Some Desperate Glory (9 page)

The Antwerp fiasco had shown the Royal Naval Division's lack of training, so Brooke was dispatched to Blandford camp in Dorset, with a gilded group that again included Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister's son. Brooke sent his war sonnets, which had been finished just after Christmas, to
New Numbers
, the Dymock poets' magazine, where they were welcomed by the editor Wilfred Gibson. Reading the proofs, Brooke thought them ‘rough': ‘The Soldier' ‘good', with ‘The Dead' the best.

In February he stayed at 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister's daughter Violet ministered to his bad cold. Later that month the Royal Naval Division was inspected by the King and Brooke told the adoring Violet Asquith, ‘I've never been quite so happy in my life, I think. Not quite so pervasively happy: like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.' He and his comrades might fight on the plains of Troy or land on Lesbos and fire shells at Hero's Tower. The Division sailed from Avonmouth on 28 February 1915. By 1 March it had reached the rough waters of the Bay of Biscay.

Ivor Gurney enlisted in February 1915, hoping that the army might jolt him out of his mental confusion. In March, Isaac Rosenberg arrived back in London from South Africa. In the rush of leaving Cape Town, many of his paintings fell into the sea, having been insecurely attached to his luggage. Such a loss was a bad start to his journey towards war.

Rosenberg resumed his old Whitechapel life, with artists and writers, most of whom shunned the war. In May 1915, his pacifism led to a scornful poem about the German sinking of the ocean liner
Lusitania
with the loss of some 1,200 lives; in June the first draft of his verse drama ‘Moses' shows how war transforms individual freedom into a kind of slavery. That month he posted copies of his privately printed poems entitled
Youth
(paid for by Marsh) to people whom he thought were influential.

Rosenberg told his new patron Sydney Schiff that the war was less to him than his own struggle to exist. He admitted that his literary technique was clumsy but wondered if he could get some writing about art published. There was now a new way of earning money: ‘I am thinking of enlisting if they will have me, though it is against all my principles of justice – though I would be doing the most criminal thing a man can do – I am so sure my mother would not stand the shock that I don't know what to do.'

That summer another poet was in the East End, near where the Rosenbergs lived. Wilfred Owen, also thinking of enlisting (‘
I now do most intensely want to fight
'), had been at a commercial fair in London on behalf of a Bordeaux scent manufacturer. Owen told his mother how, thinking ‘a little ugliness would be refreshing', he'd walked down Fenchurch Street into Whitechapel Road. How wrong he'd been, for ‘I never saw such beauty, in two hours, before that Saturday night. The Jews are a delightful people, at home, & that night I re-read some Old Testament with a marvellous great sympathy and cordiality.'

Owen's move towards war was linked to poetry. He told his mother in December 1914, from Bordeaux, ‘Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! I do not know in what else England is greatly superior, or dearer to me, than another land and people…' By February 1915, when dangers in the Channel still kept him in France, he was sure of his destiny. That month Owen wrote, again to his mother, always his greatest confidante, ‘I seem without a footing in life; but I have one. It is as bold as any, and I have kept it for years. For years now. I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.'

After the commercial fair, he went back to Bordeaux where the scent manufacturer asked him to be the firm's agent in the Middle East when the fighting ended. Owen resumed his tutoring work, thinking now of the Artists' Rifles or, if that failed, the Italian cavalry. His French pupils set off for an English boarding school in September 1915. On 21 October, aged twenty-two, Wilfred Owen joined the Artists' Rifles. In November he was in the Poetry Book-shop, buying a copy of the posthumous edition of Rupert Brooke's poems.

Brooke had become an even greater sensation in death than in life.

The sense of worthwhile sacrifice was needed. The retreat of August and September 1914, the death toll at Ypres, the stalemate in the trenches, had drained hope. Brooke's reputation had soared when Dean Inge of St Paul's read out the whole of ‘The Soldier' in an Easter sermon that was delayed by a man standing up and speaking against the war. Inge took his text from the book of the prophet Isaiah (‘thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust') and then moved on to Brooke's sonnet, the work (he said) of ‘a young writer who would … take rank with our great poets'. The Dean praised this ‘enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism', even if it wasn't quite Christian to suggest that a soul survived only as ‘a pulse in the eternal mind'.

Rupert Brooke, on Easter Sunday 1915, was already a sick man. He'd become ill, perhaps from sunstroke, in Egypt, where the expedition had stopped on its way to the Dardanelles. The force's commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, came to see the poet, offering him a staff appointment – which Brooke refused. Hamilton told Brooke's senior officer, ‘Mind you take care of him. His loss would be a national one,' and wrote in his diary of the invalid's ‘knightly presence, stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet'. Brooke ignored the suggestion that he stay in Egypt to recover and embarked with the force, resuming light duties on the ship.

A review in
The
Times
praising the sonnets reached him and he thought it ‘unperceptive'. Marsh sent an account of Dean Inge's sermon (the poet joked that he was sorry Inge didn't think him as good as Isaiah) and Henry James's appreciation of the poet's ‘happy force and truth' that shone through some ‘hackneyed' rhymes and clumsy phrasing. As the ship sailed among the Greek islands, officers read Homer and walked in olive groves on Skyros, with Brooke struggling to keep up.
New Numbers
was selling out, the paper shortage making further printing impossible. Brooke's lip began to swell, from a mosquito bite whose effect had been latent since Port Said. His temperature soared and he was transferred to a French hospital ship. Telegrams were sent. The Admiralty contacted his mother.

Rupert Brooke died on 23 April and was buried that night on Skyros. An obituary appeared in
The
Times
, under Winston Churchill's name but written by Marsh, that praised Brooke's ‘very incomparable war sonnets', his sacrificial nobility and his courage. A last poem, found in manuscript, was more measured, more grimly foreboding: more appropriate also. By the end of June 1915, Brooke's battalion had lost eleven of its fifteen officers; only two of the five men who'd piled stones on the grave at Skyros were alive at the war's end. The attempt to force the Straits was disastrous, with troops pinned down on the beaches by the Turkish defenders after inept tactics and delay. The withdrawal began in December. Churchill's reputation sank. Hamilton was never given battle command again.

At first even those who'd scorned Brooke's emotional patriotism mourned: Maynard Keynes wept; D. H. Lawrence, who loathed the war, thought the death ‘like madness'; the Dymock poets let loose verses by (among others) Abercrombie and Gibson; Robert Nichols, who'd met Brooke briefly, wrote an elegy (‘Begin, O guns, your giant requiem / Over my lovely friend the Fiend has slain'). Eddie Marsh, devastated, began preparing
1914 and Other Poems
, to be published in June.

Then the fight against the myth began. There were early doubters among the poets. Isaac Rosenberg disliked the exultant language. To Sorley, Brooke's earlier, lighter poems were better, for the sonnets appeared too sentimental, ‘far too obsessed with his own sacrifice', with ‘preserving his own world'.

Phrases have lasted, if only as historical curiosities: ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping', ‘the red sweet wine of youth' and all of ‘The Soldier', one of the most quoted poems of the twentieth century. Thomas Hardy had, in ‘Drummer Hodge', written earlier of a British soldier who'd been killed in the Boer War and buried in ‘an unknown plain' that ‘will Hodge for ever be'; Brooke made the idea more sentimental, even strangely ideal. Throughout the sonnets there's a sense, as with many of the poets, that it's the land that is loved rather than contemporary England, or Britain, where Brooke had often felt unhappy and desperate.

In May, Edward Dent, who'd admired (perhaps loved) the earlier sardonic and witty Brooke, was publicly critical in the
Cambridge Magazine
. Dent – a sharp, cynical and brilliant Cambridge scholar of music – condemned the way that the ‘romanticism he so hated came uppermost'. In August, E. M. Forster, who'd known Brooke at Cambridge, thought the sonnets ‘inspired by romantic thoughts about war, not by his knowledge of it'. Brooke had been, Forster thought, ‘essentially hard', although ‘as charming an acquaintance as one could desire'. Like Dent, Forster looked back to the rebel, to the Fabian and admirer of Donne, the satirist and the cynic; how absurd it was that Brooke should go down as ‘a sort of St Sebastian, haloed by the Dean of St Paul's, and hymned by the Morning Post as the evangelist of anti-Germanism … how he would hate it, or rather laugh at it'. Such sentiments horrified Brooke's mother. Hadn't her son returned to her values, to the spirit of Rugby?

Julian Grenfell read ‘The Soldier', telling his mother on 7 March 1915, ‘I got Brooke's poem, and liked it very much –
awfully
', and sent her one of his own poems. Grenfell had mocked the idea of the Dardanelles expedition. Would it be better, he joked on 14 March, ‘to disguise the Cavalry Corps as reindeer and to send them up by Norway, and in that way?' His brother Billy was now at the front, having joined up on 7 August 1914 and become a second lieutenant within a week.

Like Brooke, Julian Grenfell was offered a job on the staff of a general, a friend of his parents; like Brooke, he refused. While out of the line, he went to a boxing match in a town hall near Ypres, challenged anyone there, took on a huge man who'd been a professional boxer, and laid him out, giving his mother a detailed description of the fight. Grenfell was shocked by the destruction inflicted on Ypres and the high prices, amused that the girls said they had never had so much pleasure. Then came the trenches for five days, only fifty yards from the Germans, although quite quiet. ‘You should have seen our men setting out from here for the trenches – absolutely radiant with excitement and joy to be getting back to the fight.'

He yearned for more solitary adventures: ‘I wish they'd let me go and fight the Bosches on my own…' At this time he wrote ‘A Prayer for Those on the Staff', a mockery of those who were out of the fighting. A big attack was said to be planned for the spring. Grenfell doubted that the German lines could be broken. The Germans themselves had failed earlier at Ypres, with their greater artillery and shell power.

A diary begun in March shows more doubt than the letters: sex in Ypres (‘a very hot day for me'), birdsong in the woods, leaving the front line (‘although I like trenches, I love getting back'); fear after bombs and noise, so ‘petrified' that he ‘lost self-control'. Julian Grenfell's battalion stood in reserve near La Bassée during a British attack in March which led to 4,000 casualties. He went on leave to Paris in April, a ‘divine' city whose people seemed so light-hearted, more natural than the British, real ‘artists in fun': ‘the biggest experience of New Things I've ever had in my life'. A photograph of a Parisian girl – Peggy – was found later in his wallet.

That month a German attack forestalled an Allied spring offensive, bringing the action that Grenfell had craved. The Germans used gas for the first time; French troops, terrified, fled; the next attack, against the Canadians, found the defenders prepared; and German awe at gas's success left them uncertain of what to do next. Shelling destroyed much of Ypres and reduced the salient held by the Allies. British counter-attacks kept the city from the Germans, at a high cost. The British had some 58,000 casualties against the German losses of 38,000.

Grenfell's detachment moved east of Poperinge, near Ypres, on 24 April. It was very cold at first before the weather changed to a warm spring. The poets learned those Flemish names – Poperinge, Vlamertinge, the Menin Road, Passchendaele – and also came to know the flat country where a mound or a sheltering coppice gave great advantage. On 29 April, Grenfell's brigade rested in a field near Poperinge. Billeted in a farmhouse, he had ‘wonderful sunny lazy days' sleeping outside to the sound of nightingales yet still ‘longing to be up and doing something'. That day he noted, ‘Wrote poem – Into Battle': a poem that glorifies courage, romantically linking it to the earth's spring and human and animal beauty. This was the passion of Grenfell's war. It seems true, then ends in ambiguity with a Death that alternately ‘moans and sings'. Seeking her approval (for the war had ended Julian Grenfell's rebellion), he sent ‘Into Battle' to his mother, saying that she could try to get the poem published. The regiment moved up to the second line of trenches, near Ypres.

Grenfell was on a small hill when he was knocked over by a shell blast. Recovering, he volunteered to take a message to the commander of troops in front of him, whom he approached, saying, ‘You once gave me a mount with the Belvoir Hounds.' He was walking later on the same hill with a general when a shell landed near them and both were hit, Grenfell seriously.