Some Desperate Glory (6 page)

Each parent thought also of a past that had faded into disappointment. Tom Owen claimed to be descended from a sixteenth-century baron, a sheriff of Merionethshire; Susan, whose father was Mayor of Shrewsbury, had hoped in vain that the Mayor's will would leave her family much better off. Birkenhead, with its slums and docks, was not where they wanted to be. The Owens were respectable. When teaching in Bordeaux, Wilfred said that he was the son of a baronet.

The Church seemed a possible life; Owen read the Bible each day, dressed up as a clergyman, took mock services and went to work as an unpaid assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, a village near Reading, where he failed to win a scholarship to London University. Encouraged by his mother, he'd started to write poetry at an early age. A cousin, Leslie Gunston, was also a poet. Owen showed Gunston his work, much influenced by the romantics, particularly Keats.

Shocked by how little a religious revival at Dunsden was concerned with the village's poverty, Owen left the parish in 1913, failed for a scholarship to Reading University and seemed to be on the edge of a breakdown. His father had already taken him to Brittany on a holiday in 1908 and 1909, to let Wilfred practise his French. So, in September 1913, with his parents' support, Owen went back to France.

In France he found sophistication, freedom and possibly (although there's no evidence) sex. These months were probably the happiest of his life. But a puritan upbringing still made him flinch at strong artistic feeling. ‘I love music,' Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Bordeaux in May 1914, ‘Violin first, Piano next, with such strength that I have to conceal the passion, for fear it be thought weakness…'

Owen had his first glimpse of war's reality on a visit to a French military hospital in Bordeaux in September 1914. In Bordeaux he was at the centre of French life, for the government had moved there from an endangered Paris. The French army, still dressed in red trousers and bright-blue jackets and capes, had charged across the eastern frontier into Alsace and Lorraine and suffered terrible casualties. The hospital was in a former lycée where he was taken by a doctor friend. A classroom had become an operating theatre, the ink-stained floor now a ‘chamber of horrors'. ‘German wretches' lay there, treated exactly the same as the French patients. Owen drew some wounded limbs to show his brother Colin what war was like – a crushed shin bone of a leg, a holed knee, a skull penetrated by a bullet, feet covered in dried blood. The young Englishman – still only twenty-one – reported, ‘I was not much upset by the morning at the hospital; and this is a striking proof of my health.' As yet he had no plans to return to England.

News of war spread across Britain's empire, Isaac Rosenberg hearing it in Cape Town. Rosenberg's first collection –
Night and Day
– had been privately printed in 1912 by a sympathetic Jewish printer, the poems influenced by Keats, Shelley and Francis Thompson. Blake and Milton were also there in the sense of an implacable God. Although the shy, stammering Rosenberg was a difficult beneficiary, benefactors helped him, including the writer (and later translator of Proust's last volume) Sydney Schiff and a Mrs Cohen, who persisted even after Isaac and she had quarrelled. In Eddie Marsh's spare bedroom, Rosenberg's painting
Sacred Love
– of a girl and a boy in a clearing in a wood – impressed a guest for whom it ‘glowed with a strange, dream-like intensity, reminiscent of Blake – a lovely vision'. The work's mysterious scene showed that its creator had a different imagination to that of the other poets who were lining up for the trenches.

Marsh had helped Rosenberg to get to South Africa. He paid for a second privately printed book of poems, to be called
Youth
, which did not come out until 1915. To Marsh, obscurity was a demon and Rosenberg admitted his own lack of traditional technique. He didn't fit easily into the new art scene. Roger Fry's 1910 post-impressionist show and Bomberg's cubism were quite different from his poetic realism. ‘I dislike London for the selfishness it instils into one,' he told a friend, ‘which is a reason for the peculiar feeling of isolation I believe most people have in London. I hardly know anyone whom I would regret leaving (except, of course, the natural ties of sentiment with one's own people); but whether it is that my nature distrusts people, or is intolerant, or whether my pride or my backwardness cools people, I have always been alone.' Rosenberg thought of going to the United States or Russia, where he had relations. But his sister Minnie had settled in South Africa with her husband so it seemed an easier destination. The Jewish Educational Aid Society paid for the voyage.

In South Africa, Rosenberg may have had an affair with an actress. He found that there was some interest in lectures which he gave on art. But Cape Town's dazzling light and landscape faded for him and a letter to Marsh reveals contempt for the materialism and the whites (he scarcely seems to have considered the Africans) ‘clogged up' with ‘gold dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and heaven knows what other flinty muck. Well, I've made up my mind to clear through all this rubbish.' Soon he was yearning for home, for intelligent appreciation of his poetry, as the poem ‘The Exile' shows:

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

 

 

 

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE
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 fighting. 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.