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

by Vera Brittain

  At the time that the Worcesters took over, the moon was nearly full, and the path through the hedge must have been quite visible by night to the vigilant eyes which were only, at that point, a hundred yards away. As soon as Roland reached the gap, the usual volley was fired. Almost the first shot struck him in the stomach, penetrating his body, and he fell on his face, gesticulating wildly, in full view of the company. At the risk of their lives, his company commander and a sergeant rushed out and carried him back to the trench. Twenty minutes afterwards the doctor at the dressing-station put an end to his agony with a large dose of morphia, and from that moment Roland ceased - and ceased for ever - to be Roland.

  The next morning a complicated abdominal operation was performed on him by the senior surgeon of the Casualty Clearing Station at Louvencourt, ten miles away, but the wound had caused so much internal mutilation that the doctors knew he was not likely to last longer than a few hours. The machine-gun bullet had injured, amongst other things, the base of the spine, so that if by some combined miracle of surgical skill and a first-rate constitution he had been saved from death, he would have been paralysed from the waist downwards for the rest of his life. As it was, he only came round from the operation sufficiently to receive, ‘in a state of mazy contentment’, Extreme Unction from the Jesuit padre who, unknown to us all, had received him into the Catholic Church early that summer. ‘Lying on this hillside for six days makes me very stiff,’ he told the padre cheerfully. They were his last coherent words. At eleven o’clock that night - the very hour in which I had been so happily filling the men’s paper-bags with crackers - Uppingham’s record prize-winner, whose whole nature fitted him for the spectacular drama of a great battle, died forlornly in a hospital bed. On the Sunday morning that we, in the Keymer cottage, were vainly trying to realise his end, his burial service was read in the village church beside the military cemetery at Louvencourt. As they brought his body from the church, the colonel told us, ‘the sun came out and shone brilliantly.’

  That was all. There was no more to learn. Not even a military purpose seemed to have been served by his death; the one poor consolation was that his routine assumption of responsibility had saved the wiring party.

  Later, night after night at Camberwell, watching the clouds drift slowly across the stars, I dwelt upon these facts until it seemed as though my mind would never contain the anguish that they brought me. Had it been heroism or folly, I asked myself for the thousandth time, which had urged him forth to inspect the wire beneath so bright a moon? In those days it seemed a matter of life or death to know.

  ‘All heroism,’ I argued desperately in my diary, ‘is to a certain extent unnecessary from a purely utilitarian point of view . . . But heroism means something infinitely greater and finer, even if less practical, than just avoiding blame, and doing one’s exact, stereotyped duty and no more.’

  All the same, gazing fixedly out of the ward window at a tall church spire blackly silhouetted against banks of cloud pierced by a shaft of brilliant moonshine, I would whisper like a maniac to the sombre, indifferent night: ‘Oh, my love! - so proud, so confident, so contemptuous of humiliation, you who were meant to lead a forlorn hope, to fall in a great fight - just to be shot like a rat in the dark! Why did you go so boldly, so heedlessly, into No Man’s Land when you knew that your leave was so near? Dearest, why did you, why did you?’

  Hardest of all to bear, perhaps, was the silence which must for ever repudiate that final question. The growing certainty that he had left no message for us to remember seemed so cruel, so baffling. To-day, after one or two experiences of shattering pain, I understand the degree to which both agony and its alleviations shut out the claims of memory and thought, but at that time, in spite of six months in hospital, I did not allow for the compelling self-absorption of extreme suffering or the stupefied optimism induced by anæsthetics, and it seemed as though he had gone down to the grave consciously indifferent to all of us who loved him so much. All through the first months of 1916, my letters and diaries emphasise, again and again, the grief of having no word to cherish through the empty years. He had been coming on leave the very next day - the day after he was wounded, the day that he died - and yet he had never mentioned to anyone his mother or me, nor the fact that he expected to see us so soon.

  For weeks after the news of his death I waited and waited in the hope of a message, and wrote letters to France which my correspondents must have found very childish and pitiful, for they replied with infinite patience and kindness. But when I too had heard from his colonel, and his company commander, and his servant, and the Catholic padre, and a sympathetic officer who, in order to satisfy me, made a special journey to Louvencourt and catechised the doctors, I knew I had learnt all that there was to know, and that in his last hour I had been quite forgotten.

  3

  When my leave, which I spent entirely at Keymer, came to an end, it was Edward who took me back to Camberwell. In the final months of intense, exclusive preoccupation with Roland, I had almost forgotten him, but now he returned quite suddenly to the chief place in my consciousness.

  One evening in Sussex I came in from a lonely walk to find him and Victor almost filling the tiny sitting-room with their long, khaki-clad limbs. Together they were trying to occupy the leave which now had hardly more point for them than for myself, and Roland’s mother had invited them both to tea. They looked, I remembered later in my diary, ‘like courtiers without a king’. The strained sorrow which lined their faces and darkened their eyes moved me to unexpected remorse, and I remembered, with the surprise of a new discovery, that Roland had been their friend long before he became my lover.

  The death of the friend that he most admired before he himself had even succeeded in getting to France, plunged Edward, as I learnt long afterwards, into bitter humiliation even less endurable than his grief for Roland’s loss; he had not, he felt, the excuse of serious illness which gave Victor his right to mourn in the monotonous security of ‘defending’ Woolwich Arsenal. But in tenderness for my desolation he concealed from me much of his sorrow and all his bitterness, and I parted from him outside the 1st London General with a sense of leaving behind me all that life still held of strength and comfort.

  My small room in the long wooden hut, uncannily silent because everyone else on night-duty was already asleep, seemed the utmost limit of miserable solitude, although Betty had put a fragrant bowl of mimosa there to welcome me. Sleep was impossible, and at supper I became wretchedly conscious of furtive glances from Sisters and V.A.D.s, intrusively curious, despite their embarrassed pity, to discover how an acquaintance was ‘taking’ her bereavement.

  For the next few nights, I was sent on temporary duty to a variety of unknown wards. The Matron, whose humane sympathy had already extended my leave, no doubt meant to protect me from the tactless condolences of my former patients, but the experiment was not a success. With the Scottish Sister in my familiar ward - where the lively arguments about the evacuation of Gallipoli would not long have been diverted to the sorrows of a nurse over one more man ‘gone west’ - I might have settled down into some kind of routine, but a series of strange Sisters and patients provided me with no incentive to forget myself in work. As I was conspicuously not sleeping and must have appeared the ghost of the excited girl who went on leave - indeed, I felt as though I had gone down to death with Roland and been disinterred as somebody else - the Matron sent for me and offered to put me, with Betty, back on day-duty.

  Obstinately I refused the concession, ungraciously insisting that I had ‘got to get through this alone’, but in the next ward to which I was sent I much regretted my stupidity, for the work was depressing beyond description. A harsh, intolerant day Sister carped at me perpetually, attributing every small mishap in her ward to my nocturnal activities, while her V.A.D., who was shortly getting married, exasperated me with her jubilant complacency and the freedom with which she shared her romance with the men - particularly as, unconsciously cruel, they p
ersisted in discussing it with me. To complete my nervous misery, a paralytic patient required constant uninviting ministrations, and drove me half crazy with the animal noises which he emitted at intervals all through the night.

  Even death was evidently better than paralysis, I reflected miserably, vainly endeavouring to defeat thought by working my way with resentful conscientiousness through the pile of correspondence that had descended upon me. At the beginning of 1916 the amount and variety of letters of sympathy were still overwhelming, for reiteration had not yet wearied the pens of the sympathisers, but out of them all only two really counted. One of these came from my English tutor, to whom also the War had brought a measure of personal sorrow. Her brief, grave note, suggesting as consolation the living beauty of the life that was gone, assumed a degree of contemplative detachment of which I was then quite incapable. But it comforted me, with its beautiful scholarly script, in a way probably unguessed by the writer, for it represented a link with the world once so rapturously chosen and now incredibly remote - the world of intellectual experiment, of youthful hope, of all the profound and lovely things that belong to the kingdom of the mind. Yet it was to the other letter, so great a contrast in its shy abruptness, that I turned still oftener.

  ‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ Geoffrey had written from the bleak perils of the Salient, vainly striving for words that would express his acute sensitiveness to another’s pain. There were times, he said, when letters were but empty things, and he could not write.

  By the end of January, Camberwell and its demands had come to seem unspeakably hateful. I had hardly realised how entirely it had been the eagerness to share Roland’s discomforts which had made me shoulder the disagreeable tasks left over by everyone else, but now that he was dead the stultifying monotony of the rough work that I had once found so inspiring weighed upon me with growing heaviness, and the increasing consciousness of loss and frustration filled me with impotent fury and resentment.

  ‘Everything is so exactly the same as it was before, which brings it all back so vividly,’ I wrote to Edward. ‘It seems unendurable that everything should be the same.’

  The Sisters must have been disconcerted by the change in me, for I now evaded all but the most obvious duties, and took an infinite time to perform the simplest tasks, while the inquisitive pity of the V.A.D.s soon turned to bewildered impatience. No doubt they would have understood a sentimental, dependent sorrow, with hair-stroking at bedtime and hand-holdings in the dark, but they were not unnaturally baffled by an aloof, rigid grief, which abhorred their sympathy, detested their collective gigglings and prattlings, and hated them most of all for being alive when Roland was dead. Betty, in spite of much rough treatment, was invariably gentle, but Mina wrote two or three reproachful letters, scolding me for having become - as Betty had told her - so ‘difficult’. The sooner I left that hospital, the better for everyone concerned it would be, her final effort concluded severely.

  Numerous other correspondents counselled patience and endurance; time, they told me with maddening unanimity, would heal. I resented the suggestion bitterly; I could not believe it, and did not even want it to be true. If time did heal I should not have kept faith with Roland, I thought, clinging assiduously to my pain, for I did not then know that if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead.

  Deliberately I turned my back upon my companions at the hospital, and except when Edward or Victor came up to town, spent all my off-duty time alone. Driven in upon myself, I sought such consolation as I could find in books and letters, and in Sunday morning visits to the Catholic church of St James’s, Spanish Place. Roland, his mother told me, had often gone to this church; long before the impulse had seized him to put ‘R.C.’ in the space for ‘Religion’ in his Army papers, he had been attracted by the sybaritic mysticism of the Catholic faith. I could not follow him there, being temperamentally too much of an agnostic to become a convert even in tribute to his memory. But as I knelt, drowsy with sleeplessness, at High Mass beneath the tall, pointed arches, the lovely Latin intonations which I could not follow flowed over me with anodyne sweetness, drugging my senses with temporary resignation to the burden of my sorrow.

  In my wooden hut, by means of a folding card-table and a remnant of black satin for tablecloth, I made a small shrine for a few of the books that Roland and I had admired and read together. The Story of an African Farm was there and The Poems of Paul Verlaine, as well as The Garden of Kama and Pêcheur d’Islande. To these I added Robert Hugh Benson’s Prayer Book, Vexilla Regis, not only in honour of Roland’s Catholicism, but because my mother had sent me some lines, which I frequently read and cried over, from Benson’s ‘Prayer after a Crushing Bereavement’:

  ‘And lastly to me who am left to mourn his departure, grant that I may not sorrow as one without hope for my beloved who sleeps in Thee; but that, always remembering his courage, and the love that united us on earth, I may begin again with new courage to serve Thee more fervently who art the only source of true love and true fortitude; that, when I have passed a few more days in this valley of tears and in this shadow of death, supported by Thy rod and staff, I may see him again, face to face, in those pastures and amongst those waters of comfort where, I trust, he already walks with Thee. Oh Shepherd of the Sheep, have pity upon this darkened soul of mine!’

  Fifteen years were to pass before Bertrand Russell, ruthlessly undeluded by beatific visions of a compensating futurity, published The Conquest of Happiness, with its unresigned, unpitying exhortation to the bereaved:

  ‘A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident.’

  Both passages are beautiful, and Benson’s has a faith and a mysticism which Russell’s lacks, but if I were to suffer the same loss to-day, it would be in Russell, and not in Benson, that I should find courage and comfort.

  4

  Whenever half-days made it possible, I escaped from London to the family at Keymer, but in the daily three-hour intervals a new source of consolation presented itself, unexpectedly enough, in the person of Victor. His meningitis had apparently entitled him to indefinite light duty combined with frequent and prolonged periods of leave, and these he dedicated entirely to my service, unobtrusively constituting himself the Father Confessor that he had once been to Roland.

  Towards himself his attitude was consistently humble. ‘I am a very ordinary and matter-of-fact person,’ he told me once. Upon his friends he made no demands, but continually encouraged the staking of claims upon himself by others. On alternate Sundays, when I was off duty in the evening, we had supper together for several fortnights running at the Trocadero, where I was always the talker and he the patient, untiring listener. However much I railed, complained and lamented, his dark, considerate eyes never lost their gentle expression of interested attention.

  For the first two months after my return to Camberwell, we seem to have corresponded every few days. His letters in their sloping, ingenuous hand now appear pathetically childish, and yet so maturely selfless in their obvious determination to see both sides of every problem, and then to give exactly the advice likely to prove most congenial to the inquirer. As the details of Roland’s last moments came through, he must have spent hours in laboriously writing to explain how important it was that the wire should be mended even on a moonlit night, while ‘the best traditions of the Regular Army’ demanded that a platoon commander should inspect the damage himself even when the occasion was dangerous.

&n
bsp; At the time - accustomed though I was by Roland’s passionate vitality to quite a different manifestation of youth - I did not perceive the ingenuous childishness; I realised only the healing balm of unself-regarding sympathy, and found the long, boyish letters very comforting. His unmitigated kindness, his gift of consolation and his imaginative pity for the sorrows of others, still impress me, when I re-read his letters, as quite astonishing in a young man at an egotistical age.

  The more I came to detest my work at Camberwell, the more I relied upon my short intervals with Roland’s family to give some purpose to an existence which seemed to have become singularly pointless. Two or three weeks after Roland’s death, his mother began to write, in semi-fictional form, a memoir of his life, which she finished in three months, as well as replying at length to letters of condolence from friends and readers all over the country. At the end of that time she had a short breakdown from shock and overwork, and was in bed warding off serious heart trouble for several weeks. The many occasions on which I went down to see her and discuss the publication of her memoir, filled me with longing to write a book about Roland myself, but I concluded that three months was too short a time for me to see personal events in their true perspective. I would wait, I decided, rather longer than that before contributing my own account of his brief, vivid existence. I should have been astonished indeed had anyone told me that I should wait for seventeen years.