Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

Rupert Brooke was camping out that fateful August of 1914 in a place remote from newspapers with their rumors of war. Away on a sailing trip, he heard no news of any sort for the space of four days. Then on his return, as he stepped out on the beach with singing pulses and the happy tang of the salt spray on his lips, a telegram was put in his hands: “We’re at war with Germany. England has joined France and Russia,” it read.

It was as if all the winds of heaven had passed in a moment into a dreadful, breathless calm. In the stunned and sultry stillness that engulfed him, his whole being hung helpless like an empty sail. He ate and drank as one in a dream, and then went out alone to the top of a hill of gorse, where he sat looking broodingly at the sea and trying to understand. Over and over he repeated the words, “England at war—war with Germany! Germany!...” Scraps of memories—pleasant, appealing, and humorous—floated by like bits of remembered tunes: the convivial glitter of a Berlin café; the restful charm of a quiet-colored summer evening at Munich; the merry masquerade and revelry of carnival time; the broad peasant women singing at their work in the fields. Could it be that all the wholesome, friendly world he knew there had changed—had become a menace, a thing to be hated?

Not only the Germany he knew, but the whole world, was trembling. The earth was not the stable place of solid content and cheerful achievement he had always taken for granted. A shrinking, quaking nightmare of change had seized the foundations of the universe in its trembling grip. The months ahead loomed gaunt and strange—no days for happy work; no quiet evenings for untroubled friendship and affection; no time to “loaf and invite one’s soul”; no place for play, for music, for poetry, for anything that made life worth living. An age “of blood and iron” had swallowed up the golden age. England would be merry England no longer.

England! The name rang in his ears like a knell. England invaded! “I realized with a sudden tightening of the heart,” he said, “that the earth of England was like a loved face, like a friend’s honor—something holy. The full flood of what England meant to my inmost self swept me on from thought to thought. Gray, uneven little fields, and small ancient hedges rushed before me, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses—the England that had given me life and light!”

England! The name was now a trumpet call! What were the piping times of peace to this great moment when he could go out as England’s son to meet her foes, to keep her sacred soil safe from the invaders’ tread? Aloud he said grimly, “Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there.”

It seemed to many as if this terrible war must indeed be the mysterious Armageddon, darkly foreshadowed in the Book of Revelation as the war of wars, when the “kings of the earth and the whole world” should gather for the battle that would usher in the great day of God. It was to be the war to end war.

Rupert Brooke, a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Naval Division, was one of that brave, futile company of Englishmen that were hastily flung across the Channel to the defense of Antwerp. Crouching in ditches, rifles in hand, they waited the approach of an unseen enemy whose big guns were shelling the outer forts from a point beyond the horizon line. There was nothing that the bravest could do but lie there amid the whistling, screaming shells, and fall back as ordered when the range of the heavy fire advanced. The battle was fought by the great cannon and the scouting aëroplane that circled high overhead and signaled the range to the distant battery.

When the forts crumbled before the bombardment—pitiful hopes of the old order before the deadly engines of the new—the city was a place of terror and desolation. The hideous din of bursting shells, the crash of falling houses and shattering glass, mingled with the terrified cries of distracted fugitives. The young poet-soldier, marching in a night retreat under a black sky, lighted fitfully by the glare of burning villages, saw the pathetic multitude of helpless refugees hurrying eastward. There were two small children trying to help their mother push a wheelbarrow piled with clothing on which sat the feeble, trembling grandmother. Another family had loaded all their most cherished possessions in a little milk-cart, pulled by a panting dog, while a heavy-eyed lad of nine pushed from behind and watched to see that nothing was dropped by the way. Aged peasants with bundles on their backs tottered by, and mothers with tiny babies in their arms trudged wearily along, trying to comfort the frightened children who ran by their side or clung to their skirts. All had the dazed faces of the victims of flood or fire, who flee from the place that was home to the uncertain refuge of outer strangeness.

It seemed to Rupert Brooke that the suffering he saw was his own. As in the old Rugby time, when everything that the days brought—honest work, hearty play, and happy comradeship, in a fair English land under peaceful skies—was taken up as food for his eager life and made a part of himself, so now it seemed that body and soul alike tasted every grief and distress that can come to helpless humanity. There were new depths in the brave blue eyes that had seen defeated hopes and yet never doubted that right would triumph. The face that had before expressed promise, now showed power.

All through the trying weeks that followed in his training-camp in England, he carried with him the memory of those tragic days in Belgium. “I would not forget if I could,” he said steadily. “Remembering is sharing.” And steadily, with a strength that ever cries, “We’re baffled that we may fight better!” he looked past the darkness of the present to the victory that his spirit saw.