He cleaned his glasses and frowned at me, as if I were having some sport with him, but in the end he only shook his head and moved on.
I was not having sport with him. I was telling the truth. What I could not tell him is what the Lady told me this morning.
It is morning, a beautiful autumn morning, and we are having a light breakfast of tea and croissants on her patio. She is wearing a dark skirt and a light-blue blouse, gathered at the cuffs and midriff, fastened at the throat by an emerald brooch. Her dark hair is tied up in an intricate manner. Her eyes are smiling as she pours my tea.
“We will not meet again for a while,” she says, setting the silver teapot aside. She adds the single lump of sugar I prefer.
I am stunned into silence for only a minute. “But I want… I mean, we must…” I break off, appalled at my own incoherence. I want to tell her that I used to be a poet who understood language.
She sets her hand on mine. “And we will,” she says. “We will see each other again. It will be a short while for me. A bit longer for you.”
I frown at my lack of understanding. “You realize that I understand nothing,” I say honestly. “I had thought that our love would…had to…”
She smiles. Her hand does not leave mine. “Do you remember the photograph of the painting in your mother’s drawing room?”
I nod, my face reddening. Discussing this is somehow more intimate than our night of total intimacy. “G. E Watts,” I say. “Love and Death. The woman figure of Death…” I pause, unable to say ‘you,’ “…the robed figure standing above the child… Eros, I presume. Love.”
Her fingernails trace small patterns on the back of my hand. “You used to think it had a secret meaning.” she says, very quietly.
“Yes.” I can think of nothing intelligent to say. The secret meaning had eluded me then. It eludes me now.
She smiles again, but again there is no mockery there. I remember her face in the firelight. “Perhaps,” she says, “just perhaps, instead of the female Thanatos looming over the threatened Eros, it is your feminine…metaphor…” She smiles more broadly now. “…of Love who is stopping the capricious young prankster Death from playing his tricks.”
I blink, struck stupid.
My Lady laughs softly and pours herself tea, lifting the cup and saucer. The absence of her hand on mine is like a harbinger of winters to come.
“But love…of whom?” I say at last. “Of what? What great passion would forestall death?”
Her graceful eyebrow arches. “You do not know? You, a poet?”
I do not know. I say as much.
She leans forward so that I can hear the rustle of her starched cotton blouse and the silk beneath. Our faces are so close that I can feel the warmth from her skin. “Then you need more time to learn,” she whispers, her voice as filled with emotion as when she cried out last night.
I set my own hand, shaking, on the small iron table. “And how much time will we have…now…together…until we part?” I ask.
She does not laugh at my redundancies. Her eyes are warm. “Time enough for tea,” she says, and raises her cup to her lips.
Thursday, 31 August, 1.00 P.M.—
Discharged from the field hospital near Albert today. Can barely walk, but found a ride in an empty ambulance going back to Carnoy Valley where General Shute has pulled the brigade to rest before another offensive.
One of the other surgeons, over Dr. Babington’s terse report that my wound and pneumonia were healed sufficiently to return to duty, recommended strongly that I be shipped back to Blighty for at least a month of recuperation. I thanked the other surgeon, but said that Dr. Babington’s suggestion suited me.
I know very few of the chaps here in the valley camp. I did run into Sergeant McKay, the gentleman who had helped me up out of the trenches after I had been knocked backwards by poor Captain Brown, and we were so delighted to see that the other had survived the attack that I think we barely restrained from hugging one another. Most of the other faces in C and D Companies are fresh and strange.
Sergeant McKay asked me if I had heard the storm the night before. I admitted that I had slept through it.
“One ’ell of a show, Sir,” he said, his red face beaming. “Soaked us all good, it did. The lightnin’ was worse than the barrage on the day we went over. At the ’eight of it, Sir, it struck two of our observation balloons and blowed them right up, Sir. Quite a show. Beggin’ your pardon, Sir, but I can’t see how no one could sleep through such a show. No disrespect meant, Sir.”
I grinned at him. “No disrespect inferred, Sergeant.” I hesitated only a second. “It sounds like quite a storm, but it was just…ah…well, last night was my last night in Albert, and I…well, I was not alone, Sergeant.”
The NCO’s smile grew broader, his face screwed up in a wink worthy of the stage, and he saluted me. “Yes, Sir,” he said. “Well, glad you’re back, Sir. And wishin’ you good health while you’re here, Sir.”
Now I sit on my bunk and try to rest. My chest aches, my leg aches, but I try to ignore these distractions. Word is that there will be a general attack on Delville Wood within 48 hours and that General Shute wants his lads—us—in the forefront of it.
But 48 hours is a goodly amount of time. I have books to read—The Return of the Native here in my locker, as is the new Eliot which I have not yet finished—and after reading a bit, I may take a stroll around the camp. The storm seems to be over. The air is clear. It is a lovely evening.
Editor’s Afterword—
Here ends the newly discovered war diary of Lieutenant James Edwin Rooke.
There was an attack on Delville Wood on the 2nd of September, 1916, although Rooke’s Battalion did not bear the brunt of it. The Gloucestershire Regiment, 5th Division—the so-called “Bristol City Battalion”—had the honor of leading the way. The Battalion was all but destroyed in thirty hours of fierce fighting.
Rooke did participate in the larger offensive of 15 September. This battle marked the first time tanks were used on a battlefield, although there were too few and they were poorly used. Rooke was not injured during this final attack on Delville Wood, although 40% of his platoon were reported missing, wounded, or dead after the action.
The poet did not see Thiepval finally captured on 27 September. A forgotten transfer had come through shortly after the 15 September offensive, and Rooke returned to his old unit, the 13th Battalion Rifle Brigade. There are only two letters extant from this quiet period in the “cushy” trenches near Calonne, but in both letters to his sister, Rooke appears to have been simultaneously contemplative and quietly joyful. He wrote no poetry.
The 13th Rifle Brigade returned to the Somme on 11 November, 1916, when winter was setting in and trench conditions were particularly dreadful. James Edwin Rooke participated in the terrible fighting during the attack on Serre on November 13-15. The objective was not attained. Rooke was in the field hospital near Pozieres, dealing with a third and more serious bout of pneumonia, when word came that the Battle of the Somme was “over” on 19 November, 1916.
Actually, there was no formal end to the battle. It had merely petered out amidst the mud, snow, and freezing temperatures of that particularly early and harsh winter.
More than 1,200,000 men died during the five months of fighting along the Somme in 1916. No major breakthroughs were achieved.
James Edwin Rooke returned to his unit and stayed along the Front at the Somme—where casualties still ran at about 30,000 men a month for the
British—until he was wounded again at the battle called Third Ypres, or Passchendaele, in August of 1917. Rooke was hit by two machine-gun bullets while leading an attack on a German pillbox with the strange name of Springfield Farm.
Survivors of Passchendaele later remembered and spoke mostly of the mud there; General Sir Douglas Haig himself wrote:
“…the low-lying clayey soil, torn by shells and sodden with rain, turned into a succession of vast muddy pools, the valleys of the
choked and overflowing streams were speedily transformed into long stretches of bog, impassable except by a few well-defined tracks, which became marks for the enemy artillery. To leave those tracks was to risk death by drowning.”
Indeed, in one of his few letters to his sister in which he mentions details of the war itself, Lieutenant James Edwin Rooke—then convalescing in Sussex—described how a friend of his, a certain Sergeant McKay, did drown in the mud of a shell hole while the wounded lieutenant lay nearby and could do nothing to help.
Of James Edwin Rooke’s life after the Great War, much has been written. Of his decision to write no poetry for publication from that time on, many have lamented. When Rooke decided to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1919, his family and friends reacted with shock. When he actually became a priest in 1921, family and friends essentially disowned him. Only his younger sister, Eleanor, continued to correspond with him during the years that followed.
While Rooke’s Trench Poems took on a fame and life of their own, the man himself retreated from the literary scene. Few of the poets of the 1930s and 40s who patterned their verse after his knew that the poet himself was still alive, although in relative seclusion, in various monasteries in France, Indeed, Rooke’s literary production in those decades, while well picked-over by scholars, consists almost entirely of correspondence with his sister and the intermittent (but lively) letters he exchanged with his friend, Teilhard de Chardin. The one book he did print, privately, was the now legendary Songs from Silence, (John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 1938) a series of prose poems describing the contemplative life he had led in the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille and the long visits he had made—some lasting years—to the Cistercian Monastery of La Grande Trappe, the Abbey of Solesmes, and the Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia.
Scholars have shown that within the Church itself, Father Rooke seemed anything but monastic. Always expressing a love for life that sometimes bordered on the apostate, Father Rooke became as famous within his small theological circles for his theory of “life ascendent” as his friend Teilhard did for his theories of moral and spiritual evolution. These two continued their lively and impassioned correspondence until Teilhard’s death in 1955.
In 1957, Rooke’s sister Eleanor wrote him a letter in which she asked the aging priest why he had forsaken the comforts of wife and family for all of the years since the War. Father Rooke responded in a letter which has become famous but which, until now, has not been totally clear. I present that letter now in its entirety:
15 September, 1957
The Abbey of St. Wandrille
My dearest Eleanor,
I read your letter while strolling on the Rouen-Yvetot road this evening and it delighted me, as your letters always do, with your keen intelligence and gentle wit. But it also saddened me that you feel hesitant to ask me a question…“have waited these forty years,” you wrote, “and know that I should wait forty more.”
There is no need to wait forty more, my dear, nor even another day. The question is asked, and I take no offense.
Tonight, when the Abbot tapped his mallet and the reader ceased his reading and intoned “Tu autem Domine miserere nobis,” and we all rose and bowed as we chanted our thanksgiving, I was—as I have every morn and noon and evening for almost forty years—thanking not a personal or impersonal God, but merely the fact of Life itself for its gift of life.
As to my celibacy—or as you so quaintly put it—“my long denial of life’s physicality,” well, Eleanor, have you ever known a more physical person than your brother? Even this afternoon, as I labored to finish weeding the last patch of peas in the garden between the Abbey and the forest, can you not imagine me taking sheer physical pleasure in the sweat that ran into my eyes and trickled under my rough robes?
But I know you speak of marriage, or more precisely, of physical love.
Do you not remember that I wrote many years ago that I was married? Not felt married or acted as if I were married, but married. I should wear a wedding ring like the nuns in Rouen who show they are wed to Christ.
Only I am not wed to Christ. I respect him and grow more interested in his teachings as each year passes—especially the idea that God is, indeed, quite literally, Love—but I am not wed to the Galilean.
Yes, my dear, I know that this is heresy, even to such a casual C of E sometime-believer as yourself. Imagine if the Abbot or dear Brother Theophylaktos or serious Father Gabriel heard me utter these words! Thank heavens for vows of silence.
I am wed, not to Christ, nor to any conventional image of God, but to Life herself. I celebrate Her daily and look forward to seeing Her even as life seems to abandon me, I find Her in the smallest things each day—the sunlight on the rough plaster of my cell, the touch of rough wool, the savor of those fresh beans I defended with my hoe for so many hot months.
Eleanor, do not think that I have abandoned God in my love of Life. It is merely that I understand—have been made to understand—that God is found in this Life and that to wait for another is folly.
Of course you must ask how I can shut myself away if I believe in embracing Life. The answer is difficult even for me to understand.
First, I do not consider my life in these abbeys as a retreat from life. It is—as I hope I showed in the simple little book I sent you fifteen or sixteen years ago (my God, time moves on, does it not, my baby sister?)—my way of savoring life. As imperfect as those writings were, they were my attempt to share the exquisite simplicity of such a life. It is as if I were a connoisseur of fine food, and rather than discourage my appetite through gluttony, I indulge it by ingesting only small portions of the finest cuisine.
I love Life, Eleanor. It is that simple. Had I the choice, I would live forever, accepting pain and loss as my due and learning—across time—even to appreciate the sharp seasoning of this sadness. The alternative is the Child Who Devours.
I know this makes no sense, my dear. Perhaps this poem I shall enclose, written some time ago, might cast some light on the murky cloud of verbiage I have stirred up. Poets rarely get to the point.
Please write again soon. I wish to hear about your dear husband’s health (improving, I hope and will pray) and the continued fortunes of Charles and Linda in the big city. (I would not recognize London were some miracle to transport me there. The last time I saw it was during the Blitz, and while morale was very high amongst the populace, the old city itself had seen better days. Tell me, are the barrage balloons still there? Just kidding—the pub (I still call it that) near the station in the nearby village boasts a television and I caught a glance of a film set in London just last month on my way to a conference in Rouen. And there were no barrage balloons.)
Do write, Eleanor, and forgive your brother’s continued obtuseness and perversity. Someday I shall grow up.
I remain—
Your loving brother,
James
{Ed. note—The following poem was enclosed.}
THE GREAT LOVER
I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,
My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.
Shall I not crown them with immortal praise
Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me
High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see
The inenarrable godhead of delight?
Love is a flame;—we have beaconed the world’s night.
A city:—and we have built it, these and I.
An emperor:—we have taught
the world to die.
So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,
And the high cause of Love’s magnificence,
And to keep loyalties young, I’ll write those names
Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,
And set them as a banner, that men may know,
To dare the generations, burn, and blow
Out on the wind of time, shining and streaming…
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such—
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns… Dear names,
And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—