Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  For a moment I thought that my legs would not carry me, but they behaved quite normally as I got up and went to the door. I knew what was in the telegram – I had known for a week – but because the persistent hopefulness of the human heart refuses to allow intuitive certainty to persuade the reason of that which it knows, I opened and read it in a tearing anguish of suspense.

  ‘Regret to inform you Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. killed in action Italy June 15th.’

  ‘No answer,’ I told the boy mechanically, and handed the telegram to my father, who had followed me into the hall. As we went back into the dining-room I saw, as though I had never seen them before, the bowl of blue delphiniums on the table; their intense colour, vivid, ethereal, seemed too radiant for earthly flowers.

  Reconstructing the events of that day for this account from Testament of Youth, written more than a decade later, Vera had no diary to rely on: it had petered out on her return from Malta a year earlier. Nor were there any letters to revive her memory: all her regular correspondents, apart from her mother, were dead. All that survived to remind her of that fateful afternoon were some faded stems from the blue delphiniums, dried and pressed within the pages of a notebook.

  At three o’clock on the morning of 15 June, the Austrians had launched a surprise attack with a heavy bombardment of the British front line along the bottom of the San Sisto Ridge. Five hours later, the enemy had penetrated the left flank of Edward’s company and had begun to consolidate its positions. Edward led his men in a counter-offensive and regained the lost positions, but while keeping a lookout on the enemy, a short time later, he had reportedly been shot through the head by a sniper and had died instantaneously. He was buried in his blanket with four other officers in the small cemetery at Granezza, 4,000 feet up in the mountains.[ii]

  Robert Leighton, Roland’s father, endeavouring to offer some comfort to Edward’s grief-stricken father – ‘having passed through the same harrowing ordeal’ – wrote of ‘the proud consolation’ that Edward had ‘met his death gloriously in the hour of victory’. But Arthur Brittain would never recover from the loss of his son. Seventeen years later, he would take his own life by drowning in the Thames near Twickenham.

  Numbed with grief – ‘Not many women have suffered more than she has suffered in this war’, as Robert Leighton noted – Vera reapplied to VAD headquarters for a further foreign posting. However, a change in the rules meant that a VAD who had broken her contract could not be sent abroad again without a further term of ‘grounding’ at a home hospital. As a consequence, Vera would spend the remaining months of the war in London, first at St Thomas’ Hospital, and then at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital on Millbank. She would be ‘demobbed’ at the end of March 1919, four months after the Armistice.

  Looking back on those last months of the war, she remembered that:

  Now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the war; nothing remained except to endure it.

  And yet the rebuilding of her life following the war was a remarkably rapid process, attributable to Vera’s qualities of dogged endurance and self-belief, as well as to her ambition to be a writer, which, more than anything else, she later claimed, held her to life. In the spring of 1919, at the age of 25, Vera returned to Somerville after a four-year absence. Here she changed subject from English Literature to History, a reflection of her belief that a study of the recent past might help her to understand the events of the last four years.

  But by now Vera was close to a breakdown brought on by a form of survivor’s guilt, in which she suffered from the delusion that her face was disfigured. She was bitter, too, at what she regarded as the insensitivity of her younger Somerville contemporaries towards her war experiences. She was rescued and sustained by the friendship of another undergraduate, Winifred Holtby. Temperamentally and physically the two women were poles apart. Vera was small, dark and intense, and far from easy to know; Winifred was tall, blonde and gregarious. What they had in common was a desire to succeed as writers.

  From Winifred’s recognition of Vera’s emotional fragility emerged a relationship that was to be mutually satisfying and beneficial. Winifred’s warmth and generosity, her need to be needed, which was such a strong component of her personality, would sustain Vera as she rebuilt her life and attempted to fulfil her literary ambitions. Vera, for her part, would help to mould Winifred’s future as a writer, as well as encouraging her commitment to working for peace and women’s rights. In the autumn of 1921, after taking their Oxford finals, and travelling to Italy and France to visit the graves of Edward and Roland, they set up home together in Bloomsbury. They contributed pieces of journalism to a variety of publications, including the feminist weekly Time and Tide, and wrote fiction, and lectured for the newly founded League of Nations Union, which promoted the League’s work for disarmament and international arbitration, and for the Six Point Group, in support of equal rights feminism.[iii] It was the beginning of a working partnership that would extend over the next 14 years.

  In 1923, Vera published her first novel, The Dark Tide, earning herself a mild notoriety in the literary world – as well as a stinging rebuke from her former college – for its mocking portrayal of Oxford, Somerville and its dons. Another, less successful, novel, Not Without Honour, followed a year later. In June 1925, Vera married George Catlin, a political scientist. Loosely speaking, he was a member of the ‘war generation’, though illness had prevented him from reaching France until just before the Armistice, too late to fight. In more ways than one, he was ‘Another Stranger’, resembling the enigmatic figure in Roland’s poem: his courtship of Vera was conducted largely by letter from America, and there were only limited opportunities for them to meet before their marriage. Moreover, Catlin, like Roland, was a Roman Catholic.

  What George Catlin offered Vera was a marriage of equals, defined in feminist terms, and a generous acceptance of Winifred Holtby, Vera’s ‘second self’, as she once referred to her, as the third member of their London household, an arrangement that worked especially well as Catlin was in the United States for half the year, teaching at Cornell University.

  By 1930 they had two children: John Edward, born at the end of 1927, and Shirley Vivian, in the summer of 1930. Living in Chelsea, Vera had a life of relative domestic contentment, and intellectual stimulus, and companionship of a kind she had always aspired to, and one that would have appeared unattainable from the perspective of her Buxton years.

  An ‘In Memoriam’ page to Roland, Victor, Geoffrey and Edward from Vera’s notebook. The line at the top is from Robert Nichols’s ‘Farewell’, one of the poems in his wartime collection, Ardours and Endurances (1917).

  However, something of overwhelming significance continued to elude her: the successful completion and publication of a book about her war experiences. Only this, Vera believed, would exorcise the suffering of the war years, commemorate the young men she had lost, and ultimately bring her peace of mind.

  [i] During August 1917, Vera’s first month at Etaples, almost three thousand officers, and more than thirty thousand other ranks arrived there, while 2,432 officers and 51,707 other ranks were despatched to the Front from various depots.

  [ii] For the mysterious circumstances of Edward’s death, see the Afterword below, ‘Ipplepen 269: The Tragic Fate of Edward Brittain’.

  [iii] It should be clarified here that, throughout the twenties and most of the thirties, Vera accepted that the controlled use of armed force, through internationalist solutions, might be necessary to prevent war. She did not become a pacifist, with the absolutist conviction that it is wrong to take part in any war, until 1937 when she joined the Peace Pledge Union.

  4 ‘Didn’t Women Have Their War As Well?’ 1918–1933

  After an hour of strenuous work she was in the annexe outsid
e the ward for a moment, getting some fresh water to wash a patient, when hasty footsteps echoed down the passage, and a voice called agitatedly … She went outside the annexe immediately, to see a flushed and somewhat dishevelled Angell, who leant against the wall, and panted out, ‘I say! Do you know your brother’s in K ward!’

  Pale as death with the sudden shock of reaction, Ruth stood for a moment quite unable to speak. At last she gasped out:

  ‘Gabriel – in K! Angell, are you sure?’

  ‘Sure! I should think I was! Why, I’ve just been bathing him. You can imagine what I felt like when I came to take off his tunic, and saw the name on his label.’

  ‘Is he badly wounded?’ asked Ruth excitedly …

  ‘No, not very badly’, was the reply. ‘It’s his foot, I think a fractured ankle … Oh, and there’s a nasty little wound on his right hand, but that’s not serious.’

  […]

  A waving arm in a blue pyjama sleeve summoned her, from a bed beneath one of the tall windows; in another moment she was by his side. Around them the work of the ward continued hurriedly and somewhat noisily, but to Ruth everything seemed wrapped in a great stillness in which she and Gabriel were alone. She only wanted to see him, touch him, know that he was safe. He was pale, but very cheerful in the joy of release from strain. She noticed with a shock that in the four weeks since she had seen him, he seemed to have aged five years. His uninjured left hand lay clasped in hers, and she sat listening while he talked excitedly, finding relief in words from the burden of recollection.

  ‘I couldn’t get the men to go at first. Some Hun had shouted “Retire!” and part of the regiment in front of us came back in a panic. I made them follow me in the end, all the same. This knock on the hand didn’t worry me, but I couldn’t get on after my foot was hit. I yelled to them to carry on, though … I never knew what dead men could look like before I was in the midst of a whole heap of them. One was turning all green and yellow … I dreamed about that for a night or two’ …

  As he talked on Ruth became aware of subtle alterations in Gabriel … He had come too close to the horror of the great conflict to regard it any longer as an ideal war, but he had by no means lost his powers of idealization.

  This passage, describing the reunion of a VAD nurse with her brother, who has recently been wounded during the fighting on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, is instantly reminiscent of a similar meeting recounted in Testament of Youth, and, further back still, of Vera Brittain’s diary account of coming upon the wounded Edward at her hospital, the First London General, in July 1916.[i] Yet, as is evident from the brother’s and sister’s Christian names, it belongs to neither. Instead the scene is taken from one of the many fictional treatments of her war experiences which Vera wrote in the period from the end of the war to the late 1920s.

  In the foreword to Testament of Youth, published in 1933, Vera described her original idea for her war book as that of a long novel. She never got much further than planning it as it turned out to be ‘a hopeless failure’: ‘I found that the people and the events about which I was writing were still too near and too real to be made the subjects of an imaginative, detached reconstruction.’

  In fact this is a massive oversimplification of the creative process that led eventually to Testament of Youth. For a bewildering number of plans and drafts of different novels centring on the war and Vera’s experiences exist; most of the drafts are difficult to date with any precision; some break off in medias res, while others appear to have reached completion even where a complete draft apparently no longer exists.

  A publicity photograph of Vera in 1933 taken for Testament of Youth.

  As far back as March 1916, Vera had written to Edward that ‘… if the War spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four …’ (at that time her friendship with Geoffrey Thurlow, the fifth member of her wartime circle, still lay in the future). We know from Vera’s diary that, in the months following Roland’s death in December 1915, she wrote a short story about their relationship, though this appears to be no longer extant. However, her first attempt at a sustained work of fiction was based on life at the 24 General. Returning from Etaples in April 1918, and confined to her parents’ flat, Vera decided to embark on a novel about her hospital experiences in France while her impressions of her time there were still fresh. The novel’s original title was ‘The Pawn of Fate’ – in 1924 it was revised and retitled ‘Folly’s Vineyard’ – and its plot revolves around the relationship between a young VAD, Sybil Beresford (or Veronica, as she is called in some parts of the book), an obvious attempt by Vera at a self-portrait, and an eccentric senior nursing sister, Hope Milroy, based on Faith Moulson, the sister in charge of the German ward at 24 General in 1917.

  The first part of the novel, set at ‘Echy’, includes moving descriptions of nursing German prisoners in terms that are almost identical to the pieces of journalism on the same subject that Vera was writing in the closing months of the war: ‘The more Sybil pitied them, the more acutely she felt the tragedy of war. It seemed to her that she and they alike were victims, broken by the desire for domination of that military caste which had plunged Europe into disaster.’ In its concluding chapters, though, the plot takes a sudden sensational lurch towards melodrama, as Hope Milroy is raped by Basil Raynor, a hospital surgeon, gives birth to a child back in England, and commits suicide, leaving her daughter to be brought up by Sybil Beresford.

  The knowledge that the Hope Milroy story was to some degree taken from real life, and that Basil Raynor also had a prototype at Etaples, led Roland’s parents, Robert and Marie Leighton, to advise Vera to delay publishing the novel. Robert Leighton, with his experience as a publishers’ reader, admired the hospital sections but did not see how Vera could eliminate ‘the very human story of Sister Milroy’ without damaging the structure of the book as a whole. Mrs Leighton thought the novel ‘too good as it is to lose’, and advised Vera ‘to write it as you thought it & hold it back.’ Vera was not discouraged, as she already had another novel in mind: ‘the hero will be taken from you’, she wrote to Edward on 4 June 1918, 11 days before his death, ‘& I don’t suppose you’d have me up for libel!’.

  In the meantime, Vera had been preparing her war poetry for publication by Erskine Macdonald, an ‘experimental publisher’ of distinctly dodgy credentials, using a subsidy from her father in the form of ten reams of ‘antique printing paper’. Verses of a V.A.D., which appeared in late August 1918 with a foreword by Marie Leighton, contains Vera’s first published observations about the First World War. Predominantly elegiac and documentary in subject matter and tone, the collection included ‘Perhaps’, written in Roland’s memory, and ‘To My Brother’, completed four days before Edward’s death, as well as poems in memory of Victor and Geoffrey. Many of the Verses had been written during rushed breaks from the hospital routine. In September 1917, for example, Vera reported that she had been writing a poem about the German ward ‘while watching a patient who was rather sick come round from an operation’. Among the other published hospital poems were tributes to two nursing sisters at Etaples, whom Vera mildly hero-worshipped, not only Faith Moulson but also Sister ‘Mary’ from the medical ward at Etaples where Vera nursed in 1917–18. Two poems, ‘The Sisters Buried at Lemnos’ and ‘Vengeance is Mine’, commemorating the nurses killed in the German air raid on Etaples in May 1918, a month after Vera’s departure from the camp, anticipate one of the major themes of Testament of Youth, the concern that feats of female heroism in the war should not go unrecorded.

  Yet, despite the fact that Vera’s awareness of the human cost of war is very much to the fore in some of these poems – in ‘May Morning’, for instance, she refers to the ‘ruin’ and ‘individual hell’ that ‘only War can bring’ – there is none of the bitterness, anger or indignation against the war that was so strongly to characterise her later reflections. ‘The German Ward’ may contain glimmerings of Vera’s future pacifism, or at least
of her latent internationalism, when she writes of what she has learned from nursing enemy prisoners (‘that human mercy turns alike to friend or foe/When the darkest hour of all is creeping nigh’). But these are effectively snuffed out by the appearance, further on in the sequence, of ‘To My Brother’, with its bold martial spirit and appetite for military glory. Where bitterness is certainly manifest is in two poems written by Vera following her return to Oxford in 1919 (and not therefore published in Verses of a V.A.D.). ‘The Lament of the Demobilised’, and ‘The Superfluous Woman’, express her post-war desolation and the beginnings of a sense of her own personal betrayal by the war.

  The flat at 52 Doughty Street, in Bloomsbury, which Vera shared with Winifred Holtby after coming down from Oxford in 1921, was a hive of literary activity. Here they wrote – and rewrote – their first novels, Vera’s The Dark Tide and Winifred’s Anderby Wold, read what the other had written and provided constructive criticism and mutual support.

  In 1922, in their first year at Doughty Street, Vera submitted typed selections from the diary, or ‘Reflective Record’, which she had kept between 1913 and 1917, for a publisher’s competition offering a prize for a personal diary or autobiography. Entitling her selections ‘A Chronicle of Youth’, she reduced the length of the diary by almost a half, replacing all the names by pseudonyms, and cutting the text short at April 1916, soon after Roland’s death and a year prior to the diary’s actual conclusion. In doing so Vera was able to shape the narrative as a tragic love story, ending it climactically with the death of Roland (or Vincent Farringdon as he is called here) and her consuming grief for him. In a foreword Vera wrote that she hoped that the diary would remind readers of the extent of ‘that despair which wasted so much youthful vitality and darkened the sunshine of the sweet years’. She continued, ‘[c]ould we but have a few more records like these to aid the imagination of the militarist and the sceptic, I believe that there would be few left who would be willing to condemn another generation to endure what this one has endured’.