Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Stylishly written, and embellished by more than eighty gloriously evocative images of the period, Peace and War offers a memorable and moving portrait of a society and a nation on the brink.

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  Introduction

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  We have long since ceased to think of the Edwardian era – which most historians now see as being bookended by the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, rather than merely the reign of the eponymous King Edward himself – as an age of tranquillity, comfort and languid leisure; a period typified by ladies with parasols in long white muslin skirts, green lawns under endless summer skies, and chaps in boaters or cricket whites, shooting at nothing more offensive than a passing pheasant.

  In his play Look Back in Anger (1956) John Osborne sneers at his alter ego Jimmy Porter’s disapproving father-in-law Colonel Redfern as ‘one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian wilderness who just can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more’. Grudgingly, though, he admits that in retrospect the Edwardians had made their world look ‘prettyappealing’. Two decades previously, the historian George Dangerfield, in his seminal study The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), had exploded the myth of Edwardian stability and progress, revealing an England marked by three major upheavals: the rearguard battle conducted by the Tory party and their Ulster Unionist allies against the reforms, including Irish Home Rule and a rudimentary welfare state, introduced by Asquith’s Liberal government; the struggle for votes for women led by the Pankhurst family; and the strife and strikes racking industry led by militant trade unionists. These convulsions had combined in a perfect storm of unrest which had only been halted by the greater tempest of the war in 1914.

  In this book I have tried to present a picture of the nation as it was on the eve of war, concentrating on the figures and developments which historians – aided by the remarkable wisdom of hindsight – have deemed to be outstanding. Like Dangerfield, I have given due weight to the major political and social issues of the year – the Ulster crisis, the suffragettes and the growing fears of European war – but I have also highlighted some of the undercurrents that, little noticed at the time, have since come to characterize our view of that year from the perspective of the past century. I have looked in some detail at the artists of the age – the poets, painters and sculptors – whose self-conscious modernism threatened to blow away the cosy certainties of an era already outmoded before the first guns of August had spoken and whose work foreshadowed and prophesied the disasters that lay in wait just around the corner.

  SCRUBBING UP: boys cleaning coal at Bargoed, South Wales, where bitterly fought strikes and labour disputes had reached a violent climax by 1914.

  What was it really like, the England of 1914? An orderly garden party about to be interrupted by a devastating thunderclap and cloudburst, or a seething mass of unresolved conflicts and contradictions racing towards inevitable destruction? The evidence of cold, hard statistics suggests the latter. Contrary to the sepia images of lazy country house weekends, out of a population of just over forty-six million the vast majority of British people belonged to the impoverished working class, living cheek by jowl in huddled poverty in the cities or eking out a bare existence on the sufferance of their landlords in a countryside where most land was privately owned and jealously guarded.

  As summer came into full bloom at the beginning of August 1914, the last weekend of the old world was crowded with sporting fixtures. Fashionable race-goers gathered at Goodwood on the Sussex Downs; yachtsmen raced their craft on the Solent in preparation for the Cowes Regatta; at Canterbury and Hove, Kent and Sussex were playing at home.

  Watching Sussex play Yorkshire at Sussex’s hallowed County Ground in Hove was the future playwright and novelist Patrick Hamilton, whose prep school overlooked the ground. The home side were doing well. The previous day Joe Vine and VallanceJupp had enjoyed an unbroken second-wicket partnership of 250 runs. Then, just after 3 p.m., the spectators heard the blare of martial music. A file of khaki-clad soldiers appeared, preceded by a marching band. Ignoring the match, the troops strode across the greensward and onto the pitch itself, where they turned and wheeled in formation to the bellowed commands of a regimental sergeant-major. The cricketers stood around gaping, unable to comprehend that the gentle activities of an England at peace were being brutally shoved aside. In his novel The West Pier (1952) Hamilton noted:

  This entirely unnecessary, gratuitous and largely bestial assault upon the players (curiously akin in atmosphere to the smashing up of a small store by the henchmen of a gangster) beyond doubt ended in the victory of the aggressor – though at the time of its happening very few people present were able vividly or exactly to understand what was taking place… [We] inhaled unconsciously the distant aroma of universal evil.

  As the shadows lengthened across the County Ground and the umpires drew stumps, the crowd making its sheepish way home knew that the party really was over.

  TOWARDS THE WEIR: punters on the Thames enjoy tranquil waters, 1914

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  1. The Darkening Sky

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  On New Year’s Day 1914, the strong man of Britain’s Liberal government, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, gave his thoughts on the coming year to the Daily Chronicle, a top-selling popular newspaper that was effectively the house organ of Lloyd George’s radical wing of Liberalism.

  The chancellor’s message was soothingly reassuring, his normal tone of aggressive eloquence muffled by the olive branch that he bore in his beak as a dove of peace. Contrary to recent fears, he told his interviewer, the likelihood of conflict in Europe was diminishing, not increasing. Any signs of strain in Anglo-German relations were subsiding ‘owing largely to the wise and patient diplomacy of Sir Edward Grey’ – an emollient reference to Lloyd George’s cabinet colleague, the foreign secretary. Thanks to this new spirit of harmony, the chancellor continued, ‘Sanity has been more or less restored on both sides of the North Sea.’

  Indeed, the ‘Welshwizard’ added, in a bullish swipe at another cabinet rival, the ever-belligerent young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, he was so confident that the year ahead would bring peace rather than war that he would stand fast against Churchill’s demand for an increase in the year’s naval estimates to keep Britain comfortably ahead in its naval race with Germany. The Kaiser’s Germany, forecast the chancellor, was no longer interested in beating Britain at its own naval game, and would concentrate on building up its armies to defend itself against potentially hostile neighbours on its borders rather than on strengthening its High Seas Fleet. ‘That is why I feel convinced that, even if Germany had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it completely out of her head,’ concluded the chancellor, complacently adding for good measure: ‘Never has the sky been more perfectly blue.’

  The peace message was born of wishful thinking (like all chancellors, Lloyd George liked to keep a firm grip on the government’s purse strings and was against spending money unless it was absolutely necessary). Holding the lid down on naval expenditure suited his fiscal schemes, as well as dealing a satisfying snub to young Winston. The slightly smug confidence of this New Year interview was widely felt by many other Britons – particularly those who shared Lloyd George’s radical views. The socialist journalist H. N. Brailsford, for example, confidently opined:

  In Europe the epoch of conquest is over, and save in the Balkans, and perhaps on the fringes of the Austrian and Russian Empires, it is as certain as anything in politics that the frontiers of our national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six Great powers.

  LLOYD GEORGE AND CHURCHILL on Budget Day, 1910. Rivals and friends in the Liberal cabinet, the Welsh chancellor and his younger colleague would lead their country respectively in the two world wars.

  WARLORD: Winston Churchi
ll as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1914. When war came, he at least would be ready for it.

  This faith in peace was often curiously allied, among progressive thinkers, with a fervent admiration for Germany. Ignoring the evident militarist nature of the Wilhelmine empire, along with its obvious ambition to supersede Britain as Europe’s premier power, many on the Left looked enviously at the advanced social welfare structures that the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had put in place to appease the growing power of his country’s social democratic movement. The rudimentary skeleton of a welfare state – old-age pensions and health insurance – that Lloyd George introduced with his 1909 ‘People’sBudget’ had existed in Germany for several decades, and few wished to contemplate the awful possibility that the millions of socialist-minded workers whose toil and sweat had driven Germany to top place among Europe’s industrial powers could, with a swift change of uniform, become a conquering horde trampling the continent under their jackboots. Another Liberal minister, the Lord President of the Council John Morley – the embodiment of Gladstonian rectitude – even called Germany the ‘high-minded, benign and virile guardian of Europe’speace’.

  THE PROPHECY OF POETS

  If politicians were happy to bask in the warm glow of contentment generated by their own complacency, it was left to poets – those unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley had called them – to pick up the more disturbing vibrations of the prevailing Zeitgeist. In Russia the great poet Aleksandr Blok told his readers prophetically, ‘If you only knew the darkness that is to come’, while in Germany the young Expressionist Georg Heym, who would fall through the ice of Berlin’s Havel River to drown before his dark prophecies became grim reality, described a hallucinogenic vision in his poem ‘TheWar’:

  Tower-like he crushes the embers’ dying gleams,

  And where day is fleeting fills with blood the streams,

  Countless the corpses swept into the reeds,

  Covered with white feathers, where the vulture feeds.

  More pragmatically, another young poet, the handsome and well-connected Englishman Rupert Brooke, gave a newspaper interview, while on a world tour, that was considerably less optimistic than Lloyd George’s fatuous Panglossian fluff. Under the headline ‘General European War is Opinion of Political Writer from Great Britain’, Canada’sCalgary News Telegram reported that Brooke predicted the imminent outbreak of a global ‘struggle in which practically every country will participate’; the paper then added that Britain needed to build more and still more of Brooke’s friend Churchill’s Dreadnought battleships to counter the German threat. Unlike the politicians, more sensitive souls were clearly tapping into waves from the future – waves as yet unseen but deeply felt nevertheless.

  Back in London, a rather different sort of poet, Osbert Sitwell, an aesthetic young aristocrat, had recently joined the elite Grenadier Guards, stationed at the Tower of London. In his autobiography Great Morning, Sitwell recalled how his brother officers in 1914 – amidst their routine round of humdrum duties interspersed with pleasurable nights at the music halls and West End clubs – were wont to consult a palm-reader so fashionable that even Winston Churchill was reputed to use her services:

  My friends, of course, used to visit her in the hope of being told that their love affairs would prosper, when they would marry, or the directions in which their later careers would develop. In each instance, it appears, the cheiromant [palmist] had just begun to read their fortunes, when, in sudden bewilderment, she had thrown the outstretched hand from her, crying ‘Idon’t understand it! It’s the same thing again! After two or three months, the line of life stops short, and I can read nothing…’ To each individual to whom it was said, this seemed merely an excuse she had improvised for her failure: but when I was told by four or five persons of the same experience, I wondered what it could portend…

  ‘Beneath it all,’ wrote a later poet, Philip Larkin, ‘the desire for oblivion runs.’ In 1916, under the influence of the war, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud would postulate the idea of the ‘deathinstinct’ – the notion that, parallel to our appetite for life, a darker stream shadows us always, tending towards our extinction. It seems clear that, beneath the evident bursting energy of the Edwardian world with its inventiveness, passion for new technology and forward-looking thought, other powerful forces were stirring in the subterranean collective unconscious – a force resembling a gigantic blind mole fumbling towards the surface, tunnelling its way beneath the smooth lawns of tranquillity.

  The writer J. B. Priestley has described how he spent the first seven months of 1914 ‘running at a standstill’ – on the surface engaged in a frenetic round of activity, yet accomplishing very little. It was as if he – and with him the whole nation – were waiting for something, anything, to happen. ‘Historic rationality cannot reach it,’ mused Priestley:

  We can of course point out – and it is wise to do so – that the very things that were supposed to preserve peace did in fact greatly help to end it. Thus the great powers… were prepared for war, whereas if they had all been unprepared for war there would not have been one. Again, the very system of alliances, interlocking for better protection, pulled one country after another into war: the powers were like mountaineers roped together but with the rope itself nowhere securely fastened above or below them. Even so, and at the risk of offending every historian, I believe it is useless examining and brooding over every document, telegram, mobilisation order, putting the blame first on one foreign office, then on another. If the war had not arrived one way, it would have arrived some other way. What was certain was its arrival.

  EUROPE TAKES SIDES

  According to the popular image, the crisis touched off by the shots at Sarajevo that culminated in the Great War arrived out of Lloyd George’s‘perfectlyblue’ sky, unexpectedly and savagely interrupting the sedate concert of European nations with the force of a cloudburst ruining a summer garden party. The image is false. It may not have been conscious of the fact, but Europe had been gearing up for war for more than a decade. In April 1914 Britain and France were celebrating ten years of the Entente Cordiale, the informal agreement that had ended almost a millennium of hostility and intermittent but fairly regular warfare between the two neighbours.

  Officially merely a tidying-up of colonial rivalries and disputes between the British and French empires, in Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere in Africa, the Entente in fact marked the end of almost a century of ‘splendidisolation’ in which Britain had held herself loftily aloof from European affairs. Ever since finally trouncing Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, Britain had steered clear of continental involvement. Mistress of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, ruling dominions covering a quarter of the globe’s surface on which the sun never set, Britain smugly sat behind the steel castles of her navy – easily the strongest fleet in the world – and gazed down condescendingly upon the quarrels of ‘lesser breeds without the Law’, as the bard of empire, Rudyard Kipling, had called them.

  Kipling, in fact, was far from the unthinking jingo imperialist he is often portrayed as being. In ‘Recessional’ (the poem in which he refers to the ‘lesserbreeds’) he issued a stark warning against imperial hubris, cautioning that Britain’s empire – for all her ‘Dominion over palm and pine’ – was doomed, like those of the ancient world, to crumble into dust. ‘Recessional’ was written in 1897, after Kipling had seen Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead and watched with pride as no fewer than 195 grim, grey warships had steamed by. But, despite being hugely impressed by this stupendous display of power, Kipling had foreseen the certainty of imperial overstretch and decline:

  Far-called, our Navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  THE FLEET LIT UP: Britain’s sea power illuminated at George V’s coronation review, June 1911. Two years later England expect
ed another Trafalgar, but didn’t get it.

  As late as the 1860s, Britain’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had still been building forts along her southern coastline to repel the threat of a cross-Channel invasion by another Bonaparte emperor, Napoleon III. But in the early years of the new century – perhaps taking Kipling’s warnings on board – Britain’s post-Victorian rulers had initiated overtures to the old enemy, France. However, when the brash new kid on the European block, Bismarck’s Germany, had contemptuously smashed France’s armies in the 1870–1 Franco-Prussian War, proclaiming a new German empire in that holy of holies, the Palace of Versailles itself, the news came as a cold douche of realism for Britain: a wake-up call to look to her defences anew.

  With the benign approval of Victoria’s son Edward VII – a frequent visitor to belle époque Paris, with his own louche reasons for wanting good relations with France – diplomats cautiously extended the hand of amity across the Channel. The result was the eventual signing of the Entente, followed by a similar understanding with Germany’s other principal potential enemy, Russia. Thus, by the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, Europe was divided into two armed camps: the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain; and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (though when push came to shove, Italy would throw in her lot with the Entente, to be replaced as a German ally by Turkey).