Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Roland’s telling postscript to a letter to Vera, dated 21 April, showed the extent to which his ideals of honour and glory, and heroism in the abstract, were already wearing thin after little more than ten days’ experience of trench life. ‘There is nothing glorious in trench warfare’, he observed despondently. ‘It is all a waiting and a waiting and taking of petty advantages – and those who can wait longest win. And it is all for nothing – for an empty name, for an ideal perhaps – after all.’

  Back in February, in her first overt criticism of the war, Vera had questioned Roland about whether the call of King and Country was really the call of God, as soldiers and civilians were so often being told. Now she went further and asked him whether anything could justify ‘all the blood that has been & is to be shed’:

  The terrible things you mention & describe fill me, when the first horror is over, with a sort of infinite pity I have never felt before. I don’t know whether it is you or sorrow that has aroused this softer feeling – perhaps both … Is it really all for nothing, – for an empty name – an ideal? Last time I saw you it was I who said that & you who denied it. Was I really right, & will the issue really not be worth one of the lives that have been sacrificed for it?

  Roland made no direct answer to her question. For Vera, this perception all at once clouded over, and she admitted in her diary that ‘I am not sure that I agree myself in all I said to him.’

  In fact, Vera’s continuing dependence on rhetoric of patriotism and martial heroism is evident in her response to the posthumous appearance of Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet cycle, 1914. The five war sonnets had recently been published in book form (following Brooke’s death from blood poisoning in the Aegean, while sailing to the Dardanelles with the Royal Naval Division), and immediately had a profound effect on Vera. They were ‘all sad & moving, in spite of their spirit of courage & hope’, she noted, after listening to the English tutor Helen Darbishire reading them out loud to a small group of students, one evening at Somerville, ‘& through them all ran a strangely prophetic note, a premonition of early death.’ Furthermore, Brooke’s image as a warrior-poet inevitably fused with thoughts of Roland, for whom she enclosed copies of four of the sonnets in her next letter.

  Even Somerville had succumbed to the war effort. Vera returned to Oxford for the summer term of 1915 to find that the War Office had requisitioned the college buildings as a military hospital – where both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves would later be patients – and that most of the students and dons had moved to Oriel College’s St Mary Hall quad (Vera was among a small number of undergraduates who were allocated rooms at Micklem Hall, off the High Street).

  Attempting calmly to work for her next batch of exams seemed almost an impossibility, with news of the war constantly overshadowing everything and her anxiety for Roland dominating her thoughts. Instead of doing her work, she told Roland, ‘I sit dreaming over it, thinking of you among barbed-wire entanglements.’ Her tutor, Hilda Lorimer, formerly so distant and critical, appeared more sympathetic now. Miss Lorimer’s attitude to events outside Oxford was less insular than that of some of her colleagues. Her favourite brother had been killed in Persia in 1914, and she would later serve as a hospital orderly in Salonika.

  Vera might no longer be interested in her college work, but she resolved none the less that she ‘must do it without feeling interested. Such is the only form of courage I can practise.’ However, throughout the spring of 1915 she had been considering another option: to abandon her studies and become actively involved in some form of war work. Government propaganda was beginning to put pressure on women to participate in the war effort, freeing men from their peacetime occupations and allowing them to enlist. Already, during the Easter vacation, Edith Brittain had faced criticism, from another Buxton matron, of Vera’s failure to take up voluntary nursing, unlike some other young women of the town. At one point Vera considered registering at a Labour Exchange for clerical work, ‘a sort of service’ that appealed to her ‘far more than merely to swell the number of superfluous housemaids [which is how she still looked upon voluntary nursing].’ She even started to learn to type as preparation for office work.

  Why then in the end did she decide to nurse? Most obviously, her immediate motivation derived from her love for Roland. It was her need to empathise with him and his sacrifice that made her choose the female war service demanding the hardest work and ‘the most wearying kinds of bodily toil’; one that, if she ever succeeded in being posted to a frontline hospital, would bring her as close to the dangers of the conflict as it was possible for a woman to be.

  But in applying to nurse, Vera was also responding to the widely accepted parity between the public school educated men who volunteered for Kitchener’s Army and the socially privileged women who became Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses. For these middle and upper class women, longing for a wartime identity beyond the passive role of knitting for the troops or living vicariously through their male relatives, the figure of the volunteer nurse – as opposed to her professional counterpart – with the sign of the Red Cross emblazoned on her chest, and public perception of her heroism, appeared as a clear answer to their needs.

  The Voluntary Aid Detachment programme had been founded in 1909 to provide voluntary aid to the sick and wounded in the event of an invasion. By 1915, the scheme had been greatly expanded to cope with the severe shortage of professional nurses caused by the unforeseen effects of trench warfare. VADs were provided as probationary nurses, paid and housed by the military authorities. Once accepted, following a month’s probation, the VAD signed a six-month contract. In addition to an allowance for food, washing and travel, the volunteer nurse was paid £20 a year for the first seven months, with increments of £2.10s for each subsequent six-month period. The pay may have been less than what the average domestic servant received, but this did not stand in the way of a rush of recruitment in the early period of the war, when as many as 600 voluntary nurses a week were being appointed to military hospitals at home and abroad. Most VADs, in any case, did not need the money, and looked for no financial reward. They were expected to be of an equivalent social class to male commissioned officers, and, while there were plenty of VADs from lower down the class structure, most of them conformed to this middle or upper class pattern.

  Vera’s decision to leave Somerville in order to nurse, initially for a year, was accepted by Emily Penrose, the College Principal. On 17 June, Vera took Pass Mods (in July she would receive a letter from Miss Lorimer congratulating her on her well-deserved success). Ten days later, she started work as an unpaid auxiliary Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at Buxton’s Devonshire Hospital, a short walk down the hill from ‘Melrose’.

  Vera’s VAD record card, showing the dates of her enrolment (13 August 1915) and of her eventual departure from service in March 1919, four months after the end of the war.

  She would work at the Devonshire for the next three months, attempting in the meantime to sign on as a VAD under contract at a military hospital. It was a gruelling nine-hour day. At the outset Vera’s duties included making beds, cleaning and serving meals. Before long she was allowed to dress minor wounds while undertaking some other aspects of basic patient care. As so often, she demonstrated a seemingly inexhaustible desire to prove herself in whatever task she set herself, however menial. She had never worked so hard in her life. Vera’s pre-war existence had been largely cloistered and protected from mundane drudgery – at the start of her nursing career she was unable even to boil an egg – but this new experience was providing her with ‘a little insight into the lives of those who always have to work like this.’ She imagined that caring for her British Tommies at the Devonshire was like nursing Roland by proxy, and nurtured the dream that he might be invalided home with some slight wound, allowing her ‘to look after him & thoroughly spoil him.’

  On 18 August, Vera finally received the news for which she had waited for so long: after nearly five months at the Front, Roland was c
oming home on a week’s leave. Two days later they were reunited in the first class ladies’ waiting room at London’s St Pancras Station. Roland looked older and thinner. In his time away, Vera noted sadly, he had acquired ‘a premature air of having knocked about the world’. At first, owing to his short-sight, he barely recognised her. Then they shook hands and stood looking at each other, somewhat awkwardly. She could scarcely believe that standing before her was the flesh and blood reality of the man who had appeared at times to exist for her solely through the written word and her imagination. Roland’s sense of dislocation was even greater. Indeed, returning to England, after months in the trenches, must have seemed to him like coming to another planet, with precious little time to readjust before he went back again,

  The barrier of reticence increased the tension between them, and this in turn was exacerbated over the next few days by a sequence of tiring railway journeys. On the train to Buxton that evening to stay with Vera’s parents, Roland proposed marriage to her. Vera’s response, despite her acknowledgement of her deep feelings for him, was to assert a sense of her ‘best self’, and with it, of her independence and autonomy. She declined an announcement of the engagement in The Times, or a formal request by Roland to her father for her hand in marriage. The next day they agreed after further discussion to consider themselves engaged, though with Vera’s additional proviso that she would not wear a ring. However much the conventional side of her was attracted by the thought of wearing an engagement ring, she saw the custom as a survival of the days when a wife was regarded as her husband’s possession. It was a symbol of the old inequality, ‘& therefore hateful to me’.

  Returning to St Pancras the next day, en route to Lowestoft, they had lunch with Edward and Victor Richardson. It was the first occasion on which Uppingham’s Three Musketeers had been together since the outbreak of war, more than a year earlier, and, unlike Roland, neither Edward nor Victor had succeeded in getting to the Front. Edward had experienced serious disappointment, confidently expecting to be posted to France on several occasions since the spring, only to be kept back, having fallen foul of his commanding officer in the Sherwood Foresters, who had developed a strong dislike of him. In the meantime, Victor had almost died from an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis, the illness that had killed his mother, and would only be fit enough for light duties on home service at the Woolwich Arsenal towards the end of the year. Both men, therefore, listened intently to Roland’s first-hand experience of life at the Front. Roland went into technical detail about the barbed wire entanglements in front of the trenches, and spoke about the shooting of sentries who fell asleep on duty.

  At the Leightons’ cliff-top house at Lowestoft – darkened according to the black-out regulations because of its position as a conspicuous landmark for Zeppelins or ships out at sea – Marie Leighton regaled Vera with stories of Roland’s childhood, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief as she did so. The other members of the household, the younger children, Clare and Evelyn, and their father Robert, gathered round to examine Vera with open curiosity. Mrs Leighton seemed to have accepted the existence of another woman in her son’s life. ‘I am very fond of you’, she told Vera during one of these long confessionals, ‘but I do want any woman that gets him to care for him so very much – just as I have done.’ Roland meanwhile hovered in the background, silent and detached.

  His and Vera’s one moment of intimacy that weekend occurred as they walked alone on a cliff path, the afternoon before their departure. Sitting down ‘on a soft dry bed of heather’, they looked out at the ‘vast grey shadow’ covering the sea, as Roland silently put his arm around her and drew her close to him. He gently played with the wisps of Vera’s hair that were blowing over her face and after a time rested his head on her shoulder before kissing her. There was ‘such a painful joy & a joyful pain’, she remembered afterwards, knowing that they had been together in life so little and were soon to part again. ‘There, on that dark heather-covered cliff beside the sea, I realised the depth & strength of my own passion – realised it & was afraid.’

  As Vera had to report for duty back at the Devonshire on 24 August, and Roland was not returning to France until the end of the week, they had agreed that he should see her off at St Pancras. They spent their final hours together on a shopping expedition in London. Vera had herself measured for a VAD coat, in preparation for her orders to a military hospital; Roland bought himself a ‘vicious-looking’ steel dagger in case ‘the fierce excitement & madness of hand-to-hand fighting’ ever arose. She was depressed by the sight of the dagger in his hands, and, watching him write out the cheque to pay for it, found it incongruous that a person ‘with such artistic hand writing should have use for a thing like that.’

  But the warrior’s mask slipped during their last minutes together. ‘He said very bitterly that he didn’t want to go back to the front, and this glimpse of England and real life had made him hate France more than ever.’ Vera tried to commit his features to memory, realising that in just a short time ‘they would only be an image in my mind’:

  He stooped & kissed me passionately almost before I realised he had done it … He looked away from me a moment & dragging out his handkerchief furtively drew it across his eyes. I hadn’t realised until then that this quiet & self-contained person was suffering so much …

  The whistle sounded & the crowd moved a little away from the door. But he still stood close to me and as the train began to move he pressed my hand almost violently, and, drawing my face down to his, kissed me again, more passionately than ever. And I kissed him, which I had never done before, and just managed to make myself whisper “Goodbye.” He said nothing at all, but turned quickly from me and began to walk rapidly down the platform … He never turned again. What I could see of his face was set & pale.

  The resumption of routine life, at the hospital and in the trenches, proved more difficult after their time together. She cherished the bitter-sweet memory of his arm round her and of his bristly head on her shoulder, and told him of her ‘insane impatience’ to be kissed by him again. A return to the written word as their means of communication, however, came as something of a relief for both of them. ‘We both seem less reserved in letters,’ Roland observed, ‘more like our real selves’.

  By early September, Roland and his battalion were in France, in trenches in the Hébuterne sector, between Amiens and Arras. From here he sent Vera a melancholy description of his surroundings. In earlier months, he had derived some comfort from the ways in which pastoral elements of the landscape co-existed with the destruction of war, however incongruous that sometimes appeared. But now the sight of an old trench, ‘disused and overgrown with grass, with dug-outs fallen in or wrecked by shells, and here and there a forgotten grave and rusty bayonet’, depressed him. In such conditions, he admitted, England and Vera seemed very far away.

  The gulf between Roland’s heroic conception of war and its reality was growing. Back at the beginning of August, before his leave, Roland had confessed to Vera that, whereas he had once talked of ‘the Beauty of War’, experience had taught him ‘that it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful’, and that ‘Modern warfare is merely a trade’. Now, in a letter to Vera, written a fortnight after his return to France, he delivered his most sustained, powerful and damning condemnation of the war – and specifically of the kind of rhetoric, extolling the chivalric values, and elevated abstractions, of patriotism, honour and sacrifice, even holiness, that were to be found in the war sonnets of Rupert Brooke.

  Nowhere is Brooke’s name mentioned, but the echoes of ‘The Dead’, Brooke’s third sonnet, quoted with bitter irony, make Roland’s intention plain. While superintending the building of some dug-outs, Roland had chanced upon the remains of some dead Germans, ‘the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth …’:

  Let him who thinks that war is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour
and Praise and Valour and Love of country … let him look upon a pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side … and let him realise how grand & glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known & seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?

  In her reply to Roland, Vera acknowledged that the war could only be justified ‘if it puts an end to all the horror & barbarism & retrogression of War for ever.’ But at the same time her diary reveals how limited was her understanding of what he was trying to tell her. Her dependence on precisely the kind of rhetoric Roland was attacking is clear in several passages where she quotes, completely without irony, from Brooke’s sonnets. Later, she would write to Roland that Brooke’s lines about pouring out the red, sweet wine of youth keep coming into her head as she contemplates the wounded in her ward. Roland had once sent Vera violets from ‘Plug Street Wood’, knowing that she would understand. However, the gap between her sentimentalised conception of the war and his first-hand experience of it was deepening, and potentially the cause of a new kind of barrier of incomprehension was coming between them.

  It would at least have helped to alleviate his boredom if Roland had been involved in some actual fighting, rather than spending day after day sitting in a ditch, taking the occasional shot ‘at a more or less docile and usually invisible enemy who is content to do the same.’ In late September there seemed at last some chance of this and Roland warned Vera that his section of the line might be involved in a major British attack. But it was a false alarm, and the ill-fated and costly Battle of Loos took place without the 7th Worcesters playing any part in the fighting.