The secret loves of Rupert Brooke

More than 90 years ago, the most handsome man in Britain was on a troop ship, thinking of the beautiful actress he had left behind. Before the ship reached its destination off the Turkish coast, Rupert Brooke took up his pen and poured out his feelings:

"Oh my dear, Life is a very good thing. Thank God I met you. Be happy & be good. You have been good to me. Goodbye, dearest child - Rupert," he wrote, in a letter dated "March 18 - off Gallipoli."

A collection of 82 of Brooke's letters went under the hammer at Christie's, in London, this week. They were all addressed to Cathleen Nesbitt who, unlike Brooke, lived to a grand old age. She was in the Broadway productions of My Fair Lady and Gigi in the 1950s, and died in 1982, aged 94.

Brooke - as everyone with a basic knowledge of English war poetry well knows - died young, at 27. He was one of 480,000 French and British Empire troops packed off to the Dardenelles in 1915, to open a new front in a war that had become bogged down in the trenches. Nearly one in ten of the expeditionary force died in battle or from illness. Brooke was one of the first - dead before the fighting began. On the outward journey, he suffered sunstroke in Egypt, then was bitten on the lip by a mosquito off the Greek island of Skyros. He contracted blood poisoning and died.

Up until the age of about 24, Brooke had had everything going for him. The son of a housemaster at Rugby school, he grew up in a cloistered world, with the triple advantage of being academically bright, good at sport and stunningly handsome. The poet W B Yeats said he was the most handsome man in the country. Another poet, John Cornford, remembered him as "a young Apollo, golden-haired."

At Cambridge University, he mingled Maynard Keynes, E M Forster, and Virginia Stephens - later known as Woolf, who wrote later: "So much has been written of his personal beauty that to state one's own first impression of him in that respect needs some audacity, since the first impression was of a type so conventionally handsome and English as to make it inexpressive or expressive only of something that one might be inclined half-humorously to disparage. He was the type of English young manhood at its healthiest and most vigorous."

But Brooke's life took a downward turn because of his endlessly complicated relationships with women. He became engaged to one girl, Noel Olivier, while in love with another, Katherine Cox. This almost caused him to have a mental breakdown. He wandered around Europe for several weeks to recover, came back to England in September 1912, and began a two-year romance with Cathleen Nesbitt.

"Haven't you noticed your chin and neck are the most beautiful thing in the world?" he wrote in one of the letters that went under the hammer at Christie's. Or again: "Haven't you heard about your hair? Has nobody told you about your eyes? Haven't you read in the papers that your lips are maddening?"

While this affair was under way, Brooke set off abroad again, to the USA, New Zealand, and Tahiti. "My life's been getting madder and madder," he wrote to Cathleen, from the South Pacific. "I tumbled into Fiji without a friend or an introduction: and left it a month later amid the loud grief of the united population, white and black." What the letters omitted was that he was having another passionate affair, with a Tahitian islander named Taatamata. It is rumoured that she had a child by him.

He returned to England in July 1914, just in time to join the first rush of young men who enlisted to fight the Germans. He took part in the defence of Antwerp, and caught flu during the retreat to Bruges - a warning that he might not be able to stand the rigours of war. While convalescing, he wrote the five War Sonnets, which brought lasting fame.

By coincidence, he was not the only war poet on the prospectus of a London auction house this week. A Military Cross awarded to Siegfried Sassoon, found in a descendant's attic, was also scheduled for auction, but was withdrawn at the last minute. Brooke's letters were also withdrawn when the bidding failed to get above £65,000.

Though they are grouped together under the heading '"war poets", the two could hardly be more different. Sassoon was a military hero whose experience of battle turned him into a conscientious objector.

To avoid jailing him, the authorities sent him for psychological examination, at the same clinic as the other great anti-war poet, Wilfred Owen. Sassoon's poetry is full of biting humour about the horrors of war, as in the lines: "Does it matter? losing your legs?/For people will always be kind ..." Brooke, by contrast, was part of the first wave of public-school educated officers who went off to fight as if they were on a particularly tough school expedition. There is no doubting his courage. When the War Office learnt that he had fallen ill in Egypt, they thought twice about risking the life of a poet whose verses were becoming a propaganda weapon, and offered to pull him back into a safe post. He refused.

But he saw action only once, in Antwerp. Apart from that brief experience, his early death spared him from having to see men being killed or mutilated in their hundreds, or die from the illnesses prevalent in the trenches. His War Sonnets are full of patriotic optimism, and succeeding generations of British children have learnt the famous opening lines of "The Soldier':

"If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England."

Actually, it was not a "foreign field" that served as Brooke's last resting place, but a stone cairn on Skyros where his friends hurriedly buried him before heading off to Gallipoli. His mother later arranged a grander tomb. Meanwhile, his legend grew. He was accorded an obituary in The Times, including a section reputedly written by Winston Churchill, exhorting others to follow Brooke's example and enlist. "The Soldier" was read out during the 1915 Easter Day service in St Paul's Cathedral.

Later, when public opinion ceased to see glamour in war in general, and especially the First World War, Brooke came under attack as a jingoist who ignored the horror of mass slaughter. But we cannot know what he might have written if he had lived to see more than 44,000 Allied troops and nearly twice as Turks massacred at Gallipoli.

Those letters to Cathleen Nesbitt suggest his enthusiasm was already fading. If nothing else, those words "Goodbye, dearest child" imply that Brooke foresaw that, for him, death was drawing near.