Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Brooke did not yet know it, but the death he had escaped at Antwerp, was already being replanned for him, in a very familiar setting: the Admiralty and Number Ten Downing Street, where Winston Churchill had already seized on the absurdly ambitious plan to short-cut the stiffening stalemate on the Western Front by some amphibious operation to strike elsewhere at a vulnerable soft underbelly of the Central Powers. His first scheme was to land a Russian army on Germany’s Baltic coast, backed up by the Navy and the RND. When Russia’s crushing defeat at Tannenberg precluded this, and Turkey entered the war on Germany’s side, he switched his support to a scheme for relieving pressure on Russia by forcing the narrow straits of the Dardanelles into the Black Sea, and, as a possible bonus, seizing the then Turkish capital, Constantinople.

  It was the sort of madcap idea that was to appeal irresistibly to Churchill throughout his career: impatiently, he always disliked the long slog, in war, as in politics, and was forever searching for the short-cut, the audacious surprise blow. This one would have the advantage of employing the Navy and the RND – both his babies – linking up with Russia and possibly knocking Turkey out of the war, and opening up a route into Europe’s heart, all at a single stroke. Meanwhile, as he laboured to convince his sceptical Cabinet colleagues, the RND, lacking an immediate function, marked time.

  In November Brooke was posted to Portsmouth with the RND’s Nelson Battalion, and thought, in his frustration, of applying for a transfer to the Army, which was at least seeing immediate action in France. Impatient for an invasion, he wrote to Jacques Raverat that the English needed a salutary blooding: ‘The good ones are alright … but there’s a ghastly sort of apathy over half the country. And I really think that large numbers of male people don’t want to die. Which is odd. I’ve been praying for a German raid …’

  Suddenly there came a ray of hope: Oc Asquith told him there was a vacancy in A Company of the RND’s Hood Battalion, commanded by Bernard Freyberg, a massively built and exceptionally brave and brilliant New Zealander. As soon as he applied, he heard by telegram from Eddie that not only himself, but also the brother officers he had been with at Antwerp, were being transferred en masse to the Hood Battalion, under the command of a professional CO, Colonel Arnold Quilter. As a gift, Brooke brought with him a mass consignment of winter woollies, sent by his Aunt Fanny ‘on behalf of the Mayor and Corporation’ of her native Bournemouth. Marching through Bournemouth on the way to the Hood Battalion’s training camp at Blandford in Dorset, he saw a playbill advertising Butterfly on a Wheel, starring Cathleen Nesbitt. Stung by her obvious refusal to heed his hints about giving up the stage, he wrote petulantly: ‘I hope you’ll be giving up this beastly stage business soon.’

  Arriving at Blandford on the last day of November, he was placed in charge of No. 3 platoon of Freyberg’s A Company, responsible for some 30 men. In a letter to Russell Loines in New York, he gloried in the transformation wrought in those of his friends who had joined the colours:

  … it’s astonishing to see how the ‘intellectuals’ have taken on new jobs. Masefield drills hard in Hampstead … Cornford is no longer the best Greek scholar in Cambridge. He recalled that he was a very good shot in his youth and is a Sergeant-Instructor in Musketry. I’m here. My brother is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Post Office Rifles … Among the other officers in this Division are two young Asquiths … a New Zealander [Freyberg] who was fighting in Mexico and walked three hundred miles to the coast to get a boat when he heard of the war, … Denis Browne … a youth [Shaw-Stewart] lately through Eton and Balliol … a young and very charming American John Bigelow Dodge who turned up to fight ‘for the right’ – I could extend the list. It’s all a terrible thing. And yet, in its details, it’s great fun. And – apart from the tragedy – I’ve never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium. And now I’ve the feeling of anger at a seen wrong – Belgium – to make me happier and more resolved in my work. I know that whatever happens I’ll be doing some good, fighting to prevent that.

  Life at Blandford was run on austere naval lines: Brooke slept in a wooden hut with seven other officers; leave in town was referred to as ‘going ashore’; and, in a well-meant bid to make the wintry conditions more homely, Brooke began to pester those practical women, the Ranee and Ka, with requests for extravagant creature comforts for his comrades. He sent Ka the measurements of the hut windows with a plea for her to sew suitable curtains – and did she know where a deck-chair was to be obtained? She should rope in the Oliviers to help her, he said imperiously: ‘That’s what you civilians are for, isn’t it?’ He also got Eddie to wangle Denis Browne a posting to the battalion from nearby Portland – ironically, for this ensured that Denis, too, would go to his death on the Dardanelles expedition. Ka dutifully responded to Brooke’s importunities, sending a parcel of maps and pins for the brothers-in-arms to follow the war’s course.

  As winter drew on, the weather worsened, and mud became the bugbear of their existence on their frequent route marches: ‘My God, this mud!’ Brooke complained to Ka in comic exasperation. ‘We hope to get Winston down into it. Then we may obtain alleviation.’ His relentless requests for practical help to his former love went on unabated: her next task was to discover how many Christmas Turkeys would feed 250 hungry stokers, and what such a lavish gift would cost. In another mission of mercy she supplied the red curtains he had requested, and the Ranee sent a chest of drawers. His quarters cosily furnished, he hunkered down for the festive season. His health, as usual in moments of high stress, was giving him trouble: in fact he was never really to be fully well again. His throat, a perennial weak spot, was permanantly sore, its rawness exacerbated by the coke fumes from the hut stove.

  It was not only his body that was failing the exorbitant demands of its owner – his mind, too, was troubled. In a letter to Dudley Ward he confessed:

  Last night I rolled about in this so-called bed. I’ve been bad lately with [typhoid] inoculation, a cough and things. And I dreamt I landed at Papeete, and went up between the houses, and the air was heavy with sunshine. I went into the house of a half-caste woman I know and she gave me tea, and talked … And at last I said ‘and how and where’s Taata-mata [sic]?’ and she said: ‘Oh – didn’t you know?’ And I said ‘No’. She said ‘She’s dead.’ I asked (knowing the answer) ‘When did she die?’ ‘Months ago, just after you left’. She kept evading my eye. After a long silence I asked (feeling very sick) ‘Did she kill herself?’ The half-caste nodded. I went out of the house and out to the lagoon, feeling that a great friendliness – all the place – had gone against me. Then I woke with a dry throat, and found a frosty full moon blazing in at the window, and the bugle hammering away at the 6.30 Reveille. Perhaps it was the full moon made me dream, because of the last full moon at Mataia (about which there is an unfinished poem, now in German possession). Perhaps it was my evil heart. I think the dream was true. ‘There’s no health in me’ as we used to say to some Confession in Chapel. And now I’m not only sicker with myself than ever: but I’ve also got another bad attack of Heimweh for the South Seas.

  Brooke need not have worried: Taatamata was not only alive – if reliable rumours are true, she was about to give birth to Brooke’s child, perhaps conceived under the very full moon he dreamed about. His psychic connection with her – probably activated by conversations with his company commander, the bluff Freyberg, who knew the Pacific islands well – was about to be concretely revived by a letter from the woman herself, although he would never know of the daughter he had left behind. All this makes Brooke’s regrets about not marrying and leaving a child behind all the more poignant. He told Dudley:

  I agonise every night. At times I want to wire to almost anybody ‘Will you be my widow?’ And later, I sigh, that I’ll be free and the world before me, after the war. It’s partly dependent on my premonition. If I think I’ll survive, I plump for freedom. When I feel I’ll be killed (which is my general feeling and deepest), I have a revulsion towards marriag
e. A perplexing world.

  But the question was beginning to obsess him, as he put it to Jacques, in his sleeping-bag between thoughts on the attack and his men’s boots. Then he would doze, to be awoken by the orderly’s gruff ‘Six-thirty, and you’re Orderly Officer today, sir.’ And another dim and drizzling day would be ushered in with a ‘queer green chalky dawn’. Even his imagery is becoming corpse-like.

  There were, at this stage in his life, practically speaking, four candidates for the role of Brooke’s widow: Cathleen, Eileen, Ka and his latest interest – not least for her connections with the highest corridors of power – Violet Asquith. In November he had begun a regular, light-hearted correspondence with the equine Violet, who was more in love with his handsome persona than he could ever be with her. She came down to the camp to visit her brother Oc and Brooke, and finding them both sickly, removed them to convalesce at Lady Wimborne’s conveniently close country house at Canford. Here Brooke showed her the drafts of his war sonnets, which had now become four, with the completion of the weakest of the poems, also called ‘The Dead’, which was Brooke’s own favourite, although it is generally judged the worst of the bunch:

  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.

  Once again lists of tedious nouns slap feebly around like dying fish searching for meaning. Brooke’s wit and precision have entirely deserted him here in favour of a few flaccid metaphors almost entirely devoid of any sense.

  Christmas was spent in a state of simmering discontent among his landlocked stokers, who do not seem to have entirely taken on board the correct war spirit. Brooke tried to alleviate their boredom with games like draughts and hoops, supplied by his well-meaning Uncle Alan, the Dean of King’s. Ka came up trumps with a huge batch of mince pies for the men, and many in the unit got slightly drunk. The day before Christmas Eve, while still staying at Canford, Brooke scribbled down a single line in his field-training notebook: ‘If I should die, think only this of me.’ It proved to be the opening line of his fifth and final war sonnet – and the most famous poem he was to write in his short, truncated life. He continued to develop it over Christmas, and when he had shepherded the last of his drunken stokers to bed on Christmas Day, he had an hour to himself to finish and polish it, as he proudly reported to Eileen Wellesley.

  Old habits die hard, and, although he continued to correspond with Cathleen and Eileen, a large number of letters flowed to and fro between Brooke and Violet Asquith, who at least had the virtue of novelty – and she was, of course, the Prime Minister’s daughter. At the end of his busy Christmas Day, he found time to reply to one of her own hopelessly indiscreet letters, in which, writing from the moated and crenellated Walmer Castle in Kent, she had excitedly reported on a top-secret meeting between her father, the War Minister Lord Kitchener and General Sir John French, commander of the British armies in France. ‘Your Walmer weekend sounds too thrilling for belief,’ responded Brooke. ‘I wish I’d been there. But one can’t get away from this mud-heap very easily. My throat collapsed again and left me voiceless …’ Two days later, on cue, Violet invited him to Walmer. Brooke, predictably, was tickled pink: ‘Can you really find room for me among all those Field Marshals? And may I wear my oldest khaki and finish a sonnet?’

  Granted New Year’s leave, he saw in the last year of his life, as he had so many others, at home in Rugby with the Ranee. But on 2 January he arrived at Walmer – scene of the death of Eileen’s forebear the Duke of Wellington – to take up Violet’s invitation. Two days later he was in London, and in a brief reprise of his former socializing, lunched at the Admiralty with Denis Browne, Winston Churchill and the Prime Minister. That evening he attended a variety show at the Ambassadors’ Theatre with Denis and Eddie, accompanied by Oc and Violet Asquith; followed by supper at the Carlton Grill. The next day, while he was staying with Eddie, word came that his Cambridge contemporary James Elroy Flecker had succumbed to TB at a Swiss sanatorium. Although Brooke had not known the poet well, he was hit hard by the news and penned an obituary tribute in The Times. He told Eddie bitterly: ‘What a bloody jest: and a bloody world.’ To Eileen he was even more prescient: ‘He was my friend. Who’ll do The Times for me, I wonder? Damn them.’ That question was to be answered much sooner than he perhaps imagined.

  On his return to Blandford Camp yet another shock awaited him. A letter had arrived from Taatamata in faraway Tahiti, and, still more astonishingly, it had been lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for the intervening months, since it was posted as long ago as May, just after he had left the island. The letter had been on the doomed Empress of Ireland, whose loss Brooke had learned of as he docked at Plymouth six months before. Divers had recovered it from the wreck, and, faded, dog-eared, but still legible, it had found its way to him. As he commented to Dudley after retailing the letter’s strange odyssey: ‘I think life’s far more romantic than any books.’

  The letter itself, couched in Taatamata’s quaint marriage of English and French, was both touching and ambiguous:

  My dear Love darling, I just wrote you some lines to let you know about Tahiti to day whe have plainty people Argentin Espaigniole, 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 20’clock this morning. I hope to see you here to last night. Lovina make plainty Gold Money now. About Mrs Rosentale she is went to [illegible]. whit crower by Comodore before they go away to whe have 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 voila Cela partir pour San Francisco je lui ais donne quel cadeau pour lui he told me to send you his regards je me rapeller toujour votre petite etroite figure et la petite bouche qui me baise bien tu m’a perceau mon coeur et je aime tourjours ne m’oubli pas mon cher maintenant je vais finir mon lettre. parceque je me suis tres occupee le bateau par a l’instant. 5 heurs excuse me write you shot letter. I hope you good health and good time. I send my kiss to you my darling xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx mlle kiss Taatamata

  There was more than enough here to make Brooke ‘gulp’, as he put it to Dudley. Apart from the obvious fact that his lovemaking had pierced Taatamata to the heart, there was the hint that he had left a more tangible souvenir of his sojourn behind in Tahiti than fading memories: ‘I get fat all time Sweetheart.’ What did that throw-away phrase mean? We do not know whether Brooke, puzzling out the faded script by the flickering lights of his hut, took in the full import of the words – although later events would seem to suggest that he confided his story to Dudley, a long-time confidant in the affairs of Brooke’s heart.

  But now the only thing to do was to grit his teeth, shove the letter away in his pocket and get on with his military duties, which meant acquiring a new sniper’s
telescopic rifle for his platoon at a cost of eight guineas; he appealed to his mother to go halves on purchasing the deadly weapon. Meanwhile, unknown to Brooke, his fate was being decided in Whitehall. Ever more urgent appeals were coming in from Russia for a diversionary attack to remove pressure on their hard-pressed fronts. On 2 January the Russian Chief Commander, the Grand Duke Nicholas, the resolute uncle of the weakling Tsar, sent an appeal which tipped the balance: he pointed out that a successful forcing of the Dardanelles straits would also benefit England and France, releasing unlimited supplies of Russian wheat, to replace the already U-boat-threatened Atlantic route from the USA. Kitchener went to see Churchill at the Admiralty to discuss the Russian plea. The War Supremo, whose influence over the civilian politicians was at this time immense, was converted. ‘The only place that a demonstration might have some effect …’ he told Churchill, ‘would be the Dardanelles. Particularly if, as the Grand Duke says, reports could be spread at the same time that Constantinople was being threatened.’ Britain’s Naval Supremo, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Jackie Fisher, was equally enthusiastic, and gave the project his customary energetic endorsement, promising a squadron of antiquated battleships to help force the straits.