Read Online Some Desperate Glory by Max Egremont - Free Book Online

they had more freedom, although the officers’ quarters were very comfortable. The soldiers seemed to be nicer to each other than his fellow pupils at Marlborough had been.
    Sorley read some of the poems that flooded into the newspapers. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’ he thought was too jingoistic, unworthy of the author of The Dynasts . His own ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’, another evocation of marching, was darker, with its sense of an implacable natural world unmoved by the possibly doomed men. This resembled the Hardy that he admired and was quite different from Brooke’s reassuring vision, written a few months later, of a foreign field enriched by the English dead.
    Bored by training, Sorley affected not to mind who won the war as long as it ended quite soon; in fact ‘for the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope Germany will win’. The enemy was much in his thoughts. He recalled the unashamed intellectual interest he had met in Jena, an aspect of Germany’s spiritual superiority, even if the Germans had no insight into the minds of those who differed from them. His letters broke into German, to remind himself of the language’s beauty. Sorley wanted to write to the family he’d known in Schwerin. His sonnet ‘To Germany’, about the tragic breakup of his Europe, laments how ‘in each other’s dearest ways we stand, / And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.’
    Robert Graves, who also received an almost instant commission, had stronger enemy links, with members of his mother’s family fighting in the German army. Another connection, this time to the secretary of the Harlech Golf Club, got him into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. At the regimental depot at Wrexham the puritanical young Graves was shocked by the attitude of the troops to girls and bored by the unheroic duty of guarding interned aliens in a camp at Lancaster.
    During leave in October, by now itching to be at the front, he went to Charterhouse to see the boy on whom he had a crush. The school’s strength came back, Graves writing that it was ‘a grand place in spite of its efforts to cut its own throat and pollute its own cistern’. The casualty list began to feature old pupils; he reassured himself that he hadn’t joined up for patriotic reasons but agreed, as another old Carthusian said, that ‘France is the only place for a gentleman now.’ Graves wouldn’t be sent there until well into 1915, partly because of his scruffiness.
    None of the poets were in the great retreat. The Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan – the strategy for a quick victory by means of an invasion of northern France and capture of Paris, keeping only a small force against Russia in the east until reinforcements could be sent across the continent after the defeat of the French. The French advanced too, into the territories that they’d lost to the Prussians in 1870, a suicidal scramble in red trousers and blue coats, the uniform of their earlier defeat. The result in the north was German soldiers surging so fast through Flanders and Picardy in the August heat that, as in 1940, their chief fear became one of exhaustion. There was a massacre of the French in Alsace and Lorraine. In Flanders, the French and the small British Expeditionary Force fell back.
    Paris was saved in September at the battle of the Marne. This first victory for the Allies coincided with the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s September Programme of German war aims that embraced huge territorial gains, including industrial areas of France and Belgium, colonial conquests in Africa and a Germandominated customs union extending over much of Europe. Such ambition pointed to a long war.
    Rupert Brooke, the first of the poets to see action, felt moved by the national mood; ‘all these days’, he told his love of the moment, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, ‘I