Some Desperate Glory (8 page)

The defence of Ypres held although the German onslaught did terrible damage to what was left of Britain's small professional army. Grenfell, back in the trenches, was given permission to go out on patrol alone. He described to his mother how he had shot several of the enemy at close quarters: one ‘laughing and talking' so that ‘I saw his teeth glisten against my foresight, and I pulled the trigger very steady.' He crawled back in daylight; half an hour later the Germans advanced slowly and ‘we simply mowed them down; it was rather horrible…'

The stalking expedition became part of his myth, added to by a medal for gallantry, the Distinguished Service Order, and the entry in his game-book, following ‘105 partridges' at Panshanger in early October: ‘November 16th: 1 Pomeranian'; ‘November 17th: 2 Pomeranians.' By then, since the battle of the Marne and the deliberate flooding of parts of Belgium from the River Yser and the Bruges canals, the line of trenches snaked in stalemate across from the English Channel through northern and eastern France down to the Swiss border. Antwerp, Ostend and Zeebrugge were occupied by the Germans. Calais and Dunkirk were still free, allowing the passage of troops and supplies from Britain.

Julian Grenfell's letters were printed anonymously in
The
Times
, sent to the newspaper by his mother. The editor put an extract from one of them as a headline, to show that pre-war political disputes had ended in a unity of purpose and faith: ‘Isn't it luck for me to have been born so as to be just the right age and just in the right place?'

Waiting to go out could be frustrating. But Robert Nichols found these months among the best of his life. Having enlisted in September 1914, he stayed in England for almost a year. He'd been commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery, his weak health making the medical an ordeal which he only just passed. His training took place in Surrey and Hampshire; later he saw this time as ‘the happiest I have so far experienced'. His sad home life – his cold father and unstable mother – seemed bleak in contrast with ‘the sky over me, beautiful horses, loyal companions in the men, an officer whom I intensely admire as my major, a definite and, in its way, noble creed – for I never thought of killing'. Nichols, however, thought that he would certainly be killed. This sense of death's proximity, and an involvement in an immense cause, inspired him, and other poets, to write with a new energy.

Siegfried Sassoon seemed not to share this excitement. The first months of his war were dull and disappointing. Riding during a break from learning how to dig trenches, he fell and broke his arm which had to be reset and gave pain: the dreary pain of peace. Sassoon, still a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, read about the battle of the Marne. By November, he was feeling depressed, latching on to rumours that they would go to France soon after Christmas. From the front, a hunting friend, an artillery officer, wrote about what ‘Sig' could expect, that he shouldn't hurry to come out: ‘Honestly & bar all rotting – please don't. We are in action now, and have been firing a lot the last 3 days – with considerable success we are told – in support of infantry.' There was time to write poems that were still charmingly Georgian, with titles like ‘Today' or ‘Storm and Rhapsody', to be collected in 1915 into another thin privately printed volume. Sassoon remembered these later as an escape from the war.

At Dymock in August 1914, a friend of Brooke hadn't yet discovered that he too was a poet. Although Edward Thomas disliked the nationalistic outpourings, in the press and among poets, he thought of enlisting, partly for money but also because of his love for a version of England, the land that he'd walked across rather than the proud imperial nation. Another poet, Ralph Hodgson, accused him of lacking patriotism. In November, while on one of their long walks, Thomas and Robert Frost were confronted by a gamekeeper who accused them of trespassing; the American stood up to the bully, but Thomas cowered, backed down and afterwards felt ashamed of his unmanly response. The shame stayed with him.

The poetry began in December. Some of Edward Thomas's themes resembled Frost's: landscape, the seasons, characters met on those long journeys, then his past life, the flickering of ghostly selves, regrets, echoes of childhood, in language that resembled speech. ‘Up in the Wind', in December, was the first one, worked up from a prose piece; and there came a sense of a unique view, as in ‘An Old Song II':

A light divided the swollen clouds

And lay most perfectly

Like a straight narrow footbridge bright

That crossed over the sea to me;

And no one else in the whole world

Saw the same sight …

‘The Combe', about a badger – ‘that most ancient Briton of English beasts' – that was dug out and fed to the hounds, has a darkness suited to the constant news of death and the dilemma of whether or not to fight.

Harold Monro, to whom Thomas had sent his poems, wrote from the Poetry Bookshop to say he hadn't time to look at them. Robert Frost met some young soldiers in the Poetry Bookshop just before the war's first Christmas, one of whom – Robert Graves – approached him. The country was full of men in uniform. The American wondered if he too should join up; he wasn't an Englishman, yet the voyage home across the Atlantic was becoming unsafe because of German submarines.

Robert Frost's destiny became different to most of the poets he'd met in England before the war. The next year pitched Graves, who hadn't yet seen action, into one of the war's bloodiest early battles. It put Edward Thomas into uniform and took Frost back to New England, among the apple orchards, the poor farmers, the wooden barns and the clapboard houses that made his poetry. Edward Thomas's son Mervyn went with the Frosts to the United States, to escape the war. The American urged his friend Edward to come across as well so that they could farm together. So, at the year's end, the dream of a new life away from a disintegrating Europe was still there.

 

1914 POEMS

‘
All the Hills and Vales Along
' – Charles Sorley

‘
On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Peace
' – Rupert Brooke

‘
The Dead
' – Rupert Brooke

‘
To Germany
' – Charles Sorley

‘
The Soldier
' – Rupert Brooke

‘
The Combe
' – Edward Thomas

 

 

All the Hills and Vales Along

All the hills and vales along

Earth is bursting into song,

And the singers are the chaps

Who are going to die perhaps.

      O sing, marching men,

      Till the valleys ring again.

      Give your gladness to earth's keeping,

      So be glad, when you are sleeping.

 

Cast away regret and rue,

Think what you are marching to.

Little live, great pass.

Jesus Christ and Barabbas

Were found the same day.

This died, that went his way.

      So sing with joyful breath,

      For why, you are going to death.

      Teeming earth will surely store

      All the gladness that you pour.

 

Earth that never doubts nor fears,

Earth that knows of death, not tears,

Earth that bore with joyful ease

Hemlock for Socrates,

Earth that blossomed and was glad

'Neath the cross that Christ had,

Shall rejoice and blossom too

When the bullet reaches you.

      Wherefore, men marching

      On the road to death, sing!

      Pour your gladness on earth's head,

      So be merry, so be dead.

 

From the hills and valleys earth

Shouts back the sound of mirth,

Tramp of feet and lilt of song

Ringing all the road along.

All the music of their going,

Ringing swinging glad song-throwing,

Earth will echo still, when foot

Lies numb and voice mute.

      On, marching men, on

      To the gates of death with song.

      Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,

      So you may be glad, though sleeping.

      Strew your gladness on earth's bed,

      So be merry, so be dead.

C
HARLES
S
ORLEY

 

 

On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town

Snow is a strange white word.

No ice or frost

Have asked of bud or bird

For Winter's cost.

 

Yet ice and frost and snow

From earth to sky

This Summer land doth know,

No man knows why.

 

In all men's hearts it is.

Some spirit old

Hath turned with malign kiss

Our lives to mould.

 

Red fangs have torn His face.

God's blood is shed.

He mourns from His lone place

His children dead.

 

O! ancient crimson curse!

Corrode, consume.

Give back this universe

Its pristine bloom.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

 

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,

Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there

But only agony, and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE

 

 

The Dead

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,

But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

These laid the world away, poured out the red

Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,

That men call age; and those who would have been,

Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

 

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,

Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

And we have come into our heritage.

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE

 

 

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

 

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

C
HARLES
S
ORLEY

 

 

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE

 

 

The Combe

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

By beech and yew and perishing juniper

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots

And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,

The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds

Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,

Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark

The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,

Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,

That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

1915

 

 

 

O
N
25 J
ANUARY
1915, from Shorncliffe camp, Charles Sorley wrote to an old schoolfriend, ‘We don't seem to be winning, do we? It looks like an affair of years.'

The war was going badly for the Allies. The Russians were losing battles in the east. In the west, the Germans still occupied Belgium and much of northern France with its steel plants and coal and iron-ore mines. The British, however, shielded by the Channel, could look away from Flanders. Churchill, still First Lord of the Admiralty, came up with a plan to force the Dardanelles Straits with the aim of eventually taking Constantinople. This, he hoped, would knock Turkey, Germany's ally, out of the war, get supplies to (and wheat from) the hard-pressed Russians and open a way into east and central Europe. The Dardanelles, and Churchill, took Rupert Brooke to war again.