by Mike Read
If you want to go through my papers, Dudley Ward’ll give you a hand. But you won’t find much there. There may be some old stuff at Grantchester.
You must decide everything about publication. Don’t print much bad stuff.
Give my love to the New Numbers folk, and Violet and Masefield and a few who’d like it. I’ve tried to arrange that some money should go to Wilfred and Lascelles and de la Mare ( John is childless) to help them write good stuff, instead of me.
There’s nothing much to say, you’ll be able to help the Ranee with one or two arrangements. You’ve been very good to me. I wish I’d written more. I’ve been such a failure.
Best love and goodbye
Rupert
Get Cathleen anything she wants.
Before going abroad he discussed with Cathleen the fact that he ought to make a will. ‘He said: “Would you like me to leave it to you?” – and I said: “Leave what to me?” – and he said: “The proceeds of my poems”, and we both laughed, and he said: “Oh, it might be £20 a year, you never know”.’
With a sense of impending doom he also wrote to Ka.
I suppose you’re about the best I can do in the way of a widow. I’m telling the Ranee that after she’s dead you’re to have my papers. They may want to write a biography! How am I to know if I shan’t be eminent? And take any MSS you want. Say what you take to the Ranee. But you’d probably better not tell her much. Let her be. Let her think we might have married. Perhaps it’s true.
My dear, my dear, you did me wrong; but I have done you a very great wrong. Every day I see it greater.
You were the best thing I found in life. If I have memory, I shall remember. You know what I want from you. I hope you will be happy, and marry and have children.
It’s a good thing I die.
Rupert clearly felt that Eddie should be his literary executor, with the manuscripts only going to his mother and then to Ka on her death. An element of panic might well have been setting in, with regard to certain correspondence which would be among his papers, and which he would not have wished anyone else to see. To the faithful Dudley Ward he wrote:
I want you, now – I’ve told my mother – to go through my letters (they’re mostly together but some scattered) and destroy all those from (a) Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh. These are signed E. V. R. and in a handwriting you’ll pick out easily once you’ve seen it. They’ll begin in the beginning of 1909–10, my first visit to Munich, and be rather rare except in one or two bundles, (b) Lady Eileen Wellesley: also in a handwriting you’ll recognise quickly, and generally signed Eileen. They date from last July on … Indeed, why keep anything? Well I might turn out to be eminent and biographable. If so, let them know the poor truths … Try to inform Taata of my death. Mile Taata, Hotel Tiarre, Papeete, Tahiti. It might find her. Give her my love … You’ll have to give the Ranee a hand about me: because she knows so little about great parts of my life…
And to Jacques Raverat: ‘I turn to you. Keep innumerable flags flying. I’ve only two reasons for being sorry for dying – (several against) – I want to destroy some evils, and to cherish some goods. Do it for me. You understand. I doubt if anyone else does – almost…’
By the beginning of April, he was laid up at the Casino Palace Hotel at Port Said, Egypt, with what he thought was sunstroke. Patrick Shaw-Stewart had the same symptoms – headache, sickness and diarrhoea – but he was soon up and about while Rupert was still laid low. On the first day of his illness, the new Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, offered Brooke a staff job, but he turned it down, preferring to stick it out with his men and see the war through.
The fourth edition of New Numbers had now been published, far later than the December 1914 date that the cover bore. It included ‘The Treasure’, and all five of Rupert’s war sonnets. He complained to Abercrombie, ‘A. saw a notice of N. N. in The Times; by a laudatory half-wit. He didn’t seem to realise that it was “goodbye”.’
By the time the SS Grantully had gained Lemnos, Rupert had begun to feel he had shaken off his illness, but he still undertook only light duties. His heart was not really in an impromptu fancy dress ball held on the ship on 5 April, and he had an early night. Two days later a party from the ship landed on, and explored, the Greek island of Skyros, the vessel being anchored in Trebuki Bay.
Skyros is divided into two nearly equal parts by a low-lying isthmus, with Trebuki, or Tris Boukes Bay (bay of the three mouths), being one of its natural harbours. The north half of the island is the more fertile, and contains the capital, Skyros, and Mount Olympus. Beyond the forests of oak, pines and beeches are numerous herds of sheep and goats, the latter descendants of the animals that were once highly prized. As a classical scholar, Brooke would have been well aware of the importance of the island in Greek mythology. Skyros was the refuge of Achilles, who, disguised as a girl, was sent by his mother Thetis to the court of Lykomedes, King of Skyros, to prevent his going to the Trojan War. Her precaution was in vain, for Ulysses lured him to Troy, where he was killed before it fell. It was in Skyros that Lykomedes treacherously killed Theseus, King of Athens, who had sought asylum with him.
In the mail came a letter from Eddie Marsh, containing a cutting from The Times of 5 April reporting on Dean Inge’s sermon at St Paul’s in which he had read ‘The Soldier’ to the congregation, ‘a sonnet by a young writer who would, he ventured to think, take rank with our great poets.’ The report also commented on a glowing review of New Numbers in the Times Literary Supplement of 11 March:
It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism. These sonnets are personal. Never were sonnets more personal since Sidney died – and yet the very blood and youth of England seemed to find expression in them … They speak not for one heart only, but for all to whom her call has come in the hour of need and found instantly ready … no passion for glory here, no bitterness, no gloom, only a happy, clear sighted, all-surrendering love.
His hour had arrived, his poetry was being acclaimed and his name was on people’s lips. For Rupert, though, it was too late.
He was not feeling in particularly good spirits when he took his platoon on an exercise on the island of Skyros, and he was glad of a brief rest with Shaw-Stewart and fellow officer Charles Lister, in a small olive grove. After operations, the others decided to swim the mile back to the ship, but Rupert, usually the keenest of swimmers, declined; he returned in a small fishing boat. During a party on board that evening, he retired early as he could feel his lip swelling. The following day the swelling had increased and was accompanied by back and head pains, which he attributed to general exhaustion. The battalion surgeon noted a temperature of 101°F. By the following day, 21 April, his temperature had risen to 103°F, and his resistance, never good at the best of times, was very low. His condition was now considered grave enough to send for the fleet surgeon and the battalion medical officer. They discussed the situation with the battalion surgeon and agreed that the swelling had emanated from a mosquito bite on the lip and it was agreed that they should make an incision to determine the type of poison. Brooke’s condition worsened and he was moved to a French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin, anchored near by. He was laid in a little white cabin in the round-house, and the whole of the ship’s medical staff was mobilised to monitor his condition and cope with any complications. Brooke stirred just enough to say ‘Hello’ to Denis Browne and later ask for water. Denis went to the lead ship, the Franconia, where he wrote out Marconigrams to Sir Ian Hamilton and Winston Churchill in case the worst happened: ‘Condition very grave. Please inform parents and send me instructions re. disposal of body in case he dies and duplicate them to Duguay-Trouin.’ Denis and Patrick felt sure Rupert would rather be buried on the island he’d been so taken with as opposed to being buried at sea. Cleg Kelly in his journal wrote, ‘I have a foreboding that he is one of those like Keats, Shelley, and Schubert, who are not suffered to deliver their full message.’ Churchill passed on the grave news to Eddie
Marsh, who telegrammed Mrs Brooke. She replied, ‘If message of love can be sent send it please at once waiting anxiously for the news Brooke.’
Early on 23 April 1915, French surgeons began an operation to cauterise the infection, and although he briefly regained consciousness at lunchtime he was not able to speak. His condition worsened and at 2 p.m. Denis Browne returned to Brooke’s side with the chaplain from the Franconia. Browne was with him when he died at 4.46 p.m. of septicaemia.
While a coffin was being prepared, news came in that the fleet was to sail that night, so the simple wooden box was hurriedly covered with an English flag and sixteen palms. On it the French officers laid a bunch of flowers collected from the island and tied with the French colours. Asquith seared the words ‘Rupert Brooke’ into the oak. A launch put out with the coffin. J. Perdriel-Vaissières described the atmosphere:
[O]ther boats put off from the warships. There are many of them, and they glide over the water like a holiday procession … music sounds as they pass; the huge ships one after another send them gusts of harmony but the air is solemn and low. The night is soft with a sheen of moon, bestarred. The perfume of the Isle drifts throughout the night, becoming stronger and stronger.
His fellow officers had decided to bury him in the olive grove on Skyros, where he had sat with Lister and Shaw-Stewart a few days before. Denis marked out a spot for the grave, on the western slope of Mount Kokhilas, and twelve bearers carried the coffin some 1.5 miles up the hill, to where the digging party had been at work. Twelve large Australians in their broad-brimmed felt hats carried Brooke’s coffin.
The Australians made slow headway. A meagre light is spread about them by lanterns and torches which illume one step and leave the next in darkness. Sometimes they slip, half stumble, and cannot help their jolting burden. The marble pebbles turn under their feet. The brambles hide pitfalls. Their heavy laced boots press the aromatic shrubs. A bewitching odour, a mingling of pepper and musk rises like incense. The wan moonlight lingers on the end of the procession where the torches flicker no more … not a village, not a house, not a road…
Patrick Shaw-Stewart commanded a guard of honour and a rough wooden cross was hastily put together. The chaplain performed the service; three volleys were fired into the air and Malachi William Davey, the eighteen-year-old bugler, sounded the Last Post. The rifle shots rolled
through the mountains rending the air with abrupt claps which are tossed from one elevation to another, echoing. Thereupon the silent night becomes mysteriously alive. The owls cry out scarred, and little bells, any number of little bells, tinkle all around. They come from the drowsy flocks which are frightened, from the sheep and goats suddenly awakened in terror and rushing away headlong through the sweet-scented brushwood … and then it is silence; and it shall always be silence.
The cross bore an inscription in Greek, which translates as
Here lies
the servant of God
Sub-lieutenant in the English navy
who died for the
deliverance of Constantinople
from the Turks
Just hours before the Hood Battalion sailed to Gallipoli, Kelly wrote in his journal, ‘It was as though one were involved in the origin of some classical myth.’ He began to work on a musical elegy to Rupert, as well as penning this poetic eulogy:
… He wears
The ungathered blossom of quiet; stiller he
Than a deep well at noon, or lovers met;
Than sleep, or the heart after wrath. He is
The silence following great words of peace.
Kelly would not survive the war, nor would Colonel Quilter, Denis Browne, Charles Lister or Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Rupert’s brother Alfred would be killed the following month.
Browne wrote a long explanatory letter to Eddie Marsh, describing Rupert’s burial place:
[O]ne of the loveliest places on earth, with grey-green olives around him, one weeping above his head; the ground covered with flowering sage … think of it all under a clouded moon, with the three mountains around and behind us … he actually said in chance talk some time ago that he would like to be buried on a Greek island … he will not miss his immortality.
Chapter 16
He Does Not Die That Can Bequeath Some Influence To The Land He Knows
ON 26 APRIL 1915 The Times published a short obituary, soon followed by a valediction, to which Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty put his name:
Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiralty at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other – more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watched them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.
During the last few months of his life, months of preparation in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause, and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.
As the tributes poured in, Brooke was swiftly elevated to a state of legendary proportion:
Gilbert Murray: ‘I cannot help thinking that Rupert Brooke will live in fame almost as a mythical figure.’
The Sphere: ‘the only English poet of any consideration who has given his life in his country’s wars since Philip Sidney … in 1586.’
Daily News: ‘To look at he was a part of the youth of the world.’
D. H. Lawrence: ‘I first heard of him as a Greek God under a sunshade, reading poetry in his pyjamas at Grantchester…’
Frieda Lawrence: ‘He was so good-looking, he took your breath away.’
The Star: ‘He is the youth of our race in symbol…’
Nation: ‘I should be afraid to say how many poems commemorative of R. B. I have received since his untimely death.’
Walter de la Mare: ‘But once in a way Nature is as jealous of the individual as of the type. She gave Rupert Brooke youth, and may be, in these hyper-enlightened days, in doing so grafted a legend.’
Edward Thomas: ‘He was eloquent. Men never spoke ill of him.’
Wilfred Gibson was moved to write on 23 April:
The Going
He’s gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That as he turned to go
And waved his hand
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone:
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow,
And he was gone.
The glorification of Brooke brought swift verbal and written rejoinders from several people, including E. J. Dent and Harold Monro, who tried to maintain a balanced view by hoping that his newfound celebrity status would not reach idiotic proportions or result in him being used as a tool for recruitment. The attempted balance was temporarily maintained:
New Statesman: ‘A myth has been created but it has grown round an imaginary figure very different from the re
al man.’
Gwen Raverat: ‘[T]hey never get the faintest feeling of his being a human being at all.’
His friends and the iconoclasts, though, could not stem the surging tide of popularity.
The Academy: ‘It may well be, as more than one writer has suggested, that in the future he will live as a mythical figure, a legend almost…’
Maurice Browne: ‘The beauty of the outer man was as the beauty of a young god; the beauty of the inner man outshone the beauty of the outer by so much as the glory of the sun is outshone by the glory of the human heart.’
The news of Brooke’s death also made an impact on his four-year-old second cousin Winifred Kinsman:
I remember going out with my mother for a walk, and she told me that Rupert had died, and I remember feeling that he couldn’t have. It was just impossible. I said, ‘What will Aunt May [Rupert’s mother] do?’, and my mother said, ‘She will be very brave, but she’s now only got Alfred left.’
Within a week or so of Brooke’s death, Frances Cornford was moved to write:
Contemporaries
Can it be possible when we grow old
And Time destroys us, that your image too,
The timeless beauty that your youth bestowed
(As though you’d lain a moment since by the river
Thinking and dreaming under the grey sky
When May was in the hedges) will dissolve?
This unique image now we hold: your smile,
Which kept a secret sweetness like a child’s
Though you might be most sad, your frowning eyes,