Some Desperate Glory Read online

  O! dried up waters of deep hungering love!

  Far, far, the springs that fed you from above,

  And brimmed the wells of happiness

  With new delight.

  ‘Think of me,’ he told Eddie Marsh, ‘a creature of the most exquisite civilization, planted in this barbarous land.’ He begged Marsh to write to him of the English art scene, and above all ‘write me of poetry’.

  Julian Grenfell, a quite different Englishman in South Africa, had been waiting for battle during years of dreary peacetime soldiering. If war didn’t come, he had a plan to stand for parliament in 1915. Grenfell had already been offered St Albans, the constituency containing Panshanger (the country house his mother had recently inherited), but had turned it down.

  Grenfell wrote poetry and kept the poems mostly to himself (although he knew Marsh through his parents). A typical one was a celebration of the energy, freedom, speed and courage of his pet greyhound. He read quite widely – Marlowe and Ovid’s Amores – and told his mother ‘how I love the Rupert Brooke poems, who is Rupert B?’ At an exhibition of pictures in Johannesburg, he admired William Orpen and John Singer Sargent and loathed Augustus John, who ‘must be a raving lunatic – is he dead yet or have his habits toned down? He is the sort of man who might kill himself or turn round and become a religious maniac.’

  In July 1914, Grenfell wrote mockingly to his mother about the crisis: ‘Isn’t it an exciting age, with Ireland and Austria and the Servs and Serbs and Slabs?’ He read Sir Edward Grey’s ‘wonderful speech’, which had persuaded parliament to back the war, and welcomed the arrival of this overwhelming cause. How good to see a ‘great rally to the Empire’, with Irish nationalists, ‘Hindus’, organized labour ‘and the Boers and the South Fiji Islanders all aching to come and throw stones at the Germans’. To Grenfell ‘it reinforces one’s failing belief in the Old Flag and the Mother Country and the Heavy brigade and the Thin Red Line and all the Imperial Idea, which gets rather shadowy in peace time, don’t you think?’

  1914

  RUPERT BROOKE was in Norfolk at the beginning of August 1914. The night before Britain’s ultimatum to Germany ran out, Brooke had a nightmare. The next day he became melodramatic, telling his hosts, the Cornfords, that the best thing for Ka Cox, with whom he was having a fraught affair, would be ‘that I should be blown to bits by a shell’ for she could then find someone else. Frances Cornford said that only soldiers fought battles: ‘Rupert, you won’t have to fight.’ Brooke answered, ‘We shall all have to fight.’

  For Robert Nichols, war meant defending ‘the general idea of England and what she stood for’, even if she were wrong. The possibility of defeat was hideous: ‘Germans in England! Germans in Westminster dictating to us. Immense indemnities beside which that of France in ’70 would be nothing. An enslaved generation.’ He joined the army in September.

  Everything seemed much simpler to Siegfried Sassoon. In this new life he might grow up, even if it was in a destroyed Europe. Courage now was ‘the only thing that mattered’. He was advised by a hunting friend to keep away from the bone-headed rich in the regular cavalry and, following this advice, on 4 August (the day that Britain declared war on Germany) went to the Drill Hall in Lewes and enlisted as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, a territorial regiment, signing on for four years. He was twenty-seven years old.

  Robert Graves joined up in north Wales that week. Charles Sorley applied for a commission on 7 August and some weeks later, still completely untrained, saw his name in the Gazette as second lieutenant. He told an old Marlborough friend that ‘since getting the commission I have become a terror … I have succumbed. I am almost convinced that war is right and the tales told of German barbarism are true. I have become non-individual and British…’

  Not everyone was so euphoric. As the war began, Captain James Jack, a regular soldier who’d fought the Boers, observed the ‘fine fettle’ of his men and the conscientious reporting of reservists for duty. Jack thought them ‘splendid fellows’ but knew that they hadn’t been trained even to march properly. He had a rush of depression: ‘one can scarcely believe that five Great Powers – also styled “civilised” – are at war, and that the original spark causing the conflagration arose from the murder of one man and his wife … It is quite mad as well as dreadful … I personally loathe the outlook.’ Captain Jack believed that it was necessary to fight, not only because of the treaty with an invaded Belgium but also from self-interest. If France were defeated and ‘the Prussian war-lords held the ports just across the English Channel’, Britain would be left ‘friendless as well as despised for abandoning our present obligations’. Jack thought that it was lucky a Liberal government was in power. There would have been much more opposition to the war if the Conservatives had taken Britain in. As it was, only two members of the cabinet resigned.

  There was little public hysteria. Few people had an inkling of what was coming, although Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, did have some premonition and prophesied a dimming of civilization. Foreigners noted a strange calm in London, one observing that a rare sign of change was an unarmed policeman placed outside the German embassy.

  But the poets took wing. The first war poem appeared in The Times on 5 August, ‘The Vigil’ by Henry Newbolt, whose work had often celebrated manly virtues, courage and fair play. It wasn’t spontaneous as Newbolt had written the lines some sixteen years before, but the patriotic surge led to a flood of verse. More than a hundred poems a day arrived at The Times offices during August, the paper printing those by (among others) Gosse, Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ (‘They shall not grow old…’), Kipling, the poet laureate Robert Bridges, and Hardy in September with ‘Men Who March Away’. The Liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman, in charge of the new War Propaganda Bureau, encouraged this, perhaps to counter the enemy claim that Germany was fighting for culture against decadent France and philistine Britain. Germany fought back, with what’s been estimated at over a million war poems written in August 1914.

  That autumn Edmund Gosse, in an essay entitled ‘War and Literature’, welcomed a war that must make literary experiment and obscurity seem redundant and effete. ‘War is the great scavenger of thought,’ Gosse declared. ‘It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy’s fluid [a disinfectant] that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect…’ Most writers still thought of chivalry, of warrior courage and sacrifice, of pure patriotism. It was left to John Masefield, in his poem ‘August 1914’, to imagine trenches winding across downland in a rare, prophetic glimpse of the western front.

  By 17 August, Siegfried Sassoon was bored of training near Canterbury. ‘Heaven knows how long it will last – 18 months some say – but you probably know better than I do!’ he wrote to Marsh. He volunteered for service abroad, shocked that only 20 per cent of the Sussex Yeomanry had done the same. There was ‘only one gent’ in the ranks, a dull man, but Sassoon turned down the Colonel’s suggestion that he should be an officer. It seemed ‘a lifetime away’ from the arts, from the Russian bass Chaliapin whom he’d heard in London. He felt out of touch. ‘Are any of the Georgian poets carrying a carbine?’

  One was trying hard to get his hands on a weapon. Rupert Brooke turned for help, as he often did, to Marsh at the Admiralty, and Eddie obliged, even though he dreaded his beautiful genius coming under fire. Julian Grenfell wanted to get back from South Africa; Ivor Gurney volunteered but was turned down because of his eyesight. Brooke should have taken heart; if you came from the right background, it was easy to become an officer.

  Graves, Nichols and Sorley were commissioned and then sent to be trained. Owen contemplated the war from Bordeaux, watching the government of a beleaguered France. Edward Thomas, in Dymock, was with what the locals thought of as a strange enclave of poets. Edmund Blunden was still at school.

  In August, in South Africa, Isaac Rosenberg had no surge of patriotism for the war or for the prospect of fightin
g. He hoped, however, that the huge change might melt, or purify, the old, ironstructured world.

  O! ancient crimson curse!

  Corrode, consume.

  Give back this universe

  Its pristine bloom.

  Training for the front as a second lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment, Charles Sorley wondered if he should have stayed a private as they had more freedom, although the officers’ quarters were very comfortable. The soldiers seemed to be nicer to each other than his fellow pupils at Marlborough had been.

  Sorley read some of the poems that flooded into the newspapers. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’ he thought was too jingoistic, unworthy of the author of The Dynasts. His own ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’, another evocation of marching, was darker, with its sense of an implacable natural world unmoved by the possibly doomed men. This resembled the Hardy that he admired and was quite different from Brooke’s reassuring vision, written a few months later, of a foreign field enriched by the English dead.

  Bored by training, Sorley affected not to mind who won the war as long as it ended quite soon; in fact ‘for the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope Germany will win’. The enemy was much in his thoughts. He recalled the unashamed intellectual interest he had met in Jena, an aspect of Germany’s spiritual superiority, even if the Germans had no insight into the minds of those who differed from them. His letters broke into German, to remind himself of the language’s beauty. Sorley wanted to write to the family he’d known in Schwerin. His sonnet ‘To Germany’, about the tragic breakup of his Europe, laments how ‘in each other’s dearest ways we stand, / And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.’

  Robert Graves, who also received an almost instant commission, had stronger enemy links, with members of his mother’s family fighting in the German army. Another connection, this time to the secretary of the Harlech Golf Club, got him into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. At the regimental depot at Wrexham the puritanical young Graves was shocked by the attitude of the troops to girls and bored by the unheroic duty of guarding interned aliens in a camp at Lancaster.

  During leave in October, by now itching to be at the front, he went to Charterhouse to see the boy on whom he had a crush. The school’s strength came back, Graves writing that it was ‘a grand place in spite of its efforts to cut its own throat and pollute its own cistern’. The casualty list began to feature old pupils; he reassured himself that he hadn’t joined up for patriotic reasons but agreed, as another old Carthusian said, that ‘France is the only place for a gentleman now.’ Graves wouldn’t be sent there until well into 1915, partly because of his scruffiness.

  None of the poets were in the great retreat. The Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan – the strategy for a quick victory by means of an invasion of northern France and capture of Paris, keeping only a small force against Russia in the east until reinforcements could be sent across the continent after the defeat of the French. The French advanced too, into the territories that they’d lost to the Prussians in 1870, a suicidal scramble in red trousers and blue coats, the uniform of their earlier defeat. The result in the north was German soldiers surging so fast through Flanders and Picardy in the August heat that, as in 1940, their chief fear became one of exhaustion. There was a massacre of the French in Alsace and Lorraine. In Flanders, the French and the small British Expeditionary Force fell back.

  Paris was saved in September at the battle of the Marne. This first victory for the Allies coincided with the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s September Programme of German war aims that embraced huge territorial gains, including industrial areas of France and Belgium, colonial conquests in Africa and a Germandominated customs union extending over much of Europe. Such ambition pointed to a long war.

  Rupert Brooke, the first of the poets to see action, felt moved by the national mood; ‘all these days’, he told his love of the moment, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, ‘I have not been so near to tears. There was such tragedy, and such dignity, in the people.’ He wasn’t going to be fobbed off with six months’ training or ‘guarding a footbridge in Glamorgan’. Men were fighting in Belgium; ‘if Armageddon is on’, he told the writer J. C. Squire, ‘I suppose one should be there.’

  Brooke felt he should have special treatment. ‘I wanted to use my intelligence,’ he wrote. ‘I can’t help feeling I’ve got a brain. I thought there must be some organising work that demanded intelligence. But, on investigation, there isn’t. At least, not for ages.’ A staff appointment simply wouldn’t do. So Marsh helped. A new unit, the Royal Naval Division, could have the poet; the brainchild of Winston Churchill, it was a military arm of the navy, rather like the Royal Marines. Marsh had spoken to Churchill, and Brooke and his friend the composer Denis Browne were seen off by Eddie from Charing Cross station on 27 September, for training on the east Kent coast. On 4 October, these virtually untrained men were marching through Dover to cheering crowds before embarking for France.

  The First Lord of the Admiralty, determined to stop the Channel ports falling into the hands of the advancing enemy, had reached Antwerp himself on 3 October. Churchill found the Belgians exhausted and dispirited. On 4 October, the day Brooke left Dover, the Belgian Prime Minister, encouraged by Churchill’s promise of British and French support, declared that to hold Antwerp was ‘for us a national duty of the first order’.

  Brooke and others sat waiting at Dunkirk for about eight hours and were told that they were going to Antwerp on a train that would very likely be attacked. The commanding officer declared that even if they survived the train journey their chances in the besieged city were slim. The poet wrote what he called ‘last letters’, one to Cathleen Nesbitt saying, ‘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…’ Soldiers kept questioning the inexperienced officers and, still mystified but undamaged, they reached Antwerp, to be greeted by cheering Belgians. Among the party, to show its select nature, was one of the Prime Minister’s sons, Arthur Asquith. This was probably how Brooke had imagined war, or at least the beginning of war.

  Then it changed. The German artillery had destroyed much of the outskirts of the city, and Brooke’s brigade marched to an empty château which seemed ‘infinitely peaceful and remote’, where they stayed the night and came under shellfire. The next day they took up positions, relieving Belgian troops. No French reinforcements had come so it was three British brigades and the Belgians. Brooke noticed the effects of imminent danger; the ‘rotten ones’ seemed to take it worst, not the ‘highly sensitive people’, and ‘for risks and nerves and fatigue I was all right. That’s cheering.’ He wondered what would happen if ‘shrapnel was bursting on me and knocking the men round me to pieces’.

  They worked on the trenches and waited. Direct hits on the station destroyed the detachment’s baggage, including some manuscripts of Brooke’s, and the château was blasted to bits. The strength of the German artillery wore down the fortifications. It was decided to withdraw the Royal Naval Division. The troops marched through a landscape lit up by burning petrol from a hit refinery and crossed the Scheldt where two German spies caught trying to blow up the bridge were shot. Pathetic refugees from an evacuated Antwerp clogged the roads, in terrified flight from the threat of German atrocities. Brooke was proud that he stayed in the column; his friend Denis Browne was in agony from blisters, and several men dropped out.

  Rupert Brooke had heard that German behaviour in the big cities had been reasonable; perhaps the Belgians need not have fled. He felt, however, that he’d 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?’ This was different from how he’d thought war would be: ‘half the youth of Europe’ transformed ‘through pain into nothingness, in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles’. By far the greatest number of casualties came from artillery fire, a descent of death from above, as i
f from heaven, with no chance of fighting it.

  Brooke would meet this with sentiments from an earlier time, evoking thrill and patriotic duty to a mythical land that must have seemed remote, if beautiful, to most soldiers. First, however, he had to get back to England. They reached troop trains that took them to Ostend and then on 9 October through thick mist into Dover. After arriving in London, Brooke and Arthur Asquith went to the Admiralty, Marsh ushering them in to give a first-hand report to Churchill. Antwerp surrendered to the Germans on the night of 10 October.

  Churchill defended the British intervention and the sending of untrained troops, claiming that it had held up the German advance to the Channel ports. But the First Lord was attacked, particularly by the Conservative press that loathed him because of his defection to the Liberals in 1904 and his eloquent support of the radical Budget of 1910. Antwerp damaged Churchill; the episode came to be seen as evidence of his lack of judgement, of his vainglorious impulsiveness: how these led others to suffer and be killed. Prime Minister Asquith, after hearing an account from his son, wrote of ‘the wicked folly of it all’. Lloyd George castigated Churchill for behaving ‘in a swaggering way’, standing for photographers when shells were bursting near by and ‘promoting his pals on the field of action’. In fact such was the shortage of British manpower that there had been no fully trained men available and Churchill had tried to keep the recruits out of the battle. The First Lord blamed the collapse on the Belgians and the French for not sending the promised reinforcements.

  Brooke had some leave in Rugby with his mother and in London where he called on Harold Monro at the Poetry Bookshop and talked emotionally about what he had seen. Then he went back to camp, in Kent. Here the officers and men detested their commanding officer and a sense of incompetence and anger was darkened by cancelled leave when a German warship was seen off Yarmouth. Brooke’s emotions rose, as if to smother possible despair. He told E. J. (Edward) Dent, an anti-war Cambridge friend, about what he was passionately proud of having seen: ‘the sight of Belgium, and one or two other things 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’. To Cathleen Nesbit he wrote that ‘the central purpose of my life, the aim and end of it, now, the thing God wants of me, is to get good at beating Germans’.