Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Loading the ship with equipment, mules, and men took most of the night, but at 5.30 the following morning Brooke retired to his cabin to snatch some sleep. He was not too exhausted to resist the habit of a lifetime, and scribbled a quick farewell note to Ka, telling her he was off to take Constantinople. ‘Isn’t it luck?’ he burbled. ‘I’ve never been so happy … Goodbye. Please keep well.’ As he wrote, the Prime Minister’s daughter, staying the night outside Poole, was writing him what started as a goodbye note but became a love-letter: ‘When I have asked myself … why I loved being with you so … one of the reasons … was that I have never spent a moment with you anywhere – not at a pounce table – or a music hall – or a Downing St lunch! – that wasn’t permeated by & shot through with colour – & a sense of adventure – the feeling one lives for – the Dardanelles in fact.’

  The shy confession of love was followed by a hasty, blushing acknowledgement that she realized Brooke did not return her feelings: ‘but that didn’t matter to me. I was too happy to have any vanity about it.’ She ended ‘tearfully’: ‘Goodbye beloved Rupert – bless & keep you – if thoughts could save you should be very safe.’

  Clutching the letter to deliver in person, Violet drove to Avonmouth to bid goodbye to Brooke and her brother. Brooke wangled a few hours’ shore leave by swapping his watch with Cleg Kelly, and he, Oc and Violet went off to lunch at the nearest hotel. Violet’s diary recorded: ‘After lunch Brooke’s main idea as usual was to get as warm as possible – he is a real lizard – and we coiled ourselves almost in the fire-place.’ After a few hours they wandered off to find a chemist to get a prescription made up for Patrick Shaw-Stewart, who was suffering from a poisoned throat. Waiting outside the pharmacy, and making desultory conversation, Brooke showed Violet his latest poem: ‘The Treasure’, which begins with the striking line: ‘When colour is gone home into the eyes.’ ‘He said in his usual intensely quite modest eyed way – “A [I] think the first line’s perfectly divine.”’

  With a feeling that a knife was suspended above them, Violet accompanied Brooke and Oc back on board. A series of imperious siren blasts told her the knife was falling: it was time for civilians to go ashore. ‘Rupert walked with me along the narrow crowded decks – down the little plank stairs – then I said goodbye to him. I knew by his eyes that he felt sure we should never see each other again.’

  She watched as the gangway was raised and the liner moved slowly away from the quayside. The Battalion’s trumpeters played a salute on their silver instruments as the ship cleared the harbour mouth. ‘The decks were densely crowded with happy confident faces – the thought of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse flashed irresistibly thro’ my mind.’ Violet’s premonition was understandable – but unfortunate – the expedition she refers to was a raid against Sicily in 413BC, during the Peloponnesian War; it ended with the complete annihilation of the Athenian force. Through eyes misted with tears, she watched until the ship became a distant blur. She had seen Oc waving goodbye, but not Brooke: ‘I think he purposefully stayed away,’ she wrote sadly.

  Escorted by two destroyers, the Grantully Castle sailed down the Bristol Channel: to port, if Brooke had been watching, lay the cliffs near Clevedon where they had all carelessly vowed to defeat middle age. Now he was sealed in another pact. It was to prove a far surer way of defeating age, and of finding the only end of age.

  27

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  A Body of England’s

  * * *

  Brooke endured several days of seasick misery as the liner lumbered down the Bay of Biscay before he found his sea legs. Then it was into a routine of coaxing his stokers into having their vaccinations and coaching them in semaphore. By 4 March they were through the Straits of Gibraltar and passing along the southern coast of Spain. That day he wrote to Violet with a touch of his travel-reporter’s eloquence, describing the smell and sense of the Spanish land mass:

  There was something earthy in the air, & warm – like the consciousness of a presence in the dark – the wind had something Andalusian in it. It wasn’t that wall of scent and invisible blossom & essential spring that knocks you flat, quite suddenly, as you’ve come round some unseen corner in the atmosphere, fifty miles out from a South sea island. But it was the good smell of land – & of Spain, too! and Spain I’ve never seen, & never shall see maybe. All day I sat & strained my eyes to see, over the horizon, orange groves & Moorish buildings & dark eyed beauties & guitars & fountains & a golden darkness. But the curve of the world lay between us …

  The ship sailed on, tacking close to the coast of Africa as it neared their first port of call, the British island base of Malta. The two musician officers – Denis Browne and ‘Cleg’ Kelly – did their best to entertain the stokers with renderings of popular songs on the liner’s piano. The further east they sailed, the more the reality of what they were engaged on sank in. There was little hard information, and in its absence rumour flourished. Brooke told Violet: ‘We’re in the dreamiest, most utter, most Trustful, ignorance of what’s to come. Some even say it’ll all be over before we get there. I hope not: & certainly think not. Impossible. I rather figure us scrapping forlornly in some corner of the Troad [the area around ancient Troy] for years & years. Everyone will forget all about us. We shan’t even be told when peace is declared …’

  Responding tactfully to Violet’s recent declarations of love for him, Brooke claimed to have been too involved in his work – ‘entirely surrounded by the horizons of the day’ – to withdraw and think. ‘Perhaps I never have, even in peace. I’m a hand-to-mouth liver, Gods help me.’ Then he let her down gently with soft lies, similar to those he had told before, so often, and to so many: ‘It has been very good being with you. I had rather be with you than with anyone in the world. And you’ve been very kind to me.’ Then, recalling perhaps, his situation, and that there was no more need for lies, honesty overcame him:

  Do not care much what happens to me or what I do. When I give thought to it at all, I hate people – people I like – to care for me. I’m selfish. And nothing but harm ever seems to have come of it, in the past. I don’t know. In some moods that thought seems wrong. Generally right. I don’t know the truth about that – or about anything. But somewhere, I think, there’s bad luck about me. There’s a very bright sun, & a lot of comedy in the world; so perhaps there’s some point in my not getting shot. But also there’s point in my getting shot.

  The Brooke who was going to his death was as confused and, deep beneath the bright and brittle charm, as sad a man as ever. But he concluded brightly: ‘Anyway, you’re very good to me. The Staff-Captain is going to seal up the mail-bag. Goodbye. Rupert.’

  He had begun to write what he knew would be his last letters. He prioritized them: only the best, the closest and the oldest friends: Ka, Dudley, Jacques, Eddie. Many were excluded: the Strachey and Keynes brothers; the Olivier sisters – his last word to Noel, back in January, had commented cynically on the fact that his rival Ferenc Békássy had enlisted, but on the other side, going off with money from Maynard Keynes, to fight and die for his native Hungary. ‘Dreadful if you lost all your lovers at once,’ Brooke had remarked, adding: ‘Ah, but you won’t lose all!’

  His mind turning to the practicalities of his posthumous life, he explicitly instructed Dudley and Eddie to deal with his letters and literary manuscripts. Dudley, as always, was detailed to clear up the amatory messes Brooke had left behind:

  I want you, now – I’ve told my mother – to go through my letters (they’re mostly together, but some scattered) and DESTROY all those from (a) Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. These are signed E.V.R. and in a handwriting you’ll pick out once you’ve seen it. They’ll begin in the beginning of 1909-1910, my first visit to Munich, and be rather rare except in one or two bundles. (b) Lady Eileen Wellesley: also in a handwriting you’ll recognise quickly; and generally signed Eileen. They date from last July on … Indeed, why keep anything? Well, I might turn out to be eminent and biographable.
If so, let them know the poor truths … try to inform Taata of my death. Mlle Taata, Hotel Tiare, Papeete, Tahiti. It might find her. Give her my love … You’ll have to give the Ranee a hand about me: because she knows so little about great parts of my life …

  Although prepared to lift the curtain a fraction on the dark secrets of his inner life, Brooke was still – even in the valley of the shadow of death – too terrified of his mother for plain honesty; and this despite his injunction to Dudley to ‘Let them know the poor truths’. If he was frightened of revealing the truths of his sexual liaisons with white women – Elisabeth and Eileen – he balked completely at the relationship with a Tahitian semi-courtesan. As they neared the coast of Tunisia, ancient Carthage, he wrote to Dudley: ‘It is my watch. I have just picked my way over forms recumbent on the deck, and under hammocks, visited twenty sentries, smelt the stale smell of sleeping stokers, and noticed the beginnings of the dawn over Africa. The sky is a grim silver, and beyond Carthage there’s a muffled half-moon whirling faintly round in clouds.’ Dudley’s wife had sent him a gift of handkerchiefs, which, he feebly jested would come in useful for binding his stumps if his legs were lopped off by Turkish scimitars. He concluded grimly with a sober assessment of the odds they were facing: ‘There are a quarter of a million Turks ahead. We are ten thousand. This is some expedition.’

  On 8 March they put in at the Fish Dock in the harbour at Valetta. Brooke was officer of the watch, and remained on board writing to Eddie while the stokers went ashore for an uproarious day’s leave. ‘War seems infinitely remote,’ he told his mentor, assuring him that the five-pointed-star amulet given by the anonymous lady well-wisher – almost certainly Lady Eileen or Cathleen – was hanging round his neck along with his identity disc. ‘Please thank Anonyma and say I’m quite sure it will bring me luck. But what ‘Luck’ is we’ll all wait and see. At least, we’ll all wait, and you’ll see. perhaps. I can well see that life might be great fun: and I can well see that death might be an admirable solution …’ Here once more is the terrible admission, unspoken but unmistakable, that Brooke’s sense of failure and unworthiness is so strong that death seems a simple and even desirable ‘solution’; that the puzzle of life is too complex and messy to be patiently teased out, and must be severed by a bullet.

  Eddie had procured for Brooke, as a going-away gift, a history of Turkey and the Crusades, and, predictably enough Brooke and his comrades saw themselves as latter-day Crusaders, off to liberate the Holy Places of Christendom from the Infidels. He told Jacques Raverat:

  the early Crusaders were very jolly people. I’ve been reading about them. They set out to slay the Turks – and very finely they did it, when they met them. But when they got to the East, to the Levant and Constantinople, were they kind to their brother Christians they found there? No. They very properly thwacked and trounced them, and took their money, and cut their throats, and ravished their daughters and so left them: for they were Greeks, Jews, Slavs, Vlachs, Magyars, Czechs, and Levantines, and not gentlemen. So shall we do, I hope.

  The minds of Brooke and his band of brother officers were transported more and more back to the Classical world they had imbibed over dusty school benches years before: ‘… we’ve been gliding through a sapphire sea, swept by ghosts of triremes and quinqueremes, Hannibal on poop, or Hanno … soon – after Malta – we’ll be among the Cyclades. There I shall recite Sappho and Homer. And the winds of history will follow us all the way.’

  Relieved of his duties, Brooke went ashore with Oc and Denis. Valetta reminded him of Verona, which he had seen with Ka on that glorious day of reunion after his confinement at Cannes – it seemed a lifetime ago, although it was just three years. While dining, the last member of ‘the Argonauts’, as they were coming to think of themselves, joined them. Charles Lister was the delicate only son of Lord Ribblesdale and a contemporary of Patrick Shaw-Stewart at Eton and Balliol. Serving with the General Staff but eager for glory, he was persuaded by his friends to transfer immediately to the Hood Battalion.

  As they got up steam to leave Malta just before midday on the following morning, the officers got their first glimpse of Britain’s allies, in the shape of a French warship, and Denis Browne assembled the Battalion’s band and belted out a rendition of the Marseillaise to greet their comrades-in-arms. Two days later, on 11 March, they arrived off the Greek island of Lemnos, the main assembly point for the assault. The anchorage at Mudros Bay was already crowded with Allied shipping, including the brand-new British battleship the Queen Elizabeth and her elderly counterparts the Nelson and the appropriately named Agamemnon. Next morning they were joined by an antiquated Russian cruiser, the Askold, whose five slim funnels, sticking up like cigarettes in a pack, caused some wag on the ship to nickname her ‘the Packet of Woodbines’.

  They remained on Lemnos for a week, kicking their heels, while the rest of the expedition assembled. They were all bewitched by the ‘isles of Greece/where burning Sappho loved and sang …’. Brooke scanned the horizon with the Marchesa Capponi’s powerful binoculars: ‘We saw,’ he told Cathleen Nesbitt, ‘they said we saw – very far away, Olympus … But with strong field-glasses I could not certainly see the gods … its head was shrouded in mist. Also there was, I think – Parnassus … and my eyes fell on the holy land of Attica. So I can die.’

  His impending death was weighing sombrely on his mind. On 10 March, en route from Malta to Lemnos, he wrote what was intended as his final farewell to Ka, consciously couching it with an eye to posterity and Parnassus:

  I suppose you’re the best I can do in the way of a widow. I’m telling the Ranee that after she’s dead, you’re to have my papers. They may want to write a biography! How am I to know if I shan’t be eminent? And take any MSS you want. Say what you like to the Ranee. But you’d better not tell her much. Let her be. Let her think we might have married. Perhaps it’s true. My dear, my dear, you did me wrong: but I have done you very great wrong. Every day I see it greater. You were the best thing I found in life. If I have memory, I shall remember. You know what I want for you. I hope you will be happy, and marry, and have children. It’s a good thing I die. Goodbye, child. Rupert.

  On 18 March came the orders they had been waiting for. They were to sail into Turkish waters. In a postscript to Ka, Brooke described the day that followed: ‘Off we stole that night through the phosphorescent Aegean, scribbling farewell letters, and snatching periods of dream-broken excited sleep.’ Reveille sounded at 4 a.m. the following morning: ‘We rose and buckled on our panoply, hung ourselves with glasses, periscopes, revolvers, food and the rest, and had a stealthy large breakfast. That was a mistake. It is ruinous to load up one’s belly four or five hours before it expects it: it throws the machinery out of gear for a week. I felt extremely ill the rest of that day.’

  Unbeknown to the Battalion, the previous day had seen a decisive defeat for the Allied plan: Churchill had ordered a full-scale naval assault on the forts on either side of the straits in preparation for getting the assembled troops ashore, against the advice of his admirals, one of whom, Carden, collapsed with a nervous breakdown and was removed from command. Their forebodings proved only too well-founded: the Anglo-French fleet came up against a chain of unswept mines, and two British and one French battleships were sunk, with great loss of life. Brooke described the anticlimactic sequel to Ka:

  We paraded in silence, under paling stars, along the sides of the ship. The darkness on the sea was full of scattered flashing lights, hinting at our fellow-transports and the rest. Slowly the sky became wan and green and the sea opal. Everyone’s face looked drawn and ghastly. If we had landed, my company was to be the first to land … We made out that we were only a mile or two from a dim shore. I was seized with an agony of remorse that I hadn’t taught my platoon a thousand things more energetically and competently. The light grew. The shore looked to be crammed with Fate, and most ominously silent. One man thought he saw a camel through his glasses … There were some hours of silence. About s
even someone said ‘We’re going home’. We dismissed the stokers, who said, quietly, ‘When’s the next battle?’; and disempanoplied, and had another breakfast. If we were a ‘feint’ or if it was too rough to land, or, in general, what little part we blindly played, we never knew, and shall not. Still, we did our bit: not ignobly I trust. We did not see the enemy. We did not fire at them; nor they at us. It seemed improbable that they saw us. One of B Company … was sick on parade. Otherwise, no casualties. A notable battle.

  In fact the Battalion had been the victim of the sort of bungling that was to characterize the whole Gallipoli operation, which should, in hindsight, have been called off at this point, as the element of surprise was lost and the Turks, with German help, were busily strengthening the peninsula’s defences. Instead General Sir Ian Hamilton was hurriedly appointed to command another attempt, and the whole Allied force withdrew to regroup, but not, alas, to rethink. The Battalion endured another week of waiting on Lemnos, before sailing for Egypt, to disembark at the unlovely town of Port Said on 28 March.

  They pitched their tents – the last of Brooke’s camps – on a stretch of dirty sand just outside the town. Brooke shared his with his Company CO, Bernard Freyberg, the ebullient American Johnny Dodge and a Lieutenant Nelson, rumoured to be a descendant of his famous namesake who had trounced the French – now Britain’s allies – in these waters a century before. After two nights under canvas, Brooke, Shaw-Stewart and Oc Asquith were given 48-hour-leave passes for Cairo. They took the train to the capital and stayed in the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, dropping in on some of Oc’s well-born friends among Cairo’s ruling British administration, including the famous adventurer Aubrey Herbert. They saw the usual tourist sights, visiting the Pyramids and the Sphinx, where Brooke was photographed in a pith helmet astride a camel. The next day he braved the hawkers bargaining in the bazaar, acquiring a few trinkets. By the time they returned to camp that evening, he was beginning to feel distinctly queasy.