Some Desperate Glory (3 page)

Eddie never introduced Rosenberg, a shy, stammering, awkward man, to Sassoon or to Brooke. But his patronage, using funds granted by the government to the family of the early nineteenth-century assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (from whom he was descended), ranged quite far. Marsh bought pictures from John and Paul Nash, from Stanley Spencer, Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler and William Roberts. He hung Rosenberg's painting in the spare bedroom of his London flat so that every guest would see it; in 1913, he paid for the publication of Rosenberg's second book of poems; he used his influence to get the poet an emigration permit to visit his sister in South Africa; he found rooms for the young Siegfried Sassoon near his own in Gray's Inn; he read (and didn't particularly like) the early poems of Robert Graves. In August 1914, he persuaded Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty whose private secretary he was, to let the untrained Rupert Brooke become an officer in the Royal Naval Division.

Marsh disliked post-impressionist art and wasn't moved by Imagist or modernist writers like T. E. Hulme. The anthology that he edited and published in 1912 –
Georgian Poetry
– was the apotheosis of his influence. Launched at the new Poetry Bookshop near the British Museum, the book included work by D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke as well as limper verses by other poets about landscape or love. Marsh, aided by Brooke, defined the Georgians by choosing poems that were more colloquial in style and more down to earth in subject matter than the lushness and high language of Swinburne or Francis Thompson. Rupert Brooke contributed a poem that included a precise description of being sick at sea.

It was possible to move between different worlds – that of Julian Grenfell's parents (who had Marsh to stay) and that of the Whitechapel Yiddish theatre where Gertler and Rosenberg took him – and to be private secretary to the Liberal cabinet minister Churchill while loving the Fabian socialist Rupert Brooke (who wrote ‘I HATE the upper classes'). Ford Madox Ford delighted in a London that was a ‘great, easy-going, tolerant, lovable old dressing gown of a place'. At the height of the row over the powers of the hereditary House of Lords in 1911, the party leaders, Asquith and Balfour, had been fellow guests at a fancy-dress ball.

But on the eve of the First World War divisions outside the world of the arts (which in Britain wasn't taken particularly seriously) were hardening; it was difficult to imagine that amiable scene two years later. By 1913 politics had become much more vicious. The 1911 House of Lords crisis seemed good-natured compared to the strikes, the violence and suicides of suffragettes and the threat of armed rebellion if Home Rule for Ireland was forced upon Ulster.

Britain had once been the most modern country, a pioneer of democracy. Now it had the most restrictive franchise in western Europe. There was also, in the English public schools, a system of education for the rich that was confident, rigid and circumscribed. Most of the poets whose work features in this book went to public schools (the exceptions are Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney) and imbibed the public school creed of patriotic sacrifice, of imperial greatness, of the overwhelming importance of character. Britain was the modern incarnation of ancient Greece and Rome; the classics were still the foundation of school work; the poets thought of ancient heroes as they went to war. The power of these places was immense. Robert Graves kept the welterweight boxing cup he won at Charterhouse brightly polished on his desk in Majorca until the end of his life. Boxing had saved him from the bullies. It had made his nightmares cease.

These schools could be grim. In
The Longest Journey
, E. M. Forster, once a day boy at Tonbridge, describes the horrors of ‘Sawston': how what had been a free grammar school for locals had over the years turned into an expensive philistine monstrosity whose credo was ‘patriotism for the school' and ‘patriotism for the country'. At Sawston, the sight of the original Jacobean part of the chapel makes a visitor rejoice that his country is ‘great, noble and old' – so much so that he exclaims, ‘Thank God I'm English,' before adding, ‘We've been nearly as great as the Greeks, I do believe. Greater, I'm sure, than the Italians, though they do get closer to beauty. Greater than the French, though we do take all their ideas. I can't help thinking that England is immense.' Even this is not enough for his schoolmaster guide who worries that it is too rational, for ‘genuine patriotism comes only from the heart'. The spirit of Sawston is said to derive from a quotation from Aristophanes about bodily perfection and placidity of mind: ‘perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life that has ever been given'.

The buildings and atmosphere of these schools were overpowering. Gradually during the nineteenth century they had changed. Marlborough – where Charles Sorley and Siegfried Sassoon were educated – had been founded in 1843, with a weak headmaster, brutal staff and appalling conditions that set off a mass rebellion in 1851. A new head adopted the methods of Thomas Arnold, Rugby's legendary headmaster, appointing a responsible Sixth Form and younger masters and promoting games as well as work so that, according to the school historian, ‘a civilized out-of-door life in the form of cricket, football and wholesome sport took the place of poaching, rat-hunting and poultry-stealing'. Mid-Victorian gothic architecture, soaring chapels and stained-glass windows with martial boyish saints vanquishing forces of darkness showed a revival of romantic chivalry. Marlborough chapel, built in 1886, has memorial windows to the dead of the South African and Crimean wars and glass by the Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

All this affected even those who had escaped it; Wilfred Owen, after weeks of treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart sanatorium with Siegfried Sassoon (an old Marlburian), wrote to his mother in February 1918 about a novel he was reading,
The Hill
by Horace Vachell, set in Harrow School: ‘a tale of Harrow and the hills on which I never lay, nor shall lie: heights of thought, heights of friendship, heights of riches, heights of jinks. Lovely and melancholy reading it is for me.' In August, during Owen's last hours before embarkation for the western front, when he had less than three months to live, what moved him was a vision of ‘the best piece of Nation left in England': a homoerotic swim in the Channel with ‘a Harrow boy, of superb intellect and refinement, intellect because he detests war more than Germans, and refinement because of the way he spoke of my going away; and the way he spoke of the Sun; and of the Sea, and the Air: and everything. In fact the way he spoke…'

The public-school accent gave immediate identification. Some fifteen years later, when his dead friend, his ‘little Wilfred', was reaching new heights of admiration, Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps out of jealousy, said that Owen's Shropshire accent had made him ‘an embarrassment'.

Charles Sorley was the son of a Cambridge professor of moral philosophy. While a boy at Marlborough, Sorley rebelled, giving a paper to the school's Literary Society about John Masefield's colloquial poetry, saying that it was ‘the lower classes' – because ‘they did not live in our narrow painted groove' – who know ‘what life is'. He thought of becoming an instructor at a working man's college and wanted to escape the relentless classics. He feared he might get too conceited when his achievements at work and games raised him to the top of the school. Memories of his time as captain of his house later repelled him.

If you were a success, the public-school experience was intoxicating. Sorley found that Marlborough constantly came back to him while he was studying in Germany before Oxford. When during his schooldays Sorley had cut chapel to walk on the Wiltshire Downs, the master on duty that day had refused to penalize him although Sorley had argued strongly that he should be punished. He liked to think that walks like these unrolled a better land, the landmarks poetic – Liddington, the Vale of the White Horse, the Kennet valley, towards Coate, where Richard Jefferies, the Victorian writer on nature and rural life, had grown up, ten miles from Marlborough, a good place to stop for an hour to read Jefferies's
Wild Life in a Southern County
, with its description of Liddington Castle, site of a Roman camp. But friendships made at school were irreplaceable, even though Sorley had begged his father to take him away. In fact Marlborough had given him ‘five years that could not have been more enjoyable'. This seemed a mystery: ‘I wonder why.' Could it have been because ‘human nature flourished better in a poisonous atmosphere'?

The German student fraternities – often drunken, aggressive and anti-Semitic – seemed worse. But towards the end of his time in Germany, Charles Sorley wanted to stay on, perhaps go to university in Berlin. He felt he was in a serious country. He liked many Germans that he met, particularly German Jews. He admired their unashamed patriotism and intellectual curiosity, contrasting these with English puritanism, prurience, frivolity and hypocrisy: ‘England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love affairs…'

Charles Sorley wrote poetry at school, inspired by the Downs. When Marsh's first Georgian anthology came out in 1912, Sorley showed only mild enthusiasm, liking Lascelles Abercrombie, Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton and Wilfred Gibson (‘the poet of the tramp and the vagabond') whose simple language was typical of the group. Already he'd glimpsed Brooke, the most glamorous Georgian, shirtless at Cambridge. This was during Brooke's ‘neo-pagan' phase of naked swimming, sleeping in fields, tumbling with girls from the liberal school of Bedales and tossing back his longish hair. To Sorley, Brooke seemed ‘undoubtedly a poet', if a slight one. Socialism seemed right to them both. Brooke read reports on poor-law reform and spoke at Fabian meetings.

It was the Victorians that these two brilliant young men wanted to escape. Unlike Sorley, Brooke admired Robert Browning, but the stately laureate Tennyson was too much for them both, Sorley declaring in 1913, while still at Marlborough, that ‘all through the closing years of the last century there has been a grand but silent revolution against the essential falseness and shallowness of the mid-Victorian court poets'. Pre-industrial England – a landscape of imagined freedom – moved Sorley, as it did Brooke and Edward Thomas. Sorley and Thomas approached it through Richard Jefferies. Escaping from Marlborough, the school and the town, Sorley climbed up to the Downs; some years earlier, on his first day as a Marlborough boy, Siegfried Sassoon had fled there, also on his own; Wilfred Owen had looked upon Broxton Hill in Cheshire as a place of mysterious possibility. For Edward Thomas a ghost could come at such moments, an uneasy but vital part of him, an alter ego hinting at dark truth.

Such places of beauty and history were, for Charles Sorley, for Edward Thomas, for Siegfried Sassoon and for Edmund Blunden, what England meant – more than the empire or military glory or past victories. Wilfred Owen wrote: ‘Even the weeks at Broxton, by the Hill / Where I first felt my boyhood fill / With uncontainable movements; there was born / My poethood…' For Sorley, patriotism didn't become impressive until he saw some soldiers in Germany returning from a field day, singing as they marched – ‘the roar could be heard for miles … Then I understood what a glorious country it is: and who would win if war came.' He told his old master at Marlborough how ‘I felt that perhaps I could die for Deutschland – and I have never had an inkling of that feeling for England, and never shall … It's the first time I have had the faintest idea of what patriotism meant.'

Any homesickness was for those long walks: ‘it is chiefly the Downs I regret'. The German ‘simple day system' of education seemed better than an English boarding school. At Marlborough there had been too much competition over trivial matters and the confusion of ‘strength of character with petty self-assertion'. Yet Sorley slipped back, admitting that ‘there is something in Marlborough that I would not have missed for worlds…' From Germany, he asked his parents for
The Life in the Fields
by Richard Jefferies; ‘in the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities – Masefield, Hardy, Goethe – I always fall back on Richard Jefferies'.

In Germany he stayed with a family in Schwerin, had language lessons and then moved on to the university of Jena. The friendliness of the people, the much greater interest in art and poetry, the unashamed intellectualism, overwhelmed him; only gradually did the heavy bourgeois domestic life, the sultry weather, the boastful and drunken student corps and the shrill celebration of the French defeat of 1870 dull his enthusiasm. The Jews were the liveliest people; every Prussian could seem ‘a bigot and a braggart'. Germans wanted to know what England would do. Hadn't King Edward VII ‘spent his life in attempting to bring about a German war'? During the Ulster crisis, when British officers threatened mutiny if Irish Home Rule was imposed, Germans thought it ‘inconceivable that the army should refuse to obey its government'.

Austria's ultimatum to Serbia that followed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination exposed a combustible alignment of great powers, with Russia on the Serbian side and Germany with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 26 July 1914, the Jena students were shouting ‘Down with the Serbs', a new edition of the newspapers came every half-hour ‘with wilder rumours' so that Sorley could ‘almost hear the firing in Belgrade'. He wrote, ‘It seems that Russia must settle the question of a continental war, or no.' A few days later he was put in a German jail, then let out to go back to a Britain that had joined the fight. Aged only nineteen, he volunteered for the army.

Why was Charles Sorley suddenly prepared to die for his country? The outbreak of war caused even those who had rebelled at their schools to snap to attention. Robert Graves came from an exceptionally cultivated family: his literary father was a schools inspector who collected and wrote ballads and Irish folk tales; his German mother descended from the historian Ranke. Winning a scholarship to Charterhouse, the puritanical young Graves had at first loathed the school with its bullying, rampant sexuality and contempt for learning; then a reforming Head and young masters like the mountaineer George Mallory made it better, helped by the writing of poetry, a crush on another boy and the discovery that he had enough boxing skill to defend himself.