Rupert Brooke is finally a full-time soldier. Writing to Lady Eileen Wellesley, he shows the usual mix of self-centered silliness (evolving from poet to platoon leader in only a few weeks leaves very little time for letter writing and fine dining!) and bantering awareness of his self-centered silliness.
Anson Battalion, 2nd R[oyal]. N[aval]. Brigade
Batteshanger Camp, Eastry, Kent
Saturday, 3 October
Eileen,
…Oh my dear, I’ve had such a busy week! I’ve been learning everything all at once, fighting all night, marching all day, drilling & God knows what. I’ve not had a minute to myself. This afternoon is my first free space. I’m going to creep out of camp with one of the Asquiths,[1] who also turned up as a sub-lieutenant, for dinner.
…Child, I feel a strong silent sub-lieutenant. My mouth is like this, [here he apparently drew a proto-emoticon frowny-face]. My eyes are clear with perpetually gazing though spume & fog for rocks ahead. My skin is brown & hard. I think of nothing at all, hour after hour. Occasionally I’m faintly shaken by a suspicion that I might find an incredible beauty in the washing place, with rows of naked, superb, men, bathing in a September sun or in the Camp at night under a full moon, faint lights burning through the ghostly tents, & a distant bugler blowing Lights Out–if only I were sensitive. But I’m not. I’m a warrior. So I think of nothing, & go to bed.
When I do think of anything, I think how lovely it was with you, & wonder how you are…
Rupert[2]
He jokes, he jokes. But who is he fooling, really? Our camp letters have mostly been from the far less sophisticated Henry Williamson, but even Henry makes the same jokes, bragging that “my face is dark mahogany” and joking that he is “what is known as a hard-bitten, silent, cursing tommy!” (The bravado hides/fails to hide a different sort of sensitivity–not Brooke’s aesthetic/poetic [not to mention homoerotic] perceptiveness, but rather Williamson’s social awkwardness and general anxiety. The letters are to his parents, too, not to a young woman friend, as in Brooke’s case). This is all to say that we’ll see more of this sort of thing, and that no one is fooling anyone with their clever ironic self-awareness. They all pose jokingly with bicep curled, yet they are all looking sidewise in the mirror, hoping to see for themselves the soft civilian boy hardening into the soldier tough enough for what’s coming.
For Brooke, it will be coming quite soon. We’ve reached the beginning of a pause in the fighting. The opposing forces on the Aisne (and elsewhere) are exhausted, and low on supplies–shells for the guns, in particular, are in short supply. There was no thought of a truce, but, as an accident of strategy and logistics (and a consequence of physical and psychological exhaustion) the first of the war’s “quiet” periods was beginning to settle over much of the front. At the same time, however, the stymied German and French armies began to look for new openings, probing westward for weak spots where the deadlock could be broken.
Billy Congreve, our man on the staff–and therefore in a very good position to notice the coming strategic shift–explained things to his diary, a century back:
Saturday, October 3rd
It’s been made clear that the Germans have comparatively little opposite to us here, as large bodies of troops have been moving to the north-west where the French are really beginning to go ahead–so it has been decided to hold our present line across the river weakly and concentrate a reserve behind…[3]
This north-western movement is the beginning of a new phase of the war, usually called “the race to the sea,” and described overly-neatly as a series of failed outflanking maneuvers that ended only when the two armies ran out of territory, having in the process extended the battle lines from Switzerland to the North Sea.
We will get to all this soon, but right now, as far as British military history goes, we have a pause. In England, too, in a way, as the first wave of enlistment tapers off and those of our writers who have decided to put off volunteering instead go back to school.
But while the BEF refits and the French and German armies race north and west, there is a sudden crisis in Belgium. Antwerp, an elaborately fortified port city, had been avoided by the Germans as their armies poured south through eastern Belgium. But the unbroken Belgian armies within the fortress had twice raided the German flank, and with a quick end to the war no longer in sight it was deemed prudent to eliminate them, and to gain–and deny to the allies–a continental port so close to Britain. The massive siege guns had already been turned on the outer fortifications, and now te assault on the strategically important city began.
Let’s pick up the story with one of those writerly gentlemen turned semi-official propagandists. (If a man can create Sherlock Holmes, surely he can write logically impeccable military history!)
No troops were available for a rescue, for the French and British old formations were already engaged, while the new ones were not yet ready for action. In these circumstances, a resolution was come to by the British leaders which was bold to the verge of rashness and so chivalrous as to be almost quixotic. It was determined to send out at the shortest notice a naval division, one brigade of which consisted of marines, troops who are second to none in the country’s service, while the other two brigades were young amateur sailor volunteers, most of whom had only been under arms for a few weeks. It was an extraordinary experiment, as testing how far the average sport-loving, healthy-minded young Briton needs only his equipment to turn him into a soldier who, in spite of all rawness and inefficiency, can still affect the course of a campaign. This strange force, one third veterans and two-thirds practically civilians, was hurried across to do what it could for the failing town, and to demonstrate to Belgium how real was the sympathy which prompted us to send all that we had.[4]
So Rupert and friends are for it, as Brooke seems to have known. Here Churchill is in part absolved by the action of the cabinet–a communiqué had been received–last night, a century back–indicating that the Belgian government foresaw the necessity of abandoning Antwerp. This was seen as tantamount to surrender, a thing Britain must prevent, or, perhaps, a thing Britain must be seen gesturing magnificently against.
Something had to be done, to defy the Germans and to keep Belgium in the war, and there was an impetuous and ambitious politician to hand, one who not only fancied himself a soldier but was nominally overseeing a branch of the armed services which included the only large unit of uncommitted reserves ready to hand. Is it wise to throw a division of mostly untrained men into a battle already considered, by the allies on the spot, to be hopeless? Is it glorious? And what price glory?
I would like to hold this sort of aggressive glory very cheap indeed, but there’s more than one way to reckon the strategic accounting. It’s surely more just to ask “what price–in the lives of ‘sport-loving, healthy-minded’ and militarily incompetent young Britons–a glory that can be effectively transmuted into “last stand” propaganda, future good will with allies, and other strategically advantageous coin?”