Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  Their death was, in the fullest sense, sacrifice. Heaven knows, they had enough to lose! If some of them did feel, as I trust they did, that mystical joy in fighting immortally expressed in Julian Grenfell’s poem Into Battle, they were equally alive to all the other aspects of war. But since the doom that had come on the world could not be shunned, and they were poets, most of them preferred to dwell upon whatsoever mitigated the horror of war – its livid splendour, and the human qualities it revealed – the fellowship, the heroism, the humour. To glorify the qualities that partially redeem war is not to vindicate war.10

  The Pearl Appeal was based on a similar ethos that it was essential to focus on the positive in even the most devastating situations. This was not to ignore reality, but to try to bring some good out of evil. By involving the arts to raise funds for the Red Cross, it reflected the idea, so deeply embedded in the Pearl Appeal, that war could not destroy the finer aspects of civilisation. Although the war had released the most bestial elements of human nature, barbarism would not triumph.

  By the summer of 1918, actors, poets and intellectuals were finding ways to contribute to the Red Cross fund in their own unique ways. However, the most unusual ‘pearl’ given to the appeal was not a jewel at all but a poem. The academic, Israel Gollancz, gave his translation of Pearl, a fourteenth-century poem written by a grieving father about his lost daughter. Describing his ‘Pearl of price’ as ‘a fitting pendant to the Red Cross Necklace’, Gollancz turned the symbolism of the fallen as precious pearls into verse. He wrote:

  Sunder’d from the shell they shine,

  Souls translucent, pearls of price;

  Yearning hearts their worth enshrine;

  Pearl of pearls is love’s device.11

  By linking the Pearl Appeal to poetry, Israel Gollancz had found an evocative way to raise money while offering consolation to the bereaved. Six hundred and fifty copies of Pearl were printed and 550 of the vellum-bound copies sold for £3 3s at Hatchards in Piccadilly.12

  One of the leading scholars in early modern English and Shakespeare, in 1896 Gollancz had become the first university lecturer in English at Cambridge University. Nine years later, he was appointed to the chair of English language and literature at King’s College, London. A charismatic professor, who inspired his students with his charm, enthusiasm and encouraging attitude, he had seen many of his brightest and best undergraduates go off to war never to return. Identifying the fallen of this generation with an earlier chivalric age, he set out the story of the Pearl in a preface.

  The poem had been written 550 years ago, in the age of Chaucer, by a poet whose name was now forgotten but ‘happily, Time has not destroyed the magic of his words’. Gollancz wrote, ‘More wondrously than any previous English poet, he harmonized the quest for the beautiful, in imagery, word and music, with spiritual exaltation and moral purpose.’13 Lost for centuries, Pearl was not published until 1864.

  Its publication reflected the interest in medieval culture that was fashionable in the nineteenth century. In the poem, a man mourns for his jewel, which he has lost in a garden. He describes himself as ‘greviously wounded by the power of my love for that pearl of mine’.14 He then falls asleep and has a heavenly vision of his lost jewel. As he sees a girl elaborately dressed in pearl encrusted clothes and a crown, the reader realises that the pearl he is grieving for is not a gem but his dead daughter. Associated with the Virgin Mary, in medieval iconography, the pearls on her clothes symbolised purity and virginity. They were also a symbol of the soul – in the writings of St Augustine, Christ referred to the soul as ‘the most splendid jewel’.15 In her new incarnation, his daughter is transfigured; she has grown in wisdom and is able to teach her parent lessons. She comforts him and instils in him resignation by explaining that she is now safe among the blessed in heaven. Although she is transformed, she retains her individuality and is still her father’s child. She remains his ‘little queen’ who is ‘so small and sweetly slight’.16

  Inspired by the image of the pearl in Revelations, the poet described visionary scenes of the New Jerusalem. Knowing the Bible, medieval readers and their Victorian descendants would have understood the many layers of meaning in the poem. It was not just about a man finding his daughter or ‘pearl’, it was about his spiritual quest for meaning in his life. Round and white, pearls were symbols of the bread/body of Christ in the Eucharist. The poem can be read as a metaphor about man having lost communion with his soul and finding consolation in the Eucharist, which is symbolised by the pearl maiden.17

  Although the poem was overtly Christian, while Gollancz had been brought up as an orthodox Jew by his rabbi father, he believed that this poem ‘transcends all questions of theology and dogma’ because of its ‘elemental and personal note’.18 Gollancz had first published a translation of Pearl in 1891. He released this revised version in 1918 because his understanding of the poem had deepened and he felt it was particularly relevant for the war years when so many bereaved parents needed solace. By linking the present to medieval times, he hoped to provide a new perspective which would offer some comfort. Within the poem was the promise of immortality. He wrote:

  In far-off days, in the midst of the incessant wars that harassed people in the reign of Edward III, an unknown poet placed on the grave of his little child a garland of song, blooming yet after the lapse of so long a time. In these latter days of stress and strain and tribulation, ‘Pearl’ still symbolises things of the spirit outliving the vesture of decay.19

  As well as setting the First World War experiences in a medieval context, Gollancz’s writing also reminded his readers of how the Victorians drew on their spirituality to deal with grief. In his 1918 edition, Gollancz prefaced the poem with a quotation from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The late-Victorian poet laureate had sent him a letter praising the earlier translation of Pearl and acknowledging the importance of the poem to English literature. Tennyson wrote:

  We lost you – for how long a time-

  True pearl of our poetic prime:

  We found you, and you gleam re-set

  In Britain’s lyric coronet.20

  By alluding to Tennyson, Gollancz was subtly reminding his readers of another great poem of grief and eventual consolation. Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam A.H.H. was written in memory of his beloved friend, the poet Arthur Hallam. Like many of those lost in the war, Arthur was an erudite young man. Educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met Tennyson, Hallam was seen by many of his friends in the ‘Apostles’ as exceptional. In 1833, he died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage in Vienna at the age of 22. It took Tennyson sixteen years to complete the poem which is a meditation on the search for hope after great loss. The poem goes beyond the personal to the collective bereavement of his generation who found their Christian faith challenged by scientific discoveries. Tennyson’s requiem explored these religious doubts. After going through the painful process of reassessing his deepest beliefs, he reaffirmed his faith from a new perspective. He believed that truth comes to us mediated through human love.21

  Tennyson’s poem had great resonance during the First World War. From their university days, Raymond Asquith and his friends had been fascinated by Tennyson’s relationship with Hallam and considered that the Apostles were an amazing society.22 No doubt they saw parallels between their own Oxford clique and the Cambridge circle of friends of a century before. However, Raymond was critical of In Memoriam and with his typical arrogance claimed that if he had been endowed with the gift of poetry he could have written as good or better.23 His sister-in-law, Cynthia, admired the poem and, in her diary, mentions re-reading it after her younger brother Yvo’s death. However, when she tried reading it aloud to her husband ‘Beb’, who was fighting at the Front, she noted, ‘he wouldn’t take much of it.’24

  Maurice Baring drew on the Victorian verse and updated it for his own generation in his poem In Memoriam, for A.H. His ‘A.H.’ was his great friend Auberon ‘Bron’ Herbert, Captain Lord Lucas. This poem
develops many of the themes Maurice first explored in his poem to Julian Grenfell. This was particularly appropriate as Bron was Ettie Desborough’s cousin and his life was closely interwoven with Julian’s.

  Known for his integrity and courage, Bron was an inspirational figure for many of his contemporaries. His friend, J.M. Barrie, the writer of Peter Pan, analysed his attraction. He wrote that although Bron was the kindest of friends, ‘he was still an elusive man, whom you often felt you knew well but could never quite touch, like a character in a book’.25

  Maurice Baring first fell under Bron’s charismatic spell at Oxford. They were part of a group that included the poet Hilaire Belloc and Raymond Asquith. After supper they often discussed literature, religion and politics late into the night. Their parties sound like precursors of the undergraduate antics recorded in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; guests would climb in through the window then syphons would be hurled across the room and butter would be thrown up to stick on the ceiling. Bottles of port were downed and then thrown about the room. They often ended the evening with practical jokes which sometimes backfired. One night, Bron pulled the master of Balliol’s bath chair around the Quad, and the college took this so seriously that he was nearly sent down. However, what Maurice enjoyed best were long summer afternoons spent punting with Bron on the river. The punt would drift into tangled backwaters and they would doze or read aloud from Alice in Wonderland and Swinburne’s poetry, then dive into the water for an impromptu swim. Maurice described this period as ‘an interlude of perfect happiness’.26

  After university, at the outbreak of the Boer War, Bron went to South Africa as a war correspondent for The Times. During the Relief of Ladysmith, he was shot through the thigh, gangrene set in and his leg was amputated below the knee. On his return to England, Ettie looked after him at Taplow Court. His courage influenced Julian and Billy Grenfell as they watched him overcome his disability through sheer will-power. He continued to ride or walk dozens of miles a day over challeng-ing terrain and then returned to play cricket or lawn tennis. When Julian felt alienated by his mother’s preoccupation with society, he turned to Bron for an alternative model of living. Although Bron loved Ettie, like Julian he loathed her parties, finding it impossible to have a proper conversa-tion with her in such an artificial atmosphere. During his two-month stay with the Grenfells, he used to creep in and out of their house by the back door and was ‘conducted to his bedroom by a servant holding a green umbrella before him to prevent his seeing or being seen’ by any of Ettie’s ‘twittering’ friends.27 His friend, Raymond Asquith, described him as ‘very black’ against women at this time. He told him that his life was perfectly happy without them and only three things worried him – his sister being a theosophist, the prospect of inheriting a title and probably having a wife.28

  A radical thinker, Bron had no interest in social rank or possessions. When he inherited Wrest Park, a country estate in Bedfordshire built like a French château, he loaned its art treasures to the National Gallery and leased the house out to the American ambassador. When the ambassador died the house lay empty until it was used as a hospital during the war.29 Bron was a man who lived in the moment, not in the past, and was happiest pursuing an adventurous outdoor life unconstrained by society’s demands.

  After leaving Eton, Julian used to stay with Bron in Yorkshire. He wrote that he had the time of his life with his second cousin. Days were spent walking, shooting and fishing. The two men had much in common and what J.M. Barrie later wrote about Bron was equally applicable to Julian – he also was ‘an untamed thing who no one ever flung a net over’.30

  Once war was declared, many of this close-knit circle of friends joined up and were sent to France. In August 1914, Maurice was made a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps attached to the headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps, which was housed in a château at St Omer. At this time, he did not know what the Royal Flying Corps was. As he wrote, air warfare was still ‘in the gentleman-like stage’.31 There were very few aircraft on both sides at the start of the war, and Britain had only about 180 planes. At first they were only used for observation, but from the summer of 1915 the first fighter aircraft took off, armed with automatic weaponry.32

  In the early days of the war, like so many of his generation, Maurice saw the conflict in terms of a medieval Crusade. Ideas of chivalry had been instilled into Maurice and many of his contemporaries at school. At Eton, an ideal of patriotic service was romanticised for the boys through their Classical education combined with Pre-Raphaelite ideas of medieval chivalry. During services in Eton’s chapel they were encouraged to focus on a Burne-Jones tapestry and a painting by D.C. Watts of Sir Galahad which provided the boys with an image of pure knighthood.33

  When he first arrived in France, Maurice drew parallels between the modern British Army and the knights fighting at Agincourt. The battlefield was near to where he was stationed and he visited it with his old friend, Hilaire Belloc. In October 1914, he wrote about his pleasure in going to Mass in the cathedral at St Omer and listening to the same words, said in the same way and with the same gestures that Henry V and his ‘contemptible little army’ had heard before Agincourt. Standing beside a man in khaki, he wrote, ‘History flashed past like a jewelled dream.’34

  So many people Maurice knew were coming and going across the Channel that his pre-war social life continued in France, albeit in a slightly different form. In October 1914, he ran into Violet Asquith, who was visiting the Front. Dressed in a khaki Holbein coat trimmed with possum, Maurice was on a mission to buy lobster for the Royal Flying Corps when she spotted him. They travelled back in her car to headquarters through rolling green countryside, past large camps of horses.35

  In March 1915, when Maurice heard that Julian Grenfell had been posted to France he went to visit him. He found Julian lying asleep in a barn on a large sheaf of corn, with his greyhound beside him. The sun was streaming in on him and he looked happy and radiant. As Maurice gently woke Julian up, the young soldier said jokingly, ‘Shall I kill you?’ Having decided against it, instead he took him to tea in the Mess and showed him the latest poem he had written. It was to be the last time he saw him.36 Julian died in May.

  As Maurice watched one after another of his friends killed, he wrote to Ethel Smyth:

  Life is a strain now isn’t it; scaffolding falls about one daily, one’s old friends, one’s new friends are killed or disappear like flies; the floor of life seems to have gone and one seems to live in a permanent eclipse and a seasonless world – a world with no summer or winter, only a long grey neutral-tinted rainy chill limbo.37

  Julian’s death also had a profound effect on Bron. He wrote to Ettie that he was fonder of him than of any other living man and that a great part of his life had been torn from him by the loss. He added that Julian had brought fresh air into a stale, stuffy world.38 Since Bron had inherited the title Lord Lucas in 1905, he had been an active member of the House of Lords serving as undersecretary of state for war, undersecretary for the colonies and president of the Board of Agriculture. However, in May 1915, after Julian’s death, he left the Cabinet and gave up all political work to join the Royal Flying Corps. His action went beyond the call of duty because, with his disability and aged nearly 40, he could easily have avoided fighting, but he was determined to serve his country.

  He compared his training to going back to public school. At first it felt strange, as he was 39 years old and most of his ‘school fellows’ were 18 or 19. However, his enthusiasm had an electrifying effect on all around him.39 In the air, Bron was in his element and he adored flying. J.M. Barrie wrote, ‘He came down a different man from the one who went up, and was different ever afterwards as if he had made a journey into the springtime of the world and brought back a breath of it.’40

  In autumn 1916 Bron was sent to France. Once there, he met up with Maurice as often as possible. One evening they sat in the garden after dinner and talked until late. Bron was full of enthusiasm and alt
hough on a recent flight a bit of his propeller had been shot off, nothing could keep him out of the air. He described flying over the barrage as the most marvellous sight he had ever seen. The last time they met, as they walked across the aerodrome they were both struck by an unusual sunset. Beneath a large mass of drifting storm clouds the light was reflected on the horizon. Maurice wondered what it meant and said it was like a painting. Bron just laughed and said ‘Yes’.41 Maurice thought those weeks in France were the happiest in his friend’s life; he felt young again as his disability was forgotten.

  On 3 November 1916, Bron was flying over the German trenches of the Western Front when he was shot through the neck. Thinking of others even in his last minutes, he managed to land his plane safely before dying. The Germans buried him near Bapaume.42 It was some weeks before his friends and family knew of his fate. At first, when he was described as ‘missing’ it was suggested that Bron’s habit of preferring not to use his title might explain the absence of news of him from his captors.43 However, by the end of the month it was confirmed that Bron had been killed. Maurice believed his friend’s death was such a fitting ‘crown’ for his life that his own regret was lost in awe and wonder and his grief was silenced.44

  When Bron’s friend J.M. Barrie wrote a tribute to him in The Times under the headline ‘Bron the Gallant’, like Maurice, he focused on the idea of a glorious death. He wrote:

  Everyone who knew him will be glad that if he had to die he died in the air. It is an assurance to them that he was happy to the last, pursuing and pursued up there, exulting in it all, even in the last moment when he had the supreme experience.

  Barrie believed the ‘wonderful months’ he had spent in the air ‘were to him worth dying for’.

  Still in its infancy, flying was written of in terms of chivalry. The modern airmen were portrayed as the medieval knights of the skies. It was as though they were superior, godlike beings. Barrie added: