Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  At Churchill’s prompting, the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Carden, drew up a detailed plan of operation, which was submitted to the War Council in London on 13 January. Churchill’s eloquence carried the day, and the plan was approved without dissent. The RND would accompany the Fleet as the spearhead of the assault. Churchill knew full well that his brainchild would take severe casualties, but, as he grimly wired to Carden: ‘Importance of results would justify severe loss.’ Two days after the War Council had approved the operation, on 15 January, the RND Commander, General Paris, gathered his officers around him at Blandford to brief them on the broad outlines of the planned attack. He told them their training would be intensified, and that they would be on their way to the eastern Mediterranean in six weeks. ‘God knows how I shall live through the interval,’ Brooke wrote to Ka impatiently.

  There is no doubt that Brooke realized the implications of the intended operation: he knew that he had only a faint chance of returning from the expedition alive; but, as he told John Drinkwater: ‘I’d not be able to exist for torment if I weren’t doing it … Better than coughing out a civilian soul amid bed-clothes and disinfectant and gulping nieces in 1950 …’ The same fear of and contempt for old age that had inspired the Clevedon pact was at work again, and he proclaimed himself ready to die – along with the best of his generation: ‘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. But on maturer consideration, pursued over muddy Dorset, I think there’ll not be much change … Come and die. It’ll be great fun.’

  In an effort to shame Drinkwater into quitting the theatre and joining up, he added: ‘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. Péguy and Duhamel; and I don’t know what others. I want to mix a few sacred and Apollonian English ashes with theirs, lest England be shamed.’ Brooke’s self-identification with his native soil, so evident in the final and most famous of his war sonnets, ‘The Soldier’, is becoming ever more apparent.

  By the end of the month sickness was once more laying him low. ‘I’ve deplorably got a cold again,’ he ruefully reported to Violet on 24 January. ‘I’m in bed with it, stupid beyond military crassness, irritable, depressed & uncomfortable.’ But Brooke’s irrepressible energy, bubbling up like a geyser, could not be kept down for long. Despite being confined to Blandford’s ‘miasmic’ huts, he found time to look over a nearby country house, Stourpaine House, which Jacques Raverat was considering buying, and sent his friend an unfavourable surveyor’s report – there was water in the cellars. Next, with a spark of his former social egalitarianism, he was lobbying Eddie at the Admiralty for a pay rise for his miserable stokers.

  By now the handful of poems that were to make Brooke, in the hour of his death, famous to a wide public, were in print. He had sent them to Wilfrid Gibson for the latest issue of New Numbers and the galleys had come back to Blandford with his admiring approval. Deprecatingly, Brooke began to send copies out to his friends. The crowning sonnet, ‘The Soldier’, the one he had begun at Blandford and finished at Walmer, sums up the series:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever 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 the 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.

  One can well understand why this handful of words – of which no fewer than six are ‘England’ or ‘English’ – caught the national mood of the moment. Brooke had flung his fistful of images into the air and rearranged them with the sure touch of a master: the plangent repetition of the sacred word ‘England’, the sure and careful progression of thought are seamless, and it is still possible to read today and feel the faint shape of a lump forming in the throat. What stirs the doubts is not the sentiments themselves, but, as ever, Brooke’s own personal identification with them. He is mingling his own body and spirit with a mystical England, and the sticky paste that forms leaves a weird after-taste. This is not only a modern criticism from a contemporary taste informed by the poetry of disillusion that was to follow from Sassoon and Owen, Rosenberg and Gurney. One of Brooke’s contemporaries, destined, like himself, to die before the year was out, Charles Hamilton Sorley, put his finger unerringly on the weakness, the Achilles’ heel on Brooke’s flawless body:

  He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. It was not that ‘they’ gave up anything of that list in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.

  Although a minority view at the time, this has come to be the commonly accepted opinion of the war sonnets; a sequence which it is hard to view dispassionately outside the steamed-up context in which they were written.

  Brooke himself, either with false or genuine modesty, affected to think little of the poems that, together with his death, would lift him from life to legend: he deprecated all except the last two: ‘God they’re in the rough, these five camp children,’ he told Cathleen; ‘4 and 5 are good, though, and there are phrases in the rest.’ One of the main themes of ‘The Soldier’, his identification with the land he loved, and his mystical incorporation of it in his own mortal flesh, was derived from his favourite book, Hilaire Belloc’s The Four Men, an account of a four-day walk through the author’s beloved Sussex countryside. It ends:

  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.

  Now, having already written his own hymn of praise to his own patch of England in ‘Grantchester’, Brooke extends the local patriotism to his whole country. The uniqueness of England persists, even when buried in a foreign field. His much-praised body and spirit continues, albeit as ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’. Worthy or not, it is his shot of light, ‘England seeming to flash like a line of foam’, as he goes eagerly towards the darkness.

  The cold that had laid him low, refused to go away and he was granted sick-leave. He journeyed to London and was cared for by a concerned Eddie. Almost speechless, he roused himself to watch the artist Sir John Lavery paint a portrait of the reigning Queen of London society, the beautiful Lady Diana Manners, in a red gown. He dined the next day with Eddie and Churchill at Admiralty House, but his condition was not improved by this socializing and the Asquith family offered to look after him at Number Ten Downing Street. He remained at the nerve centre of British power for nine days, occasionally receiving visitors, the most distinguished being Henry James. After a week he felt well enough to venture out on his own for a poignant final meeting with Ka Cox. He had forgotten it was her birthday. ‘I feel so angry and ashamed,’ he wrote to her in retrospect. ‘I’ve grown older and evil and selfish, but the only thing I do want in the world is that I should do you as little harm or hurt as
possible, to give you what little good I may …’ It was an old and plangent theme, made poignant only by the knowledge in hindsight that it would be the last time he would voice it to its familiar recipient.

  As soon as Brooke was well, he was packed off to Walmer Castle for some sea air to help his convalescence, but he was back in London by Valentine’s Day and once again dining at the Admiralty with Churchill and Eddie. Eddie left early, but Winston was in garrulous mood and the two men sat up late talking. Brooke told Churchill that he did not expect to survive the coming expedition; but the ever-ebullient Winston told him to put his faith in the destructive power of the Navy, which within a few days was to begin the preliminary pounding of the Turkish forts along the Dardanelles straits. ‘He was rather sad about Russia,’ Brooke reported to the Ranee, ‘who he thinks is going to get her “paws burned” … but he was very confident about the Navy and our side of Europe.’

  He saw Churchill again almost as soon as he arrived back at Blandford. The First Lord came down on a long-promised inspection of his military baby, choosing a day when rain lashed the exposed Downland, and Brooke and his comrades stood in ranks ‘a battalion of Lears, lashed by pitiless rain, for half an hour’. The next day he wrote to Violet Asquith, thanking her for being an ‘angel’ to him in his sickness. He described Churchill’s implacable demand for the battalion to be put through his paces, despite the ‘mud, rain & a hurricane’.

  ‘We were hurried,’ he went on, ‘to an extemporised performance, plunging through rivers and morasses. It was like a dream. At one point I emerged from the mud, with my platoon, under the wheels of a car, in the midst of a waste. And in the car were what I thought were two children, jumping about clapping their hands shrilling and pointing. It was Eddie & Clemmie [Clementine Churchill].’ He added hopefully: ‘It is rumoured that Winston was “pleased”, & impressed by our superiority to the other Brigades: & that we shall go out as a Brigade. Which gives us more chance of survival.’ The communication ended with a touch of gallows humour: ‘This is a letter of a sublieutenant – as dull as ditchwater. I wish I had even my civilian bright little interest in anything. I’m a machine, a clod, a platoon officer … a tittle, an omicron, a jelly, a dry anatomy, a less-than-protoplasm … There’s a fine sun & a clean wind … come and view my buffalo-like health, your handiwork. Rupert.

  On 20 February Violet replied from Walmer. The previous day, the battle of the Dardanelles had begun with 40 ships bombarding the coastal forts. She added: ‘I have just … heard that you are going on Sat. I can feel nothing but grey, iced terror for you all – but I know how happy you and Oc will be & try and feel glad for you – it is very difficult.’ Brooke had already heard the news. That same day Colonel Quilter assembled his officers to tell them they would be sailing for the Mediterranean in a week. The weeks of waiting were over, and relief was instantaneous. ‘It’s too wonderful …’ Brooke told Dudley in ecstasy, ‘the best expedition of the war. Figure me celebrating the first Holy Mass in St Sophia since 1453.’

  Optimistically, they were told they would be part of a force that would not only break through the Dardanelles and link up with the Russians, but take Constantinople into the bargain. As usual with ambitious military operations, outlandish optimism was at a premium: they would only be taking equipment for a fortnight’s fighting; they were told they would be home within six weeks. ‘At any rate,’ Brooke told his mother with forced cheer, ‘it will be much more glorious and less dangerous than France.’ He failed to pass on the appreciation that, as the spearhead of the landing, the unit could be expected to take casualties of 75 per cent. His chances of surviving the expedition, already remote, were diminishing daily.

  With less than a week to go until departure, preparations moved into feverish gear. He filled in the time between last-minute kit inspections and lectures on the maintenance of weapons, with brushing up his Greek. Earlier he had written to Cathleen of his sense of identification with an old England stretching back into the mists and myths of antiquity:

  Where our huts are was an Iberian fort against the Celts – and Celtish against Romans – and Romans against Saxons … Last week we attacked some of the New Army in Badbury Rings – an ancient fort where Arthur defeated the Saxons in – what year? Where I lay on my belly cursing the stokers for their slowness, Guinevere sat, and wondered if she’d see Arthur or Lancelot return from the fight, or both, or neither, and pictured how they’d look; and then fell a-wondering which, if it came to the point, she’d prefer to see.

  Brooke, too, may have wondered which of his women, should he ‘return from the fight’, he would most want to see. Writing to one of them, Violet Asquith, he continued his sense of identification with the myths and legends of a heroic past, but this time the locale switched from ancient England to the Classical world he had learned about at Rugby in his youth:

  Oh Violet it’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so benign. I almost suspect her. Perhaps we shall be held in reserve, out of sight, on a choppy sea for two months. Yet even that. But I’m filled with confident & glorious hopes. I’ve been looking at the maps. Do you think perhaps the fort on the Asiatic corner will want quelling, & we’ll land & come at it from behind & they’ll make a sortie & meet us on the plains of Troy? It seems to me strategically so possible. Shall we have a Hospital Base (& won’t you manage it!) on Lesbos! Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15˝ guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic & wind dark & unvintageable (you, of course, know if it is)? Shall I loot Mosaics from St Sophia … & Turkish delight? & Carpets? Shall we be a Turning Point in History? Oh, God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life, I think. Not quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realise that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition against Constantinople. And when I thought I was hungry, or sleepy, or falling in love, or aching to write a poem – that was what I really, blindly, wanted.

  It is very revealing – and very Brookian – even down to the throw-away afterthought that seeks to cancel all that has gone before: ‘This is nonsense. Goodnight. I’m very tired.’ One last time the babbling Brooke of yore rises to the surface in a series of iridescent yet evanescent bubbles. The schoolboyish burbling might occasion a smile if we did not know the tragic outcome of his Trojan fantasies. The fact that he was destined to die, and be buried, on the very island where Achilles was born, is just one more twist of fate so typical of Brooke.

  British hopes were pinned on the expedition as a semi-chivalrous diversion from the depressing slogging match on the mud-locked Western front, and a big send-off was planned. Not only Churchill, but the King himself, came down to review the Hood Battalion before its departure. The big day was Thursday 25 February, and the previous evening a select band of friends, including Eddie, Violet and Clemmie Churchill, were entertained to dinner in the officers’ mess. The day dawned clear and cold, with ‘a brilliant sun sparkling on frost – air like crystal’, according to Violet’s diary. After the last of his many breakfasts with Eddie, Brooke joined his platoon.

  Clemmie and Violet on horseback cantered along the serried lines of men drawn up on the Downs. ‘Oc, Rupert, Johnnie Dodge & Patrick [Shaw-Stewart] standing like rock before their men,’ Violet noted admiringly, adding: ‘Rupert looked heroic.’ She continued:

  Poor little Eddie was heartbroken at losing the Hood – & a rather pathetic figure … Clemmie & I cantered about till the King came – then there was a formal march past – they all looked quite splendid sweeping past in battalion formation – & I had a great thrill when the Hood came on preceded by its silver band – & Quilter roared like a lion ‘Eyes Rrright’ & all their faces turning. I hadn’t realised what a different colour men of the same race can be – Patrick was arsenic green – Oc primrose – Kelly slate-grey – Rupert carnation pink – Denis Browne the most lovely mellow Giorgione reddish-brown.

  The march-past was followed by a lunch of grapefruit, marrons glac�
�s, foie gras and champagne. But Violet found the bubbly turned quickly flat: ‘It somehow wasn’t quite the fun it ought to have been,’ she recorded. ‘I had a tightening of the heart throughout.’ After lunch Brooke said a last goodbye to Eddie, who, driving alone to London, turned and waved as he sped out of sight.

  On Saturday 27 February the Hood Battalion left Blandford. Violet witnessed the striking of the last of Brooke’s many camps. She found wagons piled high with blankets and packing cases ‘becalmed in a sea of mud’. She also found Brooke in a foul mood – one of his fellow-officers, Frederick ‘Cleg’ Kelly, an Australian-born Oxford ‘hearty’ who had thrice won the Diamond Sculls at Henley Regatta, had got hold of his sonnets and shown them round the mess with antipodean ribaldry, much to Brooke’s dismay.

  Brooke gave Violet those of his personal possessions that he did not want to take with him, among them Ka’s ‘futurist’ curtains, but seemed to her ‘very tired – & the bubble of excitement momentarily gone off him. He had his hair cut very short – by order – and his sun-helmet was too small for him & wldn’t go on.’

  Soon after seven that evening the Hood Battalion, wearing their pith-helmets, marched ten miles to the railhead at Shillingstone, where they entrained for Avonmouth, the cheerless modern port of Bristol. Late that night they boarded their troopship, the 7612-ton converted Union Star liner the Grantully Castle. A last package arrived on board from Eddie, containing a mysterious gift for Brooke – a good-luck charm in the form of an amulet. Eddie’s note explained: ‘My dear, this is from a very beautiful lady who wants you to come back safe – her name is not to be divulged. I have promised that you shall wear it – and I beseech you to make my word good. It’s a very potent charm …’