Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, and Homer

I have blogged separately about Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell. They were the earliest fatalities of all the War's significant poets, and despite the immense popularity of their work for many decades, in recent times their reputations have suffered because they discomfort us with truths about war which we would rather not acknowledge. Brooke, in particular, has become a byword for naivety, his example counterblasted by Owen's and Sassoon's bitter voices of experience. If Brooke had lived longer, the argument goes, he would have learnt better. The recent anthologist who condemns Brooke's 'life-diminishing ideas' and 'sick philosophy' articulates opinions which are regularly heard in schoolrooms and beyond.

Far from being a foolish innocent, Brooke in 1914 knew more about war than almost any of his contemporaries. Granted a commission in the Royal Naval Division---a new amphibious unit of Winston Churchill's devising---he had been helpless at the siege and fall of Antwerp as what he later called 'one of the greatest crimes in history' played out: 'Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows and hand-carts and perambulators and wagons... the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard drawn faces... That's what Belgium is now: the country where three civilians have been killed to every one soldier.' Brooke understood the  nature of modern conflict, foreseeing the 'incessant mechanical slaughter'. Nevertheless, appalling as it was, the sacrifice must be made, not only to protect England from a similar fate, but for compelling humanitarian reasons: 'I've seen the half million refugees in the night'.

Back in England, Brooke wrote the five sonnets of '1914' as a 'rallying cry' to a nation which didn't yet realise what 'sacrifices --- active or passive' would be required of its citizens. The Dean of St Paul's read the last of these ('The Soldier') from the pulpit on Easter Sunday, 4 April 1915. Less than three weeks later, on St. George's Day, Brooke was dead, having succumbed to septicaemia following a mosquito bite. Winston Churchill, in his obituary for Brooke published on 26 April, celebrated a man who 'was all that one could wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable'. The apotheosis was complete: tens of thousands of copies of Brooke's poetry were sold every year until well into the 1960s, and every subsequent soldier-poet was obliged to wrestle with Brooke's legacy.

The first to do so was Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was Eton and Oxford, Brooke Rugby and Cambridge; Grenfell was a hearty in extremis (boxing, hunting), Brooke an aesthete. Yet the two men had friends in common, such as Patrick Shaw Stewart, and Grenfell would soon have known Brooke's fate. On 29 April 1915, six days after Brooke's death, Grenfell wrote his most famous poem, 'Into Battle'. Its opening stanza makes extraordinary claims:

The naked earth is warm with spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the loving breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

What starts like a gorgeous invocation of spring's renewal becomes suddenly strange and disturbing. Readers carried along by rhyme and anaphora ('And... And... And... And... And...') will find themselves assenting to statements which are, at best, controversial: 'And he is dead who will not fight; / And who dies fighting has increase.' Elizabeth Vandiver, the poem's most perceptive critic, points out that Grenfell's debt is not to Christian but to classical tradition, especially to Homer's Iliad with its belief that the reputational glory gained through a brave death in battle provides 'increase'. As a demonstration, Vandiver quotes Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus in Iliad 12: 'My dear friend, if the two of us could flee this war and be forever ageless and immortal, I would not fight on among the foremost warriors nor would I send you into the battle that brings a man glory. But as it is, since thousands of death spirits crowd upon us, which no mortal can flee nor ward off, let us go; either we will yield glory to another, or someone will yield it to us.'

Without challenging Vandiver's belief in the poem's Homeric perspective, it is possible to see that, in the days after Brooke's death, Grenfell was also influenced by something closer to hand: Brooke's '1914'. The line 'And he is dead who will not fight' --- a concise expression of the paradox that we are only truly alive when we dare to risk our lives --- comes close to Brooke's opening sonnet, 'Peace', with its dismissal of those who will not fight as 'sick hearts that honour could not move, / And half-men'. As for Sarpedon's speech, it is mediated through the octave of Brooke's third sonnet, 'The Dead':

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
      There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
      But, dying, had made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
      Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
      That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Sarpedon tells Glaucus that they may as well sacrifice themselves, as one day they will die anyway; if they could achieve immortality by fleeing the battle, they should do so. Brooke makes the sacrifice of the War's early victims more complete. These men outdo even Homeric heroes. In Grenfell's terms, they 'ha[ve] increase', being 'rich'. At the same time, they (unlike Sarpedon) have been prepared to sacrifice their 'immortality'; that is, they give those never-to-be-conceived 'sons' when they give themselves. This is the ultimate sacrifice, all the richer for losing far more than mere life.

Homosexuals in the Military

General Sheehan has made the news today for claiming that, as one headline pithily put it, 'Gay Dutch Soldiers Caused Srebrenica Massacre'. Sheehan argued that European countries which allowed 'open homosexuality' in their military had done so as part of a 'socialisation' process which led to forces being 'ill-equipped to go to war'.

General Sheehan is far too masculine and heterosexual to spend his time reading war poetry. That is a great pity, because were he to do so, he would learn that history is not on his side. For example, the Spartans encouraged homosexual relationships between soldiers because it fostered greater camaraderie on the battlefield. It has even been suggested that the 300 at Thermopylae comprised homosexual couples. Far from being associated with an unwillingness or an inability to fight, homosexuality was considered a vital component in effective soldiering.

The extent of homosociality and homoeroticism in the poetry of the First World War has been well documented. But homosexuality is present from the start in Western depictions of military prowess. When Alexander the Great visited Troy with his intimate friend Hephaestion, they paid homage to the greatest soldier of them all --- Achilles --- by drawing attention to a shared sexuality: 'Alexander garlanded the tomb of Achilles and Hephaestion that of Patroclus, the latter riddling that he was a beloved of Alexander, in just the same way as Patroclus was of Achilles.'

Of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, classical literature leaves us in little doubt. Aeschylus has Achilles ask his lover, 'Does not my holy reverence for your thighs move you, oh you thankless of my frequent kisses?' And it is his love of Patroclus which draws Achilles back to the battlefield in Homer's Iliad. Achilles refuses to fight after Agamemnon forces him to give up his beloved slave-wife, Briseis. However, he becomes enraged at the killing of Patroclus by Hector, and takes his terrible revenge against the defenders of the besieged city. (The closest to a modern parallel would be 'Mad Jack' Sassoon's suicidal rampages through German lines after the death of David Thomas.) General Sheehan might draw some comfort from the fact that Achilles's sexuality plays a role in his downfall. Troilus, fleeing from Achilles's sexual aggression, escapes into a Temple of Apollo, and is there slain by the warrior. Apollo punishes this transgression by guiding the arrow which will penetrate Achilles's heel.