Fatal Glamour (46 page)

It would make little sense to criticise Rupert for failing to foresee the Somme in 1916 or Passchendaele in 1917. No one foresaw them in October 1914. Rupert's response to the war was emotional, but it was not naive. It was a response to what he had seen with his own eyes, one of the first Englishmen to see it. He respected Goldie Dickinson, a sweetnatured pacifist don, but told him, “I hope you don't think me very reactionary and callous for taking up this function of England. There shouldn't be war – but what's to be done, but fight Prussia? I've seen the half million refugees in the night outside Antwerp: and I want, more than before, to go on, till Prussia's destroyed. I wish everyone I know were fighting.”
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Britain had entered the war because of its pledge to defend Belgium. The Schlieffen Plan, years in the making, ignored Belgian neutrality. The German road to Paris lay through Brussels, and that was just bad luck for Belgium. Ford Madox Ford claimed that Frieda Lawrence said to him, in March 1915, “Dirty Belgians! Who cares for them!”
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Whether
Frieda said it or not, in effect the German government had said it. There were only two arguments that English people could make against the war. One was that Germany had suffered great injuries in the years leading up to 1914, sufficient to justify any pain inflicted on Belgium. This was not an argument likely to convince anyone who was not German. The second and stronger argument was to accept the lesser evil. Germany had done wrong to Belgium, but resisting Germany would do more wrong to more people than standing aside and letting Germany conquer France once again.
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This might become convincing by 1916, but in 1914 no one knew how great an evil was yet to come.

In the early months of the war, Rupert was a militant patriot, but he was not a mindless one. Like most British intellectuals, he had formed a rational commitment to resist Germany by all means necessary. The old questions about his sexuality or his purpose in life could be set aside for the duration of the war. He continued to divide his attentions between virginal Cathleen and sensual Eileen without any great qualms of conscience. What did trouble him was whether he should marry before going out again to the front. Many young soldiers grappled with this, though Rupert was more indecisive about it than most. On his way to Antwerp he had thought “What
Hell
it is that I shan't have any children – any sons.” But a couple of months later he confessed that he was still unable to act: “If the war
hadn't
happened, I'd have gone on eyeing the brink, hesitating, and deferring, never quite blinded enough to say ‘Well, tomorrow'll do –' until I relapsed into a friendly celibate middle-age, the amiable bachelor, a Dent or livelier Sayle, or less distinguished Eddie, with my rooms and bedder and hosts of young friends.”
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This was either disingenuous, or an admission of his true inclinations. E.J. Dent, Charles Sayle, and Eddie Marsh were all aging gay men who cultivated sentimental friendships (for Sayle and Marsh, with Rupert himself).
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Did Rupert's fear of marriage mask a gay identity that he expected to prevail in the long run? It was hardly unusual for a gay man to be eager for children, but not for marriage. After the war, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, of all people, bore a child for André Gide without marrying him. Rupert saw the same conflict between having a child, and having a wife: “If I
knew
I'd be shot, I'd marry in a flash – oh any of two or three ladies – and do my best to leave a son. How comforting it would be to
know
: and what delicious snatches of domesticity I could steal before January 20! But, oh, if I came back in a year, and found
myself caught. It's easy to select a wife for a month: but for a lifetime – one must be a little more certain.”
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When trying to avoid marriage with Phyllis Gardner – as with others – Rupert made much of his wandering nature, unable to settle down. But what if “wandering” was really a compulsion to get away from any woman who gave herself to him, and who therefore made a claim on his love? At the least, Rupert was quite open that for him marriage meant the death of freedom. How he summed it up to Jacques was how it turned out: “The only horror is that I want to marry in a hurry and get a child, before I vanish. There's the question . . . Insoluble: and the weeks slip on. It'll end in my muddling that, as I've muddled everything else.”
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Rupert never did propose to Cathleen, or to Eileen. He had a partial reconciliation with Noel after he came back from Antwerp, and went with her to a play-reading at Bryn's house on 16 October. But Noel's closeness with the Bloomsbury pacifists excluded her from Rupert's list of possible wives. Nor, he realised, was she ever going to bend to his will.

Another loose end to be settled after Antwerp was the quarrel between the Anson Battalion subalterns and their commander, Colonel Cornwallis-West. It is not clear whether they objected to his military orders, or just his pessimism and his peremptory manners. On his side, he could not be expected to defer to a group of young varsity men with minimal military experience. But Arthur Asquith was ready to take him down a peg: “Papa Asquith . . . suddenly took the idea that his son had been insulted and ill used (as he had), sent for Winston, cussed him, and told him to put it right. So Winston damned an Admiral, who made blue Hell for the G.O.C. Marines, who wiped the floor with [Cornwallis-West], who – and finally two Sub-lieutenants Browne and Brooke were wired to, to join the Hood, where Asquith was . . . It's worth while, being the P.M.'s son.”
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By the beginning of December, Cornwallis-West was in a nursing home with a nervous breakdown. In January his solicitors wrote to the
Times
to deny “persistent rumours that he had been shot in England as a spy.”
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Either he was the victim of a cruel joke, or he was suffering from delusions of persecution. Rupert and Arthur Asquith succeeded in transferring to the Hood Battalion at Blandford Camp, Dorset. Denis Browne joined them later. Living in huts was far from pleasant, but at least Rupert was with his friends, and able to get away regularly to London.

The return from Antwerp had consolidated Rupert's identity in more ways than one. He was completely loyal to his military commitment; his dislike of Cornwallis-West did not lead to any disillusionment with the general conduct of the war, or with Churchill's decision to throw untrained battalions of the
RND
into battle. Another conviction was that the purpose of the war was to defend a certain idea of England, embodied in the English countryside. The Georgian poets had done much to popularise this ideal; the war made the land more precious because it was now vulnerable to a Prussian invasion. Never mind that the ideal left out both the industrial north and London, which were the actual strategic prizes of the war. The glorification of hedgerows, old churches, rooks calling in the elms, and all the rest played a powerful role in mobilising public opinion against Germany. In France, similarly, “la terre de France” was personified as a motherland laid waste and violated by its invaders.

Rupert's commitment to the war was also deeply personal. The enemy within was the Bloomsbury male: intellectual, pacifist, cosmopolitan, effete, cowardly, and physically repulsive. The supreme example of the type, and therefore the focus for Rupert's hatred, was Lytton Strachey. Homosexuality was also included in Rupert's gibe at the “half-men” in the first of his war sonnets. But, paradoxically, his personal ideal was now almost exclusively masculine. Much of the jingoist war rhetoric played on the idea of England, like Belgium, as a defenceless maiden being raped by Prussian soldiery. For Rupert, the awakening into manliness was virtue enough, and the women of England remain only shadowy figures.

The war sonnets were composed between Rupert's return from Antwerp on 9 October and the Christmas holidays he spent at Rugby. Their publication in
New Numbers IV
was delayed until the beginning of March 1915.
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Rupert's romantic and sacrificial vision of the war created, in due course, a reaction. Now the five poems seem to sum up every false sentiment provoked by the war, and to legitimise the terrible suffering of the years after Rupert's death. As with Kipling, though, the success of nationalistic poetry rests on the values and tastes of its mass audience. The emotional history of its creators is not yet available at the time when it first appears. Today we can see how Rupert's neuroses
found an outlet in the sonnets; in 1915, they were simply an eloquent expression of collective values and myths.

We could go further and say that the sonnets both revealed Rupert's emotional conflicts and, for the first time in his life, showed a way of overcoming them. The fundamental questions of identity that had led to his 1912 breakdown had now been resolved, two years later. For Rupert, as for many young men of his sort, the war was the best of therapists. He might well have relapsed in two years more – perhaps ending up at Craiglockhart with Sassoon and Owen – but that remains unknown.

A peculiarity of Rupert's war sonnets is that they say nothing about weapons, the enemy, military life, or even aggression of any sort. Everything that drives Kipling's war poetry is absent in Rupert's. The suffering or mutilated body appears nowhere. Instead, three words keep recurring, markers for the poet's destination: Peace, Safety, Death. D.H. Lawrence found in Rupert's poems “the great inhalation of desire” for death. Death is the great cleanser; it is the distinguished thing, unlike the “little emptiness” of heterosexual love, and the worse than emptiness of the “dirty songs” of the “half-men.” Joseph Bristow has argued that Rupert's entire career centred on his “poetic engagements with death.”
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The first four of the war sonnets are spoken as a “we” rather than an “I.” They are the collective voice of all the young men “who have known shame,” and are now to be awakened and purged. Rupert makes his own case that of his class, the infantry subalterns of 1914. It was a bold gambit, but one confirmed by the poems' reception. Those who remained in England were told that their beloved sons had been absolved of their sins and made perfect by going to war. Because they were all volunteers, they were making a purely moral statement. Conscription, which posed a different concept of duty, would not come until 1916. That it existed from the start for the French, German, and Russian armies made England a special case: a country where war was not a duty of citizenship, but a voluntary self-sacrifice. To think of it so obscured the reality of war. Rupert's soldiers were not just going to meet a noble death; they were also going to inflict as much death as possible on the enemy. “The central purpose of my life,” Rupert said to Cathleen, “the aim and end of it, now, the thing God wants of me, is to get good at beating Germans.”
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But in the war sonnets, a soldier is for England, not against a Germany that is not even mentioned.

Another kind of war poem imagines gaining honour in the field in order to come back to one's beloved in triumph. But Rupert's soldier has been “proudly friended,” rather than passionately loved. The second sonnet seems to recall Rupert and Cathleen's “ecstasy” in the Chilterns, when they were mystically but not sensually united:

We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.

We have gained a peace unshaken by pain forever.

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,

Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;

This is the opposite of a carpe diem poem. Their love is eternal because unconsummated, and therefore never tainted by the kind of pain Rupert had suffered with Ka. Nor is it harmed by running parallel with his affair with Eileen Wellesley – an affair that is also made safe by not aiming too high. In any case, Eileen is excluded from the war sonnets, as an inconvenient secret that would compromise their message.

Only in the last sonnet, “The Soldier,” does Rupert's “I” make an entrance:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

So it continues its sonorous and irresistibly emotional way. The individual Rupert did find his foreign field on Skyros, even if it was a stony rather than a fertile earth. But the “I” here is any British soldier who rests in a foreign field, as tens of thousands would do in Flanders or the Somme. What counts is the mystical claim that English soil grows its own precious form of manhood – dreaming, laughing, washed by rivers. The mass appeal of the sonnets rested on what they chose to leave out: the filth and mutilation of death as it actually happened in modern war. Yet the sonnets succeeded perfectly in depicting war the way those at home wanted to imagine it; not the way Wilfred Owen would know it, “the old lie:
Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori
.”

In Rupert's defence one can say that when he composed the sonnets he had no personal knowledge of trench warfare, as it would be fought from
late 1914 on. His 1914 letters have many sayings along the lines of “Come and die, it'll be great fun,” but he was not alone in his carelessness. Julian Grenfell, notoriously, wrote home, “I adore war. It is like a big picnic but without the objectivelessness of a picnic. I have never been more well or more happy.”
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In January 1915 Churchill could still say, “I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me.”
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The war sonnets were the most powerful statement, in their time, of the eternal message that death and suffering are noble, meaningful, and redemptive. Rupert was nominally an atheist, but his sonnets provided an essentially religious consolation. When he wrote them he knew nothing about Gallipoli, and expected his sacrifice to be consummated in Flanders. Only after his death did the sonnets take on a further weight of myth: of the siege of Troy, the Crusades, and Byron's death at Missolonghi for the liberation of the Greeks.
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