Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  The diary was not chosen, though reading it again in the course of making her selections helped to provide Vera with the plotline of her second novel, Not Without Honour, based on the pre-war struggles at Buxton of the rationalistic curate, the Reverend Ward. At the end of 1923, Vera made enquiries of her publisher Grant Richards about the possibility of publishing a war novel, presumably ‘Folly’s Vineyard’, the revised version of ‘The Pawn of Fate’. Richards was as encouraging as he could be given the publishing world’s uncertain attitude towards books about the war, but it was not until February 1926, following Vera’s marriage and temporary move to the United States to be with her husband, that she made further concrete proposals for a war novel in a letter to Winifred. This novel was to be called ‘The Incidental Adam’, and she intended to write it ‘very quickly, without having to look up anything except my letters and diaries’.

  Vera envisaged the book’s main theme as that of youth betrayed into cynical disillusionment, set against ‘a particular background of time and place.’ But by May of that year she had progressed little further and was still ‘aching, at long last, to write about the war, all the grieving and the struggle and the loss’.

  ‘The Incidental Adam’ was more broadly conceived as a narrative of a woman’s development over a decade, showing the heroine through her relationships with various men, ‘who are only incidental to what she believes to be her chief purpose in life’. Its concluding chapter was to have demonstrated that love, through a happy marriage entered into in accordance with principles of feminist equality, was not incompatible with a woman’s work; and, moreover, that a woman could be ‘set free’, not by the ‘repression’ of ‘the sex element’, but by the ‘reasonable satisfaction’ of it.

  However, in the discarded drafts of other novels from this time, the war theme is much more central. ‘The Stranger Son’ focuses on the ‘Problem of Pacifism’ and dramatises the clash between ‘the desire to serve one’s country and the belief that war is wrong’, through the story of Vincent Harlow. Vincent declares his pacifist principles on the outbreak of war in 1914, and his father threatens to disinherit him as a consequence. This doesn’t deter Vincent from expressing his disgust at the ‘blood thirstiness and perversion of truth’ that he witnesses at a recruitment meeting, or his acute disappointment, as someone with strong religious beliefs, at the attempted justification of the war by the established church. At the climax of the book, a local mob search out Vincent and violently humiliate him. The novel’s conclusion finds Vincent working as a conscientious objector on a farm in northern England.

  ‘The Stranger Son’ is the only projected war novel that survives in which Vera seems to be deliberately writing away from her own experience. By contrast, ‘The Kingdom of Endurance’ – or ‘Youth’s Calvary’, or ‘The Great Explanation’, to give the novel its alternative titles – is much closer to fictionalised autobiography. Indeed, at the outset it bears a very close resemblance to the early sections of Testament of Youth. Virginia Dennison (Vera’s fictional alter ego, also the name of the heroine of The Dark Tide) is the daughter of Robert, a ‘hard-headed’ businessman, the director of the ‘famous Dennison china-firm’, and Mildred, his wife, who originates from the ‘poverty-stricken family of an obscure professional singer’. As a child, Virginia possesses a remarkable flair for storytelling, regaling her younger brother Anthony with bedtime stories, while the young Anthony demonstrates pronounced musical gifts (‘music alone had power to arouse the enthusiasms slumbering beneath the surface of his calm disposition’). The setting of the story, Vera stated in her preface, with questionable veracity, ‘is fictitious’; ‘a considerable number of its characters’, she had to admit, though, were ‘deeply rooted in truth.’

  ‘The Kingdom of Endurance’ describes itself as a story of ‘early passionate hopes & ardent aspirations … crucified to the grey crosses of a stricken age.’ The epigraph on the title page – ‘Redemption is from within, and neither from God nor man; it is wrought out by the soul itself, with suffering and through time’ – is taken from the book so beloved of Vera and Roland, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm; and, in keeping with this, the novel embodies themes of self-sacrifice and suffering. But it also offers a message of the possibility of resurrection and rebirth in the wake of personal disaster. The author assures us in her preface that for those like Virginia Dennison who have ‘suffered and lost’ there is ‘a word of hope: RESURGAM’.

  Structurally and narratively, ‘The Two Islands’, an incomplete novel about the wartime relationship between a brother and sister, Gabriel and Ruth Barrington, is the most coherent of all Vera’s fictional versions of her war experiences. The book contrasts ‘the sombreness of the Grey Island’ (Britain) with ‘the brightness of the Gold’ (Malta), but portrays the deepening shadow that war casts over both of them. When war breaks out, Ruth is studying at the Slade School of Fine Art (where Roland Leighton’s sister Clare was a student in 1922–23). She realises that ‘the only way to endure war at all [is] to take part in it’, and leaves the Slade in order to nurse as a VAD.

  Ruth is in love with Lawrence Sinclair, a brilliant young journalist, who volunteers immediately and goes to the Front, where his illusions about the war are quickly shattered. ‘I fancy this War before it’s over will leave a good many people’s dreams in the dust’, he tells Ruth when he comes home on leave as ‘quite a veteran warrior’. When Ruth’s brother Gabriel also prepares to leave for France, Lawrence warns her that ‘[h]e won’t find the glamour of a medieval crusade out there.’

  Lawrence is killed at Loos, and Gabriel becomes ‘the only hope of her future.’ Despite his role as a thinly disguised Roland Leighton, Lawrence is little more than a cipher in the novel, perhaps because Vera was still wary of how Roland’s family, and especially his dominating mother, would react to Roland’s appearance in a book by her. Marie Leighton had become even more possessive of her son in death than she had been while he was alive, and, barely a month after Roland was killed, had persuaded the Sphere magazine to publish Roland’s love poem to Vera, ‘Violets from Plug Street Wood’, while encouraging the entirely false impression that its romantic sentiments were meant for her. Six months later, in June 1916, Mrs Leighton published anonymously Boy of My Heart, a short memoir of Roland, and an emotional – and at times embarrassingly mawkish – valediction to the son she had worshipped. The book, its publishers testified, was ‘a record exact and faithful, both in large things and small, of the short years of a boy who willingly and even joyously gave up his life and all its brilliant promise for the sake of his country’. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement squirmed with the ‘uncomfortable feeling’ that he was ‘unduly prying into experiences much too intimate for publication’.

  More significantly, the focus of ‘The Two Islands’ on the close bond between Ruth and her brother Gabriel – rather than on the Roland character – is undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that, of all Vera’s wartime losses, Edward’s was by far the most painful and the one which time could do least to heal. One of Roland’s characteristics, as a poet, has been transposed to Gabriel, but in other respects Gabriel is a portrait of Edward Brittain. He possesses Edward’s calm, imperturbable nature, his immaculate appearance, even under pressure (Edward had been nicknamed ‘Immaculate of the Trenches’ by fellow officers, and, on leave in London, Gabriel worries that his boots are ‘rather bright’ after he has wiped the Somme mud from them), as well as Edward’s professed difficulties with women.

  Ruth volunteers for foreign service and is posted to Malta. Gabriel meanwhile is awarded the Military Cross for his bravery on the Somme, and following a period of convalescence is sent to Salonika, where he is seriously wounded by a gunshot through his head at close quarters. Gabriel arrives at Ruth’s hospital in Malta, but dies after an unsuccessful operation. Ruth accepts a place in a large draft of nurses leaving for the Western Front. Before she goes, she visits Gabriel’s grave at Pietà Military Cemetery, jus
t outside Valletta (which Vera herself had visited in 1917, in order to pay her respects at the grave of a Buxton neighbour, Jerry Garnett, who had died at Gallipoli). The final scene of the novel, planned but never written, was to have depicted Ruth leaning over the ship’s rail as it sailed out of Valletta Harbour, watching ‘the tawny island’ disappear below the horizon.

  In common with Vera’s other fictional versions of her war experiences, ‘The Two Islands’ is impossible to date reliably. However, yet another set of ideas for a novel, beginning just before the war and concluding in the decade following, began to materialise towards the end of the twenties, and, with this, one enters a more definite time frame. According to Vera’s account in Testament of Experience, the sequel to Testament of Youth, the birth of her first child, her son John, in December 1927, encouraged her to think again about committing her memories to paper, at the very least for his private edification when he was grown up.

  It must have taken extraordinary perseverance, after so many frustrated attempts, to return to writing about the war; but in the course of 1928, or early 1929, Vera established the structure and major themes of her new book. Nominally the book is still fiction, although the autobiographical intent could not be clearer:

  Chapter 1 Provincial English town before the War – tennis – badminton club.

  Chapter 2 Oxford – Provincial Hospital – London in war-time. Early love, generous, spontaneous, passionate, uncalculating. Background the early part of the War – with high hopes & idealism.

  Chapter 3 London – Malta – London. The ‘carry-on’ spirit of the war. Hope gone; spirit of dogged determination left. Sacrifice still possible.

  Chapter 4 The lowest ebb of the War – France – summer of despair – London in war-time again. Sense of youth over. Nov. 11th. The Armistice came too late to save anything from the wreckage.

  Chapter 5 Oxford. The problem of the lost demobilised … have feeling of retarded lives, of lost time that will never be caught up, of being overtaken by the young, cocksure, undamaged people. Have experienced too soon & learnt too late.

  Two matters intervened to delay Vera’s progress. The first, at the beginning of December 1929, soon after she started writing the opening chapter, was the discovery that she was pregnant again. The second was a change in the literary climate. The successful publication of works by such writers as Blunden, Sassoon and Graves, beginning in 1928, suddenly guaranteed war books a popularity even more emphatic than the indifference previously shown them, and would influence Vera’s decision to write her war book, not as fiction but as autobiography.

  Vera’s plan for ‘This Was Their War’ (originally ‘The Incidental Adam’), one of the fictional versions of her war experiences. The novel would have included Roland’s poem ‘Hédauville’ (‘The sunshine on the long white road …’).

  The boom in war books that began a decade after the Armistice has sometimes been compared to the breaking of an emotional dam, or the outpouring of a flood. It began, though, as a trickle: 1928 was the year of publication of Edmund Blunden’s autobiography, Undertones of War, and Siegfried Sassoon’s skilfully fictionalised Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the final section of which deals with its hero George Sherston’s early war service in France. The end of 1928 also saw the first performances of R. C. Sherriff’s claustrophobic trench drama Journey’s End, which became a sensation when it transferred to London’s West End early the following year. However, 1929 was the point at which the dam finally burst and the spate of war books in Britain reached their numerical peak: 29 were published that year, including the appearance in March of the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichs Neues as All Quiet on the Western Front (which sold 250,000 copies in its first year), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero.

  Many of these books – though by no means all of them – were harshly critical of the war, portraying it through disenchanted, and, in the more extreme instances, disillusioned eyes as needless waste and hopeless sacrifice. At the same time a steady stream of titles with a positive view of the war continued to appear, and these maintained strong sales – not surprisingly, as they offered far greater consolation for bereavement and loss than the books that represented the war as futile. In some more ambiguous cases, the question of whether or not a memoir, novel or play was ‘anti-war’ lay very much in the eye of the beholder. The most obvious example of this was Sherriff’s Journey’s End, which quickly acquired a reputation as an anti-war play, even though Sherriff himself insisted that it was nothing of the kind and that he was simply telling the facts as he had seen them, based on his experience of the trenches as a captain in the 9th East Surrey regiment.

  To an extent that’s now almost impossible to gauge, there is also some truth in the idea that the public’s appetite for the disillusioned picture of the war was a product not of the war itself, but of a more general disillusionment with the condition of Britain at the end of the 1920s. Widespread expectations of post-war prosperity – ‘a land fit for heroes’ – had been sorely disappointed, and, following the Wall Street crash at the end of 1929, a new era beckoned for Britain of even higher unemployment and lines of hunger marchers.

  The war books boom soon turned into a war books controversy, as critics and commentators fought entrenched battles in the press over the issue of whether the disillusioned look back at the war, with its image of doomed youth led blindly to slaughter by incompetent generals, ‘without their deaths helping any cause or doing any good’, owed rather more to the reconstruction of memory than to actual experience. There was hotly contested debate about the predilection of the disillusioned school for scenes of horror, brutality and bloodlust, and questions about just how representative these were of what most fighting men had gone through. There were reminders that, while war had been hell, it had been hell with some worthwhile purpose. And there were dire warnings about the risks for the future of portraying war as such undiluted horror (the British Army was said to be seriously worried about the effect that Journey’s End might have on recruitment).

  Following these debates closely, Vera had her own contribution to make. Where in any of these books by men was there to be found an adequate account of the wartime experiences of women? She launched a fierce attack on Richard Aldington, in a review of his Death of a Hero, in November 1929, for the ‘cynical fury of scorn’ he had directed at the wartime suffering of women; and then, in a series of articles, proceeded to make more general criticisms of the belittling and insulting portrayal of women in the current spate of war literature. Either women didn’t appear in these books at all, or they were depicted as passive, sentimentalised creatures, ‘giving their husbands and sons and weeping unavailing tears, or worse still, as time-servers, parasites or prostitutes.’ Furthermore, these books failed to give acknowledgement to women’s active role in the war. The story of the women who worked on the land, or in munitions factories, of the WAACs, the WRAFs and the WRENs, and of the trained or volunteer nurses, existed only as dry statistics in the pages of government reports. Who, she asked, would write their epic of the war?

  Vera made no ‘puerile claim’ to the equality of women’s suffering and service of wartime with that of men; but she did argue that ‘any picture of the War years is incomplete which omits those aspects that concern mainly women’. With the insularity of many of Roland’s letters from Flanders and France perhaps in mind, she further claimed that a woman who had worked with the armies could provide ‘a wider and more truthful picture of the war as a whole’ than the soldier whose knowledge was inevitably ‘confined to a small corner of the front.’ This latter point was similar to one made by Mary Lee, American author of the novel, It’s a Great War (1929). Lee had observed that civilians possessed a more comprehensive view of the war than its combatants – a remark that earned her a misogynistic put-down from the British military historian Cyril Falls. Falls wrote condescendingly that ‘really, it is not the place of women to talk of mud �
�� [and Lee] is wholly mistaken in her notion that important books on the War must be written by women.’

  Of course, many books by women about the war had already been published, both during the war years themselves and in the decade since. Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, for example, published in 1929 (though much of the book had been written during the war) was a compilation of sketches, short stories and poems, derived from Borden’s nursing experience in a mobile hospital attached to the French Army at the Front. Borden claimed to have ‘blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself’; but the deadpan manner in which she relates the mutilation of heads and limbs only adds to the reader’s sense of revulsion, as a human knee is mistaken for a ragout of mutton, and half of the brain of a soldier comes off in a bandage and is placed in a pail under the operating table.

  Vera had warm words of commendation for Mary Lee’s It’s a Great War as ‘an immensely detailed and impressive book’, while pointing out that, since the book was American, it dealt with the war only from 1917 onwards. Later, she would read, ‘with deep interest and sympathy’, Irene Rathbone’s novel We That Were Young (1932), based on Rathbone’s own experiences as a VAD, like Vera, at the First London General, and have words of praise for Ruth Holland’s The Lost Generation, another novel published the same year. The missing generation of Holland’s title refers not so much to the young men who at least had the advantage of having gone to their deaths with their illusions about the war partially intact, as to the survivors left behind, who find it difficult to rebuild their lives in an alien world where the younger generation simply wants to put the past and its sacrifices behind them.