Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

The hard monotony of the days became glorious. All his life was alight with the fervor of his love for his native land and his longing to serve her. There was room in his heart for but one thought—England! And in the singleness of his devotion he felt a wonderful peace that outer happenings could not give or take away. He was safe from the chances of the changing days—safe with “things undying.” Safe!—That word which sometimes makes men craven, sounded in his ears like a note of triumph; and the lines of a new song came to his lips:

“We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain forever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavor;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.”

A wonderful thing had happened. The young soldier who had lost many things those first weeks of the war—carefree days and nights, the joy and bright confidence of youth—had found his man’s soul. And the maker of verses had become a true poet. In losing his life he had found it, and found, too, the one gift he had long sought in vain.

Rupert Brooke had learned to “see life steadily and see it whole.” The five “1914 sonnets” have the wise simplicity, the deep feeling, and the large vision that belong to great poetry. When the poet-soldier embarked with the troops that were sent on the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign, he had the joy of knowing that whatever might befall, something of his inmost life would live forever in immortal verse to stir the hearts of living men.

He never reached Gallipoli. On April 23, 1915, the day of St. Michael and St. George, he died, not in battle, but of illness on a French hospital-ship. Early in April he had suffered a sunstroke, but had apparently recovered. Then it was known that he was the victim of blood-poisoning. “Death loves a shining mark!” and “Whom the Gods love!”—The unspoken words gripped the hearts of his comrades with chill fear, yet it seemed unbelievable that this radiant young life should be snuffed out.

The poet, himself, had a definite premonition of the end—During the days of fever, his mind found now and again a cool peace in the memories of the past. He was a Rugby boy again. Now he sat in the chapel, looking at the light as it fell, jeweled green, blue, and ruby-red, through the stained glass window of the Wise Men, that Dr. Arnold had brought from an old church at Aerschot, near Louvain. Louvain—Belgium! He could not lie there quietly; his country needed him. He moved suddenly as if about to rise, and a nurse bent over him anxiously. But—once more he was at Rugby, standing before the statue of the author of “Tom Brown” and spelling out its inscription as he had when a child: “Watch ye. Stand fast in the faith. Quit ye like men. Be strong.”—Again he was on the porch leading to the quadrangle where the boys were assembled for house singing. How the “Floreat, floreat, floreat, Rugbeia” rang out!

Was it not getting very dark? He could scarcely see the white figure of the nurse. Perhaps there was going to be a storm.... He remembered a hurricane at Rugby when he was only eight years old—the “big storm,” they always called it. Many of the fine elms were laid low, among others the one survivor of Tom Brown’s “three trees.”

“Think of all the years of sun and wind that have been made into the magnificent strength of that tree,” some one had mourned. “And now see it snapped like a straw before the fury of a single hour!”

“Perhaps it’s happier to go like a warrior in battle, than just to grow old and die little by little,” the boy had said. He had somehow dimly felt that the splendid spirit of the tree—the life that ever flickered golden-green in the sunlight and danced in joyous abandon in the May breeze—had fared forth on the wings of the wind, a part of the brave spirit of things that deathless goes on forever from change to change....

They buried him at night, carrying his body by torchlight to an olive grove on the isle of Scyros, a mile inland on the heights. “If you go there,” writes Mr. Stephen Graham, “you will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his birth and his death (1887-1915) marked in black.” One who knew him said, “Let his just epitaph be: ‘He went to war in the cause of peace and died without hate that love might live.’ ”