Some Desperate Glory (7 page)

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 if 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'.

Rupert Brooke was sent to Portsmouth, then to Blandford where he joined the Hood Battalion as a sub-lieutenant in charge of a platoon. News came of old schoolfriends killed. On Christmas Day he assured an American friend that ‘England is remarkable'; especially heartening was the way the ‘intellectuals were doing their bit'. The adventure had given him a feeling of strange joy; ‘apart from the tragedy – I've never felt happier or better in my life than those days in Belgium'.

He worked on five sonnets inspired by the war, poems that took him back to his boyhood in the huge chapel at Rugby, their patriotic emotion matching the idea that duty meant sacrifice. They were to be finished during leave at Rugby, soon after Christmas, and go back in spirit to the time of his enlistment, justifying the new emotional direction that the war had given to his life. England in these sonnets becomes a religion; one, ‘The Soldier', was quoted by the Dean in St Paul's Cathedral, its solemnity quite different from earlier poems like ‘Tiare Tahiti' or ‘Heaven', a change from Marvel to Tennyson in these new times. Those bathing days at Grantchester come back in ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping', but there's no hint of the erection that had impressed Virginia Woolf. Rupert Brooke is on parade. ‘Half-men' and ‘their dirty songs' had been left behind, with ‘all the little emptiness of love' as well, in this ‘release' from shame, showing Brooke's strange but lasting self-disgust. The sonnets were his triumph. For a few, they seemed tarnished from the start, unworthy of their Rupert; but to many the sentiments were an uplifting antidote to bad news or dreariness. Later, however, despite their smooth flow, they could sound discordant as the war news became worse.

Another officer reached the Continent some two days after Rupert Brooke. Julian Grenfell, the regular soldier, left Southampton at five o'clock on the morning of 6 October; by the 11th he was telling his mother that he was fifteen miles from the Germans and hoped to reach them the next day. The casualties were heavy among junior officers, but ‘It's all the best fun one ever dreamed of – and up to now it has only wanted a few shells and a little noise to supply the necessary element of excitement.'

French and Belgian civilians cheered Grenfell and his men, making him think the locals were ‘wonderful'. At first he felt lost in a fog of marching and counter-marching where ‘only the Christian virtue of Faith emerges triumphant'. But ‘it is all the most wonderful fun; better fun than one can ever imagine. I hope it goes on a nice long time…' Grenfell was near Ypres. He had shot at the enemy. British cavalry were fighting German patrols but ‘none of us know anything'.

The battle of Ypres began in the middle of October, with the Germans determined to recapture the city which they'd held earlier that month. Julian Grenfell's cavalry division was sent as infantry to the sector to the south-west of Ypres, near the Menin Road, and came under fire at close quarters, once suffering what he called ‘the white flag dodge' when apparently surrendering Germans lured the British into an ambush. Men were killed alongside him; this wasn't yet trench warfare but still a war of movement, dashing through villages and across fields, fired on by snipers. Grenfell was disappointed when his regiment was taken out of the line.

His letters show that he'd found what he thought he'd always needed: something not only more exciting than boxing or polo but also a worthwhile part of his parents' hopes for him. The noise, Grenfell admitted, was terrible – the shelling and the explosions. Faltering was part of the challenge. ‘One's nerves are really absolutely beaten down,' he admitted. ‘I can understand why our infantry have to retreat sometimes,' although he'd been brought up to believe that ‘the English infantry cannot retreat'. A captured German officer saluted him; ‘I've never seen a man look so proud and resolute and smart and confident in his hour of bitterness. He made me feel terribly ashamed.' Grenfell saw it was nonsense to say that the war would end soon. The Germans were far from beaten – which he admired. ‘One loves one's fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him.'