Forever England

by Mike Read

  What have I done for you,

  England, my England?

  What is there I would not do,

  England, my own?

  With your glorious eyes austere,

  As the Lord were walking near,

  Whispering terrible things and dear

  As the Song on your bugles blown,

  England –

  Round the world on your bugles blown!

  Where shall the watchful Sun,

  England, my England,

  Match the master-work you’ve done,

  England, my own?

  When shall he rejoice agen

  Such a breed of mighty men

  As come forward, one to ten,

  To the Song on your bugles blown,

  England –

  Down the years on your bugles blown?

  Ever the faith endures,

  England, my England: –

  ‘Take and break us: we are yours,

  England, my own!

  Life is good, and joy runs high

  Between English earth and sky:

  Death is death; but shall we die

  To the Song on your bugles blown,

  England –

  To the stars on your bugles blown!’

  They call you proud and hard,

  England, my England:

  You with worlds to watch and ward,

  England, my own!

  You whose mailed hand keeps the keys

  Of such teeming destinies

  You could know nor dread nor ease

  Were the Song on your bugles blown,

  England,

  Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

  Mother of Ships whose might,

  England, my England,

  Is the fierce old Sea’s delight,

  England, my own,

  Chosen daughter of the Lord,

  Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient sword,

  There’s the menace of the Word

  In the Song on your bugles blown,

  England –

  Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

  Brooke’s poem was originally entitled ‘The Slain’.

  The Dead

  Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!

  There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,

  But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

  These laid the world away; poured out the red

  Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

  Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,

  That men call age; and those who would have been,

  Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

  Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

  Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

  Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

  And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

  And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

  And we have come into our heritage.

  After a brief transfer to the Nelson Battalion at Portsmouth he moved, with Eddie Marsh’s influence, to Blandford Camp in Dorset, as sub-lieutenant in charge of No. 5 Platoon, A Company, Hood Battalion, commanded by Colonel Quilter. The company commander was Colonel Bernard Freyberg, a former Cambridge man, who had accompanied Captain R. F. Scott on his South Pole expedition as a biologist. At the camp he lived in a wooden hut measuring 15 feet by 8, with seven other men, home comforts being provided by the likes of Brooke’s mother and Ka Cox. His fellow officers included Denis Browne, Oc Asquith and Oxford man Patrick Shaw-Stewart, from Barings Bank, whom Brooke knew from Raymond Buildings. At Blandford, Rupert crafted his second sonnet called ‘The Dead’ – his favourite of the five war sonnets.

  The Dead

  These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

  Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

  The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

  And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

  These had seen movement, and heard music; known

  Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;

  Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

  Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

  There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter

  And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,

  Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

  And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white

  Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

  A width, a shining peace, under the night.

  The December edition of New Numbers was delayed, which gave Brooke time to work on another sonnet. With his equipment in Antwerp he had lost a poem about Mataia, the little township on Tahiti, which he had been working on and just before Christmas had had a disturbing dream about Taatamata, in which he was told she was dead by her own hand. She was not, and in mid-January he would have the first news of her for nine months.

  At the beginning of January, Brooke stayed, at Violet Asquith’s behest, at Walmer Castle in Kent, where he worked on what was to become his most famous sonnet, initially called ‘The Recruit’, before he changed it to ‘The Soldier’.

  The Soldier

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is forever England. There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

  A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

  A body of England’s, breathing English air,

  Washed by rivers, blest by suns of home.

  And think this heart, all evil shed away,

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

  Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

  And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,

  In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

  The seeds of the idea for ‘The Soldier’ were undoubtedly sown by Hilaire Belloc’s The Four Men which Brooke read in 1912. Belloc himself, as the main narrator, recounts a journey across his beloved Sussex, with three companions: Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, and the Poet – a fictional tale based on geographical actuality. It was the first verse of a poem at the end of the farrago that was the inspiration for ‘The Soldier’.

  He does not die that can bequeath

  Some influence to the land he knows

  Or dares, persistent, interwreath

  Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;

  He does not die, but still remains

  Substantiate with his darling plains.

  After Walmer, Rupert lunched with Denis Browne, the Churchills and Herbert Asquith at the Admiralty. On 5 January, he heard that his friend the poet James Elroy Flecker had died in Switzerland and he was asked to write his obituary. This he did at the table at Raymond Buildings where the two of them had last sat together. To Eileen he wrote, ‘He was my friend. Who’ll do The Times for me, I wonder? Damn them.’

  On his return to Blandford, a letter was waiting from Taatamata, dated 2 May 1914. It had been forwarded from Ottawa, having been recovered by divers from the Empress of India, the wreck he had heard about on his arrival from New York the previous spring. It seems that she had given it to someone to post, which was duly done in Vancouver, the letter being sent eventually on the Empress, which had gone down in the St Lawrence Seaway. The letter lay at the bottom until December, and was rather washed out and frayed by the time it reached him.

  My dear Love darling

  I just wrote you some lines to let you know about Tahiti to day whe have plainty people Argentin Espagniole, and whe all very busy for four days. Whe have good times all girls in Papeete have good times whit Argentin boys. I think they might go away to day to Honolulu Lovina are giving a ball last night for them, beg ball, they 2 o’clock this morning.

  I hope to see y
ou here to last night, Lovina make plainty Gold Money, now. About Mrs Rosentale she is went to [indecipherable]. whit crower by Comodore before they go away to whe been drive the car to Lage place. Enton and I. Mrs Rosental Crower Williams Banbridge to whe got 12 Beers Bred Sardines only whe tout come right away to lage the car Break and whe work down the beach, have drinking beer. Music and whe come away 5 o’clock morning … pas dormir.

  I wish you here that night I get fat all time Sweetheart you know I always thinking about you that time when you left me I been sorry for long time, whe have good time when you was here I always remember about you forget me all readly oh! Mon cher bien aime je l’aimerai toujours.

  Le voilà Cela partir pour San Francisco je lui ais donne quel cadeau pour lui he told me to send you his regards je me rappeler toujour votre petite etroite figure et la petite bouche qui me baise bien tu m’a percea mon coeur et je aime toujours ne m’oubli pas mon cher maintenant je vais finir mon lettre. parceque je me suis tres occupée le bateau par a l’instant. cinq heurs excuse me write you shot letter, hope you good health and good time.

  I send my kiss to you my darling

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx mlle kiss

  Taatamata

  Brooke was already aware that he was not sterile, following his relationship with Ka, so what chance had Taatamata had of not falling pregnant after two months of unprotected sexual relations with Rupert? The clue is there in her letter: ‘I get fat all time sweetheart’. Was he genuinely oblivious to the comment, or did he deem it best to ignore it and bury the guilt within himself? After all, what would have been the Ranee’s reaction to a half-Tahitian grandson or granddaughter? Later developments would suggest that if he did have concerns, he confided only in Dudley Ward.

  By mid-January he and the platoon were informed that a major campaign was afoot, but in the meantime he would be able to submit his five sonnets for New Numbers: ‘Safety’, ‘The Dead’, ‘The Dead’, ‘The Soldier’ and ‘Peace’.

  Peace

  Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

  Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

  And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

  And all the little emptiness of love!

  Oh! We, who have known shame, we have found release there,

  Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending.

  Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

  Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

  But only agony, and that has ending;

  And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

  He tried to persuade John Drinkwater to enlist: ‘Come and die – it’ll be great fun. And there’s great health in the preparation. The theatre’s no place now. If you stay there you’ll not be able to start afresh with us all when we come back.’ He also confessed that he felt it was:

  Not a bad place to die, Belgium, 1915? I want to kill my Prussian first. Better than coughing out a civilian soul amid bedclothes and discomfort and gulping medicines in 1950 … I had hopes that England’ld get on her legs again, achieve youth and merriment, and slough the things I loathe – capitalism and feminism and hermaphroditism and the rest…

  He also tried to get Browne to enlist: ‘Come over and fight when you get bored with the theatre. England’s slowly waking, and purging herself of evil things.’ He wrote of Blandford:

  The camp lies between Eastbury House, where George Bubb Doddington lived, and Badbury Rings, where Arthur defended the Saxons. And on the chalk down where our huts are, was a Roman camp once, and a Celtic before that, and before that, an Iberian. – And we march through thousand-year-old English villages. England! England! I’m very happy…

  In Rupert’s semi-autobiographical prose piece, ‘An Unusual Young Man’, which represents his own feelings on the declaration of war in 1914, his thoughts turn to his favourite English views: ‘He seemed to be raised high, looking down on a landscape compounded of the western view of the Cotswolds, and the Weald, and the high land in Wiltshire, and the Midlands seen from the hills above Princes Risborough.’

  The Chilterns

  Your hands, my dear, adorable,

  Your lips of tenderness

  – Oh, I’ve loved you faithfully and well,

  Three years, or a bit less.

  It wasn’t a success.

  Thank God, that’s done! and I’ll take the road,

  Quit of my youth and you,

  The Roman road to Wendover

  By Tring and Lilley Hoo,

  As a free man may do.

  For youth goes over, the joys that fly,

  The tears that follow fast;

  And the dirtiest things we do must lie

  Forgotten at the last;

  Even Love goes past.

  What’s left behind I shall not find,

  The splendour and the pain;

  The splash of sun, the shouting wind,

  And the brave sting of rain,

  I may not meet again.

  But the years that take the best away,

  Give something in the end;

  And a better friend than love have they,

  For none to mar or mend,

  That have themselves to friend.

  I shall desire and I shall find

  The best of my desires;

  The autumn road, the mellow wind

  That soothes the darkening shires,

  And laughter, and inn-fires.

  White mist about the black hedgerows,

  The slumbering Midland plain,

  The silence where the clover grows,

  And the dead leaves in the lane,

  Certainly, these remain.

  And I shall find some girl perhaps

  And a better one than you,

  With eyes as wise, but kindlier,

  And lips as soft, but true.

  And I dare say she will do.

  From Blandford Camp he was putting feelers out as to who might produce and perform in Lithuania, and was mentally gearing himself to writing a play about Antwerp during his sick leave. He communicated with Violet Asquith, his mother and Dudley Ward. After the Division being inspected by King George V and Rupert dining with Winston Churchill and Eddie Marsh at Admiralty House, he informed his mother:

  [W]e are going to be part of a landing force to help the fleet break through the Hellespont and the Bosphorus and take Constantinople, and open up the Black Sea. It’s going to be one of the important things of the war, if it comes off. We take fourteen to sixteen days to get there. We shall be fighting for anything from two to six weeks. And back (they reckon) in May … we are only taking five days’ provisions (beyond what we have on the boats); so we obviously aren’t expected to have a long campaign!

  Chapter 15

  ‘Some Corner of a Foreign Field’

  ON 27 FEBRUARY, Brooke’s battalion moved to Shillingstone, some 10 miles away, before catching a train to Avonmouth, and boarding the SS Grantully Castle. On 1 March 1915, Rupert, Denis Browne, Oc Asquith, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, F. S. ‘Cleg’ Kelly and Co. slipped away from the shore. Violet Asquith saw them off.

  Browne and Kelly, both gifted musicians, used the ship’s piano to lead community singing. Browne, who Rupert had known through their years at Rugby and Cambridge, was a great fan of the composer Scriabin, and no doubt would have gone on to greater things. He collaborated with Clive Carey and set some of Brooke’s poems to music. Kelly’s musical genius was overshadowed during his time at Eton and Oxford by his extraordinary prowess as an oarsman. The triple Diamond Sculls winner was not only regarded as a sporting hero, but his talents on the piano were such that he performed at both Queen’s Hall and Aeolian Hall, both major London venues; he was also a friend o
f such eminent composers as Percy Grainger and Edward Elgar. However, he was not above playing the popular songs of the day for his fellow officers and their men.

  On board the crew exercised and wrote letters home, as did Brooke, who wore around his neck, along with his identification disc, an amulet that had been sent to him anonymously, via Eddie Marsh, to bring him luck. He knew who it was from, but even in thanking her in a letter to Eddie, he couched his gratitude in the anonymous manner in which it had been given. It was almost certainly a gesture from either Cathleen, Lady Eileen Wellesley or Violet Asquith.

  Rupert had taken Sir Charles Eliot’s book Turkey in Europe with him to familiarise himself with the territory, customs and people he would be likely to encounter. Published in 1908, it included chapters on the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs, Albanians and Armenians. On board ship, north of Tunis, he wrote to Eddie Marsh: ‘I’ve read most of Turkey in Europe. But what with parades and the reading of military books I’ve not written anything.’

  The contents of the book, with its simple cover of the crescent moon and five-point star, inspired him to admit in a letter to Dudley Ward, ‘I think of joining the Orthodox Church…’

  By 9 March the SS Grantully Castle was off Greece and the reality of the situation started to set in. He began to put his literary and personal effects into order. To Marsh he wrote:

  I suppose I must imagine my non-existence, and make a few arrangements. You are to be my literary executor. But I’d like my mother to have my MSS till she dies – the actual paper and ink I mean then you – save one or two might let Alfred [his brother] and Katherine Cox have, if they care.