Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  At dawn they reached their destination, and wearily slumped into the trains that would carry them to Bruges and safety. In the ancient city of circular canals they ate and slept properly for the first time in five days, before entraining for Ostend the following morning. Their odyssey had lasted just six days. Arriving back at Dover in a morning mist on 9 October, the officers were given leave. Brooke left at once for London with Oc Asquith and made straight for Churchill’s office at the Admiralty to give a first-hand report on the blooding of the First Lord’s military brainchild. In battle-stained uniforms, they spilled out the story of the expedition’s failure. It would not be the last time that Churchill would preside over an inglorious evacuation of a British army from a Channel port.

  Brooke washed off the grime of a week’s warfare in Eddie’s bath at Raymond Buildings. When his patron returned from a long day at the Admiralty with the anticipated news of the fall of Antwerp, he continued to babble compulsively about his baptism of fire. Perhaps as a reaction to the bottled-up nervous tension, he found he could barely keep his eyes open with a recurrence of his childhood complaint, conjunctivitis. His leave extended, he went up to Rugby and enthralled a half-horrified Ranee and curious neighbours with more accounts of his military adventure. He wrote to friends, asking them if they could make good the luggage he had lost: binoculars from the Marchesa Capponi, clothes and a sleeping-bag from Frances Cornford.

  He was back in London on 16 October for a curious appointment with Hugh and Bryn Popham. His old flame had had the first of her three children with Hugh, which was disturbing enough; but the shock was compounded when he encountered Noel as he arrived. For their part, the Olivier sisters were struck by Brooke’s unfamiliarly close-cropped military haircut, and his silent and subdued manner. The meeting was Brooke’s last encounter with the two women who had unwittingly caused so much havoc in his life. But if he was taciturn in the Oliviers’ company he was loquacious elsewhere, and seemed to have a compulsion to hunt out friends and tell them of his experiences. He had a fleeting last meeting with James Strachey, and looked in at the Poetry Bookshop to talk with Harold Monro, who found him haggard, his eyes still pink, and unable to talk of anything save the war.

  Then he was off to Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast to bid farewell to Cathleen, who was touring a play in the resort. Together they walked along the seashore, reading their beloved John Donne aloud. Afterwards, back in her digs, they sat in front of a fire of sea logs, spitting blue and green flames, and Brooke asked her to read him something ‘quite beautiful’. She pulled down her well-thumbed volume of Donne and read ‘The Anniversarie’, with its haunting lines:

  Here upon earth, we’are Kings, and none but wee

  Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects bee.

  Who is so safe as we? Where none can doe

  Treason to us, except one of us two.

  Brooke’s spongy memory soaked up the lines; and they went to seed one of the group of sonnets he had begun to work on, which were destined to ensure his lasting fame – or infamy – as either Michael Holroyd’s ‘chauvinistic fugelman of 1914’ or, in Winston Churchill’s altogether more flattering view, ‘one of England’s noblest sons’.

  Brooke was already far gone in the process of identifying his own obsessions and concerns with those of the greater community of the nation. It had come as a blessed relief to him to cast off the clothes of selfishness and bathe in the common pool of a cause in which he was merely one of a number. For him, the idealized figure of Cathleen symbolized what he was going to war to defend; he told her explicitly: ‘I feel so happy in this new safety and brightness … Do you know what a trust you hold for the world? All those people at the front who are fighting – muddledly enough – for some idea called England – it’s some faint shadowing of the things you can give that they have in their heart to die for.’ He was Arthur to her Guinevere.

  Back at Betteshanger on 18 October, Brooke heard a garbled rumour from Denis Browne that the Old Vicarage was to be demolished. In alarm, he asked Frances to investigate the report, and appealed to Gwen Raverat to go and make a painting of the house as a sad memorial to a lost epoch. With relief he learned that the reports of the house’s end were false, and he declared his intention of buying the freehold should he survive the war. In his heart, however, he must have known that the prospects for this were rapidly diminishing. Meanwhile he turned again to Ka for aid – not for emotional support, but for the sort of assistance that her friends always relied on her for: sheer, hard-headed practical help. What he needed, he told her, were the sort of simple, concrete things similar to the list he had enumerated in ‘The Great Lover’, but even more banal: a tin mug, toilet paper, a cake of sweet-scented soap. She would know, he concluded patronizingly, where to acquire such items quickly and cheaply.

  Meanwhile the Anson Battalion was on the move from Betteshanger, transferring by rail to naval barracks in the port of Chatham. It was not a happy unit: there were grumblings in the ranks and among the officers over their insensitive and overbearing CO – the man who had cheerfully told them before the Antwerp expedition that they were all going to their deaths. Brooke, Asquith and Browne discreetly lobbied the authorities through Eddie to have the man removed before the Battalion ‘floundered in a morass of incompetence’.

  Brooke fired off a long letter to his old Cambridge friend E. J. Dent, who had written to ask him to contribute to a fund to send a bronchial friend to winter in the warm climate of California – just as Brooke had done the year before. In his reply, Brooke was withering: it was not the time, he told Dent, to be wintering in Los Angeles, and if anyone had cash to spare ‘he should be trying to assist … some of the outcast Belgian widows and children’. He added that he had seen such victims of the war: ‘I can’t help feeling, I mean, that there’s bigger things than bronchitis abroad. I know a girl who is consumptive. Her doctor said she’d probably die if she didn’t spend the winter in a sanatorium. She’s doing Belgian refugee organization and clothing in London, and is going to stay at it.’

  Now that he had embraced his country’s cause with his whole heart, there was no holding him back. Scornfully, he recommended that Dent’s friend should disregard his ‘weakness’. He continued:

  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 been saved sans their best friends … I feel very small among them. But that, and the sight of Belgium … make me realize more keenly than most people in England do – to judge from the papers – what we’re in for, and what great sacrifices – active or passive – everyone must make. I couldn’t bear it if England daren’t face or bear what Germany is facing and bearing.

  This attitude of ‘Don’t they know there’s a war on?’ became more and more pervasive. It seemed that even in his most generous and self-sacrificial moments Brooke could not pass up the temptation to sneer at and scorn those denied his own courage and commitment. And, along with his usual insight and prescience about the long struggle that was now beginning – in stark contrast to the prevailing ‘it will all be over by Christmas’ belief – there was a sense of snobbery that Brooke and his comrades-in-arms were members of a self-chosen élite somehow more worthy of the title ‘Englishmen’ than those who did not see things his way.

  The roll-calls of casualties at the front were ominously lengthening – some Rugby contemporaries were already dead – and, at the end of his letter to Dent, Brooke noted the death of a French poet who was, like him, a socialist turned patriot: Charles Péguy. He was, he owned, almost ashamed not to have gone west with him: ‘I am envious of our good name.’ His new-found stern resolution came out clearly in a letter to Cathleen from Chatham: after again deploring her stage career – ‘If you were a man there’d be no excuse for you to go on acting. You’d be despicable’ – he launched a full-frontal assault on non-combatants, ending belligerently: ‘The central purpose of my life, the a
im and end of it, now, the thing God wants of me, is to get good at beating Germans. That’s sure.’ Underneath the bluster, though, there were still hints of the doubting, questing Brooke of old: ‘What it [his life’s purpose] … was I never knew, and God knows I never found it. But it reached out deeply for other things than my present need. There was some beauty and holiness in it I should have taken hold of.’ There is poignancy in the realization that Brooke knew surely that there would be no more time to answer these questions. He had boarded a train there was no getting off.

  He had already begun work on the series of five sonnets that are his main claim to fame and yet the most serious bar to the appreciation of his worth as a poet by a modern audience. In their mystic mood of exalted, almost religious patriotism and sacrifice, the sonnets published under the title 1914 and Other Poems are both untypical of Brooke and prone to his worst poetic vices of windy linguistic flatulence and vague, empty rhetoric. Never-theless, they undoubtedly hit the authentic spot in expressing the prevailing mood of millions of people in that short and shining moment when the war seemed glorious, peace a bore and the national cause simple, generous and right. And, not least, they gave lines to the language that are still remembered and quoted down to this day. Of how many other poets who died in their twenties can this be said?

  The first of the sonnets in order of composition, though Brooke numbered it second of the sequence was ‘Safety’, inspired by his meeting with Cathleen at Great Yarmouth and her reading of Donne. As he told her a day or two later, when sending her the poem: ‘I feel so happy in this new safety and brightness … You don’t mind me printing ours, because it’s private, nobody knows it’s ours.’ It is the only one of the poems specifically addressed to an individual:

  Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest

  He who has found our hid security,

  Assured in their dark tides of the world that rest,

  And heard our word, ‘Who 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.

  After a very shaky start – the absurdly shouted ‘Dear!’, like a porter running after a lady who has forgotten a tip, and the archaic ‘most blest’ – the poem comes perilously close to becoming a list à la ‘The Great Lover’ in its middle lines: ‘winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth’ and so on. Even a sympathetic critic, John Lehmann, remarks fairly: ‘Every image in these lines is obvious and of the most general kind, and contributes nothing concrete to the idea, or makes any imaginative discovery that can be called in any way original: it is little more than a lulling incantation of clichés.’

  ‘Safety’ finds what power it possesses only in its second stanza, and it is the power of paradox. A house has been built that will endure even time’s slow gnawing; the lovers have discovered a peace invulnerable to pain; against this even the might of war is powerless; even if the lover fails to return from the war, this will not be a failure but a secure victory over the two great enemies of love and life. Ironically, for the one-time militant atheist, the sentiments are profoundly Christian: time and death are both outfaced: where are their sting and victory? Essentially these simple themes are to be repeated, with only slight variations, in the other four sonnets. Almost simultaneously with ‘Safety’ Brooke wrote the sonnet ‘Peace’ – though perhaps the title ‘War’ would have better expressed its sentiments. In it he gave expression to the spirit of stern resolution, and also relief that a peace that had stagnated into corruption had been broken by the thunderclap of war:

  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.

  It opens with an ejaculation that is very like the booming first words of the stirring Lutheran hymn: ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. Like ‘Safety’, it draws on profoundly Christian imagery: the sleeping prince roused to new life from sottish slumber. But the new life that is beckoning is actually death – though Brooke cloaks the jump into extinction in an undeniably beautiful and economic image: ‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping’. Of course, it is irresistible to point out that the ‘cleanness’ into which his swimmers are gaily leaping would actually become the slime-filled shell holes of Passchendaele. What is even more striking is the explicitness with which Brooke acknowledges that the war is a convenient way of purging his sexual sins and emotional guilt – the contrast between cleanness and dirt is specifically underlined, as is the orgasmic ‘release’ that ‘we’ (actually he) has found. The first stanza ends with a final reckoning with Bloomsbury and the Stracheys – for who else are the ‘sick hearts that honour could not move’ (to join up with him) and who else are the ‘half-men’ with their ‘dirty songs’, celebrating ‘the little emptiness of love’ – an emotion that he can at last, in all good conscience, joyfully reject.

  The second stanza, like ‘Safety’, celebrates paradox: sleep (i.e. death) mends all ills, heals all griefs; and, if the body is broken and breathing stops, so what? But the couplet

  Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

  But only agony, and that has ending

  and the last line are a weak ending to a poem that begins with such a stirring bugle blast.

  Brooke was not alone in his volte-face from socialism to superpatriotism: half Europe was seized by the same cosmic convulsion. Only one member of the mighty German Social Democratic Party – the future communist leader Karl Liebknecht – voted in the Reichstag against the War Credits, causing the Kaiser to exult: ‘I see no more parties – only Germans.’ In France, as the workers answered the ancient call of La Patrie, Charles Péguy, before he died on the battlefield, found time to call for the pacifist socialist leader Jean Jaurès to be shot, and another super-patriot promptly obeyed the command. A young leader of the Italian socialists, Benito Mussolini, resigned from the party to begin a violent and ultimately successful campaign to bring his country into the war. In Britain, those members of the Labour party like Ramsay Macdonald, who held fast to their pacifist creed, were outnumbered and howled down. The call of country and nationalism proved far stronger than the recent and nebulous concepts of international workers’ solidarity. It would take the fearful bloodletting of the next four years to prompt second thoughts, but by then, for Brooke and millions more, it would be far too late.

  As he received news of the casualty lists from France and Belgium at Chatham, Brooke was working on a third sonnet, aptly titled ‘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; g
ave 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.

  The bugle call, that ancient military instrument, which opens the poem, lends an archaic touch; and there is an appropriately medieval whiff of Agincourt in the opening lines that recalls Henry V’s pep talk before the battle, when he speaks of the tiny élite – ‘be they ne’er so vile’ – who have found rank and majesty by taking part in the fight. The colour of the poem is red – the analogy of blood and wine; the mention of gold and royal wages – and at the end the idea is repeated that dirt and dishonour are being richly purged and cleansed by the holy douche of war and death.

  The rhetoric of the poems is repeated in Brooke’s letters to friends pleading with them to join him in fighting the good fight. Or, if they are disqualified by age or pacific opinions, like his mentor Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, they are bidden to at least give him their blessing: ‘I hope you don’t think me very reactionary and callous in taking up this function of England,’ he told ‘Goldie’ in a note during a brief valedictory visit to King’s: ‘There shouldn’t be war – but what’s to be done but fight Prussia? I’ve seen the half million refugees in the night …’ Another old friend, Rosalind Murray, who had married the philosopher Arnold Toynbee, and just given birth to a son, the future critic, communist, journalist and drunk Philip Toynbee, was told with sad lack of prescience: ‘Perhaps our sons will live the better for it all.’ Brooke’s uppermost thought, when he thought he was going to die at Antwerp, Mrs Toynbee was informed, was: ‘What hell it is that I shan’t have any children – any sons. I thought it over and over, quite furious, for some hours.’