_Have you forgotten yet?..._
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man
reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
_But the past is just the same,--and War's a bloody game....
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget._
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled
sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
_Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll
never forget._
_Rupert Brooke_
Possibly the most famous of the Georgians, Rupert Brooke, was born at
Rugby in August, 1887, his father being assistant master at the
school. As a youth, Brooke was keenly interested in all forms of
athletics; playing cricket, football, tennis, and swimming as well as
most professionals. He was six feet tall, his finely molded head
topped with a crown of loose hair of lively brown; "a golden young
Apollo," said Edward Thomas. Another friend of his wrote, "to look at,
he was part of the youth of the world. He was one of the handsomest
Englishmen of his time." His beauty overstressed somewhat his
naturally romantic disposition; his early poems are a blend of
delight in the splendor of actuality and disillusion in a loveliness
that dies. The shadow of John Donne lies over his pages.
This occasional cynicism was purged, when after several years of
travel (he had been to Germany, Italy and Honolulu) the war came,
turning Brooke away from
"A world grown old and cold and weary ...
And half men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love."
Brooke enlisted with a relief that was like a rebirth; he sought a new
energy in the struggle "where the worst friend and enemy is but
Death." After seeing service in Belgium, 1914, he spent the following
winter in a training-camp in Dorsetshire and sailed with the British
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February, 1915, to take part in
the unfortunate Dardenelles Campaign.
Brooke never reached his destination. He died of blood-poison at
Skyros, April 23, 1915. His early death was one of England's great
literary losses; Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson (with both of
whom he had been associated on the quarterly, _New Numbers_), Walter
De la Mare, the Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill, and a host of others
united to pay tribute to the most brilliant and passionate of the
younger poets.
Brooke's sonnet-sequence, _1914_ (from which "The Soldier" is taken),
which, with prophetic irony, appeared a few weeks before his death,
contains the accents of immortality. And "The Old Vicarage,
Grantchester" (unfortunately too long to reprint in this volume), is
fully as characteristic of the lighter and more playful side of
Brooke's temperament. Both these phases are combined in "The Great
Lover," of which Abercrombie has written, "It is life he loves, and
not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar
details of life, remembered and catalogued with delightful zest."