. He then travelled to the east coast to see Cathleen:
The last time I saw him was before he went abroad, and I was touring and I was in Yarmouth, the theatre called the Aquarium, and we went back to my lodgings and there was a fire of logs, sea logs, and we just sat there and talked for a while and he said, âRead me something quite beautiful', and I read Donne's âAnniversarie', and then there's that lovely thing:
Here upon earth, we are Kings, and none but wee
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects beeâ¦
Who is so safe as we? Where none can doe
Treason to us, except one of us two.
So I read it right through to the end. Then about three days later, he sent me the first copy of the sonnets, and one of them was
called âSafety', and he said âYou don't mind my printing ours, because it's private, nobody knows it's ours', and then he said: âI'm a little ashamed of writing poetry in a soldier's uniform. I feel it isn't right somehow, but Philip Sidney did it', and then he sent me the galley sheet, with one or two corrections on itâ¦
In âSafety', he incorporated the âWho is so safe as we?' line that Donne had written in the 1590s.
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world at rest,
And heard our word, âWho is so safe as we?'
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death's endeavour,
Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
Back at Betteshanger Camp, he heard a whisper from Denis Browne that the Old Vicarage was to be pulled down, prompting him to put pen to paper and write to Francis Cornford to see if the rumour were true, and, if so, if anything could be done to save it. He made noises
about the possibility of buying the land, or at least getting someone to paint a picture of it or a local photographer to capture it for posterity. He wrote to Ka, asking her to send toilet paper, a tin mug with a handle and some sweet scented soap, among other things. A few days later, the battalion was moved to Chatham Barracks, where he heard the good news that the Old Vicarage would be spared, and vowed to buy it after the war. By the end of May 1914, however, the freehold of the Old Vicarage, the Orchard and other property belonging to the family of the late Samuel Page Widnall had been sold. The Stephensons, until then the tenants of the Orchard, had bought it outright, along with the Old Vicarage, with the Neeve family staying on there as tenants until after the First World War. Possibly the new owners' idea had been to demolish the house next door, in order to extend the tea garden down to the bank of the Granta.
He wrote from Chatham to E. J. Dent:
In the room where I write are some twenty men. All but one or two have risked their lives a dozen times in the last month. More than half have gone down in torpedoed ships and have been saved sans their best friends. They're waiting for another ship. I feel very small among themâ¦
In another letter to Leonard Bacon he commented:
All my friends but a few are training or serving. One or two have been killed. Others wounded and are going back. The best great scholar of the younger generation at Cambridge, Cornford, is a musketry instructor at Aldershot. Among my fellow officers are one of the best young English pianists, and a brilliant composer. Gilbert Murry gets up every morning to line a hedgerow, gun in hand, before dawn. What a world! Yet I'm still half ashamed
of England, when I hear of the holocaust of the young poets, painters and scholars of France and Belgium â and Germanyâ¦
