by Nigel Jones
At noon Oc was relieved by Denis, who at 2 p.m. was told by the French head surgeon that Brooke was sinking fast. Denis departed post-haste for the Franconia to fetch the chaplain ‘for his mother’s sake’. The chaplain, ‘Failes by name, came back with me and saw him, but he was unconscious so after saying a few prayers he went away.’ Oc had rejoined the small group attending Brooke, and Denis sent for Dr Schlesinger, who confirmed that it was simply a matter of hours. On learning this news, Oc hurried off again to make preliminary arrangements for the funeral as word was spreading that the Division was due to sail for the Dardanelles the next morning. Meanwhile an enquiry had arrived from Hamilton at Lemnos. The surgeon told Oc to answer simply: ‘Etat désespéré.’ When he received the message, Hamilton wrote to Eddie: ‘Alas, what a misfortune … he was bound, he said, to see this fight through with his fellows …’ Privately, he recorded in his diary: ‘War will smash, pulverize, sweep into the dustbin of eternity the whole fabric of the old world; therefore the firstborn of intellect must die. Is that the reading of the riddle?’
Alone, Denis sat on with his dying friend. ‘At four o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died,’ he wrote in his subsequent account, ‘with the sun shining all round his cabin and the cool sea breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows.’ The surgeon immediately wrote out a death certificate, giving the cause of death as a malign oedema caused by rapid septicaemia. This bald and brief statement of fact has given rise to much speculation as to the exact cause of Brooke’s death. It has been suggested that some long-dormant infection – possibly of venereal origin and dating back to his sojourn in the South Seas – was triggered into fatal virulence by the stresses of his service life and his exposure to the soup of tropical infections in Egypt. All this must remain speculative. The only certainty is that Brooke had a long-standing constitutional weakness and a disposition to fall victim to various infections, particularly when he was emotionally or physically overstretched. His delicate constitution was an obvious target for the virulent mosquito that probably bit him in Cairo or at the Pyramids, and once the poison was firmly in the blood, his resistance – already depleted by the relatively recent coral poisoning in the Pacific – gave way at once, allowing the disease to run its swift and fatal course.
At 5.15 p.m. Oc returned and held a hurried conference with Denis. They decided that Brooke would not have wanted to be buried at sea, and, in view of the impending departure for the Dardanelles, decided to bury him that same evening on Skyros – in the olive grove where they had rested only three days before.
Two hours after Brooke’s death a grave-digging party led by Freyberg, Browne and Lister went ashore and climbed to the olive grove, following the course of the dried-up river bed. Denis selected the grave site beneath an olive tree, which seemed to be ‘weeping’ over the head of the tomb. He cleared the ground with Brooke’s fellow-officers before handing over to stokers from A Company to do the spade work.
Back on the Duguay-Trouin, the French medical staff washed Brooke’s body and dressed him in his uniform, before laying him in a plain oak coffin provided from the ship’s stock. Oc, who was in charge of the arrangements, personally burned Brooke’s name and the date of his death into the wooden lid with a soldering iron. They covered the coffin with 16 palm fronds and the Union Flag, and placed Brooke’s pith helmet, pistol and holster on top, stepped back and saluted. Senior British officers arrived on the French ship, including General Paris and Brooke’s CO, Colonel Quilter. As a French guard of honour presented arms, the coffin was lowered into a boat. A large escort of pinnaces and launches from other ships in the fleet set off for the shore. A French officer described the funeral procession: ‘… they glide over the water like a holiday procession … music sounds as they pass; the huge ships one after another send them hoots in harmony, but the atmosphere is solemn and still. The night is soft with a sheen of moon, and starry. The island’s perfume drifts through the night, becoming stronger and stronger.’
A party of a dozen burly Australian pallbearers waited on the dark shore, commanded by Shaw-Stewart. As clouds moved across the moon, they inched their way by lamplight up the stony river course towards the olive grove. It took the cortège nearly two hours to negotiate the difficult path in the darkness, with sentries holding lamps posted every 20 yards to light their way. The procession was led by a stoker with a lantern, followed by Brooke’s platoon sergeant, Saunders, holding a large wooden cross that had been made by the men of the platoon for their departed officer. Shaw-Stewart came next, with a group of men bearing rifles to form a firing party, followed by the coffin, which was accompanied by Paris and Quilter.
The grave was dug and ready when the grave-digging party spied the bobbing lights of the cortège approaching up the valley just before 11 p.m. Seeing the size of the coffin, Oc leapt into the grave with a spade and hastily lengthened it. The earth walls were lined with olive branches and sprigs of pungent sage. Chaplain Failes recited the burial service of the Church of England and the coffin was lowered into its resting-place. At last Brooke had arrived at the end of his journey. What remained in the memory of those who saw it were sensual, immediate things: the flaring lamps, the dark clouds scudding across the moon’s face, the insistent smell of sage, thyme and mint. That night Kelly noted in his journal that the smell of the herbs ‘gave a strong classical tone, which was so in harmony with the poet we were burying that to some of us the Christian ceremony seemed out of keeping. One was transported back a couple of thousand years, and one felt the old Greek divinities stirring from their long sleep.’
Shaw-Stewart’s firing party fired three volleys over the grave. The shots rolled around the surrounding hills, sending wild goats running with a jingle of bells. The ceremony over, the parade presented arms and broke up, stumbling back to the beach the way they had come. Only five of the Argonauts – Browne, Freyberg, Asquith, Lister and Kelly – remained behind to gather the loose, sharp-sided pink and white marble rocks that lay scattered profusely around and heap them in a cairn over the tomb. A small cross was placed at the foot of the grave, and a large one, bearing Brooke’s name in large black letters, was planted at its head. On the back, the unit’s Greek interpreter, an islander from Lemnos wrote:
Here Lies
the servant of God
Sub-lieutenant of the
English Navy
Who died for the
deliverance of Constantinople from
the Turks.
As they walked away from Brooke, only six hours after he had ceased to breathe, leaving him alone with the goats and shepherds in his corner of a foreign field, more than one of his friends felt an overwhelming sense that they had been not just at a death, but at a birth: the beginning of a legend. Kelly spoke for them all when he wrote in his journal:
I have had a foreboding that he is one of those, like Keats, Shelley and Schubert, who are not suffered to deliver their full message … No more fitting resting place for a poet could be found than this small grove, and it seems that the gods had jealously snatched him away to enrich this scented island. For the whole day I was oppressed with the sense of loss, but when the officers and men had gone, and when at last the five of us, his friends, had covered his grave with stones and took a last look in silence – then the sense of tragedy gave place to a sense of passionless beauty, engendered both by the poet and the place … I copied out the contents of his notebook before going to bed …
So Kelly, who had angered Brooke back at Blandford by filching his sonnets and mockingly showing them around the mess, was moved to copy in awe the contents of Brooke’s last jottings. Among the fragmented lines and unfinished poems were a few words, in which, prophetic as always, the poet seemed to foretell his own end:
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.
* * *
Epilogue:
Brooke Now – from Myth to Man
* * *
‘Rupert Brooke is dead,’ thundered The Times on Monday 26 April 1915.
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 us 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 to the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause, and a heart devoid of hate for his 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.
The tone is unmistakable: reading the initials ‘W.S.C.’ at the foot of the tribute is superfluous – the rolling, grandiloquent prose style could have come from no other pen. Though a shattered Eddie Marsh wrote the original draft, the piece bears all the hallmarks of Churchill’s mind and pen. The short tribute followed Eddie’s official obituary (now Brooke knew who would ‘do’ him for The Times, the question he had posed in a letter to Eileen Wellesley after writing his obituary of James Elroy Flecker only months before); ironically both that obituary and the letter had been written under the roof of his obituarist and first biographer, Eddie. Churchill’s fulsome, but essentially false, tribute set the tone for the orgy of grief and lamentation that followed the news from Skyros. Beneath the clamour of loss, the private words of Brooke’s friends were drowned beneath an outpouring of sentimental elegy from those who had never met the real man. For every flowery adjective marshalled by Churchill to lay upon the dead poet’s tomb one could substitute another that would be equally, and usually more, true. ‘Joyous’ certainly, but also, like Churchill himself, bleakly and blackly depressive. ‘Fearless’ yes, but also doubtful. ‘Versatile’, perhaps, but also set in long-meditated bigotry and conservatism. ‘Deeply instructed’, of course – equipped with all that a Rugby and Cambridge education could provide; but also woefully ignorant of the processes of real life and the way that most people actually behave. ‘Classic symmetry of body and mind’ is hardly an adequate summation of a mind whose intellect and emotions were rarely in synch, whose intellectual rigour was matched by childish spleen, prejudice and self-absorption. Ready for the final sacrifice, to be sure, but more from a deep desire to escape the complexities and compromises of existence than to lay down his life for others.
But all these qualifications and counter-arguments were for later. For now, the expression of national mourning held the field, and within the short compass of a weekend Brooke the man vanished in a ray of Aegean sunshine, his human frailties buried under a ton of marble rocks. The man became a myth: the process was egged on by some of those who should have known better, but, in the shock of the moment, lent their voices to the chorus of approval. His oldest friends, for the most part, held their peace, but those who had got to know him after the watershed year of 1912 made up for the brevity of their acquaintance with the loquacity of their extravagant eloquence. For example, the day after Churchill let loose the flood-tide of eulogy, Lascelles Abercrombie wrote an obituary in the Conservative Morning Post that opined: ‘Not since Sir Philip Sidney’s death have we lost such a gallant and joyous type of the poet-soldier.’ The war sonnets, the paper’s readers learned, were not only ‘among the few supreme utterances of English patriotism’ but were ‘incomparably the finest utterance of English poetry concerning the Great War’ and ‘the work of a talent scarcely … to be equalled today’. Abercrombie spared no cliché in his drooling encomium: Brooke was compared to Sir Philip Sidney, who, killed at Zutphen in 1586, was loved by the Gods and so died young; his poetry was as ‘effortless and eager as the winged songs of Spring-tide’; and so on.
In the days that followed, a cacophony of other newspaper voices added their notes to the choirs of praise. The Sphere, too, drew the comparison with Sidney, inaccurately claiming that Brooke was ‘the only English poet of any consideration who has given his life in his country’s wars’. The Star said he was ‘the youth of our race in symbol’, while the Daily News said: ‘To look at he was part of the youth of the world’ – a statement at once obvious and meaningless.
More than one of Brooke’s friends perceived that his death had already taken on the quality of myth. Gilbert Murray, writing in the Cambridge Review, said: ‘I cannot help thinking that Rupert Brooke will probably live in fame as an almost mythical figure’; while Walter de la Mare, a writer who, as one of Brooke’s three designated heirs, had more reason than most to be grateful to the dead poet, wrote in Brooke’s old paper the Westminster Gazette: ‘Nature is as jealous of the individual as of the type. She gave Rupert Brooke youth, and may be … in doing so grafted a legend.’
Brooke’s death was first reported as being caused by sunstroke; and writing to Brooke’s old enemy Lady Ottoline Morrell, just after hearing the news, D. H. Lawrence, with his own quirky but heartfelt touch of genius, exclaimed:
He was slain by bright Phoebus’ shaft – it was in keeping with his general sunniness – it was the real climax of his pose. I first heard of him as a Greek god under a Japanese sunshade, reading poetry in his pyjamas at Grantchester – at Grantchester upon the lawns where the river goes. Bright Phoebus smote him down. It is all in the saga. O God, O God, it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness.
Henry James, hearing the news, merely hung his head and murmured: ‘Of course, of course.’ Later he told Marsh: ‘What a price and a refinement of beauty and poetry it [Brooke’s death] … gives those splendid sonnets – which will enrich our whole collective consciousness.’
Even Brooke’s spurned friends – those he had scorned in the years before his death – were horror-struck: Lytton Strachey wrote to Duncan Grant on 25 April: ‘It was impossible not to like him, impossible not to hope he might like one again.’ The same day Maynard Keynes told the same correspondent: ‘And to-day Rupert’s death. In spite of all one has ever said, I find myself crying for him. It is too horrible.’ James Strachey, writing to Harry Norton on 3 May, was more circumspect:
Yes. It’s horrible. But somehow I haven’t personally felt as much as I should have expected … I’ve hardly seen anything of him in the last three years – and that softens things. It’s more like losing the possible chance of making friends with him again than an actual loss. I cried a lot more over him when he went off in 1912 than last week. Other people feel it shockingly. Poor Eddie, whom I interviewed at the Admiralty the other day, seemed almost done for. And Ka one doesn’t like to think of. Then there’s Mrs B. – Alfred being in France. The only actual collapse I’ve heard of is most unexpected and queer. Daphne Olivier went quite mad last night.
Indeed the women in Brooke’s life seemed to feel his death more tellingly than the many men who mourned. Ka’s pain is evident in the brevity of her letter to James in response to his condolences on 28 April: ‘My de
ar. There really isn’t anything. Give my love to Noel. Ka.’ Violet Asquith heard the news while staying at the vice-regal lodge in Dublin. She was devastated:
… it was not only for me that I minded but for the world – that this perfect thing should be no more – this being without compare. It was like Spring being dead – or music – or flowers – like seeing some marvellous vase shattered before one’s eyes. And I wanted so much more of him for myself. Never to be able to dip into his mind – never to be able to look into his eyes again. I went alone to St Pauls at 12. It rained all day. After tea I saw Eddie – quite broken poor darling. It is the first thing that has given me control – the feeling that he was feeling it FOR me – it somehow seemed to lighten the weight & dull the edge.
Eddie was inconsolable. He wrote to the Ranee, who bore her loss with stubborn silence and pride: ‘It is the greatest 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.’
But Eddie and the Ranee had to brace themselves for further loss. Back in the Aegean, early in the morning after Brooke’s death and burial, the Fleet sailed again for the fatal straits of the Dardanelles: on board the Grantully Castle Denis Browne and ‘Cleg’ Kelly sorted through Brooke’s possessions – his compass was given to Charles Lister, who, as a newcomer, did not have one. The rest – silver watch, amber cigarette holder, a locket and identity disc, along with Brooke’s clothes, letters and papers (minus copies of his final notebooks which were carefully made by both men) – were packed up for dispatch to Rugby.
