Brooke might be increasingly sure of his moral resolve, but he still had to find a way into the war. His path to becoming an officer would meander for a little while longer. Brooke, like many readers in England and around the world, was impressed by the romantic accounts of Belgian and French heroism in the war's opening weeks. He would have read of the gallant (and desperate) halting of the German Army at the Battle of the Marne. This was grim and heady stuff: Paris menaced, and the famous taxis ferrying troops up the line to defend the city. The war, for all the horror of the appalling casualty figures of its opening weeks, seemed romantic, desperate, and modern, particularly as it was presented in the Allied press, which painted a picture of men willing to go all out – à outrance – to defend their homes, families, and civilisation.

Less gloriously, but no less bravely, the professional British Expeditionary Force (BEF) faced the numerically superior Germans as it made its long, dusty, and bloody-footed retreat from Mons; newspapers – and in particular The Times dispatch on 30 August – detailing the retreat aided in the great push for volunteers that ultimately fed Kitchener's new army. Meanwhile, in the East, the Russians, rag-tag but voluminous, advanced into Germany. Across Europe the armies left behind them the swelling bodies of dead comrades and dazed masses of refugees. Brooke thought of accompanying his friend Jacques Raverat to France under the pretence of helping to garner crops; he reasoned that he might join up with some sort of informal military expedition there. Like many potential volunteers in August and September 1914, he increasingly feared that he might miss his chance to see direct action, and that all the best stories, even the tragic ones, might already have been told.

Although it remained appealing, Brooke quickly turned from his first preference of becoming a journalist. Given their limited access to battlefields, which professional armies initially intended to be kept free of civilian observers, war correspondents were well supplied. While experienced and already deployed correspondents were clamouring to cover the war in whatever capacity they could, Brooke was not already in convenient residence abroad with access to first-hand accounts, and possessed no particularly exceptional language skills or familiarity with the places under fire.