Some Desperate Glory Read online

  On 2 August the Germans demanded clear passage through the whole of Belgium to enable them to attack France. The King of the Belgians refused the demand and asked for British support, under the treaty that guaranteed his country’s neutrality.

  It fell to the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to guide Britain’s declaration of war through parliament. He feared that elements of his own Liberal party would be against the war, although he knew he could count on the support of the Conservative Opposition. On 30 July the Liberal paper the Manchester Guardian had opposed the idea that Britain should guarantee ‘the peace of Europe’; the parliamentary Liberal party also resolved against being ‘dragged into conflict’. But once Belgium – poor little Belgium – had been invaded by the bully Germany the cause became almost a liberal one, of maintaining treaty obligations and international order.

  Sir Edward was thought to be the steadiest of hands, not at all showy, personifying a serene Britain that was the opposite of the bumptious German Reich. The reality was rather different. In fact the country was in the grip of a series of strikes; women demanding the vote were resorting to violence; there was open rebellion against British rule in Ireland; and a new artistic modernism arriving from Europe had moved even the young, fox-hunting Siegfried Sassoon. The Foreign Secretary’s passions, however, were fly-fishing and watching birds. He was a countryman who loved his cottage garden on the banks of the River Test and could quote endlessly from Wordsworth – a man whose refusal to be bamboozled by foreigners was shown by his inability to speak any of their languages.

  The Conservatives liked Grey who, although a Liberal, had imperialist sympathies that had been shown in his support for the Boer War. On becoming Foreign Secretary in 1905, he mostly continued with the policies of the previous Conservative government but became more involved in Europe, agreeing to unofficial staff talks with the French. Grey should feature alongside bungling generals in the questions asked by poets and very many others. Had there been enough preparations for the war? Could it have been avoided? Was the country incapable of sensing a new world?

  Victorian complacencies and confidence may have been fading, but Britain was still proudly set apart from the continent as head of the greatest empire in history. It was to India with its military life of pig sticking and retinues of servants that Julian Grenfell went as a young army officer, to get away from his parents’ world of slippery brightness, what his mother called ‘the gospel of joy’; then he went to South Africa.

  Both countries formed part of the pre-1914 army’s duties as an imperial police force. In South Africa, he found his work – facing down strikes in the mines of what he told his mother was ‘this utterly abominable country’ – disappointing. It showed ‘the utter beastliness of both sides – the Jews at the Rand Club who loaf about and drink all day, and the Dutch and Dagos who curse and shoot in the streets’. Grenfell sought relief in challenging all comers at army boxing matches. He dreamed of farming in remote Kenya.

  Britain had begun to seem ugly and constricted. E. M. Forster’s early novels – particularly Howards End and The Longest Journey – show a regret for the suburbanization of the country near London and the vulgar commercialization of English life. Near the end of The Longest Journey the suburbs of Salisbury – ‘ugly cataracts of brick’ – are condemned as neglecting ‘the poise of the earth … They are the modern spirit.’ Forster admits that ‘the country is not paradise … But there is room in it and leisure.’ Towns seem ‘excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves’.

  Howards End pits the cultured, sensitive, liberal and brave Schlegel sisters against the crude, materialistic Wilcoxes. Forster admits that it is the Wilcoxes who make things happen, even if they have no poetry, no sense of the past. Who owns England, the novel asks, the people who are narrowly practical or those with imagination? The Schlegels are half German, with the German concern for Kultur and the spirit. In London restaurants there’s talk of how the German Emperor wants war. The sisters’ father had left the new Germany after 1871 because he hated its vulgarity, power hunger and materialism. To the Schlegels, the British equivalent of this is jingoistic imperialism, the religion of the empire.

  The Schlegels get the better of the Wilcoxes. But worrying questions are asked. Is the country – the fields and woods of Hertfordshire, near Howards End, that are encroached on by London – now irrelevant? Can’t countrymen, who work the fields, still be England’s hope? Are the English reduced to being comrades, not warriors or lovers, scorned by visiting Germans for their dreary music or inability to engage in intellectual discussion? Where is the greatness? Even old London is being pulled down, sacrificed to developers’ greed.

  H. G. Wells showed similar disdain for pre-1914 England. Wells’s character Mr Britling is a successful writer who lives in a comfortable country house in Essex yet senses complacency and frivolity, an intellectual laziness. Mr Britling Sees It Through describes a drifting place, beset by unaddressed problems such as a rebellious Ireland and uncompetitive industry, a soft country of gentrified farm buildings and a political philosophy of wait and see, a slack but lucky country where too many intelligent people passed ‘indolent days leaving everything to someone else’. To a German visitor, it’s pleasant but not serious, an informal, quite chaotic place where people are kind but not polite. The whispers of change – from Ireland, from the empire, from Germany, ‘intimations of the future’ – were there to be heard, while the British, like ‘everlasting children in an everlasting nursery’, played on.

  Even in the Whitechapel of Isaac Rosenberg’s childhood, there were dreams of the past – of the lost vast spaces of the Russian Jewish pale of settlement. London’s East End was far from any quaint notion of English country life, but Isaac’s mother made gardens at their various homes. Rosenberg wanted to move from the city to the country if he survived the war. Many in Whitechapel had an ultimate yearning – that of a new life in the United States, seen as the golden land.

  Isaac Rosenberg had an outsider’s oblique vision. He met the artists David Bomberg and Mark Gertler at the Slade and resembled them in his bold use of colour but held back from their experimental art in favour of traditional representation of people and nature. Introspective, unable to afford models, Rosenberg went in for self-portraits, for conventional landscapes, partly because these were more likely to sell. Unlike Bomberg, he painted nature rather than the city.

  In November 1913 he found himself in different company when Mark Gertler introduced him to the civil servant, art collector and friend of writers Edward Marsh. They met at the Café Royal, once the haunt of Oscar Wilde and London’s fin de siècle decadents, still a place where Isaac could also meet Yeats and Ezra Pound. The sociable ‘Eddie’ Marsh featured in many poets’ lives; the boy from Whitechapel, some of whose friends were Marxists, was now within reach of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon (Sassoon’s rich Sephardic Jewish Iraqi forebears were quite different to the Lithuanian Ashkenazim Rosenbergs).

  Eddie Marsh, a homosexual made impotent by mumps in adolescence, had a chirruping, squeaky voice and could seem afloat on a wash of anecdotes, quotations and social urbanity. Yet even Marsh knew there had to be change, although he thought that this had to be grafted on to the best of the past. ‘Nine-tenths of the Tradition may be rubbish,’ he wrote, ‘but the remaining tenth is priceless, and no one who tries to dispense with it can hope to do anything that is good.’ A classical scholar and son of a successful surgeon, he was mocked by Julian Grenfell’s Eton and Balliol set. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a friend of Grenfell, was invited to breakfast by Marsh and jokingly left a cheque under his plate as a tip for the host.

  Eddie never introduced Rosenberg, a shy, stammering, awkward man, to Sassoon or to Brooke. But his patronage, using funds granted by the government to the family of the early nineteenth-century assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (from whom he was descended), ranged quite far. Marsh bought pictures from John and Paul Nash, from
Stanley Spencer, Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler and William Roberts. He hung Rosenberg’s painting in the spare bedroom of his London flat so that every guest would see it; in 1913, he paid for the publication of Rosenberg’s second book of poems; he used his influence to get the poet an emigration permit to visit his sister in South Africa; he found rooms for the young Siegfried Sassoon near his own in Gray’s Inn; he read (and didn’t particularly like) the early poems of Robert Graves. In August 1914, he persuaded Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty whose private secretary he was, to let the untrained Rupert Brooke become an officer in the Royal Naval Division.

  Marsh disliked post-impressionist art and wasn’t moved by Imagist or modernist writers like T. E. Hulme. The anthology that he edited and published in 1912 – Georgian Poetry – was the apotheosis of his influence. Launched at the new Poetry Bookshop near the British Museum, the book included work by D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke as well as limper verses by other poets about landscape or love. Marsh, aided by Brooke, defined the Georgians by choosing poems that were more colloquial in style and more down to earth in subject matter than the lushness and high language of Swinburne or Francis Thompson. Rupert Brooke contributed a poem that included a precise description of being sick at sea.

  It was possible to move between different worlds – that of Julian Grenfell’s parents (who had Marsh to stay) and that of the Whitechapel Yiddish theatre where Gertler and Rosenberg took him – and to be private secretary to the Liberal cabinet minister Churchill while loving the Fabian socialist Rupert Brooke (who wrote ‘I HATE the upper classes’). Ford Madox Ford delighted in a London that was a ‘great, easy-going, tolerant, lovable old dressing gown of a place’. At the height of the row over the powers of the hereditary House of Lords in 1911, the party leaders, Asquith and Balfour, had been fellow guests at a fancy-dress ball.

  But on the eve of the First World War divisions outside the world of the arts (which in Britain wasn’t taken particularly seriously) were hardening; it was difficult to imagine that amiable scene two years later. By 1913 politics had become much more vicious. The 1911 House of Lords crisis seemed good-natured compared to the strikes, the violence and suicides of suffragettes and the threat of armed rebellion if Home Rule for Ireland was forced upon Ulster.

  Britain had once been the most modern country, a pioneer of democracy. Now it had the most restrictive franchise in western Europe. There was also, in the English public schools, a system of education for the rich that was confident, rigid and circumscribed. Most of the poets whose work features in this book went to public schools (the exceptions are Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney) and imbibed the public school creed of patriotic sacrifice, of imperial greatness, of the overwhelming importance of character. Britain was the modern incarnation of ancient Greece and Rome; the classics were still the foundation of school work; the poets thought of ancient heroes as they went to war. The power of these places was immense. Robert Graves kept the welterweight boxing cup he won at Charterhouse brightly polished on his desk in Majorca until the end of his life. Boxing had saved him from the bullies. It had made his nightmares cease.

  These schools could be grim. In The Longest Journey, E. M. Forster, once a day boy at Tonbridge, describes the horrors of ‘Sawston’: how what had been a free grammar school for locals had over the years turned into an expensive philistine monstrosity whose credo was ‘patriotism for the school’ and ‘patriotism for the country’. At Sawston, the sight of the original Jacobean part of the chapel makes a visitor rejoice that his country is ‘great, noble and old’ – so much so that he exclaims, ‘Thank God I’m English,’ before adding, ‘We’ve been nearly as great as the Greeks, I do believe. Greater, I’m sure, than the Italians, though they do get closer to beauty. Greater than the French, though we do take all their ideas. I can’t help thinking that England is immense.’ Even this is not enough for his schoolmaster guide who worries that it is too rational, for ‘genuine patriotism comes only from the heart’. The spirit of Sawston is said to derive from a quotation from Aristophanes about bodily perfection and placidity of mind: ‘perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life that has ever been given’.

  The buildings and atmosphere of these schools were overpowering. Gradually during the nineteenth century they had changed. Marlborough – where Charles Sorley and Siegfried Sassoon were educated – had been founded in 1843, with a weak headmaster, brutal staff and appalling conditions that set off a mass rebellion in 1851. A new head adopted the methods of Thomas Arnold, Rugby’s legendary headmaster, appointing a responsible Sixth Form and younger masters and promoting games as well as work so that, according to the school historian, ‘a civilized out-of-door life in the form of cricket, football and wholesome sport took the place of poaching, rat-hunting and poultry-stealing’. Mid-Victorian gothic architecture, soaring chapels and stained-glass windows with martial boyish saints vanquishing forces of darkness showed a revival of romantic chivalry. Marlborough chapel, built in 1886, has memorial windows to the dead of the South African and Crimean wars and glass by the Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

  All this affected even those who had escaped it; Wilfred Owen, after weeks of treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart sanatorium with Siegfried Sassoon (an old Marlburian), wrote to his mother in February 1918 about a novel he was reading, The Hill by Horace Vachell, set in Harrow School: ‘a tale of Harrow and the hills on which I never lay, nor shall lie: heights of thought, heights of friendship, heights of riches, heights of jinks. Lovely and melancholy reading it is for me.’ In August, during Owen’s last hours before embarkation for the western front, when he had less than three months to live, what moved him was a vision of ‘the best piece of Nation left in England’: a homoerotic swim in the Channel with ‘a Harrow boy, of superb intellect and refinement, intellect because he detests war more than Germans, and refinement because of the way he spoke of my going away; and the way he spoke of the Sun; and of the Sea, and the Air: and everything. In fact the way he spoke…’

  The public-school accent gave immediate identification. Some fifteen years later, when his dead friend, his ‘little Wilfred’, was reaching new heights of admiration, Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps out of jealousy, said that Owen’s Shropshire accent had made him ‘an embarrassment’.

  Charles Sorley was the son of a Cambridge professor of moral philosophy. While a boy at Marlborough, Sorley rebelled, giving a paper to the school’s Literary Society about John Masefield’s colloquial poetry, saying that it was ‘the lower classes’ – because ‘they did not live in our narrow painted groove’ – who know ‘what life is’. He thought of becoming an instructor at a working man’s college and wanted to escape the relentless classics. He feared he might get too conceited when his achievements at work and games raised him to the top of the school. Memories of his time as captain of his house later repelled him.

  If you were a success, the public-school experience was intoxicating. Sorley found that Marlborough constantly came back to him while he was studying in Germany before Oxford. When during his schooldays Sorley had cut chapel to walk on the Wiltshire Downs, the master on duty that day had refused to penalize him although Sorley had argued strongly that he should be punished. He liked to think that walks like these unrolled a better land, the landmarks poetic – Liddington, the Vale of the White Horse, the Kennet valley, towards Coate, where Richard Jefferies, the Victorian writer on nature and rural life, had grown up, ten miles from Marlborough, a good place to stop for an hour to read Jefferies’s Wild Life in a Southern County, with its description of Liddington Castle, site of a Roman camp. But friendships made at school were irreplaceable, even though Sorley had begged his father to take him away. In fact Marlborough had given him ‘five years that could not have been more enjoyable’. This seemed a mystery: ‘I wonder why.’ Could it have been because ‘human nature flourished better in a poisonous atmosphere’?

  The German student f
raternities – often drunken, aggressive and anti-Semitic – seemed worse. But towards the end of his time in Germany, Charles Sorley wanted to stay on, perhaps go to university in Berlin. He felt he was in a serious country. He liked many Germans that he met, particularly German Jews. He admired their unashamed patriotism and intellectual curiosity, contrasting these with English puritanism, prurience, frivolity and hypocrisy: ‘England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love affairs…’

  Charles Sorley wrote poetry at school, inspired by the Downs. When Marsh’s first Georgian anthology came out in 1912, Sorley showed only mild enthusiasm, liking Lascelles Abercrombie, Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton and Wilfred Gibson (‘the poet of the tramp and the vagabond’) whose simple language was typical of the group. Already he’d glimpsed Brooke, the most glamorous Georgian, shirtless at Cambridge. This was during Brooke’s ‘neo-pagan’ phase of naked swimming, sleeping in fields, tumbling with girls from the liberal school of Bedales and tossing back his longish hair. To Sorley, Brooke seemed ‘undoubtedly a poet’, if a slight one. Socialism seemed right to them both. Brooke read reports on poor-law reform and spoke at Fabian meetings.

  It was the Victorians that these two brilliant young men wanted to escape. Unlike Sorley, Brooke admired Robert Browning, but the stately laureate Tennyson was too much for them both, Sorley declaring in 1913, while still at Marlborough, that ‘all through the closing years of the last century there has been a grand but silent revolution against the essential falseness and shallowness of the mid-Victorian court poets’. Pre-industrial England – a landscape of imagined freedom – moved Sorley, as it did Brooke and Edward Thomas. Sorley and Thomas approached it through Richard Jefferies. Escaping from Marlborough, the school and the town, Sorley climbed up to the Downs; some years earlier, on his first day as a Marlborough boy, Siegfried Sassoon had fled there, also on his own; Wilfred Owen had looked upon Broxton Hill in Cheshire as a place of mysterious possibility. For Edward Thomas a ghost could come at such moments, an uneasy but vital part of him, an alter ego hinting at dark truth.