Some Desperate Glory (10 page)

From the casualty clearing station, he wrote a pencil note to his mother, saying that although the British had been ‘practically wiped out' they had recovered ground. He had, he said, been wounded and ‘my head and my skull is slightly cracked. But I'm getting on splendidly. I did awfully well.' He told her he was going to a hospital in Wimereux. ‘Shall you be there?' In the event it was Boulogne. His parents came across, hope revived; then on 26 May Grenfell died, after moving his mother's hand to his lips. He had, she said, ‘the most radiant smile' they had ever seen on his face. The next day, alongside the news of his death,
The
Times
published ‘Into Battle'.

As with Brooke, there was an outpouring. Julian Grenfell's poem and death were glorious to many, at that febrile time. Henry James thought ‘Into Battle' ‘extraordinarily living and breathing, ringing and stinging'. He told Grenfell's mother that he felt ‘almost to have known your splendid son even though that ravaged felicity hasn't come my way … What great terrible and unspeakable things! But out of which, round his sublime young image, a noble and exquisite legend will flower.' Maurice Baring, novelist and friend of the family, had his sonnet ‘Julian Grenfell' published in
The
Times
in June. Lord Desborough, the poet's father, tried to direct the mourning away from too literary an atmosphere, as if to be a poet was not enough, even a little shameful. His son, Desborough said, ‘did not look upon himself as a poet, but as essentially as a fighting man, boxer, steeplechase rider and lover of animals … He used to write verses when the spirit moved him, and very often threw them away. Whether he would have taken up writing seriously when he grew older and less absorbed in outdoor pursuits it is impossible to say.'

Charles Sorley was in France by June, writing that ‘it is like a picnic' and ‘the weather is of the best'. Out of the line, he found a strange calm: ‘I have never felt more restful.' As if balancing between his two countries, he asked for Richard Jefferies's
Life in the Fields
and for Goethe's
Faust
. England took on a mythical aspect, one that he didn't want to see tarnished. Sorley planned to travel after the war, perhaps to Mexico, Russia or the Balkans: ‘in England never. England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory and the ideal.' War had freed him, he thought; Oxford, the planned next stage, would have prolonged the imprisonment.

From the trenches, Sorley told the Master of Marlborough on 25 June that ‘we have seen as yet neither horrors, nor heroism, nor suffering. The test still lies ahead.' The French locals were kind, ‘almost German in their hospitality'; and the enemy was only a hundred yards away. Sorley, not yet twenty, grew harder in this ‘incredibly peaceful' existence. He forgot dead comrades ‘in a week', considered visiting generals to be ‘bloody fools' and was thankful when a fallen body was dead for it wouldn't have to be carried in. He saved two lives during raids. By September he was a junior captain, about to take part in the battle of Loos.

Edward Thomas reviewed Rupert Brooke's
1914 and Other Poems
in June. He wrote that the book showed wonderfully ‘the thought, the aspiration, the indignation of youth', with the last poems implying that a safe reputation would come only with death, as if their author knew he must go on striving. He didn't criticize the book's sense of what he called ‘the very widespread idea that self sacrifice is the highest self indulgence'. He felt diminished by what the other poet had seen of the war. After all, as he told Frost, he himself hadn't ‘enlisted or fought the keeper'.

Work on a commissioned life of the eighteenth-century general the Duke of Marlborough, a miserable grind, deepened Thomas's gloom. This volume was thought to have propaganda value through its reminder of Marlborough's victories in northern France and may have rubbed into Thomas his absence from the trenches. His poems, now coming in profusion, depicted the war at home, the changes it brought – ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)' and ‘A Private' – and his sense of being out of it, as in ‘The Owl' where the poet shelters in an inn, leaving ‘soldiers and poor' outside, ‘unable to rejoice'. ‘The Unknown Bird' has the belief that he could reach new lands: ‘I alone could hear him'. ‘Home' (the first of two poems with that title) portrays the poet as a superfluous man.

While finishing another commission –
This England: An Anthology from her Writers
– Thomas wrote ‘Lob', about the immortal countryman. It was set in Wiltshire, where he had walked in search of Richard Jefferies, and was not nationalistic but a romantic view of a vanishing world. The old life, or Thomas's idea of it, was what he was mourning, as in ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)', more than the war dead. In
This England
Thomas put two poems of his own – ‘The Manor Farm' and ‘Haymaking' – under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway. Now he was a published poet. A trip to the Cotswolds in July may have banished thoughts of joining Frost in New Hampshire.

Edward Thomas enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in July 1915. He declared he was fighting for the landscape, for the English earth, as in ‘For These', completed the day he passed his medical examination (‘An acre of land between the shore and the hills, / Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three, / The lovely visible earth and sky and sea, / Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills…').

Siegfried Sassoon left the Yeomanry in April, to take a commission in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, fixed for him by a neighbour in Kent. He went that summer for officer training to Cambridge, where he shared rooms with a charming fellow recruit, David Thomas – with whom he fell in love. The war scarcely impinges on Sassoon's poems of late 1914 and early 1915 which include a retired huntsman's long farewell to a fading world. At Cambridge he met Edward Dent, who found the young poet ‘curious' and the possessor of ‘the vitality and artistic enthusiasm of his race and without their bad qualities'. Dent was not impressed by Sassoon's privately printed verses.

The one war poem he wrote at this time – ‘Absolution' – has a sense of Brooke's sonnets. The war came closer at the end of October when Sassoon's brother Hamo, an officer in the Royal Engineers and Siegfried's ally because of his homosexuality, was killed at Gallipoli. Sassoon left with his regiment for France on 17 November. In his diary on 28 November he wrote, ‘Walked into Bethune for tea with Robert Graves, a young poet, Captain in the Third Battalion and very much disliked.'

Graves had been out since May 1915, just too late for a failed attack at Aubers Ridge. His battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers was moved to a bad sector near Cuinchy, by some brickstacks where there was constant mining and sniping. In June, in training for Loos, he was near Vermelles, supposedly out of the line yet often shelled. The sceptical Graves, awed by the proximity of death, took Holy Communion in Vermelles church. By the time he met Sassoon, Graves had been through the battle of Loos and, although some nine years younger, could play the old soldier. When Sassoon showed him some poems, Graves said that these would change after his new friend had seen action. Both reported the meeting to their friend Eddie Marsh, each scornful of the other's verses.

Edmund Blunden, older than Graves but still only eighteen, had joined up in August 1915, cycling into Chichester to enlist in the Royal Sussex Regiment. It must have seemed natural to follow other boys leaving Christ's Hospital who were doing the same; fighting, and if necessary dying, for your country was part of the public school creed of duty. Such was the shortage of officers that within a fortnight Blunden had a commission, although his only military experience had been in the school Cadet Corps. He would not go to France until the spring of 1916. First there was training at Weymouth in Dorset and Shoreham in Kent (from where he'd walk the forty miles to his parents' home at Yalding) and in Ireland. Still constantly writing poetry, as he'd done at school, Blunden continued to look to rural England for inspiration. France and Belgium had hitherto lived for him only on maps or in books. He wrote later that ‘I was not anxious to go.'

For the Allies, the year brought few successes. The Dardanelles turned out to be a disaster. The small British Expeditionary Force – Britain's regular army – had suffered heavy casualties in the west, straining manpower which depended more and more on volunteers. Attacks quickly became bogged down at Aubers Ridge and Festubert. A shell shortage crippled artillery support.

The battle of Loos, pushed by the French General Joffre, who wanted a sign of obvious British involvement, was an attempt to break the German line, across a jagged, easily defended landscape of slag heaps, coal mines and winding towers; Haig, then commander of the British First Army, opposed the plan. There was success at first, with some ground gained, then came the lack of shells, fierce enemy counter-attacks and exhaustion. The British had some 60,000 casualties, including three generals, against the German 20,000. The Allies had used gas for the first time, but wind had spoilt its effect. Bad weather set in after 13 October, preventing further attacks.

An experienced British officer identified flaws. To him, Gallipoli was ‘the vital spot' (by this time its failure was clear) and Loos ‘a waste', an attack on the Germans at their strong point to please the French. The Old Army, the BEF, had shown its mettle; and the new volunteers were brave. However, ‘raw enthusiasts are ideal for a dashing attack, but when they've got to the limit they don't know what to do next; seasoned troops do'.

German counter-attacks throughout the war were startlingly effective. Lack of training was evident. Graves and Brooke were thrown in as officers much too soon; Blunden and Julian Grenfell's brother Billy got their commissions in weeks, even days; in David Jones's
In Parenthesis
, the officer, Mr Jenkins, is only twenty. Loos had been meant to restore the war of movement, to break out of the solidified trenches, and had failed. The experienced observer saw ‘mismanagement at the top, inefficiency in the middle, want of training at the bottom'. To these Robert Graves added the superiority of German equipment: more shells, more artillery, better gas helmets, more telescopic sights for sniping. British flares were so bad that the enemy laughed at them.

Graves had waited in the trenches at Loos. The enemy was 300 yards away; shells crashed around them and they could hear the groans of the wounded and dying. He found a water bottle full of rum and drank about half a pint which soothed his nerves. Comrades fell near him; but he wasn't sent over the top. That night the dead and wounded were brought in, while the Germans humanely held fire. Gas was launched, and a patrol sent out to observe its effects was blown to bits. Graves drank about a bottle of whisky a day to keep his nerves from breaking. On 3 October, what was left of his unit withdrew from the front line.

Charles Sorley wrote to a friend two days later, ‘on the eve of our crowning hour'. Earlier that year he'd written ‘Such, Such is Death' and ‘Saints Have Adored the Lofty Soul of You'. The end he saw as ‘a merciful putting away of what has been': ‘no triumph, no defeat': certainly now familiar as ‘we see your straight and steadfast signpost there'. Sorley dreaded pain and showing himself to be a coward; to his father he said that he was sure the Germans were on their way home, although the journey would be a long one, through rain, dirt and cold. On 13 October, the British launched another attack. Sorley was killed by a sniper as he led his troops forward. The manuscript of ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead' was found on his body – the sort of poem that Rupert Brooke might have written if he'd seen more of the war.

Loos needed a scapegoat. Sir John French, the BEF's commander, was called home, to be replaced by Haig. The battle broke another poet. Robert Nichols had been writing poetry since joining the army, imitating Brooke with ‘Five Sonnets upon Imminent Departure', which were printed in
The
Times
in May. He reached France in August 1915, as an officer in the Royal Field Artillery, some days after his elegy to Rupert Brooke had appeared. A publisher accepted Nichols's first collection,
Invocation
, at the end of August. He was now launched as a war poet.

Twenty-five years later he described how he'd felt, how he'd looked at death: ‘exaltation. Beyond was a blank. How can a boy consider what he can't imagine?' Nichols thought of one ‘decisive' image: ‘the descent of a great beam of light' or resplendence. His poetry looked back to a scene in Dedham Vale near the family house, and the sound of church bells across the fields, ‘a golden note, so calm so clear' in an ordered, historic England.

Nichols found incompetence rather than glory in France. Artillery was placed too near the trenches (‘sheer foolery') so the shells might not even clear the British front line and the attacking enemy couldn't be fired on for fear of hitting British defenders. He thought of his feelings about the Germans as Loos began. Nichols had little hatred for them, rather a determination to see that British tolerance should outlast Prussian militarism; he was also fighting, he felt, for the men alongside him. He tried to catch this in the poem ‘Battery Moving Up from Rest Camp'. Then his nerve broke in the bombardment and ‘very hard fighting' around his battery, making him useless, although his commanding officer wrote that ‘your heart was as big as a lion's'. He was just twenty-two. Nichols's poems of the war, such as ‘The Day's March' and ‘Thanksgiving', were based on his experience at Loos.

He went back to hospitals in England. In October he was diagnosed as suffering from ‘neurasthenia'; this wasn't new for he'd had previous mental collapses. But news of the death of a friend that autumn seemed to make his nerves worse, with insomnia and irrational excitement. Nichols had also caught syphilis, either before going to France or after his return. His good looks and his personality – showing desperation, posturing romanticism, hysteria and sexual energy – became inseparable from an impassioned view of his poetic destiny. Later in the war, he was seen as a leader of the new soldier poets. His first book,
Invocation
,
may have made little impression; the 1917 collection
Ardours and Endurances
, however, led to the idea (admittedly short lived) that Robert Nichols was a genius.