Rupert Brooke 100 years after his death

April is National Poetry Month. This year also marks the centennial of poet Rupert Brooke’s death on April 23, 1915. He was twenty-seven years old and became a symbol of Lost Youth in the Great War. In his short life, he wrote some of the most famous poems of his generation.

I wonder if he would feel the same had he lived to see Gallipoli,the Somme, Verdun,and Passchendaele..... A fair point and well taken here. Wilfred Owen, who was a British officer wrote some very telling poems about the actual war in the trenches. The previous war which Great Britain defeated the South African Boers 1898-1901, cost lives. The music hall song "Goodbye Dolly, I must leave you" epitomised the public acclaim for this war.

The recruiting centres in WW1 were overwhelmed in 1914. Excitement was in the air and the music halls did their job. By 1916 however, the news filtered through. Horrific casualties, the lice, the cold, the trenches. Men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Sent against machine gun fire regardless.

The recruiting offices were deserted and the War Office threatened dire action if a million men did not volunteer forthwith. There were over one million, six hundred thousand applications for deferral. Then conscription took place.

Excuse the ramble, but Brooke had not got a clue. Nor had the initial excited young men who lined up in 1914. Stories abounded when I was a child in England about the dodges used by men to escape the horror of the trenches.

Ruyland Kipling provides us with the answer. Compare his verse of early in the war, and later after his son was killed at the Front.

“For All We Have And Are”
1914
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone!
Though all we knew depart,
The old Commandments stand: —
“In courage keep your heart,
In strength lift up your hand.”

Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old: —
“No law except the Sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled.”
Once more it knits mankind,
Once more the nations go
To meet and break and bind
A crazed and driven foe.

Comfort, content, delight,
The ages’ slow-bought gain,
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,
Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.
Though all we made depart,
The old Commandments stand: —
“In patience keep your heart,
In strength lift up your hand.”

No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all —
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?

________________________________________The Children
________________________________________
THESE were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight.
We have only the memory left of their hometreasured sayings and laughter.
The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter.
Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
But who shall return us the children ?
At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us,
The first felon-stroke of the sword he had longtime prepared for us -
Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.
They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment o’ercame us.
They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning
Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.
Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her!
Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed on them.
That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven -
By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes - to be cindered by fires -
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
But who shall return us our children ?

________________________________________

Love

Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate,
Where that comes in that shall not go again;

Love sells the proud heart's citadel to Fate.
They have known shame, who love unloved. Even then,

When two mouths, thirsty each for each, find slaking,
And agony's forgot, and hushed the crying

Of credulous hearts, in heaven -- such are but taking
Their own poor dreams within their arms, and lying

Each in his lonely night, each with a ghost.
Some share that night. But they know love grows colder,

Grows false and dull, that was sweet lies at most.
Astonishment is no more in hand or shoulder,

But darkens, and dies out from kiss to kiss.
All this is love; and all love is but this.

Rupert Brooke, 1913

One of the most moving pieces about that war came from, of all people Lemmy of Motorhead.

1916

16 years old when I went to the war
To fight for a land fit for heroes
God on my side and a gun in my hand
Chasing my days down to zero

And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died
And I never did get any older
But I knew at the time that a year in the line
Was a long enough life for a soldier

We all volunteered and we wrote down our names
And we added two years to our ages
Eager for life and ahead of the game
Ready for history’s pages

And we brawled and we fought and we whored till we stood
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder
A thirst for the hun, we were food for the gun
And that’s what you are when you’re soldiers

I heard my friend cry and he sank to his knees
Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother
And I fell by his side and that’s how we died
Clinging like kids to each other

And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood
And I wept as his body grew colder
And I called for my mother and she never came
Though it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t to blame

The day not half over and ten thousand slain
And now there’s nobody remembers our names
And that’s how it is for a soldier

I would like to acknowledge your replies. Not too often that I have three responses. I had to do some reading on the Schlieffen Plan. Good for the mind at my time of life.

On a lighter note I would like to quote a music hall song following the reluctance of British manhood to break down doors. This of the recruiting offices. By the way,Some cunning recruiting sergeants let 16 year olds lie and signed them in as of military age. Got a bonus for a head count. Some boys shot for "cowardice" later. Crying in the trench and refusing to go on.

Take my muvver, take my farver, take my sistah and my bruvver.
But for Gawd's Sake, don't take me!

London accent added.

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