Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  As if to confirm his low opinion of the theatre, in the dying days of July Brooke encountered the man who epitomized all that he now told himself he loathed in London and England: Lytton Strachey. The unfortunate encounter occurred in the foyer of the Drury Lane Theatre, where Brooke had bumped into James Strachey and was chatting with him – possibly about the looming threat of war – when Lytton walked up. Facetiously James remarked: ‘I don’t think you know my brother Lytton?’ Brooke’s response was immediate. ‘No,’ he agreed, spun on his heel and stalked away. There was a stunned silence in the crowd around them, followed by the jangling of the bell summoning them for the second act. This was to be the last time that Brooke met the Strachey brothers together, and the following day he made the breach irreparable by a final curt and priggish little note: ‘My dear James, I have realized that, in the excitement of the evening, I may not have explained to you how much I was grieved at your opinions. I had hoped you had got rid of them. They seem to me not only eunuch & shocking, but also damned silly and slightly dangerous. R.B.’ With this clear projection of his own confusions on to the baffled James, Brooke’s oldest and deepest friendship came to its sad end.

  As so often in his life, the slamming of one door opened another, and very shortly after the scandal in Drury Lane, on 30 July, he found himself among the most exalted company in the most elevated surroundings in England: meeting at last Eddie’s revered ‘Chief, Winston Churchill, at Downing Street. The international situation was more and more threatening: earlier that day Brooke was sitting with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence in the Ship restaurant, awaiting Eddie, who was uncharacteristically late for lunch. At last he arrived, panting with excitement, to proclaim that the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had just averted war with Germany. Alas, Eddie’s optimism was both premature and short-lived: the diplomatic disaster of mobilizations and unshakeable alliances continued its malign work, and by the time the subdued guests gathered at Number Ten that evening, a belligerent Churchill was offering to get Brooke a commission if it should come to war. It was an offer that he would make good.

  The next day Brooke travelled to Rugby, and on the morning of 1 August the Ranee brought him his newspaper in bed with the ominous news that Germany had declared war on Russia. From Bilton Road, he gave his initial reaction to Jacques Raverat, a fervent supporter of his native France and the allied cause:

  Everyone in the governing classes seems to think we shall all be at war. Everything’s just the wrong way round. I want Germany to smash Russia to fragments, and then France to break Germany. Instead of which I’m afraid Germany will badly smash France, and then be wiped out by Russia. France and England are the only countries that ought to have any power. Prussia is a devil. And Russia means the end of Europe and any decency. I suppose the future is a Slav Empire, world-wide, despotic, and insane.

  Still in Rugby, as if by reflex he began a long letter to the latest of his lady-loves: Lady Eileen. He described a long car trip with the Ranee and Alfred through the English heartland of Warwickshire, redolent with images and memories of Shakespeare, whose death-day he would so soon come to share. He ended: ‘Please take care of yourself. Eileen, there’s something solid & real & wonderful about you, in a world of shadows. Do you know how real you are? The time with you is the only waking hours in a life of dreams. And that’s another way of saying I adore you. Goodnight. Rupert.’ He was turning over in his mind his options should war come; but had not yet decided to accept Winston’s offer. He thought aloud to Eileen: ‘If war comes, should one enlist? Or turn war correspondent? Or what?’ To Stanley Spencer – who would soon be doing his little bit in uniform alongside, of all people, his fellow-artist Henry Lamb – Brooke mused: ‘If fighting starts I shall have to enlist, or go as a correspondent. I don’t know. It will be Hell to be in it, and Hell to be out of it. At present I’m so depressed about the war, that I can’t talk, think, or write coherently.’ To Eileen he confessed that he was suffering an English melancholy: ‘an uninspiring thing, a conglomeration of swear-words and uncharitable thoughts and awkward limbs. That am I.’

  Brooke’s first reactions to the approaching conflict, however understandable, are somewhat surprising to those who have been schooled to think of him as an unswerving patriot, running lithely to answer his country’s call. In fact, the war caught him on the back foot – awkward, stumbling and uncertain of what to do.

  Still in Rugby for his twenty-seventh birthday – the last he would see – Brooke distractedly told Eileen of his nail-biting mood: ‘It is raining. Every now and then one goes out and buys an evening paper to find the news. And the news is always a little worse … I can’t sit still. I wish I could fly …’ But no Peter Pan fantasy could rescue Brooke from the grim reality that was fast engulfing him. Significantly he compared his situation to a suitor awaiting the answer to a marriage proposal – clearly a fate that Brooke could only conceive of as worse than death: ‘One feels as depressedly restless as in those dreadful pauses of a day or two after one’s sent off a proposal of marriage, and before the reply comes. What will happen tomorrow? And whatever it is, won’t it be dreadful?’

  To Eddie he wrote, with a dreadful prescience: ‘Do you have a Brussels-before-Waterloo feeling? That we’ll all – or some – meet with other eyes in 1915? … and I’m vaguely frightened. I feel hurt to think that France may suffer. And it hurts, too, to think that Germany may be harmed by Russia. And I’m anxious that England may act rightly. I can’t bear it if she does wrong …’ By ‘wrong’ Brooke clearly means if the irresolute government followed the course that a pacifist minority of its ministers was urging upon it: to ignore its obligation to Belgium, whose neutrality had been violated by Germany, and stay out of a war that had by now consumed almost every other European power.

  On 4 August, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, Brooke left for the coast, taking up an invitation to stay with the Cornfords and their infant daughter at Cley in Norfolk. The news of war did not reach the remote seaside resort until the following morning, but that night, he told Cathleen, he had a nightmare: ‘Let my love wind round you and comfort you and be a guard over you and a sweetness and a glory for you.’ Dumbstruck by the terrible news, neither Brooke nor his hosts spoke of what might happen until the evening when Brooke blurted out that the only thing that would make Ka happy would be ‘that I should be blown to bits by a shell. Then she would marry someone else and be happy.’ As a prophecy – apart from the manner of his death – it had Brooke’s usual hallmark of uncanny accuracy. When Frances protested that he would not have to fight, he grimly informed her that they would all have to.

  In an effort to cheer themselves up they took themselves off to the beach, where someone snapped Brooke, hair tousled amid the windswept dunes, reading to baby Helena, who had swallowed one of the South Sea beads he had bought for her. He stuck a flower behind his ear in pale imitation of a Polynesian. But, eerily, the flower he chose was a poppy – soon to be the symbol of the carnage of the war. On the beach he felt a chill of premonition deeper than the North Sea winds that froze the water and forced him from it after a few minutes.

  Although he remained in Cley for a few more days, his mind was elsewhere, his thoughts distracted. ‘I feel dazed and troubled,’ he confessed to Cathleen. ‘The general uneasiness and tension of mind seems to take all the strength out of me.’ He was not yet ready to follow Jacques, who had written, begging Brooke to use his influence to help him join up: Brooke tried to calm down his excitable friend:

  You mustn’t get excited. I asked Eddie about interpreters’ jobs. He didn’t seem to think anyone was wanted just now. He promised to keep you in mind … One can’t ‘go and fight’ in England. Volunteers are admitted neither to the navy nor the army. If we join the Territorials now, they give you six months’ training, then let you garrison the chief ports and sea towns, If the Expeditionary Force leaves England – it might be worth doing …

  Within a few weeks Brooke would be proved wrong – for t
he first time in English history mass armies of volunteers were being raised to fight the first mass war. Nor was he to know that his own posthumous image would be one of the most potent weapons used to tempt and shame young men into answering the call. But on one point his prophetic instincts did not desert him: ‘Unless any country gets smashed,’ he told Jacques, ‘it’ll probably be the people that hold out longest who win.’

  Brooke toyed with various half-baked ideas to be of use: did the French need hands to gather in the harvest now that so many peasant-soldiers had been mobilized, he wondered. He also made a half-hearted effort to get a war correspondent’s job, but there seemed to be no interest. Back in London on 10 August, and hurrying from office to office, he met the poet and journalist J. C. Squire in the street. Squire asked him what all the rushing was for. ‘Well, if Armageddon is on,’ replied Brooke, ‘I suppose one should be there.’

  He told Eileen of his frustration: ‘It’s not as easy as you think – for a person who has no military training or knowledge, save the faint, almost prenatal remembrance of some khaki drilling at Rugby – to get to the “front”. I’m one of a band who’ve been offering themselves, with vague persistence, to their country, in various quarters of London for some days, and being continually refused. In time, one of the various doors we tap at will be opened …’

  One door that Brooke tapped on did indeed open during these days of stress and exultation: the door to Eileen’s bedroom, or rather, to Brooke’s own; for it was most likely, during this period of frustration and hope, that the two of them became lovers in Brooke’s room at Raymond Buildings. A shocked Mrs Elgy, as Brooke, half proudly and half ashamed confessed to Eileen, found some of her hairpins in his bed. At any rate, by the middle of August Brooke felt free enough to argue out his own internal debates with his new lady:

  One grows introspective. I find in myself two natures – not necessarily conflicting, but different. There’s half my heart which is normal and English – what’s the word, not quite ‘good’ or ‘honourable’ – ‘straight’, I think. But the other half is a wanderer and a solitary, selfish, unbound and doubtful. Half my heart is of England, the rest is looking for some home I haven’t yet found. So, when this war broke, there was part of my nature and desires that said ‘Let me alone. What’s all this bother? I want to work, I’ve got ends I desire to reach. If I’d wanted to be a soldier I should have been one. But I’ve found myself other dreams.’ It was that part, I suppose, which, when the tumult and unrest in me became too strong, sent me seeking for a correspondentship. At least, it was some individualist part of me which said ‘It’s the biggest thing in your seventy years. You’d better see as much of it as you can. Go, for some paper, immediately.’ Base thoughts, those: when decent people are offering their lives for their country, not for their curiosity. You’re quite right, it’s a rotten trade, war-correspondent.

  Once again, as at so many decisive junctures in his life, Brooke displays that essentially divided nature of his: keen sportsman versus decadent intellectual; puritan versus libertine; romantic versus cynic; socialist versus nationalist – now the detached observer jousts with the self-sacrificing warrior. But by mid-August Brooke’s private war with himself seems to have been won – the man who had never wanted to be a soldier, but would write his most famous poem under that title, had decided to don the King’s uniform and serve his country as a fighting man. But not, of course, as any old fighting man. He wanted to be special. He endeavoured to explain his frustration to Eileen:

  I came to London a few days ago to see what I could do that would be most use. I had a resentment – or the individualist part of me had – against becoming a mere part of a machine. I wanted to use my intelligence. I can’t help feeling I’ve got a brain. I thought there must be some organizing work that demanded intelligence. But, on investigation, there isn’t. At least, not for ages. I feel so damnably incapable. I can’t fly or drive a car or ride a horse sufficiently well …

  To add to his frustration, some of his friends had successfully got themselves into uniform: he watched Ben Keeling drilling with the Inns of Court Officers’ Training Unit, and was filled with envy when he encountered Geoffrey Keynes in the uniform of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Desperately, he tried to pull strings, writing to Andrew Gow at King’s, the friendly don who had been put in charge of processing applications for commissions from Kingsmen. On 22 August, the day after the tiny British Expeditionary Force had exchanged its first shots with the mighty German war machine near Malplaquet in Belgium, he wrote again to Gow from Rugby, where he had gone to inform a heartbroken Ranee that he was intent on joining up. Acknowledging receipt of an application form for a commission, Brooke told Gow that he was set on an active service posting, not a staff job. Asked why he wished to enlist, he noted simply: ‘To Hell with Prooshians.’

  Meanwhile he poured his frustration into journalism. The New Statesman published two pieces of his: the first, inspired by the news that the New Zealanders had taken possession of German Samoa, was called ‘Not Counting Niggers’ – an ironically titled tribute to the South Sea Islanders – while the second, ‘An Unusual Young Man’, was a lightly disguised slice of autobiography, describing his own feelings on the outbreak of war. He recalled his pre-war sojourns in Munich and Berlin, and how he had been seduced by the music and culture of Germany. How would he feel, he asks himself, at meeting the friends he had made then on the battlefield? But he would be fighting for England: its fields, lanes and ‘holiness’. Already the lineaments of the soldier-poet are falling into place. By way of conclusion, he recalls his comment to Squire – however ambivalent his emotions: ‘If Armageddon is on, I suppose one should be there.’

  He was still at Rugby when the news came that he had been waiting for. Eddie wrote to say that Churchill was in the process of forming an entirely new unit – the first of the many private armies that the belligerent warrior politician would raise – to fight a new and unconventional sort of warfare. The Royal Naval Division, placed under the command of Major-General (later General) Paris, would comprise the Royal Marines, the Royal Naval Reserve and any suitable newly commissioned civilian officers. Intended for use as an amphibious force, the RND had naval ranks and was carried by sea, but fought on land.

  If Brooke wished, Eddie wrote, Winston would fulfil his promise to get him a commission. Brooke had no doubts. Eddie pulled the necessary strings and within a brace of days the deed was done. There would be no nonsense about interviews or application forms – he was in. ‘I’m glad I could do it for you, since you wanted it …’ wrote the doting Eddie, ‘but I feel I’m “giving of my dearest” as the newspapers say. Don’t tell a soul that I did it all on my own or I shall be plagued to death.’

  Now that Brooke was committed, he unburdened himself with a long confessional letter to Eileen, lest she labour under the illusion that he was really the stainless knight his sacrificial enlistment indicated. ‘I am really rather horrible,’ he admitted. ‘Not especially fickle-hearted, but I am rather hard-hearted. I usen’t to be. I think one of the things that appalls me is my extraordinary selfishness: which isn’t quite the same as hardness of heart, though it helps. I mean, I just enjoy things as they come, and don’t think or care how they affect other people.’ And again the death-wish that he had expressed on the day war broke out enters the equation: ‘I expect it will be the best thing for everyone if a stray bullet finds me next year.’ Once more, although he again assumed his end would be violent, he was almost spot on about the date of his demise.

  ‘And another thing,’ he added, piling on the agony:

  I’m really a wolf and a tiger and a goat. I am – how shall I put it – carried along on the tides of my body, rather helplessly. At intervals I realize this, and feel rather aghast. Oh, it’s all right if you don’t trust me, my dear. I don’t. Never trust me an inch. Oh, I’m rather a horror. A vagabond, drifting from one imbecility to another. You don’t know how pointless and undependable and rotten a thing you�
��ve got hold of. Don’t laugh. I know it’s funny. But it’s all true.

  The reality of the momentous step Brooke had taken began to sink in when he went to be fitted for a uniform. He told another lover, the Marchesa Capponi, that it brought the imminence of death home: ‘It’s terrible … but it will end all right, and lead to better things. A lot of people die, and others mourn them. But they’ll do that anyhow. Death doesn’t matter.’

  By now it was late September, and he was rubbing shoulders with those directing Britain’s increasingly desperate war effort. The huge scythe of the wheeling German attack on France had been blunted by the French before Paris in the battle of the Marne, and the Germans, blooded but unbowed, had changed direction and were now storming towards the Channel ports, opposed by the minuscule British Expeditionary Force, in the so-called ‘Race to the Sea’. Lunching with Churchill and Eddie, Brooke was vouchsafed a glimpse of high strategy. To Cathleen, who was touring a play in the provinces, he boasted:

  Winston was very cheerful at lunch and said one thing which is exciting, but a dead secret. You mustn’t breathe it. That is, that it’s his game to hold the Northern ports – Dunkirk to [Le] Havre – at all costs. So if there’s a raid on any of them, at any moment, we shall be flung across to help the French reservists. So we may go to Camp on Saturday, and be under fire in France on Monday!

  Brooke – still dressed in civvies – was already drilling at a depot at the Crystal Palace in south London. He hadn’t joined the Army, he told Jacques, but the Navy: ‘a more English thing to do, I think … I felt that if we were going to turn into a military nation and all the young men go in, I should be among them. Also I had curiosity.’ It would have been easy – but facile – to remind Brooke of what curiosity did to the cat.