Julian Grenfell was born in London on 30 March 1888. He was the eldest son of William Henry Grenfell, first Baron Desborough, and his beautiful wife, Ethel (always known at ‘Ettie’), a woman of formidable charm and considerable social distinction. Their son was educated at Summerfields preparatory school in Oxford, then Eton, and Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered as a ‘commoner’ in 1906.
An Oxford contemporary would later recall his whirlwind arrival at university:
Julian did everything and shone in them all. He rowed, and he hunted; and he read, and he roared with laughter, and he cracked his whip in the quad all night; he bought greyhounds from the miller of Hambledon, boxed all the local champions; capped poetry with the most precious of the dons, and charmed everybody from the Master of Balliol to the ostlers at the Randolph [Hotel]. And he was the best of friends and the dearest of men. The only things he couldn’t stand were pose or affectation, and he could be a terror to the occasional [aesthete] still to be met with at Oxford [. . . .]
Over six feet tall, Grenfell was a man of prodigious energy; boxing for the University, rowing at Henley, winning college steeplechases, and hunting with his favourite dog, Slogbottom, the subject of a poem ‘To a Black Greyhound’:
Shining black in the shining light,
Inky black in the golden sun,
Graceful as the swallow’s flight,
Light as swallow, winged one;
Swift as driven hurricane –
Double sinewed stretch and spring,
Muffled thus of flying feet,
See the black dog galloping
Hear his wild foot-beat.
See him lie when the day is dead,
Black curves curled on the boarded floor.
Sleepy eyes, my sleepy-head –
Eyes that were aflame before.
Gentle now, they burn no more;
Gentle now, and softly warm,
With the fire that made them bright
Hidden – as when after storm
Softly falls the night.
God of Speed, who makes the fire –
God of Peace, who lulls the same –
God who gives the fierce desire,
Lust for blood as fierce as flame –
God who stands in Pity’s name –
Many may ye be or less,
Ye who rule the earth and sun:
Gods of strength and gentleness
Ye are ever one.
Grenfell’s sketch of a greyhound
The poet’s clear identification with his greyhound’s ‘fierce desire,/Lust for blood as fierce as flame’ reveals a ferocity in the man recognized by other of his contemporaries who were not his friends. Aesthetes, in particular, felt the lash of his tongue and feared that of his Australian stock-whip. One who had suffered from both threatened legal action, but was warned by the Master of Balliol that, if he proceeded with this, he would have to leave the college.
Grenfell was ostensibly studying Classics and Philosophy at Oxford, but was easily distracted from the prescribed Latin and Greek texts and, in his third year, began to write a book of his own. A collection of seven interrelated essays – ‘On Conventionalism’, ‘Sport’, ‘On Individuality’, ‘On Calling Names by their Right Things’, ‘Divided Ideals’, ‘Selfishness, Service and the Single Aim’ and ‘Darwinism, Theism and Conventionalism’ – this amounted to an attack on the values of English society in general, and his mother’s social circle in particular. Much as he adored her, he resented the company she kept, ‘the 101 princes of the blood’, as he called the young men competing for her favours. Predictably, Ettie and her entourage hated his book; his friends were, at best, perplexed by it; and he consigned the typescript, bitterly, to the bottom of a tin trunk where it lay unread for many years.
Their response to his writing and ideals contributed to a mood of near-suicidal depression into which he slipped in the autumn of 1909. He was rescued from this, the following summer, by a passionate love affair with Pamela Lytton, wife of the 3rd Earl of Lytton. Realizing that they could have no future together, Grenfell decided to join the Army and in October 1910 was posted to India. As a subaltern in a cavalry regiment, the Royal Dragoons, he spent his time there drilling on the parade ground, playing polo, or pigsticking, a sport that produced the following poem:
Pigsticking, a sketch in Grenfell’s ‘game book’
God gave the horse for man to ride
And steel wherewith to fight
And wine to swell his soul with pride
And women for delight
But a better gift than all these four
Was when he made the fighting boar . . .
As in his poem ‘To a Black Greyhound’, Grenfell salutes a fellow hunter, praising each for a prowess that he shares: the greyhound for its running, the boar for its fighting (a favourite verb for a favourite activity).
The royal Dragoons left India for South Africa in 1911, returning to England shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914. On leave in England, Grenfell noted in his ‘game book’ that he shot 105 partridges at Panshangar in early October. His next two entries read: ‘November 16th: 1 Pomeranian’ [soldier]; ‘November 17th: 2 Pomeranians’. By then, the Royal Dragoons, separated from their horses, were reinforcing the infantry at the first Battle of Ypres. Grenfell was in his element, writing home: ‘I adore war. It’s like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I’ve never been so well or so happy.’ The fighting excitement revitalizes everything – every sight and word and action. One loves one’s fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him.’ He specializes in stalking his fellow men, and in fact did this so successfully that he was awarded the DSO.
Frances Cornford’s ‘young Apollo’, Rupert Brooke, died on 23 April 1915. One month later, Julian Grenfell was lying in a French hospital with a shell-splinter in his head. Hearing of this, his parents obtained permission from the Admiralty to cross the Channel on an ammunition boat. At his bedside, his mother saw ‘how a shaft of sunlight came in at the darkened window and fell across his feet’. He smiled at her and said ‘Phoebus Apollo’. Next day The Times carried, with the news of his death, his poem, ‘Into Battle’, which was to become – for the duration of the war and for some time after – almost as famous as Brooke’s sonnet, ‘The Soldier’.
Human society has no place in this poem. The speaker’s milieu is the natural world:
Hunting Pomeranians, from Grenfell’s ‘game book’
Grenfell’s bloodstained map
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And life is colour and warmth and light
And a striving evermore for these;
a celebration of vitality followed by two dismayingly paradoxical statements:
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.
In what sense, one must ask, is such a man increased – rather than diminished – by his loss of contact with the natural world? The answer is not really an answer:
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth.
British troops at Ypres, October 1914
German prisoners are led into Ypres along the Ypres–Menin Road, 1914
The fighting man finds exhilaration in battle and, afterwards, what increase does he find? ‘Great rest, and fullness after dearth.’ The word ‘dearth’ – particularly when rhymed with ‘birth’ – sounds like a euphemism for ‘death’, and this association would seem to link with what follows:
All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star and the Sisters seven,
Orion’s belt and sworded hip.
The stars that guide the fighting man on patrol share his predatory inclinations: the Dog-Star (Grenfell took three greyhounds with him to France) and Orion the huntsman. His friends are the inhuman stars, other predators (kestrel and owl), the blackbird that urges him to sing, and those animals associated with heroism and warfare long before they gave their name to chivalry:
The horses show him noble powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
At last, the fighting man discovers the ‘joy of battle’, but the reader has still to discover the nature of the ‘increase’ he obtains if he dies fighting. We are never told explicitly what it is – because, I think, Grenfell assumes we will know and will agree that increase it is. The answer is surely ‘glory’; Grenfell’s ambition being essentially the same as the ambitions of Hector or Beowulf. This is in many ways a horrifying poem and, like the poems of Brooke, Vernède, and countless other public-school poets, it illustrates the hypnotic power of a long cultural tradition; the tragic outcome of educating a generation to face not the future but the past.
Grenfell’s last letter to his mother
Fighting in mud, we turn to Thee
In these dread times of battle, Lord,
To keep us safe, if so may be,
From shrapnel, snipers, shell and sword.
Yet not on us – (for we are men
Of meaner clay, who fight in clay) –
But on the Staff, the Upper Ten,
Depends the issue of the day.
The Staff is working with its brains
While we are sitting in the trench;
The Staff the universe ordains
(Subject to Thee and General French).
God, help the Staff – especially
The young ones, many of them sprung
From our high aristocracy;
Their task is hard, and they are young.
O Lord, who mad’st all things to be
And madest some things very good
Please keep the extra ADC
From horrid scenes, and sights of blood . . . .
1915
Cloth Hall and Cathedral, Ypres, 1915
