<<  -- 15 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

Other memorabilia in this superb exhibition, well worth a visit, include a German soldier's grey and red beret (retrieved by Graves) and Rupert Brooke's school cap. Here too are not just Ledwidge's bible, but (more movingly) his spectacles. The many other manuscripts include Graves's Goliath and David (in memory of David Thomas, wounded 17 March 1916) and Rupert Brooke's The Soldier (Sonnet V, 1914, written on Hood Battalion notepaper; Brooke and Denis Browne appear together in a battalion photograph), touchingly juxtaposed with the dead poet's identity tag and a revealing letter to his later love, Catherine Nesbitt. Pictures by a former girlfriend, Phyllis Gardner, movingly illustrate the 1921 volume Rupert Brooke and Skyros by Stanley Carson.

Pictures of each poet -- including a series of striking sketches of Edmund Blunden, whose Undertones of War is one of the most graphic descriptions of the Somme-Ancre campaigns ever published -- by William Rothenstein, Rex Whistler and another war poet, Ralph Hodgson, and of places associated with them, rub shoulders with the very stuff of war : Sassoon's panorama map of the enemy trenches in the Mametz and Fricourt sectors -- equally well known to him and to Graves's Royal Welch Fusiliers; Sassoon's revolver (a Browning pistol); Grenfell's map (which is blood-stained); and the watch Edward Thomas was carrying when he was killed by a shell blast at a forward artillery observation post near Arras on Easter Monday, 1917, a poignant sight : it had stopped at precisely 7.36 and 12 seconds.