Forever England (28 page)
Authors: Mike Read
The cross bore an inscription in Greek, which translates as
Here lies
the servant of God
Sub-lieutenant in the English navy
who died for the
deliverance of Constantinople
from the Turks
Just hours before the Hood Battalion sailed to Gallipoli, Kelly wrote in his journal, âIt was as though one were involved in the origin of some classical myth.' He began to work on a musical elegy to Rupert, as well as penning this poetic eulogy:
⦠He wears
The ungathered blossom of quiet; stiller he
Than a deep well at noon, or lovers met;
Than sleep, or the heart after wrath. He is
The silence following great words of peace.
Kelly would not survive the war, nor would Colonel Quilter, Denis Browne, Charles Lister or Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Rupert's brother Alfred would be killed the following month.
Browne wrote a long explanatory letter to Eddie Marsh, describing Rupert's burial place:
[O]ne of the loveliest places on earth, with grey-green olives around him, one weeping above his head; the ground covered with flowering sage ⦠think of it all under a clouded moon, with the three mountains around and behind us ⦠he actually said in chance talk some time ago that he would like to be buried on a Greek island ⦠he will not miss his immortality.
O
N
26
APRIL
1915
The Times
published a short obituary, soon followed by a valediction, to which Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty put his name:
Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiralty at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible, a note
had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other – more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to carry comfort to those who watched them so intently from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.
During the last few months of his life, months of preparation in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause, and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.
As the tributes poured in, Brooke was swiftly elevated to a state of legendary proportion:
Gilbert Murray: ‘I cannot help thinking that Rupert Brooke will live in fame almost as a mythical figure.’
The Sphere
: ‘the only English poet of any consideration who has given his life in his country’s wars since Philip Sidney … in 1586.’
Daily News
: ‘To look at he was a part of the youth of the world.’
D. H. Lawrence: ‘I first heard of him as a Greek God under a sunshade, reading poetry in his pyjamas at Grantchester…’
Frieda Lawrence: ‘He was so good-looking, he took your breath away.’
The Star
: ‘He is the youth of our race in symbol…’
Nation
: ‘I should be afraid to say how many poems commemorative of R. B. I have received since his untimely death.’
Walter de la Mare: ‘But once in a way Nature is as jealous of the individual as of the type. She gave Rupert Brooke youth, and may be, in these hyper-enlightened days, in doing so grafted a legend.’
Edward Thomas: ‘He was eloquent. Men never spoke ill of him.’
Wilfred Gibson was moved to write on 23 April:
He’s gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That as he turned to go
And waved his hand
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone:
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow,
And he was gone.
The glorification of Brooke brought swift verbal and written rejoinders from several people, including E. J. Dent and Harold Monro, who tried to maintain a balanced view by hoping that his newfound celebrity status would not reach idiotic proportions or result in him being used as a tool for recruitment. The attempted balance was temporarily maintained:
New Statesman
: ‘A myth has been created but it has grown round an imaginary figure very different from the real man.’
Gwen Raverat: ‘[T]hey never get the faintest feeling of his being a human being at all.’
His friends and the iconoclasts, though, could not stem the surging tide of popularity.
The Academy
: ‘It may well be, as more than one writer has suggested, that in the future he will live as a mythical figure, a legend almost…’
Maurice Browne: ‘The beauty of the outer man was as the beauty of a young god; the beauty of the inner man outshone the beauty of the outer by so much as the glory of the sun is outshone by the glory of the human heart.’
The news of Brooke’s death also made an impact on his four-year-old second cousin Winifred Kinsman:
I remember going out with my mother for a walk, and she told me that Rupert had died, and I remember feeling that he
couldn’t have. It was just impossible. I said, ‘What will Aunt May [Rupert’s mother] do?’, and my mother said, ‘She will be very brave, but she’s now only got Alfred left.’
Within a week or so of Brooke’s death, Frances Cornford was moved to write:
Can it be possible when we grow old
And Time destroys us, that your image too,
The timeless beauty that your youth bestowed
(As though you’d lain a moment since by the river
Thinking and dreaming under the grey sky
When May was in the hedges) will dissolve?
This unique image now we hold: your smile,
Which kept a secret sweetness like a child’s
Though you might be most sad, your frowning eyes,
Can they be drowned in Time, and nothing left
To the revolving hard, enamelled world,
Full, full forever of fresh fears and births
And busyness, of all you were? Perhaps
A thousand years ago some Greek boy died,
So lovely-bodied, so adored, so young,
Like us, his lovers treasured senseless things,
And laughed with tears remembering his laughter,
And there was friendship in the very sound
Of his forgotten name to them. Of him
Now we know nothing, nothing is altered now
Because of all he was. Most loved, on you
Can such oblivion fall? Then, if it can,
How futile, how absurd the life of man.
All his friends remembered him, in their own ways, which included verse and music. One of his many Cambridge colleagues, Raglan H. E. H. Somerset, recalled:
I used to wake him on Sunday mornings to bathe in the dam above Byron’s Pool. His bedroom was always littered with books, English, French, and German, in wild disorder … we used to go back and feed, sometimes in the Orchard and sometimes in the Old Vicarage garden on eggs and that particular brand of honey referred to in the ‘Grantchester’ poem. In those days he always dressed in the same way: cricket shirt and trousers and no stockings…
‘The Old Vicarage Grantchester’ inspired Sub-lieutenant Jeffrey Day to write his poem ‘An Airman’s Dream’. He wrote ‘I had sent myself to sleep and endured dull sermons by thinking of my house and its surroundings.’ Day was shot down and went missing in February 1918.
Fellow poet John Drinkwater grieved for him:
There can have been no man of his years in England who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal to the affection of everyone who knew him, while there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since Shelley. Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and shapely zest that are his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity.
While the tributes poured in, the war was gathering momentum and many of his friends would also die. Hugh Russell-Smith was killed a year after Brooke’s own death, by which time his old home Watersgreen House, where Brooke had spent many a happy hour lazing in the hammock in the garden, had become a nursing home, caring for wounded Indians, before becoming a centre for the wounded soldiers of New Zealand.
Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary on 27 April:
So very sorry to hear [about] Rupert Brooke … I have only met him once or twice, never got to know him, but always looked forward to doing so some day and it does stab one to think of this beautiful young poet’s face with that cornfield head. He had the most lovely regard I have ever seen I think. Poor Eddie will be broken-hearted – I think he was his favourite protégé.
Eddie Marsh was indeed broken-hearted, as he expressed in his letter of condolence to Mrs Brooke:
It is the great sorrow I could have, and I dare not think what it must be to you – I have never known or heard of anyone like him – his genius and his beauty, his wisdom, honour, gentleness and humour made him such a man as seldom lived. Everybody loved him, there was no one who had so many devoted friends and so many charmed acquaintances.
With those words Marsh set the tone for his memoir of Rupert, which appeared to glorify Brooke and therefore be condemned by his mother. Initially she was grateful to Marsh for his support and devotion to Rupert, and asked him to use his influence to obtain special leave for Alfred, adding a comment about Rupert: ‘The many
painful attacks of illness which he had as a boy would fill a book … All my life and surroundings are so bound up in him, my sitting room is full of his books and things waiting for his return as my heart is.’ Gradually, however, areas of Rupert’s life of which she had no knowledge emerged, arousing in her, one suspects, a not unnatural jealousy of a world that Rupert had shared more with Eddie and his circle than with her. Cathleen Nesbitt’s name came up, and not for the last time she had to write to Eddie for a wider picture, a scenario she undoubtedly came to increasingly resent.
Late in May, Marsh’s grief was still as fresh as he poured out his heart to Violet Asquith.
It was sad and sweet to see the places he had loved so much … every ray and every leaf and flower seemed to cry out for him – the elm-clumps greatly standing, the mayfields all golden showing, the sleepy grass and the collapse of hours – all his lovely phrases came back to me, and most of all ‘Her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day’ … dear old Winston, at dinner last night, had suddenly broken out, apropos nothing, in the midst of discussing his own troubles, that nothing had grieved him, or went on grieving him, so much as Rupert’s death…
Mrs Brooke, strong as she was, was becoming morbidly inconsolable as the reality of her son’s death hit her. Dudley Ward and Jacques Raverat went to the Old Vicarage to sort out papers, letters and books, with the worried Mrs Neeve not certain that she was doing the right thing by consenting to it, without Mrs Brooke’s knowledge. The Ranee, in accordance with Rupert’s wishes, was happy for Eddie to be the literary executor, but she felt that his personal letters should perhaps go to her at Rugby. She was unaware of Rupert’s plea to Dudley to destroy some of them. Always a loyal friend, he made
sure that they went to Raymond Buildings for sorting. Meanwhile the tributes continued.
One of Rupert’s peers at Cambridge wrote this short but colourful cameo of him: ‘Suddenly a freshman, with long and not unhyacinthine locks, was seen to tear through the muddy scrum. It was Rupert Brooke, and we paused in our game to observe this semblance of a Greek god in a football shirt.’ Another friend, although more a contemporary of Rupert’s younger brother Alfred, poured out his feelings in a letter to Mrs Brooke in June 1915: ‘Cambridge and King’s particularly are full of ghosts for me, and I fear they will soon be so full that I shall feel more at home among the ghosts than I do among the living.’
June saw the publication of Rupert’s
1914 and Other Poems
, and the death in action of Denis Browne. The following week, Marsh and Henry James spent an evening together, Marsh reading Browne’s letter relating the details of Rupert’s last moments. James was deeply affected: ‘The ghost telling of the ghost moved me more than I could find words for.’
Bereavement was making Mrs Brooke edgy, and she felt that Marsh was organising Rupert’s letters, books and photographs without consulting her. He was undoubtedly more able to deal with Rupert’s literary legacy than she was, but what the Ranee saw was it all happening with indecent haste. Marsh was shaken even more by the deposing of Churchill as First Sea Lord, and he was as faithful to him as he had been to Rupert. Mrs Brooke’s life was shattered on receiving news that her only surviving son, Alfred, had been killed by a mortar bomb at Vermelles, France, while serving as a reserve machine-gun officer in the Post Office Rifles. Within a fortnight, Eddie took Rupert’s belongings from the SS
Grantully
to her at Rugby, ‘and when we got upstairs and I opened the boxes she broke down – I have never seen such suffering.’ The items included clothing and a lock of Rupert’s hair.
From Rugby, Marsh went to Wilfred Gibson’s house, the Old Nailshop, where he began his memoir of Brooke. During his stay on 10 June Gibson wrote a poem commemorating the first time Eddie had introduced him to Rupert and they had gone to King’s Cross to watch a timber yard on fire.
The night we saw the stacks of timber blaze
To terrible golden fury, young and strong
He watched between us with dream-dazzled gaze
Aflame, and burning like a god of song,
As we together stood against the throng
Drawn from the midnight of the city ways.
To-night the world about us is ablaze
And he is dead, is dead … Yet, young and strong
He watches with us still with deathless gaze
Aflame, and burning like a god of song,
As we together stand against the throng
Drawn from the bottomless midnight of hell’s ways.