Fatal Glamour (49 page)

For a week the
Grantully Castle
shunted aimlessly around the Aegean, until it dropped anchor in Trebuki Bay at Skyros. Mail came aboard, and
Rupert heard from Eddie that Virginia Woolf had published
The Voyage Out
and that Henry James was deeply impressed by the war sonnets. “I think of [Rupert] quite inordinately,” he said.
²⁷
This was private worship; more significant for Rupert's immortality was the service in St Paul's Cathedral for those who had already died in the war, held on Easter Sunday, 4 April. The sermon was by Dean William Inge, an Etonian and fellow of King's. He read Rupert's “The Soldier,” and said that “the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression.”
²⁸
No longer buried in the pages of
New Numbers
, “The Soldier” had become the anthem of the hour, and Rupert the epitome of all soldiers. Anchored off a Greek island, and expecting to go into battle in a few days, he paid little attention to the first echoes of his coming fame.

Rupert was far from well but was still determined to keep up with the rest of his battalion. Two days after arriving at Skyros he went ashore with his men, who amused themselves by shooting adders and trying to stage a tortoise race. The next day, 20 April, was more serious, a rehearsal for what awaited them on Gallipoli. The Hood battalion deployed from the beach into the stony interior of the island. It was hot and exhausting work. In the afternoon Rupert and three of his fellow subalterns rested in the shade of a small olive grove, where he remarked on the beauty of the place. That led his comrades to return, three days later.

The divisional field day went on for eight hours, and Rupert had also been on watch for four hours during the night. At the end of the day, Bernard Freyberg, Oc Asquith, and Charles Lister proposed a swimming race back to the ship. Rupert was too tired to take up the challenge – a sensible decision since Freyberg had been champion of New Zealand at one hundred yards. He came back in a fishing boat, dined with the Latin club, and went to bed early. In the morning he was too weak to get up; the swelling on his lip was worse, and he had pains in his chest and back. Five doctors came to examine him. They agreed that Rupert was dying and there was little that could be done. The ship's surgeon, Dr Goodale, was a bacteriologist; he identified Rupert's infection as
Streptococcus pneumoniae
. This could produce various major and minor ailments and could be fatal to anyone with a weakened immune system.
²⁹
It may seem odd that for three weeks none of Rupert's doctors seemed alarmed about his condition, then became concerned only two days before he died. But they were not necessarily incompetent. Infections were endemic, given how the soldiers lived, and they ran their course in unpredictable ways.
And once sepsis took hold there was little that the medicine of 1915 could do.

All that remained was palliative care, which was hard to provide in Rupert's cramped and stuffy cabin. In the same bay on Skyros was the
Duguay-Trouin
, a French three-master now converted into a hospital ship. It had a full surgical team for six hundred beds, but no patients until the French went into battle. Rupert did not want to leave his comrades, but a transfer to the French ship was in his best interest. Oc Asquith went over with him, to see him settled as comfortably as possible. He asked Rupert if there was anything he wanted, to which he replied “water” – his last coherent word.

Rupert lapsed into unconsciousness that evening. The next morning the French surgeons operated to drain and cauterize the abscess on his lip, but with no expectation that this could save his life. When Oc Asquith asked the chief surgeon about Rupert's condition, he replied, “
État désespéré
.” The French surgeons and nurses were all male, so Rupert went to his end with no touch of a woman's hand. Denis Browne was the only one of his comrades with him when he died, at a quarter to five in the afternoon of Friday, 23 April. He and Rupert were the two Rugby boys in the Latin Club. In six weeks Browne would be gone too.
³⁰

The
Grantully Castle
was due to join the invasion early the next morning (in the event, it was postponed until the following day, Sunday, 25 April). If they took Rupert's body with them, he would have to be buried at sea. To make a known resting place, a burial party would have to go ashore at once, while Asquith had Rupert dressed in his uniform and placed in an oak coffin. Browne and Lister took a contingent from Rupert's platoon to the grove where they had rested three days before. By the time the coffin had been landed and carried up a dry stream bed, the grave had been dug and lined with branches of wild olive. Asquith reported the scene to his sister Violet: “the moon thinly veiled: a man carrying a plain wooden cross and a lantern leading the way: some other lanterns glimmering: the scent of wild thyme: a dim group of French and English officers: the three volleys: the Last Post.”
³¹

The ship's chaplain intoned the sonorities of the Anglican burial service, then the firing party fired their three shots – traditionally, a signal that a truce to bury the dead was over and war could resume. The olive branches in the grave were for Rupert the poet, and dead poets before him. On the cross that Rupert's platoon had made, the Greek interpreter
wrote an epitaph in his own language: “Here lies the servant of God . . . Who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks.” F.S. Kelly wrote in his journal, “It was as though one were involved in the origin of some classical myth.”
³²

The burial service includes these words: “If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what shall be done amiss, who shall abide it?” No one in that grove on Skyros would care about Rupert's feet of clay. He had paid his price, whatever his sins, and they knew all too well that they were likely to pay it too. More than half of them were dead men walking, including the Battalion commander Colonel Quilter. Rupert's stately funeral affirmed the high meaning of their expedition; nothing like it could follow, once they encountered the horrors of trench warfare on Gallipoli. The myth of Rupert's death and burial might be considered a delusion, in the light of what was to come. But how could men fight as bravely as they did, unless they had a belief? What Rupert's death meant to them came from the immediate experience of seeing his body and carrying it to its grave. This was of a different order from the Rupert Brooke myth being stirred up in Britain. That was a dubious blend of genuine feeling and official opportunism, trying to make palatable a ghastly and static war of attrition.

When the first landings were made on Gallipoli, the Hood battalion was still in reserve. Their only action was a solo diversion by Freyberg at the northern end of the front.
³³
The Anzacs had gone in about halfway up the peninsula; the main British and French effort came at Helles Bay, at the southern tip. Here the troops could be well supported by naval guns, but they only managed to advance about three miles. Their main objective, the village of Krithia, remained beyond reach. The Hood battalion came in as reinforcements on 30 April, in time for the second attempt to take Krithia from 6 May to 8 May. This was another futile, literally uphill battle against well-entrenched Turks. The commander of the Hood, Colonel Quilter, was killed on the first day.

General Hamilton renewed the assault on 4 June, with even worse results. The second brigade of the
RND
, which included the Hood and three other battalions, lost sixty of its seventy officers – killed or wounded. The Collingwood's losses were so heavy that the battalion had to be disbanded. Oc Asquith was wounded in the leg in second Krithia and evacuated to Egypt, where Violet went to look after him. He told her that it was “simply a choice between being killed and being disabled for life –
one or the other
must
happen in time.”
³⁴
If we ask what might have happened to Rupert, we can only note that the Hood subalterns led their men into murderous fire from the Turks, who were on higher ground and well-entrenched. Rupert would have gone forward with his comrades until he was wounded or killed. Siegfried Sassoon, the most prominent of the officers who turned against the war, did not do so until 1917.
³⁵
He had won his Military Cross in 1916, and went back to the front in 1918. Rupert might have come to share his sentiments, but not in May 1915. The subalterns of Gallipoli knew their leaders had blundered, but none are known to have flinched from their duty. In the entire war only two British officers were executed for desertion, both of them on the Somme in 1916–17.
³⁶
More typical of Gallipoli was George Moor, who received a Victoria Cross for stopping a retreat by shooting four of his own men, then leading the rest back into the attack.

The making of Rupert into a mythic hero depended on ignorance both of the facts of his life, and of the reality of Gallipoli. D.H. Lawrence was the most astute of the mythmakers, though his judgment was a private one, in a letter to Ottoline Morrell a week after Rupert's death:

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.
³⁷

Lawrence had seen the early reports that Rupert died of sunstroke. The satyr Marsyas picked up Athena's flute and challenged Apollo, the sun god, to a competition. When he lost, Apollo had him flayed alive. His blood became the river Marsyas, which flows into the Aegean not far from Gallipoli. Lawrence captures the paradox of a “real climax” to a “pose.” The pose is an inauthentic way of being; reality both destroyed Rupert's pose, and confirmed that the pose was all there was to him. For Lawrence, Rupert's death was the extreme case of how young Englishmen of his class were dying in style, in a war that gave them a significance they had not been able to find in peace.

Lawrence still mourned Rupert, if not in the conventional way. One of his unkind party pieces was an imitation of Eddie Marsh lamenting Rupert's death over his evening whiskey.
³⁸
Eddie was the one who did most to make Rupert a national symbol, if it was he who actually wrote the tribute published under Churchill's name in
The Times
:

He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause, and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men . . .

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.
³⁹

Edgar Allan Poe had said that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic subject in the world; for Eddie, and for the whole nation, it was the death of a beautiful man. Britain was paying its tribute to the Minotaur and the true hero, like Theseus, was one who offered himself to save his people.

A great issue was coming to a head, with Rupert's death at the centre of it. Unlike the Continental great powers, Britain had never had a conscript army. The Liberals, especially, felt that volunteerism was a keystone of British identity. As news sank in of the butcher's bill at Gallipoli and in France, the number of volunteers for the army started to dwindle. Old-style Liberals, and the Labour Party, still felt that conscription was “against the spirit of British democracy and full of danger to the liberties of the people.”
⁴⁰
Lord Northcliffe, through
The Times
and
The Daily Mail
, ceaselessly banged the drum for conscription: winning the war was the point, not abstract ideas about liberty. By the end of 1915 Lloyd George and Churchill had come to support conscription, and Asquith had to resign as prime minister in December 1916. By 1939 conscription was taken for granted in Britain from the beginning of the war.

Rupert's death would have counted for much less if he had been a conscript. As a volunteer, it mattered little that he had died of illness just before his fellow officers were mowed down by the Turks. He had chosen
to face death for his country; his country had not chosen for him. And he had volunteered as a poet, who in his war sonnets had expressed the volunteer's creed of self-sacrifice. Nor did all war poetry need to be of that kind: the poets of disillusion – Sassoon, Graves, Owen – had been volunteers too. The 1914–15 generation of volunteers had a unique moral authority, sandwiched between the professionals of the British Expeditionary Force and the conscripts of 1916–18. No other belligerent country had met its wartime needs for soldiers in the British way; not coincidentally, none of those countries produced a comparable generation of poets. Whatever the excesses of Rupert's war poems, he still has his place in that lyrical flowering, without precedent before or since.

When Sassoon, Graves, and Owen went to enlist, they did so in much the same spirit as Rupert. Their later poetry came from experiences that he did not share, but that was just the product of chance. If Rupert had gone to the Somme with the remnants of the
RND
in November 1916, his poetry would surely have evolved from the glory of it all to the pity of it all.
⁴¹
His war poems were so much a distillation of the passions of 1914 that his personal responsibility for their sentiments becomes almost irrelevant. Rupert's voice, for that moment, had become the voice of his time and of his country. If figures like Churchill or Henry James lost their sense of proportion in canonising Rupert, that was because an individual fate could be understood but not the impersonal and ultimately inexplicable collective forces of 1914. Rupert Brooke or Edith Cavell made sense; what did not was that an Austrian nobody called Hitler would become, thanks to the war, a world historical figure. To believe in the public school hero was to keep society's reference points in their proper place, from playing fields to Flanders Fields. Who could grasp that the next war would arise from places with different rules: the beerhalls of Munich, the Finland Station of St Petersburg?