Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Eddie’s action in using the old-boy network to secure Brooke a fast-track commission looks distasteful to us today, with the hindsight of what the next four years of slaughter would bring. But the mood of 1914 was one of patriotic exaltation. After half a century of peace, the Boer War apart, England was literally thirsting for war. Few knew, in that high summer, of the mud, blood and tears that lay ahead. The talk was all of being home by Christmas. In signing up Brooke – and Denis Browne, who also secured a commission in the RND through his good offices – Eddie was not acting as a pimp of death, but rather as a member of a gentleman’s club securing admission for a promising new recruit. He was more devastated than anyone by the eventual result of his action. And, above all, it was what Brooke wanted.

  Denis Browne was the first to get into uniform. He turned up on Sunday 27 September, resplendent in his new khaki kit. The previous day, his last as a civilian, Brooke had enjoyed a quiet lunch with Eddie and the new Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. He was, he felt, one of an élite. Later on that Sunday, Eddie saw him and Denis off at Charing Cross station on their journey to the training camp. Both men were joining the Anson Battalion of the RND at Betteshanger, in the small Kentish coalfield. Sub-Lieutenant R. C. Brooke found himself in charge of the 15th Platoon in D Company, a unit of 30 men, mostly naval stokers from Northumberland, Scotland and Ireland. An unusual young man was going off to war.

  26

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  The Soldier

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  As he was swallowed up by the vast maw of the military machine, Brooke’s thoughts were still with the women in his life. To Cathleen he confided: ‘Queer things are happening to me, and I’m frightened. Oh, I’ve loved you a long time, child: but not in the complete way of love. I mean, there was something rooted out of my heart by things that went before. I thought I couldn’t love wholly, again. I couldn’t worship – I could see intellectually that some women were worshipful, perhaps. But I couldn’t find the flame of worship in me. I was unhappy. Oh, God, I knew how glorious and noble your heart was. But, I couldn’t burn to it. I mean, I loved you with all there was of me. But I was a cripple, incomplete.’

  He ended this letter with a reaffirmation of his love for Cathleen: ‘I adore you … I worship the goodness in you … I feel like a sick man who is whole again. It comes on me more and more dazzlingly how you’re the best thing in my life … Cathleen, if you knew how I adore you, and fight towards you. I want to cut away the evil in me, and be wholly a thing worthy of you. Be good to me, child. I sometimes think you can make anything in the world of me …’ But there is, in the gaps between these fervent words, doubt. The nagging sense persists that Brooke protests too much. And Cathleen was too astute a woman to miss it. Years later she recalled:

  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 … said ‘I need something to hold on to’ and ‘I don’t live up to myself’ and ‘I’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.

  If uncertainty had been the chief leitmotif of Brooke’s life since at least 1911, the war provided an answer to it. At last his duty seemed clear, his life appeared to be funnelling towards one inevitable conclusion. He did not attempt to resist, but flung himself, with a sense of almost blessed relief, into the fray. The fact that most of his friends were doing the same thing enhanced his sense of solidarity with destiny – and the fact that those he had already written off as enemies – the Stracheys and the rest of the Bloomsbury set – were not, merely served to confirm his resolve. At last, after all the indecision, he knew what he had to do. Cathleen knew it too: ‘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.’

  It was a time to tie up the loose ends of his life. To Ka, who, in spite of all, still held out hopes that somewhere they could make a future together, he wrote with ‘deep and bitter shame’: ‘through me you have been greatly hurt, and two or three years of your life – which can be so wonderful – have been changed and damaged. And I’m terribly ashamed before you.’ He strove to alleviate her grief and desperation that, after all they had been through, things had come to nought: ‘Till I think you’re complete I shan’t be happy. When you’re married and happy, I shall believe that the world is good. Till then I shall be conscious of – general – failure.’

  The least problematic of his relationships was the most recent – that with Lady Eileen – and because of their lack of history, he was able to write freely, with a carefree, careless joy:

  Well, child, if you’re happy with me: that’s something, isn’t it? I’m certainly happy with you. We can have fun together, can’t we? and supposing I go off & get blown to pieces – what fools we should feel if we hadn’t had fun – if we’d foregone our opportunities – shouldn’t we? … It’s so good being with you. You give me – much more than you know. Be happy, child … I kiss you good night … All Heaven be about you.

  If these simultaneous professions of love reveal Brooke’s familiar emotional confusion, it was not a state he was destined to endure for long: the white-hot blade of war was about to cut through the Gordian knot of his tangled feelings and make all simple once more. Mars was to replace Venus as his presiding deity.

  Military life was not unfamiliar to one who, as Brooke had, had been through the joys of an English boarding school. He was well used to the bugle calls at unconscionable hours, the duties, the rotas, the winds whistling through unheated huts. Only the 35 men in his platoon were as unlike Rugby boys as it is possible to be: he confessed himself unable to remember their names; and their Celtic or northern dialects were a mystery to him; nevertheless, he admired their physical strength and simplicity. With more than a touch of homoeroticism he wrote to Eileen:

  … occasionally I’m faintly shaken by a suspicion that I might find incredible beauty in the washing place, with rows of naked, superb men, bathing in a September sun or in the Camp at night under a full moon, faint lights burning through the ghostly tents, and a distant bugler blowing ‘Lights Out’ – if only I were sensitive. But I’m not. I’m a warrior. So I think of nothing, and go to bed.

  His first days of service life passed in a busy whirl of kit inspections, route marches through the muddy Kentish lanes, boxing, soccer, drill and (for officers only) a bath in Betteshanger rectory. At 5 a.m. on Thursday 1 October a call roused them from sleep, and they all thought they were bound for France; but it was a false alarm. But on the following Sunday the reveille call was for real and they marched off to Dover, lustily belting out music-hall songs like ‘Who’s Your Lady Friend?’ Reaching the port, they were greeted by the townspeople, cheering noisily and thrusting the fruit of Kent – apples – into their hands. Girls sprinted into the ranks to steal kisses, and tears were shed. Marshalling his platoon, Brooke was seized by gloomy reflections: ‘I felt very elderly and sombre and full of thoughts of how human life was like a flash between darknesses,’ he recalled later. The officers stocked up with provisions for the crossing at a local hotel, and then their requisitioned troop-ship stole out into the choppy grey Channel to rendezvous with two destroyers that were to escort them across the dangerous waters. By the morning they were off Dunkirk. They spent the next day unloading equipment in a vast customs shed, and as night fell word spread that, as expected, they were bound for the great Flemish port of Antwerp, which was already under bombardment by the Germans’ big guns.

  Senior officers, in a misplaced attempt to instil a spirit of grim determination into the men, told them there was little chance of survival, and advised them to use the time before they entrained in writing farewell letters to their nearest and dearest. ‘So we all sat under lights writing last let
ters: a very tragic and amusing affair,’ Brooke subsequently reported to Cathleen:

  My dear it did bring 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. I seemed so remote and barren and stupid. I seemed to have missed everything. Knowing you shone out as the only thing worth having …

  We have to imagine the scene: the arc lights on wires dancing as the autumnal evening wind got up, throwing flickering shadows across faces squinting against the acrid fumes of strong tobacco smoke. Brooke among the rest, struggling to order his thoughts, and make a sudden sense of the life that just a few weeks ago he had mentally measured in decades rather than days. Small wonder that he wished to leave little consoling lies behind: like a drowning man, he clutched at the straws of comfort.

  But even in extremis, the mocking, facetious side of him leapt out to seize the sad absurdities of the situation: ‘Men kept coming up and asking things. One said “Please, Sir, I’ve a bit o’money on me. It’s not much to me: but it’d be a lot to my wife: we’ve got fourteen children: and supposing anything happened to me. I wouldn’t like them bloody Germans to get hold of it.” What should he do? We arranged that he should give it for the time to the parson …’ His role as an officer resembled his brief stint as a schoolmaster – once more trust was placed in him. He felt the weight of responsibility and braced himself under the burden.

  They steamed east through the night and arrived in the morning to an Antwerp delirious with joy at the anticipated relief: ‘… everyone cheered and flung themselves on us and gave us apples and chocolate and flags and kisses, and cried “Vivent les Anglais”, and “Heep! Heep! Heep!”’ The last time Brooke had been in the city it was as a King’s freshman, accompanied by his brother Alfred, now serving as a volunteer with the Post Office Rifles, and he had deplored the activities of rioting strikers. But there was no time to relish the irony. They were about to be flung into a battle that was already lost. The dithering at Dunkirk had wasted precious hours, and the Belgian army was in pell-mell retreat before the inexorably advancing Germans. With the suburbs of the city already in flaming ruins, the brigade-strength detachments of the RND were too puny a force to have any hope of stopping the steamroller.

  As they marched towards the Front they were met by the dispiriting sight of wagon-loads of dead and dying men. For the first time Brooke and his men tasted the real horror of war. Stragglers on horseback and horse-drawn limbers towing guns in retreat added to the depressing sight; but before these impressions could fully sink in, they wheeled into the grounds of a château on the outskirts of town. In the darkness Brooke glimpsed little pools glimmering through trees, and ornamental statues. His men set about digging latrines in the rose gardens, before trying to snatch some sleep among the shrubbery. ‘It was bitter cold … it seemed infinitely peaceful and remote. I was officer on guard until the middle of the night. Then I lay down on the floor of a bedroom for a decent night’s sleep. But by 2 the shells had got unpleasantly near. A big one … burst above the garden; but too high to do damage.’

  Among the officers gathered in the château were those who were to remain with Brooke to the end. There was Denis Browne, who had been with him in his beginnings; and an Asquith – Arthur, the Prime Minister’s third son, universally known as ‘Oc’, who had interrupted a civil service career to volunteer the previous month; and somewhere in the darkness – Brooke had last glimpsed him embarking his men at Dover – was Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a small, fine-featured man, and a brilliant Eton and Balliol scholar, with aristocratic connections and a promising career with Barings Bank. This was the nucleus of the group of officers who would gather around Brooke’s radiant figure and accompany him across the seas to his death. Of the trio in the shell-shocked château that night, only one, Oc Asquith, would survive the war, and he would lose a leg.

  Meanwhile the night, horrible with whining shells and crashing artillery fire, imposed its own imperious duties. At dawn, sleepless, they scrambled off and marched towards the gunfire, with orders to relieve the Belgians holding Fort 7, an obsolescent structure built in the 1860s. As the shell bursts came ever nearer, Brooke passed the test of courage that every fighting man must face to his own satisfaction. ‘It’s queer to see the people who do break under the strain of danger and responsibility,’ he reflected later. ‘It’s always the rotten ones. Highly sensitive people don’t, queerly enough … I don’t know how I should behave if shrapnel was bursting on me and knocking the men around me to pieces. But for risks and nerves and fatigue I was all right. That’s cheering.’

  Once in the trenches they dug in and watched aeroplanes lazily avoiding shrapnel bursts in the skies high above their heads. ‘A dozen quiet little curls of white smoke would appear round the creature – the whole thing like a German wood-cut, very quaint and graceful and unreal.’ This sense of the ‘unreality’ of war, which Brooke mentions several times, seems like a distancing device to throw a filter between his sensitive nature and unbearable reality.

  During a long day of waiting, news came through that the Brigade’s baggage, waiting at a nearby station, had been totally destroyed by a German bombardment. Up in smoke went Brooke’s luggage in the general conflagration, including a precious pair of field-glasses – a gift from E. M. Forster – and a couple of sonnets he was working on. Both items were to be speedily replaced. Also hit by shells was the château of Vieux-Dieu, where they had spent the previous night, and the general ghastliness of the scene was given an infernal quality by cascades of blazing petrol, released from ruptured tanks struck by the shelling. Like a hammer being brought down on a line of nuts, the chain of forts the RND were holding were being reduced to rubble piecemeal by the guns of Herr Krupp, and their position was clearly becoming untenable.

  The order went out for a general withdrawal under cover of darkness, and the Brigade, weary and shell-shocked, began a 25-mile foot-slogging march of retreat. Illuminated by the blazing lakes, blinded by smoke and horrified by the sight, sound and smell of horses and cattle cooking in the burning fuel, they staggered back to the banks of the River Scheldt, where two German saboteurs were caught in the act of attempting to blow up a pontoon bridge. Both were shot out of hand. Once across the river, the march mingled inextricably with a pathetic human tide of Belgian refugees, all desperate to escape the advancing enemy.

  Recollecting the retreat in relative tranquillity a few days later, Brooke told a Californian acquaintance, Leonard Bacon, that the march had become like a scene from a Dantesque hell, lit by ‘hills and spires of flame’. But the columns of humanity spilled by the war, the dreadful flotsam of conflict, were a ‘truer Hell’ than the hottest fires:

  Thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons, moving with infinite slowness out into the night, two unending lines of them, the old men mostly weeping, the women with 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. That damnable policy of ‘frightfulness’ succeeded for a time. When it was decided to evacuate Antwerp, all of that population of half a million, save a few thousands, fled. I don’t think they really had any need to. The Germans have behaved fairly well in the big cities. But the policy of bullying has been carried out well. And half a million people preferred homelessness and the chance of starvation, to the certainty of German rule. It’s queer to think that one has been a witness to one of the greatest crimes of history. Has ever a nation been treated like that? And how can such a stain be wiped out?

  Brooke’s anguished, outraged question would be echoed time and again through the terrible century that had just begun. Victorian smugness, the belief in peaceful, inevitable progress, crumbled like a sandcastle when it encountered the harsh realities of human savagery. All at once, or so it seemed, the things that had occupied Brooke’s mind for year
s past – personal relations, the war between the sexes, art, literature, socializing – faded into insignificance. All doubts and ironies disappeared, shrivelled by the terrible things he saw through that night of hell on the road back to the railhead at Saint-Gilles. He had found a cause, and it was one that, together with most active members of his generation, he was quite ready to die for.

  ‘The eye grows clearer,’ he told Bacon, ‘and the heart. But it’s a bloody thing, half the youth of Europe, blown through pain to nothingness, in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles. I can only marvel at human endurance.’ His brush with danger, and his first sustained look at the brutish face of war, give the lie to those who jeer at Brooke for mouthing slushy sentiments without having experienced the horrors of the trenches. He was a faithful echo of the frenzied mood of patriotic self-sacrifice that had gripped every European power. Even Sassoon, whose later war poetry, informed by his disgust at the suffering of his comrades, is the quintessential voice of protest against the waste and futility of war, wrote early poems hailing the bullet and the bayonet, and acquired the nickname ‘Mad Jack’ for the ferocity of his private war against the Germans.

  During the long march Brooke saw many strange and terrible sights – railway stations with their tracks torn up; London buses rushed over to transport troops with their adverts and indicator boards intact; broken-down carts full of hopeless humanity awaiting the Germans – but the most profound change of all was the transformation going on within him – from doubter to passionate warrior; from light-hearted curiosity to furious duty; from cynical lightweight to earnest and deadly serious patriot: from a young man who liked kissing, to a soldier whose sole purpose in life was to kill and be killed. He had awakened, by the strangest irony of all, just when he was about to fall asleep for ever.