Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  He would miss the ‘incidental pleasure’ of seeing Vera at university, but in the circumstances it would be impossible to endure a life of what he called ‘scholastic vegetation’. It would seem ‘a somewhat cowardly shirking’ – that heavily loaded word again – of his duty.

  He felt that he was intended for an active part in the war. In its next few lines, his letter reveals the strongest influence of the Uppingham ethos. To Roland, war was ‘a very fascinating thing – something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of all cold theorising’.

  Rather than make the slightest criticism of his change of plans, Vera’s response emphasised that Roland was making the right choice. She found something ennobling in war too, she told him, and was in no doubt that had she been a boy she would long since have gone off to take part in it. ‘Women get all the dreariness of war & none of its exhilaration’, she exclaimed, with a driving sense of frustration; and in the coming months she was often to experience the war vicariously through the lives of her brother and her male friends. For the time being, though, she had already begun the only war work that ‘it seems possible as yet for women to do’: knitting bed-socks and sleeping-helmets for soldiers, attending bandaging classes, and sitting a First Aid exam with other Buxton ladies.

  Edward, as it turned out, would be at Oxford that autumn, not at New College, but training with the University’s OTC, and Vera hoped to see something of him while he was there. In November, he would be gazetted as a Second Lieutenant in the 11th Sherwood Foresters and sent to Frensham, in Surrey. It would be the beginning of a long period of home service with no indication of when he might be transferred to the Western Front. Roland meanwhile was billeted in Norwich as a subaltern with the 4th Norfolks, responsible for the battalion signalling section and despatch riders.

  Roland’s decision to forego Oxford, perhaps indefinitely, had tarnished Vera’s hopes of getting to know him gradually, as well as planting the first seeds of doubt in her mind regarding the relevance of the intellectual, or ‘contemplative’, life to the concerns of the wider world in wartime. Nevertheless the excitement she felt at her new, independent existence at Somerville, which began on 9 October, quickly succeeded in pushing the war into the background, and before long she had ceased to follow current events as closely in newspapers. And despite the exchange of several letters with him, Vera’s immersion in Oxford also reduced for the time being the significance of Roland Leighton as a focus in her life.

  Not that she cared in the slightest degree for the exclusively female community represented by Somerville. It was the kind of lifestyle that was always anathema to her, and the wartime departure of so many male dons and undergraduates into the army had given the University a novel feminine atmosphere. While noting that she appeared to have picked up her customary reputation for being earnest and conceited – in addition to one for being ‘the lion’ of her year – Vera recorded in her diary the beginnings of several new friendships. One was with Norah Hughes, from Winchester, whose experiences with ‘the Cathedral set’ of hating dances and being thought mad to want to go to university mirrored Vera’s own. Another, more competitive, relationship was with Una Ellis-Fermor, a London girl, later a distinguished scholar of Elizabethan drama. Liberated from her restrictive life at home, Vera revelled in cocoa evenings, with their animated discussions of dons and third years, trips to the theatre – ‘on the cheap, which is half the joy’ – and singing in the University’s Bach Choir alongside Dorothy L. Sayers, the future crime novelist and a fellow Somervillian.

  She was having to work very hard. Vera had been accepted to read English, but in order to be eligible for the B.A. degree – if and when the university granted degrees for women – she had to prepare for two exams in her first year: Responsions Greek that December, and Pass Moderations, comprising papers in mathematics as well as Classics, the following summer. In Greek, which Vera was learning from scratch with extra coaching, Vera’s determination was strengthened by her desire to impress the Classics tutor, Hilda Lorimer. This was not easily achieved. Miss Lorimer, with her harsh Scottish accent, acerbic manner and deep knowledge of Homer, was scornful of Vera’s best efforts. But by the end of term, when the Greek coach Mr May gave Vera an outstanding report, Miss Lorimer’s attitude towards her had begun to change.

  Vera sat her exam in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre on 9 December, before returning to Buxton for Christmas. Three days later, a telegram informed her that she had passed Responsions Greek (the fact that she had done so on six week’s acquaintance with the language, she admitted later, testified to the ‘simplicity’ of Responsions as an examination).

  With studying out of the way for the holidays, Vera’s thoughts centred once more on Roland. Determined to get to the Front as quickly as possible, Roland was in Aldershot seeking a transfer to another battalion, unsuccessfully as it transpired, which was due to leave for France in a matter of weeks. He was suffering from ‘mental starvation’, and longing for half-an-hour’s talk ‘with someone with some personality and temperament.’ In her next letter, Vera enclosed a pair of bed-socks which she had knitted for him as a defence against the winter cold. They agreed to exchange photographs: Roland was worried that his might be spoilt by the incipient moustache he was growing. Vera would turn 21 at the end of that month, and he asked to be allowed to give her a present for her birthday. ‘… I simply cannot deny myself the joy of receiving a book both from him & inscribed by him’, Vera confided to her diary. ‘For the present I am bound to leave the feeling at that & not analyse it further lest I should discover too much. He interests me so deeply & so strangely this serious-minded, brilliant, unusual young man …’.

  Three days after Christmas, Vera received a letter from Roland suggesting that they meet in London at the end of the month. Mrs Leighton had taken a flat near Regent’s Park for the purpose of interviewing her publisher. The idea of at last meeting ‘Marie Connor Leighton, the authoress of sensational novels’, intrigued Vera almost as much as she was attracted by the prospect of seeing Roland again, though she worried that, as an Oxford woman student, she might suggest to Mrs Leighton someone dowdy and uninteresting, like ‘a pupil teacher or under-secretary for research in Church History’.

  Mrs Brittain’s younger, unmarried, sister, Belle, was conveniently available to chaperone her niece during two days in London. Fortunately for Vera, Aunt Belle was more of a fun-loving and happy-go-lucky character than her starchier sisters, Florence and Edith. Furthermore, Belle thoroughly relished the hint of romantic assignation surrounding the occasion. On 30 December, the two women, accompanied by Edward, who was re-joining his battalion, took the train to London.

  The photograph of herself that Vera sent to Roland Leighton in December 1914. Later, three snapshots would be taken of Vera with Roland. But although these were returned to his family after Roland’s death, they appear not to have survived.

  It was five months since Vera and Roland had met. He was dressed in khaki, which, however, seemed ‘perfectly natural’, as this was how she remembered him from the last occasion they had seen each other, during the Corps review at the Uppingham Speech Day. Throughout lunch at the Comedy Restaurant they both remained tongue-tied. Later, as they walked down darkened Regent’s Street, the street lights extinguished for fear of Zeppelin raids, and with Aunt Belle and Edward hurrying along in front to give them time alone, Vera found herself wondering exactly what she did feel for Roland.

  He had told her that he wanted to get to the Front as soon as possible, and Aunt Belle had helpfully reminded Vera that in these wartime circumstances this might well be their final meeting. ‘In this time of tragedy there can be no postponement’, Vera wrote, echoing those sentiments in her diary that evening. After a sleepless night, kept awake by thoughts of Roland, she was reunited with him the next day, New Year’s Eve. At the Criterion in Piccadilly that afternoon, Vera was introduced to Mrs Leighton, and to Roland�
�s 16-year-old sister, Clare. In spite of all Vera’s trepidation beforehand about what Marie Leighton might think of her, the two women instantly established a rapport. ‘She’s quite human after all’, Mrs Leighton exclaimed. ‘I thought she might be very academic & learned’.

  Alone again – with Aunt Belle – they dined at the Florence Restaurant, where Vera faced Roland with a direct question: would he like to be killed in action? He answered ‘quite quietly’:

  Yes, I should; I don’t want to die, but if I must, I should like to die that way. Anyhow, I should hate to go right through this war without being wounded at all; I should want something to prove that I had been in action.

  In the course of dinner, she thought she saw him looking at her with a look that was close to undisguised admiration. For her part, during a performance of Herbert Tree’s production of David Copperfield at His Majesty’s Theatre, for which Roland, at her request, had obtained tickets, Vera found herself concentrating less and less on the play and increasingly on Roland’s physical closeness to her. ‘Almost everything we could have said to each other had been left unsaid’, she remarked, writing up the evening in her diary. But she was certain now that the feelings that had always seemed possible ever since she had known him were now a reality, and that she was in love with Roland Leighton.

  The year 1915, with all its potential for grief as well as joy, came in as Vera sat in the train back to Buxton, watching the dim lights of the railway go by in the blurred mist. The realisation of first love was suddenly diminishing Vera’s feminist beliefs and desire for independence, and she wrote in her diary that she would willingly sacrifice her hopes for a life of glittering achievement in order one day to be the mother of Roland’s child.

  On her way back to Oxford for the new term, Vera managed to meet Roland again, this time out of the gaze of parents or chaperone. Roland, who was now stationed at Peterborough, suggested that they meet at Leicester where she could change trains to Oxford. Inventing an excuse for her parents’ benefit about not taking the usual route via Birmingham, Vera spent a couple of hours with Roland in Leicester. After lunch he insisted on continuing the journey with her all the way to Oxford. As the city came into view, the train slowed down and she stood up to put out her hand to say goodbye. Roland suddenly raised it to his lips and kissed it. ‘Taken by surprise I resisted a little but quite unavailingly in his strong grip, & after all I did not really want to resist.’

  The war, and the likelihood of Roland’s departure for the front, was accelerating the pace of Vera’s and Roland’s relationship. The confirmation of her feelings for him was also in its turn slowly altering her attitude to the prospect of remaining as an undergraduate during wartime. Back at Somerville, Vera received warm congratulations on her exam performance, but ‘the contemplative life’, as Roland had slightingly referred to it, was beginning to seem increasingly an irrelevance.

  What began to push her in the direction of a new course of action was the sudden news, in the middle of March, that Roland had achieved a transfer to a Territorial regiment, the 7th Worcesters, which would shortly be leaving for France. There was only enough time for a hastily arranged farewell for Vera and Roland at Buxton.

  She recognised that the moment had arrived which would end all hope of any peace of mind for her until the war was over. In an emotional and fragmentary conversation at ‘Melrose’, with both of them lapsing into long silences from time to time, Vera told Roland of her conviction that either he or Edward – but only one of them – would return from the war, and that consequently she must live with the ‘Shadow of Death’ hanging over her, darkening her future. They spoke of marriage and Vera mentioned her mother’s fear that she would end up an intellectual old maid, and that that was indeed what she would probably become. ‘I don’t see why’, he said. ‘Simply because there will be no one left for me to marry after the war’, she replied. ‘Not even me?’, he asked. Taking her hand, Roland kissed it as he had in the train at Oxford – ‘but this time there was no glove upon it.’

  On the morning of 19 March, in the first of many wartime railway station partings, Vera saw Roland off at Buxton station on his way back to Maldon, in Essex, to re-join his battalion. ‘I did not wish him glory or honour or triumph; in comparison with seeing him again I cared about none of these things. So all I could say was just “I hope Heaven will be kind to me & bring you back.”’ Late at night, on 31 March, Roland and his battalion reached Boulogne from Folkestone, on board the SS Onward. A little over a week later, they arrived at Armentières, a town on the Franco–Belgian border, and, on the evening of 11 April, Roland prepared to take his platoon into the trenches for the first time. ‘I wonder if I shall be afraid when I first get under fire’, he wrote to Vera in a letter that he signed off with the words, ‘Best of love’.

  The ‘Reflective Record’, begun by Vera in what must now have seemed like the far off days of provincial young ladyhood, was turning into something closer to ‘an autobiographical novel’, as she copied into it long excerpts from Roland’s letters, used the diary as a confessional for her feelings for him, and conveyed her anguished speculation when his letters failed to arrive leaving her to imagine that there had been time for him to be killed a hundred times over. Within a few weeks of Roland’s departure, she was already writing of her feeling that she was writing a novel ‘about someone else & not myself at all’, investing Roland with something of the ‘intangibility’ of her imagination. In Turgenev’s On the Eve, one of the books that Roland had given her for her 21st birthday, she found that the love scenes between Elena and Dmitri drove her ‘wild with desire’ for him, and demonstrated what they might be ‘capable of rising to’ when they were in each other’s company again.

  The limited opportunities that had existed for the couple to meet since falling in love encouraged the creation of this romantic narrative during their long months of separation. In their letters, too, Vera and Roland were able to be more open to each other about their feelings, in contrast to the shyness and reserve that predominated when they met face to face. In one early letter, Roland told Vera that he had been kissing her photograph. She understood that it was ‘the nearness of death which breaks down the reserves & conventions’, while admitting that she envied the photograph: ‘it is more fortunate than its original’. Roland’s response left her in no doubt of his intention on his return: ‘When it is all finished and I am with her again the original shall not envy the photograph.’

  His letters did not disguise from her the grim reality of trench warfare. Nothing in the newspapers, she told him, ‘not the most vivid and heart-rending descriptions have made me realise war like your letters.’ Roland’s graphic descriptions of the trenches themselves, ‘honeycombed’ like a small town with passages and dug-outs (or ‘bug-hutches’ as they were known), gave her a clear picture of his new surroundings; while the ‘crooning whistle’ of shells flying overhead, creating a massive circular depression ‘like a pudding basin’ when they fell, told her something of the imminent danger he faced with each fresh round of duty.

  Nor did he attempt to hide the more gruesome sights from her. At Ploegsteert Wood (‘Plug Street Wood’ as British troops christened it), part of the Ypres Salient, where Roland’s battalion took over a line of trenches at the beginning of the third week of April, the German soldiers were so close – no more than sixty yards away – that, going out at night into no man’s land, Roland could hear their voices. One morning he discovered the dead body of a British soldier, hidden in the undergrowth, apparently killed in the early part of the war during fierce fighting in the wood. ‘The ground was slightly marshy’, Roland reported to Vera, ‘and the body had sunk down into it so that only the toes of his boots stuck up above the soil. His cap and equipment were just by the side, half-buried and rotting away. I am having a mound of earth thrown over him, to add one more to the little graves in the wood.’

  The experience of coming upon the body was the inspiration for Roland’s poem – almost
certainly his first since arriving at the Front – the ‘Villanelle’, ‘Violets from Plug Street Wood’, completed on 25 April. He picked four violets, growing on the roof of his dug-out, and enclosed them in a letter to Vera. He had intended to send the poem with them, but kept it back for revision, only giving it to Vera some months later.

  Violets from Plug Street Wood,

  Sweet, I send you oversea.

  (It is strange they should be blue,

  Blue, when his soaked blood was red,

  For they grew around his head;

  It is strange they should be blue.)

  Violets from Plug Street Wood-

  Think what they have meant to me-

  Life and Hope and Love and You

  (And you did not see them grow

  Where his mangled body lay,

  Hiding horror from the day;

  Sweetest, it was better so.)

  Violets from oversea,

  To your dear, far, forgetting land

  These I send in memory,

  Knowing You will understand.

  In early May, the first of Roland’s men was killed. Describing to Vera how he had found him, ‘lying very still at the bottom of the trench with a tiny stream of red trickling down his cheek onto his coat’, Roland proceeded to remonstrate with himself for bringing the reality of war closer to her.

  Vera’s response to the war, and her reaction to all Roland was telling her, showed a marked ambivalence. She could express her horror at the lengthening casualty lists from the battle of Neuve Chapelle, and her compassion for the ‘shattered bodies’ of wounded men, while at the same time be writing to Edward about how ‘thrilling’ she found Roland’s letters. ‘… I feel I should give anything to be there with him!’, she wrote to her brother. ‘I quite envy you … Somehow it seems as if to die out there wouldn’t be so very hard as it would anywhere else.’