Finishing the memoir of Rupert Brooke today on the train to Petersfield, I was struck by a counterfactual. For three months, Brooke languidly took his artistic temperature in the cafes of Munich in 1911, adjudging the German character and drawing sketches of his fellow English as Forster wannabes. It was a poet with a view to exporting the Brookes club, sole membership: one.
The counterfactual would have been triggered by Brooke crossing paths with Adolf Hitler. But the times do not match as Hitler did not emigrate to Munich till 1913. It was motivated by the question of how Brooke may have matured if he had seen action and survived the war.
The question of patriotic poetry and his gauche early work are clear. The themes of satirical focus and sketches of what he saw and experienced would probably have replaced this naif hunger for action (in which he merely articulated the attitudes of his public school generation). Would he have even written about the sense of loss and bereavement for that 'lost generation', of which, in reality, he became a part?
If Brooke had survived, it is difficult to plot his further career. Positioned between conservative patriotism and the socialism of his cohort, can we foresee Brooke as a reformed pacifist during the interwar period: the primary force in the 1945 Brooke government? His charisma certainly favoured a political role. Or is he remembered as a minor academic at Sydney University, retreading old steps to the South Seas and tired of a country that held no further happiness for him? Or would he retire like Siegfried Sassoon: perhaps becoming a housemaster again at his beloved Rugby, some special plaque commemorating "Chips" Brooke and his influence over generations of schoolboys.
None of this happened and Brooke was buried on an Aegean isle, as the voice of that lost generation, his best unwritten poetry still before him.