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

by Vera Brittain

And we came home and found

  They had achieved, and men revered their names,

  But never mentioned ours;

  And no one talked heroics now, and we

  Must just go back and start again once more.

  ‘You threw four years into the melting-pot—

  Did you indeed!’ these others cry. ‘Oh well,

  The more fool you!’

  And we’re beginning to agree with them.

  V. B. From Oxford Poetry 1920.

  1

  Early in April 1919, I said good-bye to Millbank and the War, taking home with me a legacy of rough hands and swollen ankles, and a fine collection of exotic oaths. Just as Victor had foreseen for himself if he survived, I found considerable difficulty during the next twelve months in avoiding these expressions in Oxford lecture-halls and Kensington drawing-rooms, to both of which they seemed to me peculiarly appropriate.

  To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace. But when it came in, it appeared to an exhausted world as divine normality, the spring of life after the winter of death, the stepping-stone to a new era, the gateway to an infinite future - a future not without its dreads and discomforts, but one in whose promise we had to believe, since it was all that some of us had left to believe in. At that time, too, various authorities were busy being grateful to us who had once been young and were apparently, amazing as it seemed, still so regarded. Only two days after the Armistice, Sir Douglas Haig, in the special Order expressing his gratitude to ‘all ranks of the Army and the non-combatant and auxiliary services’, had actually included ‘the many thousands of women who by devoted work in so many capacities have assisted in the victory of our arms’, and no doubt many of these felt quite elated at being told - for as long as they were able to believe it - that ‘generations of free people, both of your own race and of all countries, will thank you for what you have done . . . your gallantry never failing, your courage most resolute, your devotion to duty unquestioning.’ Even the Army Council had expressed its thanks by the end of April to the V.A.D. nurses for ‘the keenness, self-sacrifice and devotion . . . so unstintingly given during,’ as they somewhat modestly expressed it, ‘the long and trying period through which the country has passed.’

  Nevertheless, the year did not seem to have begun very auspiciously for those who still clung to the ingenuous notion that by their sacrifices they had created a world of sweetness and light for their descendants to inhabit. During the weeks immediately after the Armistice, my automatic existence at Millbank virtually obliterated for me the fact that, all over the country, eloquent platform heroes were busily engaged in Making Germany Pay and Hanging The Kaiser. But while I was making up my mind to go back to Oxford - not because I particularly wanted to go back, for I was not conscious of wanting to do anything, but because college seemed the one thing left out of the utter wreckage of the past, and I had a prejudice against leaving unfinished something that I had begun - I could not remain blind to the hectic reactions of my generation, frantically dancing night after night in the Grafton Galleries, while pictures of the Canadian soldiers’ wartime agony hung accusingly on the walls. Shocked by the spectacle, Mr Alfred Noyes described these nocturnal orgies:

  The cymbals crash,

  And the dancers walk;

  With long silk stockings,

  And arms of chalk,

  Butterfly skirts

  And white breasts bare;

  And shadows of dead men

  Watching ’em there—

  and the older generation held up outraged hands in horror at such sacrilege, not understanding that reckless sense of combined release and anti-climax which set my contemporaries, who had lived a lifetime of love and toil and suffering and yet were only in their early twenties, dancing in the vain hope of recapturing the lost youth that the War had stolen.

  Not having anyone left with whom to dance, I spent most of the blank and rather frightening days between leaving Millbank and returning to Somerville in roaming about London with a demobilised and erratically jubilant Hope Milroy, and in meditating, as the differences between our war and peace-time preoccupations forced themselves upon my mind, on the problems of an uncompanioned civilian life. How would the War ultimately have affected me? I wondered, looking with dull eyes into a singularly empty future, which seemed capable of being filled only by individual efforts that I did not feel in the least inclined to make. The immediate result of peace - the cessation of direct threats to one’s personal safety - was at first almost imperceptible, just as a prolonged physical pain which has turned from acuteness into an habitual dull ache can cease altogether without the victim noticing that it has gone. Only gradually did I realise that the War had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of apprehension; in which love would seem threatened perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might, perhaps, have it again, but never again should I hold it.

  Meanwhile in Paris, the nucleus of a wild, international, pleasure-crazy crowd, the Big Four were making a desert and calling it peace. When I thought about these negotiations at all - which was only when I could not avoid hearing them discussed by Oxford dons or Kensington visitors - they did not seem to me to represent at all the kind of ‘victory’ that the young men whom I had loved would have regarded as sufficient justification for their lost lives. Although they would no doubt have welcomed the idea of a League of Nations, Roland and Edward certainly had not died in order that Clemenceau should outwit Lloyd George, and both of them bamboozle President Wilson, and all three combine to make the beaten, blockaded enemy pay the cost of the War. For me the ‘Huns’ were then, and always, the patient, stoical Germans whom I had nursed in France, and I did not like to read of them being deprived of their Navy, and their Colonies, and their coal-fields in Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley, while their children starved and froze for lack of food and fuel. So, when the text of the Treaty of Versailles was published in May, after I had returned to Oxford, I deliberately refrained from reading it; I was beginning already to suspect that my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed, and I did not want to know the details of that betrayal. At an inter-collegiate debate a Hindu student remarked that here, at any rate, was ‘the Peace that passeth all understanding’ - and I left it at that.

  I was not, of course, so clearly conscious of these anxieties and revulsions and suspicions as to-day, with full awareness of the direction in which I was about to move, I sometimes seem to myself to have been. Letters and articles written at the time show that my mind groped in a dark, foggy confusion, uncertain of what had happened to it or what was going to happen. Still partly dominated by old ideals, timeworn respectabilities and spasms of rebellious bitterness, it sometimes seized fleetingly the tail of an idea upon whose wings it was later to ascend into a clearer heaven of new convictions.

  One of these half-found inspirations translated itself, trivially enough, into a determination to read History at Oxford instead of English, but the motive behind this superficial change of School was not really trivial. After the first dismayed sense of isolation in an alien peace-time world, such rationality as I still possessed reasserted itself in a desire to understand how the whole calamity had happened, to know why it had been possible for me and my contemporaries, through our own ignorance and others’ ingenuity, to be used, hypnotised and slaughtered. I had begun, I thought, by feeling exasperated about the War, and I went on by ignoring it; then I had to accept it as a fact, and at last was forced to take part in it, to endure the fear and sorrow and fatigue that it brought me, and to witness in impotent anguish the deaths, not only of those who had made my personal life, but of the many brave, uncomplaining men whom I had nursed and could not save. But even that isn’t enough. It’s my job, now, to
find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening to other people in the days to come. Perhaps the careful study of man’s past will explain to me much that seems inexplicable in his disconcerting present. Perhaps the means of salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.

  When I was a girl at St Monica’s and in Buxton, I remembered, I imagined that life was individual, one’s own affair; that the events happening in the world outside were important enough in their own way, but were personally quite irrelevant. Now, like the rest of my generation, I have had to learn again and again the terrible truth of George Eliot’s words about the invasion of personal preoccupations by the larger destinies of mankind, and at last to recognise that no life is really private, or isolated, or self-sufficient. People’s lives were entirely their own, perhaps - and more justifiably - when the world seemed enormous, and all its comings and goings were slow and deliberate. But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man’s inventions have eliminated so much of distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else. We were bound up together like this before we realised it; if only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn’t lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn’t matter to us, the Great War might never have happened. And though a few isolated persons may be better for having been in the War, the world as a whole will be worse; lacking first-rate ability and social order and economic equilibrium, it will go spinning down into chaos as fast as it can - unless some of us try to prevent it.

  Henceforward, my thought struggled on, following the faint gleam through the darkness, people will count only in so far as they realise their background and help to create and to change it. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence; our lives, and our children’s lives, will be rational, balanced, well-proportioned, to exactly the extent that we recognise this fundamental truth. It may be that our generation will go down in history as the first to understand that not a single man or woman can now live in disregarding isolation from his or her world. I don’t know yet what I can do, I concluded, to help all this to happen, but at least I can begin by trying to understand where humanity failed and civilisation went wrong. If only I and a few other people succeed in this, it may be worth while that our lives have been lived; it may even be worth while that the lives of the others have been laid down. Perhaps that’s really why, when they died, I was left behind.

  So, thus portentously, I decided to read History, and then, when I had gone down from Oxford, to get into touch with some organisation which thought and tried to act along these lines. I had heard, as yet, very little of the bitter tale of pacifism during the War - the Union of Democratic Control, with its interrupted meetings and police-raided offices; the imprisonment of E. D. Morel; the removal of Bertrand Russell from his post at Cambridge; the persecution and humiliation of conscientious objectors - but I had already started on the road which was ultimately to lead me to association with the group that accepted internationalism as a creed.

  At Somerville the news of my intention to change my School was received without enthusiasm; in English I had been regarded as a probable First, but in the field of History I had forgotten even such information as I had once derived from Miss Heath Jones’s political and religious teaching, and a student’s ingenuous anxiety to remedy the errors of the ages could hardly be expected to count with an Oxford college in comparison with the possibility of increasing its list of Firsts. But although the hazy ignorance from which I set out to read the newly chosen subject was a permanent handicap throughout my university life, I never regretted the decision, for in studying international relations, and the great diplomatic agreements of the nineteenth century, I discovered that human nature does change, does learn to hate oppression, to deprecate the spirit of revenge, to be revolted by acts of cruelty, and at last to embody these changes of heart and mind in treaties - those chronological records of a game of skill played by accomplished technicians who can hardly, in any time or place, be described as leading the van of progressive opinion. Even after the Franco-Prussian War - one of the bitterest campaigns in history - the dead were remembered and soldiers’ graves were mentioned, for the first time in any international agreement, by the treaty of 1871. The more widely I read, the more clearly I seemed to discover that nobler prospects existed for humanity than had appeared possible when the Peace of Versailles was reluctantly signed by Germany in the Galerie des Glaces on June 28th, 1919 - and what was the sacrifice of a possible First compared to that knowledge?

  2

  Two days before the League of Nations came into existence at the end of April by the adoption of the revised Covenant at the Fifth Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, I returned to Oxford to find Somerville in the last term of its long occupation of Oriel. My parents, like myself, took my reincarnation as a student entirely for granted; my father, indeed, so strongly approved of college in comparison with the perturbations of hospitals and foreign service that he was now as ready to send me there as any modern father who considers the safeguard of a profession to be as much the right of a daughter as of a son.

  Going back felt disturbingly like a return to school after a lifetime of adult experience; nevertheless, I pinned to Oxford - having nothing else to which to pin them - such hopes for the future as I still possessed. The dons, I believed, would recognise and concede to me the privileges of maturity; time had obliterated in my mind the various differences between the average academic and my adventurous Classical tutor, who had urged me after Edward’s death to keep to my plan of coming back to Somerville - especially because at college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life.

  She was quite right, as she always was; had I not taken her advice I should never have known either of the persons who now share my home, but at the time I scarcely bargained for the period of forlorn isolation that would have to be endured before the fulfilment of her prophecy. My own ‘Year’ had gone down long ago, but the unknown students would be, I felt confident, quite different from Kensington calling acquaintances or some of my relatives, who only wanted to be told how splendid our dear boys had been at the front, and how uplifting it was to be on active service in hospital, and how edifying to have had a lover and a brother who had died for their country. These young Somervillians were bound, I thought hopefully, to feel an interest in someone who had had first-hand experience of the greatest event of their generation, and, being interested, perhaps they would be kind. At the moment I felt as though kindness, provided it were intelligent kindness, mattered more than anything else. I was sore and angry and bitter, and I wanted desperately to be comforted and restored; the still rational remnants of my mind recognised anger and bitterness as crippling things which made for inefficiency, and I could not afford to be inefficient; it was more than time, if I were ever to accomplish it, to get on with the job of becoming a writer.

  My confidence in this sympathetic, congenial future was considerably shaken by my first interview with the Principal of Somerville. When I had last seen her, between my periods of service in Malta and in France, she had been cordial and benevolent, but now her face wore an inscrutable and rather grim expression. ‘This is going to be a difficult term - a very difficult term,’ it seemed to say. ‘If we’re not careful these wild young men and women back from the War will get out of hand!’ Her greeting, at any rate, was as brief and laconic as though she had taken leave of me the previous Easter.

  ‘How do you do, Miss Brittain?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you,’ I answered conventionally, being as yet unaware th
at the War’s repressions were already preparing their strange, neurotic revenge. ‘I’m so glad to be back - at last,’ I added, unable to resist that injudicious, emotional plea for one word of welcome, of encouragement, from the university which had become, for me, the last refuge of hope and sanity. But the disturbing hint was quietly disregarded, and any suggestion that my interview represented more than an ordinary beginning-of-term routine visit was discreetly tidied out of the atmosphere by the Principal’s next words.

  ‘You are living in King Edward Street this term, I think?’

  I agreed that this was so. I had gone down four years ago from Micklem Hall and now I was living in King Edward Street; that was, apparently, the only change in my circumstances of which the university was prepared to take cognisance.

  Looking back, after fourteen years, upon the spiritual jar of that rebuff, I realise now that the college authorities had been, according to their lights, thoroughly generous. (Had I been an ex-service man, their concessions would have seemed obvious enough, and were, indeed, granted to every male who wanted to take advantage of them, but Oxford women, after Mr H. A. L. Fisher’s pronouncement, were never officially regarded as ‘patriots’ whatever their service might have been.) They had kept my exhibition for me for four years; they had undertaken, since I was so excessively ‘over-standing’ for Honours, a special procedure on my behalf to enable me to take an Honours Degree at all; they had even tolerated my inauspicious change of School. But they could not add the final graciousness and make me feel welcome.