Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. ‘No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right - ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.’

  This apathy eclipsed the initial eagerness with which I had set about my work in the hospital; now that Roland’s leave was over and there was nothing immediate to look forward to, the endless trudging over stone floors seemed more tiring than ever. My days, I told him, had to be passed in the spirit of Alice Meynell’s ‘Renouncement’:

  I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,

  I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—

  The thought of thee - and in the blue Heaven’s height,

  And in the sweetest passage of a song.

  Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng

  This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;

  But it must never, never come in sight;

  I must stop short of thee the whole day long.

  But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,

  When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,

  And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,

  Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—

  With the first dream that comes with the first sleep,

  I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

  He wrote very tenderly in reply.

  ‘Your photograph . . . is on the table now in front of me, leaning up against the lamp - such a sad two eyes, too, “as if,” as Walter Pater says of Leonardo’s Gioconda, “upon this little head all the ends of the earth had come.” . . . Lyndall’s eyes must have been like that. I wonder why I have always thought of you two together . . . It is getting very late. I have been thinking more than writing, I am afraid, and coming to life again, and finding the pen still in my hand. I am going to kiss the photograph good night, as you do the amethyst . . .’

  Did my picture really look so sad, I wondered - the small photograph taken just before those Christmas days in London which now seemed such ages ago? It ought to have been, comparatively, a happy photograph, for the fear that was now an insistent anguish had then threatened only as a remote possibility.

  ‘Thoughts and feelings like those . . . of the last few weeks, destroy the first phase of one’s youth - its careless happy freshness,’ I admitted to him. ‘The first thing I noticed about you the other day was that that had gone - if indeed you ever really had it. And I am afraid that all the compensation in the world will not bring it back to either of us ever. When one has known, one can never be again as one was before one knew. But I suppose it’s no use weeping over last year’s dead leaves. All the tears in the world cannot make them green again. Perhaps when it is all over we shall find that other and better things have taken root in the mould of their dying.’

  Early in September, we heard of the first casualty to happen in our family. A cousin from Ireland, we learnt, had died of wounds after the landing at Suvla Bay; the original bullet-wound behind the ear had not been serious, but he had lain untended for a week at Mudros, and was already suffering from cerebral sepsis when operated on, too late, by an overworked surgeon on the crowded Aquitania. I had hardly known my cousin, but it was a shock to learn that lives were being thrown away through the inadequacy of the medical services in the Mediterranean. Was it, I wondered, a repetition of Scutari, with no Florence Nightingale to save the situation?

  ‘The shortage of doctors,’ I commented, ‘must be a tremendous problem - yet when the women doctors they are crying out for now began their training, every possible obstacle was put in their way.’

  I did not then know that when the group of medical women who later organised the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in France and Serbia had offered their services to the War Office in 1914, they had been told that all that was required of women was to go home and keep quiet. But I felt miserably conscious that, apart from the demand for doctors and nurses, women in war seemed to be at a discount except as the appendages of soldiers. It must have been about this time that I cut out and sent to Roland a remarkable notice in the ‘Agony Column’ of The Times: ‘Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’

  Was that her way of remembering while seeming to have forgotten? I wondered. Was she feeling useless and unwanted, or did she, perhaps, really wish to forget? In sudden fear that, in spite of our conversation on the cliff at Lowestoft, he might think me, too, capable of such a desire, I implored Roland to believe that, whatever happened, I should ask nothing better than remembrance.

  ‘It will not be possible to forget you, Roland, ever, except perhaps in death. For then - about which we both admitted we could come to no conclusion - one may be obliged to forget, even against one’s will. I never can understand the Nirvana ideal - which you sometimes rather rejoice in, don’t you? I would rather suffer æons of pain than be nothing . . . I keep getting moments of fierce desire to write something, I don’t mind what, except that trifles wouldn’t do. Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one’s self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one’s gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left . . . It is a cold and cheerless . . . afternoon; the sky is as leaden as if laden with coming snow. I have had a somewhat annoying morning at the hospital, due chiefly to the Sister, who quite by chance and very much against my will heard the other day that I was engaged to you.’

  Since that time, I told him, my popularity with this disapproving and vigilant spinster had not exactly increased. ‘I wonder,’ I concluded, ‘if she really thinks me enviable?’

  But his reply made me feel that, in spite of so much grief and apprehension, I was, perhaps, enviable after all.

  ‘This afternoon is glowing with the languorous warmth of the dying summer,’ he wrote from the trenches. ‘The sun is a shield of burnished gold in a sea of turquoise; the bees are in the clover that overhangs the trench - and my superficial, beauty-loving self is condescending to be very conscious of the joy of living. It is a pity to kill people on a day like this. In a way, I suppose, it is a pity to kill people on any kind of day, but opinions - even my own - differ on this subject. Like Waldo I love to sit in the sun, and like him I have no Lyndall to sit with. But it was the last verse of his poem; it is only the first of mine . . . Mother has asked me once or twice lately whether I should like to go into the Regular Army as a profession . . . Now, having hitherto developed the scholastic at the expense of the active, I feel in the spirit of Rafael in Browning’s poem that I would far rather win the Military Cross than the Nobel Prize, perhaps because it is the opposite to what most people would expect of me. “What of Rafael’s sonnet, Dante’s picture?” Qu’en dis-tu? . . . I wonder what I should say to you if you came along the trench now and in at the open doorway - I can imagine very well how you would step from the bright sun into the twilight, though I cannot see your face. I don’t think I should say anything. I shouldn’t be able to. I should probably feel rather like a very shy child at his first party; and just look at you; and you would look at me and through me with your “wet” eyes; and there would be a hopeless inadequacy about it all. I’m sure we should both forget that we had ever been so intimate in our letters. It does seem silly, though, doesn’t it? When I have actually seen you intermittently for as long as 17 days!’

  13

  My sense of being enviable was very short-lived.

  As September wore on and the Battle of Loos came nearer, an anxious stillness seemed to settle upon the country, making everyone taut and breathless. The Press and personal letters from France were alike full of anticipation and suspense. Roland wrote vaguely but significantly of movements of troops, of great changes impending, and seemed more obsessed with the idea of death than ever before. One lette
r describing how he had superintended the reconstruction of some old trenches, was grim with a disgust and bitterness that I had never known him put into words:

  ‘The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another’s Lust of Power. Let him who thinks 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 with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little 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, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a fœtid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?’

  Had there really been a time, I wondered, when I believed that it was?

  ‘When I think of these things,’ I told him in reply, ‘I feel that that awful Abstraction, the Unknown God, must be some dread and wrathful deity before whom I can only kneel and plead for mercy, perhaps in the words of a quaint hymn of George Herbert’s that we used to sing at Oxford:

  Throw away Thy wrath!

  Throw away Thy rod!

  O my God

  Take the gentle path!’

  His next letter, which arrived only two or three days before the battle, spoke even more definitely of some coming cataclysm.

  ‘Away on our left in the French area we could hear what is even at a distance the most terrifying thing on earth - the pounding of heavy guns, now fainter, now louder, but coalescing always into one dull, thundering roar . . . At night the sky was lit with the flashes and flickered strangely with a yellow, restless glow . . . A glorious day, but rather hot for much marching. Am feeling delightfully dilettante and lazy this morning. After all I do agree that it is a pity to kill people in any weather really; though there are some who deserve it. I have sometimes wondered whether I should mind being killed after all, but on days like this I cannot help wanting passionately to live. Life is very attractive, if only as a toy to play with.’

  A toy to play with! And to me it appeared a giant to contend with! Waiting for that something which everyone seemed convinced would happen reduced me to a condition not far from insanity. I dreaded going to bed because of the shock of acute realisation with which I awoke every morning, yet when I came back from the hospital I was too tired to sit up. One evening, overcome with fatigue and wretchedness, I flung myself down, fully dressed, on my bedroom floor, and awoke to find myself, sore and stiff, still there at daybreak. Even sleep brought no relief, so restless and disturbed with dreams were the nights. Time - as always in the tense intervals before a great push - seemed to stop moving.

  In the afternoon off-duty hours of that warm, lovely September I could not sit still, but once again took to my bicycle and rode off to the quiet scenes of the spring’s mental wrestlings. The whole of one hot afternoon I spent lying in the half-sleep of tormented delirium on a bank above the riverside path to Miller’s Dale, listening to the gurgle of the water as anxiously as though it were the guns in France, and miserably watching the long brown grass on the opposite hillside swaying in the wind.

  On Sunday, September 26th, came a brief note from Roland, written three days earlier:

  ‘I have heard nothing definite yet, but they say that all posts will be stopped very soon. Hinc illæ lacrimæ. “Till life and all.” . . .’

  ‘Hinc illæ lacrimæ’ was the short Latin sentence which we had agreed that he should use if he knew that he was going into action. Edward, who was on leave with us for the week-end, increased my agitation by telling me that posts had never been stopped since their establishment after the Retreat from Mons. Desperately conscious that he might now never read them, I hurriedly wrote and sent off a few lines to Roland:

  ‘If this word should turn out to be a “Te moriturum saluto”, perhaps it will brighten the dark moments a little to think how you have meant to someone more than anything ever has or ever will. What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always.’

  Next day the news came.

  ‘TWO REAL VICTORIES AT LAST!’

  announced the Daily Mail in exuberant headlines. ‘German line pierced in two places! The French and British take 20,000 unwounded prisoners and 33 guns! The Allies have won two splendid victories. The British have advancedmiles on a 5-mile front south of La Bassée.’

  Gradually, after a few days in which the awful sluggishness of the hours seemed a specially devised torture of hell, came the usual apologetic modifications of our ‘great victory’, and, still later, the lists showing the price that we had paid for this sorry achievement. The country, though growing accustomed to horror, staggered at the devastating magnitude of the cost of Loos. Even now, eighteen years afterwards, September 25th remains with July 1st and March 21st, one of the three dates on which the ‘In Memoriam’ notices in The Times fill the whole of one column and run on into the next. The usual rumour that the 6th Sherwood Foresters had been in the battle threw the whole of Buxton into a state of apprehension, and though, once again, this particular battalion had missed the worst of the fighting, news soon came of young officers killed in action who as boys had been with Edward at his Buxton day-school. But of Roland, still, there was no news at all.

  ‘Dreams, ideals, impersonal visions bow down to-day before this terrible human love,’ my diary records, ‘and in this hour my heart knows only one prayer.’

  And when at last, on October 1st, a letter did come from Roland, it was to tell me that the alarm over which I had agonised had been false after all, and that after twice preparing to go ‘over the top’, his regiment had escaped the battle.

  ‘Oh, Roland ! . . .’ I responded; ‘that exclamation comprises every comment I have to make on the situation. “Continuation of Allied Offensive,” I keep on reading, so I suppose you are in it now. But I felt so sure you were in all that awful week-end fighting . . . When you are out there and know what is going on it must be quite impossible to put yourself in the place of people here, who don’t know and can’t get news. You have no idea what . . . these last few days have been to Mrs L. and me. Perhaps one day you will see the letters we have exchanged on the subject! For my part I have done nothing since Monday . . . but watch the gate, and follow every telegraph boy that went in the direction of our house . . . I am expecting to be called to London any day now. The wounded are beginning to come into England already and there will be a great rush soon.’

  The summons, I felt, was near. Instinctively I dreaded it even though I had already recorded in my diary my longing for it to come.

  ‘It will be a relief not to be told I look tired by someone every night. If I don’t feel tired it is very annoying, and if I do it is more annoying still.’

  One October afternoon I met in the town a visiting Somervillian whose comments on my prospective war-service so roused my indignation as temporarily to divert my thoughts from the still-raging battle.

  ‘This girl,’ I told Roland, ‘continued to remark rather sarcastically that she supposed I had no ideas of ever going back to Somerville . . . Everyone thinks I have left because I hadn’t enough stability to stick to it, and wanted . . . a little excitement. (Fancy nursing being excitement!) . . . My late music master actually said to Mother: ‘Going down, is she? Well, I told you so - I knew she would get tired of it before long.’ . . . Sometimes when I think . . . of the Dream-city, with its
grey towers and autumn sunsets, and the little room where surrounded by books I used to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles before a glowing fire at twelve o’clock at night, I can only cry inwardly: ‘I hate nursing! How tired I am of this War - will it never end!’ And then I think of you out there in the danger and the darkness, and the cold and the rain - most precious being, a thousand times more tired of it than I! . . . The latest people who seem to know all about the ending of the War - and they are more depressing than usual - are turning round and making most ingeniously appropriate a prophecy in the Revelation of St John about the beast with seven heads and ten horns (who is of course the Kaiser!) ‘and all power was given unto him for two and forty months.’ Therefore, say they, the War will end in January 1918. Sounds delightful, doesn’t it!’

  All that autumn Edward expected to be sent to France to join one of the numerous battalions of Sherwood Foresters already out there; in consequence his ‘last leaves’ were legion, and on one occasion he invited for the night his now beloved friend from the regiment, a young subaltern whom we all knew as Geoffrey. When that reticent idealist with visions of a clerical career in a slum parish first entered our house, he was so shy that his few remarks were almost inaudible. Geoffrey was too diffident, Edward told me, to be good at dealing with people, and yet his very self-depreciation caused him to be embarrassingly adored by his batmen and his men.