· CALIFORNIA STNfE T.lNIVERSI'rY t NOHTBRrDGE

LITEH.ARY ll'IAGES OF WAR:

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of thB requirements for the degree of Naster of .Arts in

English

by

Ila Jean Kragthorpe

May, 1982 The '.rhesis of Ila Jean Kragthorpe is approved:

Dr, Arthur Lane, Committee Chairman

California State University, Northridge

ii Acknowledgment

'lhe writer acknowledges with appreciation the guidance and encour­ agement of Dr. William Stryker and Dr. Lacy Gibson, Advisors, and of

Dr. Arthur Lane, Chai~~an of her Committee.

Ila Jean Kragthorpe Table of Contents

'ri tle Page • • • • • • ...... ~ ...... Approval Page.. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ii

Acknow·led.gment " • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • iii

'I'able of Contents. . . • • • • • • 0 • • • • • • • • • • • • • i.v

Abstract • e • • • • • • • • ~ • • • • • • • • • • • a • • • o v

Introduction ...... • • • • • • 8 • ~ • • • • • • • • • • • vii "Literary Images of War:

A Woman 1 s Testament of Reality Y ersus the Myth11

Chapter 1 T'ne Jvlyth: Images of Glory • • • • • • • • • • 1

Chapter 2 The Conflict: Images of Death • • • • • • • • 29 Chapter 3 'l'he Testament: Vera Brittain-Heali ty and

The Road to Reconciliation. • • • • • • • • 60

Bibliography ...... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 113

iv ABSTRACT

LITERARY ll'IAGES OF WAR:

A WONAN' S TES'l'.Al-lJ:ENT OF REALITY 'TERSU5 T'".clE Krr.ru:

by

Ila Jean Kragthorpe

.Master of .Arts in English

Because the literature of a people is as much its creator as its creation, those images within literature which are especially power­ ful in forming societal values and mores should not be accepted with­ out scrutiny and evaluation. This is especially true of such images as are traditionally held of war. For war involves more of a coru­ mu.o.ity than does any other societal experience: more people, more

:physical, spiritual, and mental energy; more in natural resources.

It devastates, dehumanizes, and deteriorates the human community more completely than any other single, shared experience.

In Western society, the traditional literary image of war is one of glorj, of heroism. It is an image based on a religious concept of fighting on the side of Gt..')d and one which has woven its way insidi­ ously into the nationaJ consciousness of Western nations. i~orld War I marked a significant turn in war literature as poets and novelists who bore the bloody burden of trench warfare became determined to en­ list their talents to break the old myth of war's glory and heroism and to re·veal it for the horror it really is. The first World War also marked a change in the participation of women in war. And this in­ cluded women writers. One such woman was Vera Brittain, who survived participation in both world conflicts and dedicated her literary skills to the changing of war's literary image. 'rhis English writer \ofas to spend half a century in the cause of world peace.

Vi Introduction

For millenia, literature has been the major medium for exploring some of the deepest and most complex aspects of our humanity. In its many forn1s, it has perhaps been the creator as often as the creature of our human d.rama. , As 8-Tl integral part of religion, it has spoken to and of those most innate qualities and contradictions of our human natrtre, proddir..g us to further awareness of life, both within and without. And that the most profound and enduring literature, 1? any form, deals with man's search for identity, his internal quest for wholeness, few would dispute. Perhaps this theme is, in fact, literature's ultimate subject for in this journey into self we confront the most complicated and variegated stores of our humanity, and our connnunion with this treasure is literature's greatest gift to us. If it is a communion of integrity.

Possibly the most intense historical mirror of our internal strug­ gle, of our progress toward wholeness-or disintegration-is war. It thrusts before our eyes, if we are willing to focus clearly, the ex­ ternal consequences of our internal battle. In the experience of war we meet not only the demons and saints of Man, but those of 01xr indi­ vid1:a::i. selves as well. That is, we meet them if the reflection we see is clear and undistorted. 'rhe critical problem here is ·that of finding criteria for judging the integrity of literary reflections of war.

Insofar as possible, the reader must be conscious of the internal bal­ ance of the wxiter in order to interpret the validity of the reflection seen in his writings. What portion is a reflection of societal myth and .from -w·hat experience does the writer draw in his presentation of war? It is because literature exists as both the creator and the

vii creature of our human society that literary images of war pose a sig­ nificant problem, for such images have the power not only to address

the i..11dividual but to affect the masses,.

Historically, Western .man has held war to be glorious, heroic,

obligatory, a11d even profitable. His concept has been undergirded by

both religious and literary traditions. Until ;..[orld War I, those writers who tried to see beyond the mirage of war's mythical glory were few. Btlt out of that conflict came a litera1~ turn spur! by the

poets who had i:!:lhabited the trenches and who were compelled to write

the truth about war. Nuch of their writing was at first rejected as

"unpatriotic" by those who had never questioned the validity of writing

about war in the abstract. Nationalism had left little room for sin.­

cere self-inspection by the nation at war. But the turn was there

and the poetr

truce had. been sounded, of the mutilation of spirit and body, the de­ humanization, and the compromising of all that man is at his best.. It

bore witness to the fear, the futility, the agony, and the death, of war.

\-lorld War I marked another historic tw.~. as well, in that more women wexe more actively involved in it than had been the case in previous v..a:rs.. And more women writers began to address the topic of war. One of these, Vera JV1ary Bri ttain--a young Oxford student at the outbreak of World War I--left her studies to serve as a nurse for the d·!..lration. Her experience in the war and the personal losses she sus­ tained ma.de her return to Oxford later to read History instead, and to devote her literar'J skills to a lifetime of active peacema.l<::ing. Her endea.vo~r spanned two world wars and i:nvol•J"ed her in many of the lesser

Viii international conflicts which followed World War II. Her experience, as well as her insight and literary achievements, make her a timely figu~e for study today by a generation which seemingly must choose between peace and eventual total annihilation.

ix Chapter 1

THE MYTH: D'IAGES OF GLORY

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just,

And that braggarts must

Surely bite the dust,

Press we to the fi,=!ld ungrieving

In 01~ heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just.

"l1en Who Narch Away 111

by Thomas Hardy

One seldom hears warfare spoken of without mention of heroism.

For millea~ia it has been so. Perhaps there is something innate in man, maybe an integral part of his will for survival, which calls him to strive, to do battle with, and to conquer-·-whether it be lands, ideast or other men--something which he must justify with a concept of heroism by which he is glorified because also indwelling in h.im is the

Sel1Se of justice and peace, the sense of honoring 1ife for its own sake.

It .is tr<:.e that heroism within the context of war sometimes speaks of that ultimate love out o.f which one will lay down his life for his com­ rade. It also, if rarely, embraces that sense of justice which honors the life o.f the enemy, as did young David when he refused his oppor­ tunity to sJ.ay Saul in the wilderness of Ziph2-an example which, while it may be obscure in the mind of western man, is still integral to the base of his Judeo-Chr:i.stian moral heritage by reason. of David's stature

1 2

among botb. Jew and Cr.u:-istian.. :But this latter aspect of heroism has

had to be systematically undermined if war were to be successfully

fought. For the hero in war must be able. to risk all for the conquest;

by this his valor is proven; from this comes his greatest image of

glo:t•y,.

It is, therefore, most natural that what we retain of David•s

reputation is his determined bravery against the Philistines and later

among them, his ability to lead men heroically. and victoriously into

battle, for such is the nature of war itself. And, in spite of the

West's general identification with the Prince of Peace, the Old Testa-·

ment concept of fighting for the glory of God has not been lost on

western man.

The idea of fighting for the glory of the Caesar-god, almost

lll'liversal among men, was certainly tightly woven into the moral cloak

of the Reman warrior. It was a mantle easily assumed by Christians

from the fourth century on, not only as a result of Constantine's

*'In hoc signa v inces," but because it was essentially in accord with

the Pauline teachings of obedience to those whom God had put in power}

A part of ti1e fabric of feudalism, it was reinforced by l'lartin Luther duri11..g the Reformation--in spite of his opting for loyalty to Electo:::

Frederick of Saxony, his immediate ruler, over obedience to Charles V,

Holy Ronan Emperor.. For, further in accord with the teachings of St.

Pau.l, Luther perceived his higher allegiance to be to God and deter­ mined his obedience to Frederick accordingly. Yet, in spite of

Luther's insistence that in the end it was only God's grace, through faith, that "saved" man, he himself was no less guilty of violent bloodshed against the Anabaptists of his day than had been the 3

Crusaders in their quest for a self-deemed righteous glory against the

Infidel~ brief centuries earlier.

The fervid nationalism that eventually developed with the forma­ tion of the European countries, and later the United States, was a national1sm which claimed both the will and the support of God in the battles fo\J.ght by the State. Imorality in abeyance while engaging in the battle at hand, which has remained most prominently with us. And if the urge to conquer and the desire for glory stem from some innate source in man, they remain perhaps primarily· not an ever present fire within him so much as the coals of tl1at fire, psychologially, spiritually, and physically banked not only by his primitive nature but by the literary images of war which form his heritage~ the heritage of his nations: l.iterary images which began i."l the o:ral traditions of cultures and have perpetuated them­ selves in the ~itten language, banking the fire against the nation's crucial need--or desire--for battle.

Much literature concerning war is derived, of course, from history itself. But .for the most part such literature has traditionally been interpretive rather than reflective of the actual experience. The images of heroism this literature presents have been and continue to be both defined and perpetuated by its cultural roots, products of the social attitudes concernL"lg armed conflict which are, in turn, 4

supported and nourished by the heroism held to in the literature it- self. TrLe process is cyclical.

E. Talbot Donaldson in his Introduction.to:' 91 Beowulf" asserts that

"the :poet's materials must·have been very much alive to his audience, for the elliptical way in which he alludes to events not directly con­ cerned with his plot demands of the listener a wide knowledge of tra-­ ditional Ge:rmanic history.. This knowledge was probably kept alive by other heroic poetry, of which little has been preserved in .Ellglish, though much must .once have existed. ,A There can be little doubt that among the Germanic tribes, just as in the Hebrew long before the establisr~ent of Israel, a sense of ethnicity and power was continually generated and regenerated by the transmission of a strong oral tradi- tion.

T'ne basie relationship of th~e and lord, portrayed in "Beowulf" a."ld f>;u'Jdar.uental to the concept of heroism in service to God and coun- try, wao not one of subservience but one in which, as Donaldson points out, the thane took pride as he defended the noble's lands and fought his battles. It was a bonding based on mutual trust and respect and therefore intrinsically an enabling relationship. Perhaps just as inherent i.u the covenant, however, was the resulting violence. For, as the lord's obligation to the thane included material reward for his services, despoili1~ of the enemy, most often brutally, was an integral pert of the machinery that perpetuated a warring mentality which re­ sulted from and promoted furthE>.r a "heroism" of violence. In fact,

Donaldson's conclusion regarding the importance of thE: treasure. seized in battle and then disbursed to the warriors by the good king or .lord is that "it is a kind of visible proof that all parties are 5

realizir~ themselves to the full in a spiritual sense--that the men of this band are congenially and successfully united with one another. ,5 Here we have a confirmation,· perhaps,.· of what C. s. Lewis chose to call "the. deepest of worldly emotions .... the love of ma:.."l. for man,

the mutual love of warriors."6 A close look at wars men have waged

and the literature which has resulted would bear out such a conclusion, it seems. Whether such spoils consist of treasures, territories, or body co~~ts, and whether the unity results from a sense of sharing. . boo~J, victory, or guilt, there is that experience in sharing the final result of battle which does indeed seem to bind men together in a very special way.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that vengeance also became a major cause of war and an essential element in the code by which men came to live "honorably." The "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth11 of tbe Old Testament law had been, by :Beowulf's time, trans- lated into the wergild, the 11man-price." That vengeance 'tl'aS also a self-perpetuating curse, fom1ded in man's self-pride, is seen in the never--ending cycles of war it set up. The true depth of its curse i.s perceived. most clearly in the painful dilemma of King Hrethel, one of whose sons had accidentally killed another.7 Vengeance was at once dem~~ded of and forbidden to him according to the code of valor, and he could only dwindle into death, a victim of the paradoxes of that code by which he chose to live--perhaps a shadowy archetype of man ld:nd... in general.

That J. B. Trapp's evaluation of ":Beowulf" as "a tragedy of the human predi.cament: more narrowly, of the warrior's situation" in which the "Germanic hero 1 s fulfillment is not reached in victory alone, 6

but in unflinching com'age in all circumstances, most of all when the

odds--adversaries, conditions, age, and the rest--are stacked against

him and he must die118 is valid, is borne out by Beowulf 1 s own words:

"Fate often delivers an undoomed earl / If his spirit be gallant!" (l. 547-548) 9 For fate had the last word and even though its death

call could be averted if the fighter were brave enough, he must yet

be willing to die. The tragedy of the warrior's situation is em­

bodied .in the code of his callingt in the heritage of its translation.

In the words 1'With. hand-grip only I'll grapple with Grendel; /Foe against foe I!ll fight to the death" (1. 423-424) Beowulf confesses

the first half of the warrior's credo. Its second half is pronounced cy Wig-la.f tow·ard the close of the poem as he addresses those who had deserted Beowulf in his hou.r of need: "Death is better for every

earl/ Than life besmirched with the brand of shame!" (1. 2723-2724)

Dauntless courage in individual battle, w-lllinching loyalty to com­ mander and comrade alike, are demanded of the warrior. And although

Beowulf's major battles are with demons, both motivation and approach reflect the attitude of man's warring with man. It is a code deeply embedded L~ the psyche of western man and tightly interwoven with his precepts of duty to State, as fulfilled in warring, and loyalty to kin, as embodied in the seeking of vengeance. It is a code reflected in the credentials Beowulf offers to Hrothgar:

Bloody from battle; five foes I bound

Of giant kindred, and crushed their clan.

Hard-driven in danger and darkness of night

I slew the nicors that swam the sea,

Avenged the woe they had caused the Weders, 7

And ended their evil--they needed the lesson! (14 404-409)

The fuel for the nationalism which was eventually to consume so much of the world in two global conflicts had already been kindled in the social and moral consciousness of man, and he had, in fact, sung tts virtues and painted its heroism long before he finally created its written images of glory.

The power of literat·ure was not to be so much in its ability to reflect man's responses to warfare, perhaps, as i.."l its ability to create those responses. Li terahu·e was more portable than paintings

~"ld statuarJr, more cumulative and accessible than the songs of

Beowulf's "scop." (1. 87, 478) Through literature, the oral tradi­

·tion was concretized and circulated, preserved and promulgated. "It was ever their wont to be ready for war ••• 'Twas a noble race!" declares the narrator of "Beowulf," (L 1140, 1143) and heroism is defined. by Beowulf himself:

All men must die; let him who may

Win glory ere death. 'rhat guerdon is best

]'or a noble man when his name survives him. (1. 1272-1274)

'11!-l.:t'oughout the lengthy poem, Beowulf often credits God generously for the sttccessful feats of brave men, those acts performed out of commitment to the glory of the lesser lord in whose name and for whose people they are accomplished. In a declaration of intrinsic national­ iam, Beo~Jlf recounts his victory over Grendel to Hygelac; "But the deeds I did "'ere a lasting honor/ Beloved prince, to your people's name,. 11 (1. 1967-1968) Although the dying thoughts which comfort the hero revolve around the fact that he had never killed kinsmen, courted quarrels, nor sworn false oathss. "Beowulfn is essentially a poem whose 8

heroism is based on bloodshed, revenge, and well-requited victory in battle; .it is an heroic poem.

J. B, 11z'app points out that King Alfred in the ninth centur.r was among the poem's early admirers, and that it was a source used by poets even then. Trapp also notes that "Beowulf 11 was not titled until 10 18051 nor was it printed 1..mtil 1815. Yet, that the earliest and longest, finest, single piece of literature in our language is such a poem, must necessarily reveal to us something about our basic orien- tation to hu..tnan relationship, especially within the contexts of com­ munity, of conflict. That the poem not only derived from a soil com- posed over centuries of cultural attitude~ and mores as well as ex- periences, but that it added much to the ground from which future concepts-and .:.~ontroversies-·would grow, we cannot deny. And fertile g£ound it proved •

.Arthur Lane has a:ptly cited as "man's most pernicious myth: the glory of death in battle. 1111 It has proven a blood-thirsty myth, yet it has been cultivated by those whose blood it sought in the very ground soakv.l by the blood of those whom it .had already claimed. .De­ ceitfully. it proposed glory in war for the country's honor, in battle

.for the b8t-t1e' s sake. It ignored the contradiction of two warriors facil1g one ;:.nother: one, to gain glory in victory, the 0ther, to gain glorJ .in death.. Literature has been at once the receptor and the re- generator. of this myth:

The mountaL~ sheep are sweeter,

But the valley sheep are fatter,

We therefore deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter. 9

We made, an expedition;

We met a host, and quelled it;

We forced a strong position,

And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed's richest valley

Where herds of kine were brousing,

We made a mighty sally,

To furnish our carousL~g.

Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;

We met them, and o'erthrew them:

They struggled hard to beat us;

But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,

The king marched forth to catch us;

His rage surpassed all measure,

But his people could not match us.

He fled to his hall-pillars;

And ere our force we led off,

Some sacked his house and cellars,

While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild'ring,

Spilt blood enough to swim in:

We orphaned many children,

And widowed many women.

The eagles and the ravens

We glutted with our foemen; 10

The heroes and the cravens,

The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,

And much their land bemoaned them,<

Two thousand head of cattle,

And the head of him who owned them:

Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, 12 And his overtr~ow, our chorus.

Accordir~· to Arthur Symons, Thomas L. Peacock judged his above quoted poem, 11 The War-Song of Dinas Vawr," as "the quintessence of all

-war songs that ever were written. • • of all the tendencies and con- 1 sequences o f ...~..ne ' m~'1 ~' t ary. •·• '~ . mhI a t ~· t J.s· bl a t antl y 1ronJ.c' -' ~· d ea1 1ng· with both the "nobilityn of war's cause and the "glory" of its result, could hardly be argued, even though it has likely not always been in~ te1y~eted as such by its readers~ Far from the usual elevated tone of

"·..ra:r songs, 11 Peacock's is immediately one of mockery. "The mountain sheep are sweeter, I But the valley sheep are fatter; I We therefore deemed. it meeter / To carry off the latter," is linguistically a cress between a nursery rhyme and the usual warrior J.i tany. The unglorious pursuit of such phmdering and bloodshed in order "To furnish our

CB.rousing," is later complemented by the satiric exaggerationof having "Spilt blood eno·ugh to swim in:" while making orphans of many children and widows of mailY women~ Wri ti."lg in the early nineteenth century, Peacock wat3 obviously aware of the fact that the.warrior'.s 11

esse, which he presented so satirically, had traditionally been held

no less than sacred. But Peacock was consistent to the end. Lest

there be any doubt in the critical reader's mind, the poem's ending

is fashioned after the ending of a limerick: ;'His head was borne be­

.fore us; / His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, / And his over­

throw, our chorus." Hardly dignified. Unmistakably unheroic. And.,

although thG poem obviously did not shake the literary fo~dations of

war's heroic: image, the only basic element he ignored 'ITas war's "holy"

justification. It is an element which most would argue is critical to war's heroism.

P~d a contemporary of Peacock's, Thomas Babington Macaulay, _did

inelude it:

And she of the seven hills shall mourn her children's ills,

And tremble when she thinks on the edge of England's sword;

And the kings of earth in fear s~~ll shudder when they hear What the hand of God hath wrought for the Houses and the Word. 14

So ends Ka.caulay's 11 '1'he Battle of Naseby." Perhaps the poet's ele­

vated concept of war could be understood on the basis of his youth; he v1as only twenty-four, the age of a good warrior, when he wrote it.

T'ne fact remains, as well read as he was in history even by then, the

brilliant your~ writer reflects just how deeply embedded was the literary myth of glory in the national battle-with God's ever-present will and a.id leading commander and comrade alike.

But in spite of Peacock's satire, and even with Macaulay's in­

clusion of God, the world had begun Q~awing on another set of images

a.s well, secular images of .glory conju·~ed up in previous centuries, 12

augmented by evertJ war that engaged the nation: images of. ·Stoutheart­ ed men whose allegiance to their king and conscience demanded of their spirit and -their body eveJ..'Y last pressing force of energy, of will:

Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer, •ro add something more to this wonderful year,

To honour we call you, not press ·you like slaves,

For who are so free as the sons of the waves!

Hearts of oak are our ships, hearts of oak are our men,

We always are ready

Steady, boys, steady,

We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again.

So wrote David Garrick, in 1759, in his "Hearts of Oak, 11 whose three 1 stanzas each end vii th the same four-line refrain. 5 Highly national­ is·tic, it was a poem whose tone and intent are echoed in the opening lines of Jessie Pope's versed combination of invitation and exhorta- tion one hundred fifty years later:

Who's for the trench­

Are you, my laddie?

Who'll follow the French--

Will you~ my laddie?

Each of these poems struck the nerve center of the nation. Or perhaps the reflex system is what they struck: a reflex syst~m of national­ istic pride, courted and claimed by traditions and mentalities which had been preserved and empowered in a national literature of war.

From the earliest of times, as we have noted in "Beowulf," the 13

involvement of God· strengthened the justification for as well as the honor of war. This involvement was the :warp of the warrior's cloak of glory. Its woof had beenthat indomitable urge that rose from within man himself to do battle, to conquer, the urge which had needed to be defined as heroic. Within war literature, heroism itself came to app~ar somewhat iridescent in that sometimes the.warp was most visible, sometimes the woof. It was a matter of literary emphasis.

According to Donaldson, the Old English rendition of "Beowulf," and Old @n.glish poetry in general, derived its strength of expression from its dominance by nouns and compound. nouns used alliteratively, from the use of strong verbs, and from the distinct absence of prepo- sitions and articles, "little" words so common to our modern English 1 which tend to dissipate the force of the language. 7 To Donaldson, this disparity ·was significant enough to cause him to choose a prose t::-anslation of the great poem. ':rrapp, on the other hand, found the translation by George w. Kennedy adequate. It is a translation which reli-eS-hea:dl'y-on-s-trO-n8'-nouns-and-v-e-:r-l>S-and.-wh4eh-a-t-tempts-aa-ea-rnes-t---­ fidelity to the Old English alliteration in order to preserve the s-trength of expression of the original language in a return to one of the lin~S-uistic characteristics of war poetry which had noticeably changed throughout the years.

B,y the time of Garrick's writing, war literature, by continuing to both reflect and reform cultural images and ideas, had begun to evolve if not a turn in motivation, at least a synthesis of the religious and the secular. But there had been a corresponding lin­ guistic change, as well. It was more of a tun1 from the old dependence on a syntax of forceful nouns and verbs used alliteratively in nar- 14

ration to one which claimed the direct involvement cf the reader, an

involvement reflected in Garrick's poem. From the narrative which

extoll~t the heroic past, war poetry had begun a move to the present

by either recountir~ in the first person the experience or the anti­

cipation of the conflict, or by exhorting the reader to come join the

conflict. "Prepare, prepare," begins William Blake in "A War Song."

He speaks of the 11 lots, cast in the spacious orb;" which 11 The Angel o,f Fate turns ••• with mighty hands, I And casts ••• upon the dark­

ened earth, I Prepare, preparel 11 And then, questioning his sinking heart aB he perceives one fatal scroll to bear his name, he reassures

himself~ "Had I three lives, I'd die in such a cause, / And rise with gl1osts over the well-fought field. I Prepare, prepare!" The Angel of Fate notwithstanding, "The arrows of Almighty God are drawn!" the poet cries.. 'lihere is but one course of action:

Soldiers, prepare! Our cause is Heaven's cause;

Soldiers, prepare! Be worthy of our cause:

Prepare to meet our fathers in the sky:

Prepare, 0 troops that are to fall to-day!

Prepare, prepare! 18

1rhe poem, subtitled "A War Song to Englishmen," is a marriage of the. direct call to battle and the concept of God's activity through the

warring nation, even though it does not reflect Blake's feelings

toward war. It undergirds the concept of war's glory, of the warrior's

·heroism.

Tennyson's "Riflemen Form! 111 9 captures the same immediacy in an

·argent call to "Form, be ready to do or die! / Form in Freedom's name 15 and the Queen's!" And there is room for neither contemplation nor doubt on the g.rounds that God is not mentioned in this poem. Now, the cause is th~ nation 9 s and stands on its own merits.

Wordsworth, too, in writing "To The Hen of Kent," addresses them:

Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent, Ye children of a Soil that doth ad,rance Her haughty brow against the coast of Fra.'"lce,

Now is the time to prove your hardiment!

Such nationalistic poetry challenged men from the Soil for the Soil:

No parlaying now. In Britain is one breath;

We all are with you now from shore to shore;-­

Ye men of Kent, 'tis victory or death! 20

And, too often, it was indeed the soil which claimed them.

This irony is also clear in another of Wordsworth's poems:

".Antj.ci.pation, October, 1803." Written at the same period as "To The

Men of Kent, 11 it is a poem reminiscent of the forty-seventh or the ninety-eighth Psalm, except in its ironic juxtaposition of the heart's enjoyment a..•d uthe prospect of our brethren slain." The poet begins,

Shout, for a mighty victory is wonl

On Britiah ground the invaders are laid low;

The breath of Heaven has drifted them like snowt

And left them lying in the silent sun,

Never to rise again!--the work is done.

At t~is point Wordsworth calls on old men, wives, and children alike to greet the returning survivors iiith drum and trumpet. But he ends 16

the poem thus:

Clap, infants, clap your hands! Divine must be

Tr~t triumph, when the ve~J worst, the pain,

And even the prospect of our brethren slain,

Hath something in it wrrich the heart enjoys:-­ 21 In glory will they sleep and _endless sanctity9

Again, a penetration of the spirit and a permeation of the body of society by that "most pernicious myth." On the one hand, death was glorious for its being the outcome of man's committing his total strength to his country's purpose; on the other, its glory lay .in the realm of Divi...~e Justice which used men as its instruments on earth.

The t"fro elements are combined--the nHemlock for Socrates, 11 and

!~the cross that Christ had, "-in c. H. Sorley' s nAn The Hills and

Vales Along, n written early in the twentieth century. The young writer again provides a true reflection of the literary images of war which :have helped form his own concept of battle:

Cast away regret and rue,

Think what you are marching to.

Thus begins his second stanza. It ends with the admonition:

So sing with joyful breath,

For why, you are going to death.

•reaming earth will surely store

All the gladness that you pour.

His final two stanzas, calling the soldiers to sir..g on the road to death, both end, "So be merr-y; so be dead~ 1122 The unusual aspect. of this poem which calls the soldier to war is that it speaks only in terms of the marching, singing men's death.· .lt does not mention their killing a:nyope else. In this respect, Sorley' s choice of heroes,

Socrates and C~~ist, is appropriate. But there remains something life-th.r..obbing. in the beat of the verse, virile in the marching, sing­ ing throng of men, which echoes the futility in the poet's lines:

"Earth will echo still when foot I Lies numb and voice mute." 'l'he overall tone is one of fatalistic surrender to the "Angel of Fate11

Blake wrote of, but it is a surrender of giving over to rather than giving up to a predetermined destiny. It is a vital marching into a proscribed way of deali~~ with conflict. Its irony lies in its juxta­ position of virility and an abandonment of individual will for the sake of a societal concept of glory, of heroism.

ibis same abandonment of will is mirrored by a contemporary of

Sorley. In Alan Seeger's "I Have A Rendezvous With Death," we sense the ambiguity of time, but that the rendezvous itself is pledged be­ lies the poet's expressed preference of lying with his love. His real desire seems to be death. At one point, he appears to remember

Beowulf's belief that "Fate often delivers an undoomed earl I If his spirit be gall.ant." "It may be I shall pass him (Death) still,"

Seeger considers briefly. Yet his concession is clear by the end of the poem:

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this yea~,

And I to my pledged word am true, 18

2 I shall not fail that rendezvous. 3

In the ear1.y,twentieth century, then, Sorley and Seeger represent yet another g·eneration of youth pledged to heroiemin battle. It was a

"heroism~ which had long since transformed both killing and being killed i.-'1to "glory." .And by now it bore a fatalistic mood; it was a matter in ,•.;rhich one had little or no choice.

F'Undamental to both the development and the preservation of this heroism in war was the idealization of warfare. 'rhis was a short step from the concept of doL'1g battle in God's name or for the honor of ruler-country, but it was a critical one. The most prominent characteristic of war poetry became that it dealt with war in the abstract. The napple blossoms" of Spring as well as the "scarred slope of battered hill," in Seeger's poem quoted above refer but obliquely t

It may be he (Death) shall take my hand

.And lead me into his dark land .~d close my eyes and quench my breath--24

Sueh images hardly take into account the reality of the screaming shells that tore to shreds so many soldiers among whose bloodied remains the survivors had to huddle in trenches. The idealizing of both warfare and warrior led to the abandonment of the individual will by elevating both to a realm in which men could only be dis­ honor.ed by dissent. War not only represented the corporate will in dealing with international conflict; it was also in accord with the corporate conscience: war had been sanctified as well as glorified. 19

And traditional poets, tending by nature to.be bQth aesthetic and ethereal, had no difficulty in continuing to cultivate images of war, of heroism, which further idealized that nultimate 11 sacrifice of man for country, of comrade for comrade.

Perhaps the corporate will, the corporate conscien~e, the relin­ quishment of i..'ldividual will for the sake of honor and nobility have nowhere be~n more concretely--and far reachingly--extolled than in

'Eenuyson 1 s "The Charge of the Light Brigade.". Generations of English­ speaking schoolchildren, male and female alike, have echoed the poetic creed of obedience:

Theirs not to make reply,

'Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Generations of English-speaking children have followed the Brigade

"Into the jaws of Death, / Into the mouth of Hell," to the only triumph that is lasting:

When can their glory fade?

0, the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder'd.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred! 25

It would be false, of course, to im:ply that all poets affirmed war, that all poets saw in the bloody purge of warfare a cu:re for mants lagging spirit of commitment to life, to cause. Yet, if not 20

all poets found war to be heroic, the biggest fault of those who did not lay in their adherence to 'the tradition of treating war in the abstract even as they tried to reveal its futility and immorality.

For it would be difficult to crack the hard-crusted coat of armor reinforced by countless centuries of myth, impossible to undermine the basic orientation of society to war as an honorable undertaking, as long as the engagement i·tself was relegated to an abstract ideal: a moral obligation on the part of nation and citizen alike.

Written by Tennyson in 1853, the fifty-three line poem "War!" is an example of both product and producer of idealized warfare. •J.lhat he could write of 11 the (fair) face of night" as "She ••• spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars--" and that he could assert

"• ... yet it lighten'd my despair /When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right," readily reveals that yet another of the nation's Poets Laureate, as had Wordsworth before him, saw war as the great carrier of Divine Justice. And, although Tennyson in "War!" joins ancient standards of glory to present moral considerations,

That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease,

The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,

Nor Britain's one sole God be the millionaire:

No more shall commerce be all in all," the very beginning of the poem, in the starry and myth.filled heavens, serves to remove the reader from the horror of war's rabid reality.

It is a retreat he resumes throughout the poem:

.And hail once more to the banner of battle unrolled!

Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep 21

For those that are crushed in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet C~d's just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant liar;

.And many a darkness .into the light shall leap, 26 And shine in the sudden making of splendid names.

'rhe staying power of the myth remained in its abstract nature.

'rhe one fed the other so that even the moral statement of the poet who would speak to the futility of the cycle became a vehicle of its per- petuation insofar as the statement was cushioned in abstraction and remo,red to the Ideal.

Georg-e Henry Boker, writing in the late nineteenth centu1.·y, had

11 a n~)W definition of war in his nnirge For A Soldier :

Fold him in his country's stars,

Roll the drum and fire the volley!

What to him are all our wars,

What but death bemocki1~ folly?

But the impact of these four lines which begin the third stanza is cushioned by the abstraction present in all four stanzas. The opening words of the !lCi~m, "Close his eyes; his work is done!" result, by the second stanza, in metaphorically idealizing the soldier's death to the state of ''sleep," a common literary device in dealing with death.. The warrior's valor is affirmed on his own behalf and as a fulfillment of society's e:x:pectatim.1s of him in the beginning of the second verse:

As man may, he fought his fight,

Proved his truth by his endeavor;

Let him sleep in solemn night, 22

Sleep forev·er and forever.

Where, then, is the afore-mentioned "folly" if, in fighting, he has proven himself? Further, that the reader should "let" the dead soldier sleep implies that be has earned it as a reward and basically denies the sacrifice extracted from him. 'rhe moral obligation of battle has been fulfilled and in this lies the lasting glory. For this reason, the closing stanza of the Dirge observes solemnly that we may now:

Leave him to God's watching eye;

Trust him to the hand that made him.

Mortal love weeps idly by;

God alone has power to aid him. 27

!Iere, mortal love is absolved of any responsibility. Resignation is construed as obedience, death as sleep, and the corporate responsi­ bility is relegated to the heavens. Ironically, his negative defini­ tion of war is itself negated in Boker's reliance on those same liter­ ary images which over the centuries have stripped man of his options in solvir~ cor~~lict by means other than wars, images which have helped make "all our wars, / What but death bemocking folly?"

Thomas Hardy approached the problem of seeing war differently in anoth~o.ir wa.y. In "The Nan He Killed," written in 1902, Hardy contem­ plates the meeting of enemies on another grouu~d:

"Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet 23

Right many a nipperkin!

&1d three lines later, "I shot him dead because-- / Because he was my foe," the narrator in the poem says simply, although perhaps the only

reason the two faced. one another, ultimately, was that:

"He -thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like--just as I--

Was out of work--had sold his traps-­

No other reason why.

Here the poet treats a profound consideration: th.e killing of an

enemy who was an indiviq:ual in his O\ot'Il right. It is a consideration

necessary to the destruction of the myth because it moves beyond the

abstract; it concretizes both parties. And, ironically, Hardy in the

first line of his final stanza of the poem echoes a philosophy of resignation appropriate to the military mentality: "Yes; quaint and

curious war is! 1128 But it is an irony which eludes the military mind

and the corporate conscience.

1rhe elusion is evident in that one of the most widely read and

memorl.zed poems to come out of World War I was undoubtedly John

McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." Here again, death's stark reality, to

say nothing of the violence by which it overtook the soldier, is

softened in. images of poppies blowing and larks "singing bravely."

.War is reduced to a "quarrel" and the ancient symbol of man's civ­

ilized continuity, the torch, is used in admonition;

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

'ro you from failing hands we throw 24

The torch; be -yours to hold·it high.

If ye break faith with us who die,

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 2 In Flanders fields. 9

'ro be anything but dissolute, one had to respond to the call to battle.

That those who had died might not have died in vain, more were summoned to their death. ':Phe final stanza of liicCrea' s poem effectively summar- izes the military heroism rendered through ages of warring and song: idealized warfare whose covenant claimed the living for the dead.

b'ut World war I was a war which issued in other war poetry, a new kind of \vai poetr.r.- Ji'or there was a new awareness abroad as well •

.And as men returned home they seemed to have formed new sensitivity to both the corporate values and the corporate conscience of their nation ..

It was a sensitivity which resulted in the abandonment, not of the will this time, but of the value system which they had accepted as they had marched off to war.

And perhaps, in the general dissolution of the value system durh~g the period that followed World War I, there was something which was not only an outgrowth of that war's experience, especially by the poet, but something which, again through the literary images he created, held the possibility of affecting the concept of war so firmly estab­ lished in western society. As for heroism, Thomas Carlyle, in his essay "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History," asserts that "Hero-worship, ~ nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceasesen30 Our study tends to affirm his conclusion. Perhaps, then, hope lies in an unexpected source, 25 p •

especially since war and heroism have ~idden together throughout so many of man 1,s ages., T. s. Eliot, writing to Marcel Proust, states that the post-war poet saw himself as spokesman,!or "a generation for 1 whom the dissolution of value had in itself a positive value."3

Undou.bted.ly the greatest positive value that could come out of that dissolution.:would be a clea.~er evaluation of tbe phenomenon, of war.

Anrl basic t·o that evaluation would necessarily be a reforming of the concept of heroiso. 26

Notes·

1 Thomas Hardy, "Men Who March Away," in Soldiers' Verse, ed.

Patrie D1ckinson (London: Frederick 11iuller Ltd., 1945), p. 18. 2 The Holy .Bible Revised Standard Version (New York: ':rhos.

Nelson & Son.s; 1959), I Samuel 26: 6-12, pp. 315-316.

3 The Good News Bible Today' s :English Version (New York: Thos.

Nelson & Sons, 1976), Romans 13: 1-5, PP• 215-216; I ':Hmcthy 6: 1-2, p. 286.

4 E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. T'ne Norton Anthology of .English Liter­ ature 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & t;o., Inc., 1974), I, p. 26.

5 Donaldson, p. 27. 6 C. S8 Lewis, The A1legor.r of Love (1936; rpt. London: Oxford

Univ. Press, 1938), P• 9.

7 11 :Beowulf 11 in 1'he Oxford Anthology of cl'lglish Literature, ed.

J. B. Trap;p (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), I, p. 82,

1. 2298-2328. 8 'lxapp, p .. 27.

9 l1Beowulf" L'1 Trapp, p. 42, 1. 547-548.

10 ·T... r.app, P• 20 • 11 .~thvx Lane, An Adeguate Response (Detroit: Wayne State Univ.

Press, 1972), Po 167. 12 Thomas 1 .• Peacock, "The War Song of Dinas Vawr" in War And The

~' ed, Richard Eberhar;t (New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1945), pp .. 86-88~ 13 -, ' ~bernart, p. 224. 27

1 4 Thomas B. Macaulay, "The Battle of Naseby," i.l1 The Victorian !£!!.., ed. JorUI w. Bowyer (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.,

1938), PPe 29-30~ 1 5 David .Garrick, 11 Hearts of Oak," in War Songs of :Britain, ed.

Harold E. Butler (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd.,

1903), pp. 160-161. 16 Jessie Pope, "'rhe Call," in ~ssie Pope's War Poems (London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1915), p. 38. 1 7 Donaldson, p. 29. 18 William Blake, "A War Song," in War Songs of Britain, pp. 172- 173. 1 9 Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Riflemen Form!" in War Songs of

Britain, nn. 214-215. -- ....,_ 20 William Wordsworth, 11 To The Men of Kent," in Ehglish Poet:;x and Prose of the Romantic Movement, Revised ed., eda George B. Woods,

(New York: Scott Foresman & Co., 1929), p. 320. 21 ..."or d swor+h u , p. 320 •

22 1 c. H. Sorley, "All The Hills and Vales Along, ' in Soldiers'

Verse, :p.. 20. 2 3 Alan Seeger, "I Have A Rendezvous With Death," in Soldiers' Verse_, p .. 11.

24 Seeger, p. 11. 25 Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," in The Victorian

~' P• 106 .. .:::oroJ Tennyson, •rwar!" in War Songs of Britain, pp. 201-203. 27 George H. Boker, "Dirge For A Soldier," in War and the Poet,

PP• 106·-107. 28

28 'lb.omas Hardy, "The,Man He Killed," in,War .And The Poet, pp~

110-111.

29 John hcCrae, 11 In Flanders Fields," in Soldiers' Verse, p. 60.

30 Thomas Carlyle, The Victorian Age, p. 186. 31 Albert C. Baugh, ed. Literary History of England, 2nd ed.

(New York~ Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), p. 1583; quoted in 'rhe Chapter 2

'l'HE CONFLICT: ll"IAGES OF DEATH

0 meet it is and passing sweet

To live in peace with others,

But sweeter still and far more meet

To die in war for others

"Ballad of Purchase Moneyt' 19141

by Wilfred Owen

Happy are men·who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not flowers

For poets' tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers •

• • • Dullness best solves 'rhe tease and doubt of shelling. . .

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns ••• Wilfred Owen: ttinsensibilitytt 2

29 30

The stark contrast in Owen's above quoted :poetry reflects the

inner transformation of a young man weaned on the myth of war's glory

and heroism. 'rhe change was WJ;ought by his own e~perience in the war,

&ld it was a change shared by many of his generation--the generation

called upon to be the heroes of World War I. Owen's initial inversion

of the 'blessings of war and peace in "~allad of Purchase ftloney," writ­

ten before bis participation on the front, seems guileless enough,

couched as it is in the syrupy abstraction of idealism. But no such

sweetness is attendant on his "Insensibility," which echoes like some

sardoni0 transliteration of the New Testament Beatitudes, and there is

nothing abstract about the feet of soldiers becoming "Sore on the

alleys cobbled with their brothers," or in the way Owen deals swiftly

w·Hh the poet who would equate the dying soldiers with fading summer

flowersa "Dullness best solves / 'l'he tease and doubt of shelling," he

continues, trying to relay what he knows so well to be the truth.

For, far from the energy-charged battle-cry of the eager warrior~ it

has been something else which he has encountered on the field: "P..nd

some cease feeling I ENen themselves or for themselves. 11 Where is the glory in the gore-filled foxhole? Only by dying in part himself can

the soldier continue the killing that is expected of him, can he bear

__•!Chance's strange arithmetic" in the shells flying about him. It is·

not of insensitivity that Owen speaks. The problem, he knows, is that

the soldiers ~~ sensitive. For this reason their survival depends

upon letting "their veins run cold," that they, 11'rheir senses in some

scorching cautery of battle I Now long since ironed, I Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned." That they have had to die in part in order

to survive puts them far apart from those "cursed .... dullards whom 31

no cannon stuns." Owen had confronted the myth head-on and, although the war itself was to claim his life, he sought to proclaim to others the truth he had discovered for~himself. It was vital for him to do so and the vitality breaks through in the concrete expressions of pain and futili-ty in his poetry of war's experience.

Siegfried Sassoon, too, is an example of the kind of transforma­ tion which su:p;Jorts .Arthur Lane's conclusion: "attitudes adopted toward the fact of war undergo a radical conceptual change in direct proportion to the distance--the experiential distance--from which it in viewed."3 Robert Graves, in recalling his first meeting with Sas- soon, in November, 1915, describes his reaction to Graves' war poetrJ:

He frowned and said that war should not be written about in

such a realistic way. In return, he showed me some of his

own poems~ One of them began:

Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,

Not in the woeful crimson of men slain. • •

Siegfried had not yet been in the trenches. I told him, in

my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change.his style.4

Sassoon, who was to emerge from the war a dedicated pacifist, did indeed change his style, and this change is gTaphically reflected in his poem, "Counter-Attack":

• • • clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench. The place was rotten with dead; green clums,y legs High-booted, sprawled and groveled along the saps;

And trunks, face downward in the sucking mud, Wallowed like trodden sand-bags, loosely filled; 32

And naked, sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads, slept in the plastering slime.5

Here we find no mention of;the soldier's well-earned rest, of his holy

sleep. Sassoon's stark description ,and his alliterative use of "s"

especially as it builds to 11 suckii"..g mud" and "sodden buttocks11 and

peaks j_n the phrase "slept in plastering ·alime11 force a powerful

visual contradiction to the traditional image of the dead soldier,

resting .in peace. In fact, Sassoon 1 s poetry breaks an accepted mold

of poetry in his very specificity, as he reveals the suffering human­

ity of the soldier/man--a suffering experienced and shared by the

poet himself. The violence and human degradation were indescribable

and .inexpressible--especially to the inexperienced majority who, still

far removed from the field of battle, continued to cultivate war's

heroic myth. But Sassoon became determined to describe and express

it, to bridge what he perceived to be an increasingly gaping chasm

between those on the home front and those on the battlefields of

World Wa.r I.

'fuere was indeed a chasm, a very real and very great chasm, which

had issued iu what Lane has termed 11 The 'two .&\glands' concept (which) 6 was a commonplace among soldiers" --a concept fed by jingoism and

propaganda at home, which devoured the ideals along with the flesh

of men fighting L'1. France. And behind the breach was the war-myth.

·Most of the young men, like Sassoon and Owen, had entered the "servicE!'

of their country under the spell of that myth and, both inwardly and

outwardly, they had at first given it new substance by their very

dedication to the humanity they sought to serve. This must be 33

remembered especially as it applies to the.poets in the early days of

that war, .for Herbert Read recalls to us the power which that . myth

held as the country entered World War. I-and he does not neglect the

influence .of literature in effecting that power:

It must be remembered that in 1914 our conception of war

was completely unreal. We had 'Childish memories of the

Boer War, and from these and from a general confusion of

KiplL~esque sentiments, we managed to infuse into war a

decided element of adventurous romance. War still appealed

to the imagination.7

It was precisely this "imaginationlf upon which the government depended L1 order to sustain the military machine. It was a warping of the ni.rnaginatior1 11 of which Owen speaks in his "Insensibility" when he tells us that only those soldiers who have lost it altogether have the power to endure. 'rhe warping of imagination-of that "power of formiP~ mental images of what is not present, of creating new ideas 8 by combining previous experiences, " -was systematically carried out on the home front. The people had to be fed the propaganda of the myth so that they would continue to feed the war-machine itself.

Indeed, the power of both remained so constant that the old alliance of war and moral integrity, which it sought to preserve, seemed as tight as it had been in Beowulf's time. It cannot surprise us, then,

that Sassoon's writing of the "naked 7 sodden buttocks," of dead soldiers; of the complicity of the Church in war's destructive hell;9 10 of a young soldier's suicide; or of the staid and respectable

Squire who "nagged and bullied" young men off to a war which he could 34 sit out at home, was considered not only· too specific and "too limit- 11 ed in scope" but also in bad taste and downright unpatriotic.

In "Break of Day in the Trenches" Isaac Rosenberg also includes the realitie.s of rats and risk rather than the mythical glory and enthusiasm which allegedly SlUTound the soldier in battle:

Only a live thing leaps my hand--

A queer sardonic rat-

• • •

Now you have touched this ~glish hand

You will do the same to a German-

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

Ironically, he contemplates the life that formed the rat and that which brought forth the lives of the soldiers who share the field. with him, and deliberates the chances of survival open to each--and the factors behind those chances: ·

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

StL~r~ eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder.

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.12

The 11 Break of Day 19 --the coming of the light to see the reality of war's horror--occurred all too late for those in the trenches. "What do you see in our eyes. . .?II. he addresses the rat, endowing 35

it with a possibility of perception which will never come from those back home• It is indeed ironic that the repulsive ro-dent has, on the battlefield, not only a greater chance of survival than the soldier who dares not "cross the sleeping green betweenfl in daylight, but also ' has more freedom, a greater charge of his own life, than he who was put in do:mi.TJion over all the earth, he who is now, in this struggle, and by the concept which allows the struggle to continue, bound 11 to the whims of murder. 11

It was strong language for the reader on the home front--language neither Welcomed nor well-circulated. And after the war there were still those who sought to keep before the public's eye images of the grim reality of warfare. Owen and Rosenberg had been claimed by the war. Sassoon, to whom Bates refers as the "Dean of :&J.glish war poets" r~~ained and, along with him, Roqert Graves, whose Goodbye to Al~

~ was an attempt to chronicle much of what he experienced physi­ cally and emotionally, much of what he witnessed. He, too, is ex­ plicit and, going beyond his ow'Il experiences, deals with the ultimate dehumanization of those who dehu.'Ilanized others by their power and inclu.des statistics which were to shock a civilian population which had been so caught up in answering the needs of the war machine that it had not fully considered the cost:

At least one in three of my generation at school died. • o •

The average life expectancy of an infantry subaltern on the

Western Front was, at some stages of the War, only about

three months; by which time he had been either wounded or

killed. 'rhe proportions worked out at about four wounded to every one killed. Of these four,. one got wounded ser-

iously, and the remaining three more or less lightly. The

three lightly wounded returned to the front after a few

'\>reeks or months of absence, and again faced the same odds.

Flying casualties were even higher ••• 13

Harsh statis.ticS··-but war was a harsh task-master; Graves thought that evrm an un\villing public had the right to know. For him, the vital image was .L"'l the reality; the reality ~ the image, the only image that mattered. He quoted a captain in a Line battalion of a

Surrey regiment: " 1 In both the last two shows I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody .. , , .. 14 aw f 1..u.. • • • But war's devastation and dehumanization are perhaps moat profoundly punctuated by the conclusion of his accou..11t of the final burial service he attended on the field: 11 This, as it turned out, was the l.ast dead man I saw in France and, like the first, (he) 1 had shot himself. n 5

Such revelation is all the more vital against the backdrop of

Sassoon's "Suicide in the Trenches11 and the reality underlying his

"The Hero.·" For who could bear to bring such news to the survivors of those soldiers who had taken their own lives. • • yet how compound- ed the myth became because the truth was not fully known. In the sorrow of Sassoon 1 s bereaved and courageous mother, as her "weak eyes .... had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy, / Because 16 he'd been so brave, her glorious boy," we see again what the myth sought to sustain. In this joy lay the motivation for mothers to continue sending. their sons off in "honor" to fight for their country. 37

And this very sense of honor begat silence on the part of the home­ coming soldiers: the horrors of the battlefield were not only inex­ pressible--they were inconceivable as well.

Yet there continued to be those who attempted to express the inex­ pressible, to describe the inconceivable, to relate in concrete terms, however inadequately, the real horrors of war. A..Yld although the expli­ cit nature of their poetry did not accomplish an explosion of the myth, it did provoke some disintegration of the heroic image of the warrior experience. 1'he agony of killing and being killed, reality for hun­ dreds of thousands of soldiers, became more forcefully concrete for millions of civilians through poetry which sought not so much to be poetry as it did to simply bear witness to the reality of war. As

Owen insisted in his Preface to his book of poems, "l"Jy subject is War 17 and the pity o.f War. The Poetry is in the pity. n It was the bold­ ness of such poets which helped open the eyes of many on the home front and which inserted into literature the grotesque imagery of the battle­ field in all its tragic dimension of reality--not the mythical hero, but the individual soldier/man: the panic-stricken youth, the weary and demoralized veteran, the battered flesh, the shattered limbs, the inglo:r;·ious.ly desecrated corpse. The expel:ience of war \ias finally por­ trayed with a vision of clarity and persistence by those who had under­ gone it. .And it was far different from the myth. By the time of the second World 11iar, mere school-children had learned 11 In Flanders Fields" than had read the poetry of either Owen or Sassoon, yet the exposure was there and it was to gain a momentum which, by World War II, re­ sulted. in such poetry as "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," by

Randall J"arrell: 38

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed. from its dream of life,

I woke tc black flak and the nightmare fighters .. wnen I died they washed me out of the t\rrret with a hose. 18

Jarrell was explicit--and beyond that, he addressed the myth on two counts. We see the State in his poem not in terms of a banded

~~d glorious brotherhood, seeking to preserve its liberty against a crushing foe; we see instead that "rough beastn of Yeats' "Second

Coming" which, "its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards

Bethlehem..... " It is a State which claims its members body and soul, asserting itself the Savior yet relegating to the pos.ition of

Sacrifice those whom it claims to save. It is the antitt1esis of for­ mer images of that idealized community on behalf of which men had for so long marched to their deaths. The dead airman had had no time in

·which to live, to develop, to dream, to mature: "my wet fur froze."

There is no sense of nurturing here, only bondage to a system.. "On ice" until needed, the soldier had "hunched in its belly," devoured from the begiru1ing by a heritage which had predestined his doom in centuries of warring--and in centuries of literature which glorified the death he was to die. In his powerful last line, Jarrell accents the dehumanization and depersonalization of the airman's death with the image of the hose, reminiscent of the serpent. The "washing" is hard.J.y the washing of regeneration, of rebirth; instead, it is the water of the Flood, of death--and its activity here of preparing the turret for its next victim prefigures the fate of him who is to follow, 39

at the directive, once again, of the State. In six stark lines,

Jarrell forces us to look directly at the futility of the man's death

-and at the culpability, rather than the glory, of the State which

sent him to that death. Jarrell, as had an elect body of poets

before him and since, knelv that .if the myth were ever to be unshrouded

and seen for what it was, t"fo fundamental "realities" had to be dea1t

"W.i th .in literature: the glo;sy_ of war's Cause and the heroism of death in battle ..

But men, the conceivers and heroes of war, its balladeers and

recorders in both myth and history, had too skillfully accomplished

the glorification of both Cause and Death in war. And each genera­

tion had been successively locked within the paradoxes which have ever faced the Brethels of his brotherhood--even those who protested. Per­ haps especially those who protesteq. 1rhe cry of the protesting poets,

a minority for millenia, was but a whisper almost drowned i.L"'1 the ba:t­ tle songs of a world which had too loP~ viewed war as an acceptable means of solving internatior~l disputes. That World War I marked the

significant tur·ning point in how war was described by its image makers and that that difference came out of the experience of those who de­

scribed it, is clear. It was also a turnir~ point for ths involvement of women, in both experiencing and protesting war.

1wenty-four centuries earlier, Aristophanes had spoken not only tPxough woman to protest war, but also succinctly for her:

Magistrate: It's all very well this carding and winding­

Women!

You haven't any idea of what war means. 40

Lysistrata (very deliberate and serious): We know just twice·

as well

We bore the sons

You took for soldiers.

Magistrate: Must you recall Such painful memories?

Lysistrata: Yes.19 r·t remains a painful message--one which the State must yet be reminded of. There have always been, it seems, too few to speak out against the State. There have been even fewer to witness on behalf of women and the sacrifices extracted of them by the god/myth, because for generations she was literally powerless to speak for herself.

She was, however, eventually to find a voice of her own. In- creasingly so. Selden Rodman, in: fact, asserts that Marianne Moore~ s

"In Distrust of Nerits11 was hailed by several poets as the outstand- ing war poem of the present war" (World War II). He sees its essen- tial value in its having "wrung a lesson of personal humility out of 20 the sacrifice of others, 11 but surely her meaning goes far beyond that simple statement. For, although her images appear lofty at times and Moore, for lack of personal experience, does not deal in the savage specificity which occupies poets like Sassoon and Owen, she attempts to treat the disease itself, rather than the symptoms:

Streng·thened to live, strengthened to die for

medals and positioned victories?

They're fighting, fighting, fighting the blind

man who thinks he sees,-- 41

who cannot see that tne enslaver is

enslaved; the hater harmed. • • •

0 alive who are dead, who are

proud not to see, 0 small dust of the earth

that walks so arrogantly. • •

The World's an orphans• home. Shall

we never have peace without sorrow?21

She does, as Rodman po.ints out, draw a thin hope from the agony of

\var: "If these great :patient dyings ••• can teach us how to live, these dyL'I'lgs were not wasted." But her hope is narrowly that, for she precedes it with "0 quiet form upon the dust, I cannot look and yet I must." Hope, then, is dependent upon the collective yet in­ dividual vision of those blind who continue to fight blind opponents in a world of those who are "proud not to see," who have been led to trust in "medals and positioned victories." Will we look at the suf­ fering-even our own-long enough .to recognize the truth-11 the en­ slaver is enslaved; the hater harmed, 11 --or will we ever \>lalk with eyes averted ~~d ignore the dead who lie at our feet: the dust we share, lying on the dust from which we came? It is the blindness of Sorley's "To Germany," "You are blind l.ike us,"22 but taken a step fu~ther. It .is the looking .inward for each of us which Moore sees as essential. The vision must be an individual one:

There never was a war that was

not inward; I must

fight till I h11ve conquered in myself what· 42

causes war, but I would not believe it.

I inwardly did nothing.

0 Iscariotlike crime!

Beauty is everlasting

And dust is for a time.

·rhe lesson Rodman cites is but the prologue for the step which lies at the central cause of war and is the theme of Moore's poem. Here is no simple indictment against the State, but against each individual member of its body, betraying itself and the body as a whole with war's false promise. "Iscariotlike," she says. "And we devour our­ selves? The enemy could not have made a greater breach in our defenses," because our glorification of war, the "medals and posi­ tioned victories," have blinded us to our own nature. We have betrayed ourselves. Perhaps, in·fact, the tragic hope lies mostly in the fact that "Beauty is everlasting / And dust"-even our own arro­ gant dust-"is for a time." That Moore's poem was distinguished was remarkable indeed for if historically the voice of the male poet who protested war was but a whisper among the shouts of glory, woman's voice was surely only a sigh.. She had remained outside the "business" of war altogether, and her presence in literature was peripheral. Still, she had not been totally silent. Among those who spoke on her behalf were mid­ eighteenth century contempories Jane Elliot and Lady Nairne~ Had they not been of the nobility, perhaps neither would have been able to publish her poetry, especially that which dealt with war. And the war poem of neither is remarkable for any significant deviation from the t:caditional image. Yet in each lies a subtle tr.aread that affirms 43

man's mortality rather than his glory in .the death of battle.

Lady Nairne's "The. Hundred Pipers" bears the marks of her genera­ tion's experience in the Jacobite. rebellion. It also, not surprising- ly, dwells on the glory of the Highland men:

Oh! our sodger lads looked braw, looked braw

Wi' their tartans, kilts an' a' ·an' a' ,

Wi' their bonnets, an' feathers, an' glittering gear23 and cele.bra-tes the Cause:

1 1 13cnnie Charlie the King o us a , hurrah!

She does not speak of death directly, but the question is there along with a quiet sense of the internal throbbing of the sweethearts and mothers as they see the you..J.g men march away:

Will they a' return to their ain dear glen?

Will they a' return, our Highland men?

Second-sighted Sandy looked fu' wae,

And mothers grat when they marched away.

It is the poet's alliteration in "Second-sighted Sandyu which draws focus to these last two lines of the second stanza of four, for it is her most pronounced use of this device in the poem and its prominence lends it even more emphasis. Couched as it is in the traditional speech glorifying war, the message appears even more poignant for its reflection of the powerlessness of the women left behind, with their questions.

In "The Flowers of the Forest," however, Jane i!:lliot writes· about 44 a war which took place more than two hundred years before her time.

It was a war celebrated later by Sir Walter Scott in his 289-line poem "Flodden J!'ield," which dwells mostly on details of the defeat of

James IV in that battle but which also includes reference to women in the person of Lady Clare, whom Blount, as he rides off to battle, ad­ monishes, "Bid your beads and patter prayer." Here the childish con­ notation of 11 patter" liru.:ed alliteratively as well as spatially to

11 prayer" underscores the insignificance of the woman's ·part, her in- ability to contribute anything essential to the battle. Its subtle demeaning of prayer also ironically elevates man and his warfare above

God, who wilJ perhaps stay behind, attendant on the woman's pattering while glorious man goe·s off to fight. Scott does, however, carry his portrait of woman's peripheral involvement further:

Ask me not what the maiden feels,

left in that dreadful hour alone:

Perchance her reason stoops or reels;

Perchance a courage, not her own, Braces her mind to desperate tone.--24

It is a consideration not often expressed in such poetry and one certainly not present in "Flodden," subtitled "The Ehd," by William

Ettmondstone Aytoun whose subject was that same battle. Concentrating on the loss of the young 11Monarch Clenching still his shivered sword" who lay S\U'rounded -by the glorious host of his loyal lords, Aytoun ends his much briefer poem of forty lines with a hint of the futility of the battle:

And the heavy clouds were settling 45

Over Flodden, like a pall.25

Hut his emphasis is unmistakably on the heroic loyalty given James IV by those who 11 All so thick. • • lay together" now in death, e:md .Aytoun. as was the custom slumberizes that death:

And I closed our hero's eyelids, And I left him to his rest.

A brief study of Jane Elliot's poem, whose subject is also the defeat at Flodden, is interestiP~ for its subtle contrast on several

:points to the 'b11o poems quoted above. Su.btitled "A Lament for Flod- den," he:r "Flowers of ~he Forest" refers literally to those young men of whom Owen speaks in his "Insensibility":

But they are troops who fade, not flowers 26 For poets' tearful fooling.

Elliot's "Lament" lingers on the sadness of the country maids whose men have been called away to battle:

I've heard the lilting at our ewe-milking,

Lasses a 1 lilting before dawn o' day; But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning-­

The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede awaye 27

1~e joys have gone out of life; the pastoral scene has faded as the color and fragrance of its Flowers have been plucked prematurely,.

Four of lill.liot's six stanzas end with the lament, "The Flowers of the

Forest are a 1 wede away," and the "flowe1.·s" are referred to in a fifth 46

stanza as well. Her metaphor is far from the weapon-brmldishing war­

rior image, traditional for the soldier. It reflects a sensitivity to the being of man instead of reducing him to a particular function

as hero. Its sad refrain was to be echoed in the question of a song of lament for another war, more than two hundred years later: "'where

have all the flowers gone'?n Nor was the answer very different: "Gene

for sold.iers, every one •••• ••

In moving beyond the lament of the maidens for the present sorrow

Elliot touches on th~ futility of the young men's death. She does not

treat it either as glorious or as sleep:

"The p-rime of our land are cauld in the clay. u

There is a sound and sense of harshness in the finality stressed by

the :proximity as well as the meanings of rrcauld" and "clay."

Harshness and finality are also present i.YJ. .Emily Dickinson's 11JI'Iy Triumph Lasted till the Drums";

My triumph lasted till the drums

Had left the Dead alone,

And then I dropped my victory

And, chastened, stole along

To where the finished faces

Conclusion turned on me--

And then I hated glory And wished myself were They! 28

Here we .ha.ve the lament of the surviving soldier himself--and more 47

than a lament in the words, "I hat>o/J my glory. 11 Dickinson, by framing the thought ip terms the hero was long schooled in, "triumph, 11 "vic­ tory," "glory11 and then taking us inwaro to. his 11 yhastened" self, accompl.ishes.our identification with his recognition of his torn self-the hero-killer. And like the sword of which she S}Jeaks, she drives her point sharply, lest we c.e:nsider repentance for war's slaughter sufficient compensation for those killed on either side:

A bayonet's contrition Is nothing to the Dead!

One can only speculate on her capitalizing of "Dead," as she had

"They! 11 There is no doubt that she meant the dead on either side of the battle, but perhaps her point goes further and includes the sur­ vivor whose partial inner death reflects not only the war he has lived through, but that which he must continue to wage within himself, the price he must continue to pay-the reason he "hated glory" and wished that he "were They!" Alice Ne;ynell, in "Summer in England 1914," addresses another group of survi'll'ors. They are the survivors of that "second" Ellgland­ the home front. In two lyrical stanzas, she describes the sun, the sky, the r1pening grain of a "Most happy year!":

Noon after moon was heavenly-sweet Stroking the bread within the sheaves,

Looking twixt apples and their leaves.

It is the world the young men had left behind, and she uses neither metaphor nor my·th to convey the reality of that which they found on the battlefields of France:

And while this rose made round her cup,

The armies died convulsed. And when

This chaste young silver sun went up

Softly, a thousand shattered men,

One wet corruption, heaped the plaL~

After a league-long throb of pain.

Flower followL~g tender flower; and birds,

And berries, and benignant skies

Made thrive the serried flocks and herds,--

Yonder are men shot through the eyes. Love, hide thy face

Ji'rom man's unpardsmable race! 29

The juxtaposing of the pastoral "chaste young silver sun" of life­ giving vitality to the 11 thousand shattered men, 11 of its coming up softly on the sodden heap of corrupted flesh on some foreign plain even as it rose and made thrive the "serried flocks and herds" back home, begins to effect the stark contrast which she brings to culmina­ tion abruptly in seven sharp words; "Yonder are men shot through the eyes." The eyes that desire to behold again the beauty of that coun­ tryside which shares the same sun and moon with the battlefield will never again see the beauty or the agony of either. Yet much more than that is conveyed in Meynell's explicit designation of the eyes.

Even more powe=ful than the inner blindness for which it calls us to account i.s the image of men whose eyes have been actually shot through. 49

ibere is no backing off for the reader here. The image pictures more graphically the sav~ery of war. It is different from a lost leg or a shattered arm; one shot through.the eyes has not only been killed but has suffered the brutal violation of one of the most personal and individual parts of our body, cf our identity. The bloody hollows of dead men's eye socke·ts are a shocking rebuttal to the empty spiritual vision of those who make war. And the eyes of the reader are called upon to see not only the savagery but our o-wn betrayal of the fight­ ing m~1 as we are preoccupied with the pastoral-beauty of our safety, so deaz·ly bought •

.Meynell does not mention hate, but her closing admonition to

Love, whose face is ever present in her pastoral scenes, tells us as much about hate as we need to know, if we have eyes to see. Her mes­ sage comes as the scenes of war's corruption are bonded to those of the countryside. And one can only wonder who ceased to see first­ he who celebrated the "Most happyyear!" of a bountiful harvest at home or he whose eyes were shot through on the battlefield in France.

It was ~lildred Aldrich, writing betwee~ the years of 1914-1919, who captivated a large audience with her letters describing tho life of a lone ru1d retired American woman living out the World War I years in the small French town of Huiry, about twenty miles from Paris, overlooking the ~~me River and a valley in which considerable fight­ ing ·took place. In her initial book of letters, she treats sensi­ tively the beginning upheaval, the hardships of the Germans living in

France at the beginning of the war as they were either exiled or in­ terned, the pain and confusion of separation as young men left for the army-all those human details one might expect a woman, especially a 50

woman writer, to see in a world gone out of focus.

Again, she does not describe the physical mutilation which Owen,

Sassoon, and others are determined to expose; she speaks instead of the emotional and spiritual, even the cultural mutilation, which war- fare perpetrates on people. Aldrich dwells on the relativity of the word "civilization." She finds irony in the fact that governments who profess a foundation in a religion which commands 11 Thou shalt not kill," ce.n "still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale slaughter, and that with weapons no so~called civilized man should ever have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to be made. u30 Her statement would seem a strong indictment against wart yet she is ambivalent: "I know that a long peace makes 1 for weakness in a race,"3 she asserts, echoing what one suspects is at the heart of the myth itself. This second statement follows soon after the first and although her seeming rationalization for war comes from a letter dated August 24, 1914, before she had really experienced war's cruelty? it expressed a belief never totally displaced by her later experience. At the end of the war she. could still observe, '~ar is not all tragic, any more than dying is, and without this war the

United States would never have known themselves nor. ~ • (been) welded into the great power they are yet to be. 1132 Such conclusions reveal an almost fierce nationalism which Aldrich would have been the first to acknowledge. It was a nationalism which fed on her eventually just as fierce hatred of the Germans, whom she foresaw as potentially even more dangerous in the years to come:

Why, in ten years from now (1929) or say fifteen (1934)

Germany will have a bigger army than she had in 1914, for, of course, none of us believe for a moment that she will not find a way to train them. 33

In her strong indignation over what she saw as Germany's escape from a just punishment, along with her rationale for war, we see the essence of the war-myth: vengeance and nationalism. Yet, in her writing as a whole we see, too, a woman who is sensitive to the devas­ tation war brings on so many counts, one who, in her final book When

JoP~EY Co~~la~hjng Home, ponders how the war experience will have changed the nation, will have changed Johnny. It is in this same book ti:lllt she tells her American friend back home tr...at she will hammer away at ·the tragedies of war like cannonade, "lest you forget • .,34 Iron­ ically, however, one senses that although she was in the line of in­ vasion she yet viewed the war figuratively as well as literally frcm the HilltoP. on the I

~uldred Aldrich's close friend Gertrude Stein, twenty-four years her junior, waS! to live through both World Wars. Although she ini­ tially sought refuge outside of France during the first war, she soon

.retun1ed to drive her own vehicle delivering medical supplies as a volunteer, and there has beenspeculation that the older woman's deter­ m.ined courage during those years prompted Stein, an American Jewess, to remain .in German-occupied France during the era of the Holocaust.

EJ.ler.1 Wilson, in The;r Named Ne Gertrude Ste:J.n, describes Stein's in­ volveme.nt in World War I in a way that renders her down-to-earth, practical approach to life: the need is there; let's get on with it.

Wilson reflects, as do all accounts including Stein's own, her joy in 52 I ' seeing the doughboys and her pride in their Americanism. It was a nationalistic pride which was tempered by the end of World War II, however, by Stein's keen insight into reality, when she quietly pre­ dicted of the American troops;

• • • among other things ••• they would all go home and stand in line to get jobs making gadgets, to make money so

that they could all stand in line to buy them.35

One cannot ignore the cynicism in such a statement. In seventy­ one years she had lived through the two worst wars in man's history; she had learned where the powers of government lay. She had also, how­ ever, no less than most of her contemporaries, assimilated the patent nationalistic view of war. .c.ven thou.gh much of "Prim Roses," written in 1918, may be o'bscure due to Stein's unique handling of the language, the poem in part reflects this nationalism:

We will pay them the villains.

Keep sober and tall.

We will be tall.

We are tall and strong.

We will take long.

·:rha.TJ.k you as we win. 3'7

'I'he poe:·m is. cited here not for any literary merit it achieves in deal.i.n.g \vi th warfare, but because it reveals the glue of the myth which held her to the spirit of nationalism in spite of the hesitant bope o.f a..-1y purposefulness she saw in the future of those men who would return home safely. The simplistic formula of the enemy's vil- 53

lainy, of our own courage and strength--our height-and last, but cer­ tainly not least, the incorporative "we" which identifies poet and reader with warrior, all are present in these six lines. It is an ironic fixing of that formula and one cannot help but feel that Stein felt· both the. irony and the force of it.

But neither "simplistic11 nor 11 cynical" can describe the sensitive accounts Stein renders of the behind-the-scenes effects of war on a civilian population living in the center of its tensions and psycholo­ gical brutality. It is significant that in Paris, :!!'ranee (1940) and

Wars I Have Seen (1945), the two works in which she dealt most expli­ citly and most extensively with the two World Wars, Stein avoided using her experimental and often obscure style and wrote instead in straight­ forward standard English. She appeared intent on the urgency of her subject and her message, and the images she has preserved for us re­ flect the various deaths of war's reality in yet another dimension.

Especially aware of the woman's burden in war, she records trag­ edies such as that of a woman who had borne a son in Paris in 1916, amidst the bombing, whose grandson is now born in Lyon, amidst the bombing of 1940, and she points out:

It certainly is true that a very considerable percentage of

the relatively few Frenchmen killed in this war were the only

sons of widowed mothers who had had their husbands killed in

the last war. 37

It was a circumstance not unusual, yet not contemplated by very many--unless perhaps by those widowed mothers themselves or those fig­ ured by Sassoon's sorrowful mother whose weak eyes "brimmed with joy" 54 at the bravery of her dead son, the woman who, as Sassoon had sought to show us, had been well-schooled in her sacrifice. In Stein's writ- ings we sense that the eyes of the widowed and now sonless mothers are not so weak after allv They have been powerless for the most part, but theL~ vision is no less keen for all of that, and there is no quiet or courageous thrill in the agony of seeing thei~ boys march off to war or take to the hills to fight in the Underground. Neither is there any in seeing those who are left behind carted off to Germany during World War II to work in munitions factories, the central bomb- i."lg targets of the Allies. In this Sassoon had been correct: his sorrowful mother's eyes had had to be weakened for she could not allow her~el.f to see the truth and still feed the war-machine. Her blurred vision was her only hope in the face of death's claim upon her son.

But Stein shows us that the opposite was just as true. Women in wartime had to keep their vision, internal and external alike, keenly alive if they were to survive the brutalities inherent in Occu- pation, if they \'/ere to keep the farms going, the factories producing,

--all the time surviving the whims and dictates of the Occ~pier, treading the fine psychological line of maintaining their sanity while preserving th,?ir lives. She relates the strict rules 1n having to carry thei.J-:- "papers" with them always, "even on a trip to the store to 38 buy bread, u, ,;;nd the constant threat of bej.ng taken away at any mo- ment at the whiirt of the Occupier. It was the psychological and spir- itual weight of their being occupied themselves-not just their land- that lias e'1en heavier than any physical hardship that that were called on to ~ndure, and this was the death image Stein sot~ht to convey.

It was an inner death, sometimes not visible exten1ally because of 55

what was left to be endured. But it was a death of self, nonetheless.

She enables us.to see that the common experience of billeting soldiers was itself fraught with theimplicit threat,ofviolence, violation, and looting~ especially since most households contained only women, a."ld we recognize that for Stein, an American Jewess, the potential d.angers·were even greater .. One can only contemplate what -this meant for her on the occasions during World War II when she was forced to billet both German and Italian soldiers at various times in her home.

Early in Wars I Have Seen, Stein quotes William James, her for- mer professor at Radcliffe College, as saying that the will to live is accompanied by the will to destroy.39 But she cannot quite accept war as a necessary result of that combination. Rather, she blames our own blindness, as did so many of her contemporaries. And partially she

-blames the civil servants:

1~e thing that is most interesting about government servants

is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they

really do believe what they are supposed to believe, which

has a great deal to do with wars and wars being what they

are. • • • And so naturally they believing what they are

supposed to believe make it possi'ble for the country to

think they can win a war that they cannot possibly win, and.

so they go to war, and all because the public servants really

believe wr..at they are supposed to believe they really do. 40

Although we cannot deny here the presence of the traditional justifi­ cation of war-namely that it be "winnable"-neither can we ignore her implicit charge to all who follow blindly the directives of those in 56

power. 1here is suggested immorality in either the wielding or the yielding of such power. "It is pretty wonderful and pretty awful to have been intimate and friendly .and proud of two American armies in 41 France apart only by twenty-seven years, u she observed at the close of World War II. And yet, as she anticipated the soldiers' return home, she concluded sadly that the war "game" would ineV'i tably be passed down to the little boys of a new generation as a pastime. For even then, as the big battle-guns of .l!.'urope had finally been stilled and she heard the voices of children laughing and playing outdoors once again, she found it ironic that their laughter was punctuated by the "pow.m po:mm pomm pomm pomm pomm porum pomm" as they playfully killed one another-the "enemy. 11 57

Notes

1 J. I"l .. Gregson, Poetry of the First World War (London: iliw.

Arnold, Publ., 1976), p. 15. 2 c. Day Lewis, ed., The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New

York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1963), pp. 37-38.

3 Lane, p. 57. 4 Robert Graves, GOodbye to All That, revised, 2nd ed. (Garden

City, .New York; Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 174-175.

5 Siegfried Sassoon, "Counter Attack" in Poems of War Resistance, ed. Scott Bates (New York: Grossman Publ., 1969), p. 136. 6 Lane, p. 99. 7 Sir Herbert Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience, quoted by

Gregson, :p. 9.

8 Webster's New World Dictionary, New, revised, David B. Guralnik ed. (New York: Popular Library, 1979), p. 300. 9 Siegfried Sassoon, "They" in Out Of Battle, ed. Jon Silkin

(London: Oxford Univ. Fress, 1972), pp. 140-141. 10 Siegfried Sassoon, Selected Poems, rpt. (London: Faber &

Faber, 1976), p. 28. 11 Lane, p. 25. 12 Bates, p. 138. 13 Graves, P• 59. 14 Graves, P• 186. 15 Graves, P• 243. 16 Lane, p. 102 17 ' Lewis, p. 31. 18 Randall Jarrell, "The Death of The :Ball Turret Gunner, 11 in

War and the Poet, p. 200. 1 9 Aristophanes, Llsistrata, Scene 1. tr. by Patrie Dickinson,

Bates, p. 76"

ro Selden Rodman, Richard Eberhart, eds. War and the Poet, p. 1 64 21 I"'.t8.rianne Noore, "L11 Distrust of Nerits," in War ~~d the Poet,

p. 164.

22 Sorley, 11 To Germany," A Banerjee, Snirit Above Wars ( New Delhi,

India: Nac:Nillan Co. of India, Ltd., 1976), p. 28. 2 3 Lad.y Nairne, "The Hundred Pipers," :Butler, pp. 158-159 .. 24 Scott, "Flodden Field, 11 Butler, pp. 78-87.

25 Aytoun, "Flodden," Butler, pp. 88-89. 26 Lewis, P• 37.

27 Elliot, "The Flowers of the lt,orest," Butler, pp. 90-91. 28 .Emily Dickinson, ".IVJy Triumph Lasted till the Drums," Eberhart,

pp. 107-·1os. 29 . ' Al~ce Meynell, "Summer In England 1914," ed., P. Dickinson

Soldiers' Verse, p. 41.

30 ~il~ced Aldrich, AHilltop on the Marne (New York: Grosset &

Dunlap, 1915), p. 80. 1 3 A Hilltop on the :N!!_~, Po 81 2 3 Mildred Aldrich, When JoraL'1Y Comes Marchine Home (Boston:

Small Maynard & Co., 1919), Pa 73.

33 When Johnnl Comes Marching Home, p. 268.

34 When Johnny Comes Marchir~ H~~' p. 11. 59

35 Ellen Wilson, They Named Me Gertrude Stein (New York: Far­ rar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), p. 122.

36 Gertrude Stein, Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces (1913-1927)

(New Haven:· Yale University Press, 1953), p. 212. 37 Gertrude Stein, ~rs I Have~ (New York: Random House,

1945), P• 135.

38 Wars I Have Seen, p. 187.

39 Wars I Have Seen, p. 64. 40 wars I Have Seen, PP• 52-53. 41 Wars- I Have Seen, P• 247. Chapter 3

THE TES'rAMENT:

VERA BRITTAIN--REALITY AN~ THE ROAD TO RECONCILIATION

Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years,

Recalling words

Whose echoes long have died,

A..?J.d kind moss grown

Over the sharp and blood bespattered stones

Which cut out feet upon the ancient ways. * * * * * * * * * But who will look for my coming?

Long busy days where many meet and part;

Crowded aside

Remembered hours of hope;

.And city streets

Grown dark and hot with eager multitudes

Hurrying homeward whither respite waits. * * * * * * * * * But who will seek me at nightfall?

Light fading where the chimneys cut the sky;

Footsteps that pass,

Nor tarry at my door.

And far away, Behind the row of crosses, shadows black

6o 61

Stretch our long arms before the smouldering sun. * * * * * * * * But who will give me my children? "The Superfluous Woman" 1 by Vera Brittain, July, 1920

nr have tried to show how experience is bo-th particular and

universal. • • • In this sense my story reflects an epoch in 2 history."

World War I has been observed, experienced, and related by a number of women writers, but its uniquely female interpretation by one who had nursed the wounded and dying in field hospitals and suf­ fered the hollow ache of deep personal loss herself, has come to us from the British author Vera Brittain. Indeed, she has given us a unique perspective on the tragedy of war--and not only as it affects woman in particular. She helps us also to see those steps which we as a human family must take to gain a broader vision of our destiny together--in peace. A young, keenly sensitive idealist with a profound passion for the practical, Br.i ttain was in her first year of reading English at

Oxford's Somerville College when the first War broke out in Al~st,

1914. Ten months later at Devonshire Hospital she began her nursing

"careero" T'nis coice of a healing ministry, to serve a wounded humail­ ity in a wartime crisis, reflected the nature of a woman whose writ­ ings eV<ually were to be coilcerned not only with symptoms of war but with the disease itself. Her commitment to the healing of mankind led her finally to dedicate her literary abilities to this end, and 62

her life itself is a testament of faith to the struggle she waged.

"From the end of the First World War, 11 she writes, "I had seen my

work ever more clearly as an attempt to enlarge the 'consciousness of

humanity.'"3 This perception is constantly reflected in her literary

testament 1 a testament well worth examining by a generation wr..ich

today faces that same threat.of dehumanization ~,d devastation which

twice clouded her life. For today's pot~~tial cloud is filled with enough destruction to end forever whatever testament the human family hopes to bequeath to its posterity. Surely, if there were ever a time

to deal "YI'i th the disease rather than to re-examine the symptoms, it is

today, when government leaders are proposing the possibility of a

"1imited11 nuclear war.

Brittain's realization of war as a useless tradition which held

no hope for future peace was not a reflexive realization. At the close

of Chapter •rwo in Testament of Youth, having traced her monumental

struggle first to convince her parents of the merits of an Oxford ed­

ucation for herself and then .. to sufficiently fill the gaps in her

provincial formal education in order to qual~fy at Somerville, Brittain

records her initial reaction to the outbreak of World War I: "It is

not, perhaps, so very surprising that the War at first seemed to me

an infuriatLJg' personal interruption rather than a world-wide catas­

trophe. ,.4 If such a statement reflects the self-centeredness of a youngt strong-willed, provincially raised prospective Oxford student, who saw for herself a glorious literary future, it also foreshadows

the intense sense of personal identity which eventually led her to dis­

regard not only the glories of that literary light she had hoped to

become, but even her personal safety. For her perspective of the war was to be profoundly &~d perman­

ently changed:

God said, "Men have forgotten l"le:

~he souls that· sleep shall wake again,

And blinded eyes be taught to see."

So since redemption comes through pain

He smote the earth with chastening rod,

And brought destruction's lurid reign;

But where His desolation trod

The people in their agony

Despairing cried, "There is no God. n5

Wi:th stark simplicity, "August, 1914" highlights one of the basic

causes of the disease known as War: that scapegoatism which can be

directed eithe:r at the enemy or at God, depending upon the disposition of the accuser.

Still a young woman of twenty, sheltered and of conse~vative

background, Brittain expresses here sentiments held by many people-­

"good': citizens, "obedient and loyal 11 --throughout the long, warring history of mankind: War is a sign of God's displeasure, a tool of his

judgn1ento She also includes the irony of man's interpretation of that

judgment. For here it is not destruction that the God she speaks of wills, that bloody and tormenting death of body or soul which ia the

issue of war.. Rather, he hopes to restore life to the "souls that

sleep" and sight to the "blinded eyes.n Yet, as man teaches, as man has been taught, "redemption comes through pain" and so the earth, 64

and man, if he is to be 11 saved," must experience the "lurid reign" of

God's "chastening rod. 11 In the simplicity of these first six lines we fjnd. both the source of the spiritual hope that man has gleaned from the agony of war and the end of his relentless search to justify his warring. For he has a long history of consciously warring vicar­ iously for God. In effect, in the experience that is war "redemption" is in progress through God 1 s "chastening rod," and furthermore, we ourselves are the extensions of that "rod" as we bring his 11 justice" to the enemy. Little wonder that a sensitive twenty-year-old woman nurtured in the Protestant soil of .fugland, the great empire builder, should have assimilated such beliefs or that she could have encapsu­ lated a misdirected faith and its tragic potential so succinctly at a time when England's pulpits pleaded for troops. But she did blame

God; she was as blind as the rest of her country to the essence of her statement,

In her final three lines we are transported back to &len's end, where man 1 s assumption of God 1 s prerogative results in a final alien­ ation, not only man from man, but man from God. In the nine brief lines, then, Brittain captt~es the essence of the myth: God's right­ eousness and our potential extension of it by acting out his dest~Ac­ tive reign essentially justify and sometimes even demand war. But she also takes us beyond that myth, into the results of a "redemption" that leaves little but the agony and despair of the ultimate desola- tion: "There is no.God."

One senses that what Bri·ttain creates here is an expression not only of what she has observed in those about her, but also what she h2rself felt deep inside. It was a cry that seems to have echoed throughout the painful years of her youth as she recalled sweetheart, brother, and intimate friends lost to that "chastening rod" which a

God whom she could not understand refused to withdraw. And laying man's L'"lhumani ty to man before the throne of a seemingly uncaring, cruel, or impotent God, the young woman found herself alienated and unbelieving. "I was ••• not even sure that I believed in God," she said, as late as 1937.6

Nevertheless, two years after "August, 1914," and reflecting a maturer evaluation of war, came "A Militar-.r Hospital":

A mass of human wreckage, drifting in

Borne on a blood-red tide;

Some never more to brave the stormy sea

Laid reverently aside;

And some with love restored to sail again

For regions far and wide.7

Written while she was serving in 1st London General Hospital, its tempered tone and its focus on the suffering remnants of the battle- field derive from Brittain's nursing experience. The poem also con- tinues to reflect what appears to the nurse as the seemu1g powerless- ness of the individual. Indeed, the "mass of human Wl.'eckage" describes a deindividualized, compounded humanity, molded by conscription of both will and body into vessels which will sail the stormy seas vicar­ iov.sly for the Ship of State, berthed securely at home. "Drifting," the "blood-red tide" and ubornen underscore the feeling of helpless- ness in the wake of the gargantuan flood that is the struggle between nations dedicated to war. But surely the metaphor itself rose direct- 66

ly from her experience of crowded hospital wards ·in which ·she saw wave after wave of battered and mutilated young men descend in numbers too great to either house or care for adequately. Against the larger back­ grotu~d of her nursing experience as it is explicitly detailed in Testa­ mentJ?!_]"outh8 it is clear that the phrases, "Laid reverently aside," and "with love restored," emanate from that inner spirit of her love for mankind •1fhi.ch had not only persuaded her youthful heart to blame

God for war, but which, more significantly, later impelled her to a life-loP~ work of peace-making• justice, and reconciliation.

For her concern, even during periods of war, was not to be re- stricted to the suffering within her own l~~d or to those of her nation's allies, those who embraced fundamentally the same ideology as she. An early example of that universality which she strove to perfect in her person as well as in her writings as an avenue toward world

:peace is "Tne German Ward, "9 which she wrote in France, in 1917. She will, she confesses in this poem, always recall the "pallid faces and half-suspicious eyes," the "bitter groans, the laboured breath••• the weary tedious cries" of the enemy. "Sights and smells.of blood and wounds and death" were as much a part of this nursing experience for :Brittain as they had been when she had ministered to the wounded from her own country, But within this caring for the German wounded lay the seed of her future commitment to reconciliation:

For I learnt that human mercy turns alike

to friend or foe

When the darkest hour of all is creeping nigh,

jL~d those who slew our dearest, when their lamps were

burning low, 67

Found help and pity ere they came to die.

In contrast to war's self-perpetuating "conscience" which demands

vengeance, we see here a higher steward of human. morality, a "mercy"

which, if fo.llowed to its ultimate conclusion, would reinterpret the

"chastening rod", of a desolate "redemption" to the "help and pity"

which ·..;·ould themselves light the faces of men for one another and cast

the shadows foraver behind them. Brittain, in a much later work,

still recalls the profound impact which nursing enemy soldiers had

upon her:

After seeing civilizations wrecked ••• I had dedicated my-

self in the months following the Armistice to a future which

was less a 'career' than a devotional crusade.

It had begun with the realisation, in a German prison camp at Etaples, that the basic fact of men's humanity is

more important than the political differences which some-

times divide them. • • • I had become convinced that there

were certain ideas, however difficult to realise and pro-

mote, which could save mankind from its suicidal follies.

And I believed that,. through experiment, patience, and the

integrity b.y which the artist transcends the cruder expedi-

ents of the propagandist, I could learn to embody those

ideas in my work with s1~ficient conviction to make others . 10 think "&OOe

r.rhe goal was a worthy one. But it depended, perhaps, as much on

her patience with the growth of tmderstanding in others as the deter- mined sense of coliiDlitment within herself.. ]'or her own awakening had 68

not been immediate, she realized. It had come harshly and slowly through a growing awareness of suffering, through the loss of her own loved ones,- and through tedious and painful hours, weeks, months, of nursing. Her diary at the beginning of August, 1914, reveals a young woman engrossed in tennis, one who kept company with a band of youth

"wrapped up in our careers or our games or our love-affairs. 1111 Yet, some weeks later, as she remained still on the periphery of war, a restless syirit stirred within as she contemplated the international situation against the background of "shimmering autunm days":

• • • very hard to believe that not far away men were being slain ruthlessly, and their poor disfigured bodies heaped to­

gether and crowded in ghastly indiscrimination into quickly

provided common graves as though they were nameless vermin •

• • • It is impossible to find any satisfaction in the thought

of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay;

the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be

English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilisation~ 12

Suxely, she was to realize later, just as she held the seed that sensed humanity's potential corporateness within herself, so must others. Tne task before her, then was to bring as much of that co­ lective seed to fruition before the propagandists could, as they had so often before, destroy it or pervert its wholesomeness. And, for her, this task became indeed a "devotional crusade11 which was to last a lifetime. For she came to realize that not only propagandists had caused a mutation in that seed; much of l!.hgland' s great literary 69

heritage was also responsible by its glorifying of death in battle and its heroiz±ng of the warrior by whom that death was inflicted. Her goal was to become not only to help man see the fallacy of the myth, but to help him see beyond its camouflaged death-shrouds to the hope of realizL"'lg his full potential as a member of an Ll'ltegrated human family. Certainly, then, Brittain would have taken issue with c. s. Lewis' estimation

After reading these books, I began to ask: "Why should these

young men have the war to themselves? Didn't women have 70

their war as well? They weren 1 t, as these men make them',

only suffering wives and mothers, or callous parasites, or

mercenary prostitutes. Does no one remember the women who

began their war work with such high ideals, or how grimly

they carried on when that flaming faith had crumbled into

the grey ashes of disillusion? Who will write the epic of

! ' the women who went to war? • • • Besides, I see things other than they have seen, and some of the things they perceive I see differently.15

This realization, which initially undergirded the point of view

. in TestaJ!lent of Youth, was to become indicative of most of her books ..

Her aim was universality, yet she realized how lacking the feminine

perspee-Hv-e----was--f-r

tive which, as a matter of integrity, she bonded to her interpretation

of life and to her goal of a world at peaca. It was a perspective

which she became determined to supply while neither apologizing for

its particularly feminine insight nor condemning its masculine coun­

terpart as short-sighted. She was conscious of the supreme sacrifice

exacted of many thousands of men in war, but having lost all who were

dearest to herself only sharpened her awareness of the futility as well as the fact of that sacrifice. She was also aware that she

could not write so graphically of the battlefield as had those poets

and novelists who had fought and bled--and died there. Yet her years

of serving-in the most profound sense of that word-as nurse to the

sick, the wounded, the dying, to the battered and bloody remnants of

soldiers she had seen embark on trains to carry them to the front,

had given .Brittain herself a deeper \Ulderstanding of woman's spirit 71 and sense of self-sacrifice during extreme crises-and the credentials to write about the war on behalf of women. This, too, was to be re­ flected .in her writings.

In late September, 1916, Vera Brittain journeyed aboard the

H.M..H.S. n:sritannic 11 to Nalta, where she served until May 22, 1917.

On Murdos, where she changed ships, she comppsed the reflective lament

"The Sisters Buried at 1emnos. 11 "We were told that on the island are

·the graves of tl->..ree Canadian Sisters, who died nursing in the camp hospital there,u she says simply, in introducing·the poem:

0 golden isle set in the deep blue ocean,

With purple shadows flitting o'er thy crest,

I offer thee my reverent devotion

For some who on thy bosom lie at rests

Seldom they enter into song or story;

Poets praise the soldier's might and deeds of war,

But few exalt the Sisters and the glory

Of Women dead beneath a distant star.

No armies threatened in that lonely station. • •

But heat and hllilger, sickness and privation. • •

Cou~ageously they stayed to meet their hour. • •

No blazing tribute through the wide world flying,

No rich reward of sacrifice they craved;

'rhe only meed of their victorious dying

Lies L~ the hearts of humble men they saved. 72

Who when in light the final dawn is breaking,

Still faithful, though the world's regard may cease,

Will honour, splendid in triumphant waking,

'l"he souls of women, lonely here .at peace.

0 golden isle with purple shadows falling

Across thy rocky shore and sapphire sea,

I shall not picture these without recalling

'i'he Sisters sleeping on the heart of thee! 16

As poetry "The Sisters-" reflects neither the style nor the di­ mension which Brittain was to achieve later. Its clear and simple lines reveal her youth as well as her preoccupation with the direct and clear-cut responsibilities of nursing. And underlying it one de­ tects her haunting fear of dying herself, either on the ship, ( fear which she expresses in Testament of Youth) or on land, somewhere "be­ neath a distant star." :But the poem stands as a tender tribute to those whose burdens she has shared, whose obscurity she has begun to lament, and whose death she not only mourns but seems to feel a part of. In the vision of the "purple shadows flitting" one senses the ghostly r8mn?~t of the ministering nurses, now but shadows themselves, who live only in the memory of those they served. • • or in that of a young woman dedicated to that same service who offers now, on their behalf, her "reverent devotion."

B\lt once again, just as war's consequences are the fruit which she finds so pungently bitter, the cause of war is the soil from which her lament blossoms. "Poets praise the soldier's might and deeds of war" with "blazing tribute through the wide world flying." How well 73 ~

she knew the :power of that praise, the impetus of that tribute. "If

you could choose your death," young Vera :Bri ttai.-·l had asked her sweet-

heart, barely five months after he had netted six out. of seven literary

scholastic honors awarded at the Uppingham' Speech Day of July, 1914,

~'would you like to be killed in action?" "Yes, 11 he had responded, "I

should. I don't want to die, but if I must ·r should like to die that

way. Anyhow I should hate to go all through this war without being

wounded at all; I should want something to prove that I had been in

action .. "17 Surely the cumulative cultural effect of the poet's praise

and the world 1 s tribute is, after all, something we must come to grips

with, if even this young scholar, initially a peace-loving budding

poet, could assert by the end of February, 1915, that he was impatient

to be in "a place where men are and do not merely play at being 18 soldiers. n

And what was it that had called the Sisters, then, the dead women who rested now beneath earth 1 s bosom, or any of those Sisters who

"seldom••• enter into song or story" whom "few exalt ••• and •••

glort"? 1'he courage of these had been challenged no·t by threatening

armies, but by "heat and hunger, sickness and privation," and by ·t;he

trying weariness of meeting the emotional as well as the physical needs of the men whom they had nursed. This much young Brittain knew al- ready from her own expe~ience. The loneliness, the unacclaimed per-

severing through various desperate levels of conditions, the urgent need of personal care coupled with the necessity of not becoming per-

sonally involved--these were the essential elements of such nursing.

And beyond all of these came the vital necessity of becoming accus- tamed to the battered and shattered bodies and spirits of the young 74

men given into their care.

''Women get all the dreariness of war, and none of its exhilara­

tion,u19 she ha'd written in the autumn of 1914, two years before her

journey to I1alta. Such a statement reveals that y<:>Ung women, too

intelligent, literary, and peace-loving young women, had also accepted

the myth. Years later, she was able to reflect more objectively on

her early days of nursing, having gained some perspective as to her

motivation. "l!.very task, from the dressing of a dangerous wound to

the scrubbing of a bed-mackintosh, had for us in those early days a

sacred glamour which redeemed it equally from tedium and disgust. 1120

Withi."l that 11 sacred glamour" was the feminine portion of the myth~

Women, too, could have a share in the awesome na·tional Destiny. The

only fear amor~ young nursing candidates, according to Brittain, was

t:r..at they might be judged inadequate in some aspect of their training

and therefore be rejected as "unsuitable" for service. The fear of

such rejection, and the general wartime enthusiasm of the youth, were

both observed and exploited by the military authorities.

Eut by the time she sailed for Malta and reflected on the graves

at Le11lllOSJ he:.:.' vision had seen far beyond the "sacred glamour." From

the depths of her own spirit, from the reaches of her own experience,

she had perceived the true dimension of the qtuet sacrifice of the

Sisters. She knew that they "craved" neither 11 blazing tribute t}:-l..rough

the wide world flying, 11 nor "rich reward of sacrifice. 11 By the time

Brittain wrote 11 The Sisters-," two years into the War, the ,young man

she had hoped to marry already lay buried in France.- And perhaps

---through-that·-··gT-eat-1oss-,-more than-through any-other--single-consequence­

of the war up ·to that time, she sensed that the real reward for the 75

nurses could lie only "in the hearts of humble men they saved."

~ne quiet tone of the poem emphasizes not only the contrasting

:role played in the war by men and women, but also the poem's spiritual

theme. It was a theme which was ·to continue to develop throughout the

writer's life: the power of resurrection found in love's sacrifice.

For through the .healing efforts.,of the Sisters, Brittain knew well

that many of the wounded had been literally redeemed from the grave

and also that, even when bodies could not respond, spirits did, and

young men died more peacefully. Such was the manner of her own heal­

ing work. She had come to believe that only through healing and re­

conciliation could that sense of human family be discovered and nour­

ished. Her vision of the resurrected nurses whom the "humble men"

will still faithfully "honour," is founded on that belief.

·Indicative of Brittain's writings, "The Sisters Buried at Lemnos"

acknowledges the reality of war, our motivation and our suffering, but

it also moves beyond that. It carries us past the hostility and the

heroism of killing with all their temporal consequences, to the heal­

ing, to the human sense of service, and therefore to a consciousness

of the eternal.. Paradoxically, although killing is absolute, healing

is more powerful.

So that man's basic view of life might reach beyond the "glory"

of a national honor embodied in the "heroism" of an individual's war­

ring valor, she sought to insert into the myth this same sen.se of re-

_conciliation, of healing. Her message u1cluded the tenet that even the

"valiant11 can reach out to the broken, to those "less courageous," in

the healing of a broken world. In fact, she concluded in her poem,

"To A V .C.," written in September, 1918, this reaching out was es- 76

:pecially incumbent upon the valiant"

Because your feet were stayed upon that road

Whereon the others swiftly came and passed,

Because the harvest you and they had sowed

You only reaped at last,

'Tis not your valor's meed alone you bear

Who stand the hero of a nation's pride

For on that humble Cross you live to wear

Your friends were crucified.

'J:hey shared with you the conquest over fear,

Sublime self-disregard, decision's power;

But death, relentless, left you lonely here

In recognition's hour~

Their sign is yours to carry to the end;

The lost reward of gallant hearts as true

.As yours they call~d their leader and their fr.iend

Is worn for them by you. 21

Once more we see the knitting together of the hero's glory and the nation's pride. But again, as always with Brittain, we see be- yond, to the responsibility of the hero to regard himself not as an isolated spirit of courage, but as a member of the human community.

T'ne "harvest ••• they had sowed" together, he alone was left to reap.

The death which claimed his friends, he alone survived. She neither commends the V. C,. for his heroism, nor does she deny it: "'Tis not your valor's meed. alone ••• 11 but the poem certainly lacks acclaim 77

for the glory of the warrior.

It is interesting to note ·that even in a period of religious tin-

belief, Brittain uses the image of the crucifixion in connection with

the Victoria Cross which must have long .since lost any personal re-

lationship to that Prince of Peace sacrificed so long ago to "a nation's pride." But use it she does: "friends., •• crucified."

Crucifixion was execution--by the State. Still, she does not exhort

the recipient to throw away the reward of a misdirected humanity that finds glory in the senseless slaughter of one another. Rather, she reminds him of the price of the reward he now wears and of his re- sponsibility to bear it for those lost "gallant hearts as true" as

lftheir leader and their friend."

The im:plici t admonition in the final four lines of "To A V .C." was integral to the young woman' !3 .basic philosophy and formed the kernel of her novel Born 1925, written thirty years later. It was a novel through which Brittain sought to exemplify a larger kind of heroism than that of the decorated soldier whose homecoming signals the end of his service to his country. Fairly autobiographical, its focus is "the Reverend Robert Carbury, V .C~" who, out of painful re- morse for the killing which resulted in his being awarded this highest honor, beca.me an Anglican Vicar, dedicating his life to the service of humanity ~~d the seeking of world peace. That the young clergyman was to embody much of the intrepid Anglican peace-activist of the early

1930's, Ca11on 11Dick" Sheppard, is foreshado\led early in the novel as young ":Bob11 Carbury was said to have "a spirit that, during an impor-

I tant period of London's history, was to endow the dry bones of Angli- canism with colourful life. 1122 78

In the novel, that "important period of London's history" was to be the Second World War, during which Carbury would literally work him­ self to death in service to his fellow man and in,the cause of Peace.

EJ.s faith, no less than his stance and his self-sacrificing commitment

:reflected, that of Canon Sheppard, the man "whose example," Vera :Brit­ 2 tain says·later, 11 had changed my spiritual.perspective." 3 Canon

Sheppard himself did not live to see ~land's entry into World War II, but his death in 1937 was to leave her with art even deeper commitment to the principles of pacifism and reconciliation. "When a lead.er dies,tt she reflected later, "his followers must become leaders them- selves. .. •

Unlike the decorated soldiers of 11 To A V .c.n and Born 1925, Brit­ tain herself emerged from World War I with neither merit for valor nor deformity from wounds. Or so it appeared. But within her had accumu-· lated. that vast wealth of courage and honor which she had associated. with the three dead Sisters at Lemnos: an ample meed which no military award could have matched. It was the well-spring of a commitment which sent her back to Oxford to read History instead of English, in order to assist her in her work for world peace, and a well-spring which was to nourish her in her concern for the human family as a whole for the rest of he:r life ..

Nor were her wounds less real for their having been of the spirit instead of the body. Her world at Oxford was changed completely by the interruption of years and the age difference she was to encounter be­ tween herself as a returning student and those young women just enter­ ing its academic world.. But these were changes whose impact she could easily have obviated. What made it a somber world, heavy and gray with 79

old memories of anticipation, was that neither her sweetheart nor her

brother.would now share its adventurous challenges with her. Now, Ox­ ford. was often a miserable chore because their mute absence kept her

loss L~tensely and continually before her.

But alienation at Oxford was to come from another quarter as well.

If she had thought that the irony of war was. already complete by its

L~volvement--at times to the extraction of the ultimate sacrifice--of those who protested its brutality and horror, she was to find another dimension to that irony on her return to Oxford. · In "The Lament of the

Demobilised~" :published in Oxford Poetry in 1920, she reviews bitterly

the "welcome" received in academia by those who had served their coun~

try. No one cared to discuss the war. Neither the other students nor

the facul-ty seemed aware of any particular benefit they might obtain or of ~~y peculiar need of the returnees which might be met by such discussion. Rather, they treated those few who did dare return to

th~ir studies, who did dare to bridge that gapism chasm of lost time and nightmarish experience, as though such students were oddities eithe::: because they had absented themselves from so worthy a pursu1t as an education at Oxford, or because of the experiences themselves.

"The Lament--" posts Brittain: s protest" .

"}'our years," some say consolingly. "Oh well,

What's that? You're young. And then it must have been

A very fine experience for you!"

One can sense the author's pain in these opening lines which echo her reception at Oxford at a time when the young returr1ing students needed, as she confesses of herself, "comfort" and restoration, "an 80

.intelligent kindness" il not recognition in some form for what had been sacrificed. "And .they forget" the poem continues, that vJhile so many served out of the country's need rather than out of their desire to do so, others stayed behind, "achieved" and.got recognition.. "• •• and men revered their names, /But never mentioned ours," she says. The sense of alienation here borders on that of betrayal and it must have been a feeling common to many returning 11 non-heroes." Its expression comes to a head in the poem's concluding lines:

And no one talked heroics now, and we

Nust just go back and start again once more.

"You tru:·ew 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.25

'rhe sharpness of the poem cuts deeply into an obliviousness to both the remembrance of war and the recognition of its consequences,

L~to which a nation most often seeks to submerge itself once the ar­ mistice is achieved: the oblivion which society calls the "healing process. 11 .And it is precisely this sharpness, this directness of both

·topic and speech, which marks another passage in the maturation of

Brittain as a poet. Surely no one would expect such an indictment from a woman, surely not from a woman who had spent four years in the healing of others. And most certainly one would not expect such an indictment to be leveled against Oxford, a microcosm of. all that so many had just bled and died to preserve. But that its author per­ ceived it both as a valid indictment of Oxford and the back which that 61

venerated institution could turn on the reality of War, and as a po- tential instrument of healing cannot be argued. Only when our most venerable institutions were examined, she knew' could we come to un- derstand ourselves fully enough to change. Her commitment to peace was firm, but her pacifism was not pas-

siv ism; rather it was based on,. the need for our m1derstanding not only what had happened, b11t why. It was this conviction which had :prompted her, upon her return to Oxford, to relinquish an already achieved

status iJl Thglish in favor of beginning anew in History, a field in which she confessed a 11 hazy ignorance." For only through a fine study of History could she satisfy

• • • a desire to u."l.derstand how the whole calamity had hap-

pened, to know why it had been possible for me and my con-

temporaries, through our own ignorance and others' L"lgenuity,

to be used, hypnotised and slaughtered. • • • 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 '"'6. happening to otheT people in the days to come.~

:Bri ttai11' s keen mind and urgent sense of the necessity for recon- ciliation demanded of her the clear indictment of those individuals,

institutions, political parties, or national governments for the L"l-

justices which they perpetrated on others. It was not only Oxford's

potential vulnerability that she attacked in "The Lament of the Demo-

bilised," but its potential·vitality as well. For its vitality, liter-

ally its life, in the future must hinge on a broader perspective of the

reality of war. 82

;rhat scholars should even, superficially regard War as an unfortu- nate interrup·tion of academic pursuit was intolerable. If Oxford, if

.Ellgland herself, .were to survive in a meaningful future, war must be examined and revealed for what it was historically: what it stemmed from, what it promoted, and what were its consequences.

The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour

is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge

to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the

senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a

common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have

just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure 2 call more persistently than at any later tirne. 7

Of this youthful response to t_he call of war, she could speak from

experience. Of those about her whose lives war had claimed, she had known clearly the absence of any malice toward the "enemy" they had be_en called upon to kill.. They had responded out of a sense of duty and a liDpe of glory. And so had those whom they had fought and killed in turn.

As for what war promoted, she saw as perhaps the most tragic pro- duct cf ~·ar the double standard it necessarily creates in order to jus- tify all that the military mentality sees as "just" for the preserva- tion of "the right." In examining society's tolerant consideration of the sudden bloom.of "war babies," for instance, Brittain weighs the chances of an equally charitable attit-q.de toward "peace babies" with na similar unorthodox origin. 1128 In spite of the fact that in Western society properly regulated sex, especially for ~wmen, is central to-.. 83

much of the moral code, here that strict concept was held in abeyance for the cornfort of the warrior.

But a far more critical standard involved the taking of human life. Although she had witnessed, and in a sense shared, the suffer­ ing of masses O'f mutilated men, nursed restoration and death alike,

Brittain's profoundest reaction to this double standard came when her brother, EtlwaJ:>d, was awarded the Ylili tary Cross. Suddenly, she real­

izerl the enormity of betrayal in this "coveted decoration," constantly a source of public "awe and reverence, 11 which glorified peacetime's most heinous crime. "The ironies of war, I reflected sadly, were more than strange; in terms of a rational universe they were quite inex­ plicable. But now the universe had become irrational •••• 29 Yet,

.for her, the rational must be restored; causes and effects examined and.re-examined, evaluated and re-evaluated; options created, weighed, and chosen. 'lb these ends she used her intellect, her time, and her literary skills, and in this case one cannot doubt that Etiward's award ultimately led to her writing both '"lb A V.C." and furn 1925; since it was her intent to record as much real experience as possible within the f:r:-arnework of literature.

Perhaps it was the advent of Freudian psychology, or perhaps it was the immenseness of both the geographical space and the destructive power involved in World War I, that awakened a public sensitivity to

the emotional needs of the returning warrior. Certainly the more realistically intense war poets contributed to the recognizing of this need, as they tried to give the people "back home" some sense of the hell that war really was. And in succeedbg 11 conflicts11 and wars, thj.s need has been reaffirmed as valid and sometimes even critical. Society 84

has lived long enough to see even the heroic warrior it has trained return only to point a gun at itself, take hostages, and sometimes even kill, out of an "irrationali tyu instilled in him by that same society. Books have been written, dramas performed, stories filmed, and interviews shared on the critical emotional and psychological needs of the returning soldier. 1'he recognition of such a need was, if anything, long overdue, both because it was a vital step in the healing process and because it addressed the abnormality of war.

Brittain, just as she takes us beyond war's end in the process of re~ow::iliation, tries also to take us to war's prologue-that condi­ tioning step of the soldier-to-be--to help us gain a clearer perspec­ tive of his emotional needs upon his return. In Testament of Youth, she traces the progress of her sweetheart from his initial "adjusted" response to that myth-war of destiny to his reassessment of its reality drawn later from his experience: "I feel I am meant to take an active part in this War," he wrote in the fall of 1914. "It is to me a very fascinating thing-something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and ver~ beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it ebove the :r·each of a.ll cold theorizing. n3°

But experience was to shatter forever his image of war's "beauty":

The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entazl­

glements 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 of their Country's Glory or another's Lust of Power. 85

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 ••• look at a lit­

tle pj.le of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull-and-a

shin-bone ••• or at this skeleton lying on its side, rest­

ing half crouching as it fell ••• headless ••• and let him

realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have dis­

tilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of

hideous putrescence! ••• who can say that Victory is worth 1 the death of even one of these?3

Brittain'~ determination to transcend the personal level of her

account of the war in order to "make my own generation remember, and 2 the younger generation understand, what it meant at the time"3 is

substantiated when one considers the personal pain involved in reliv-

ing the trauma and the tragedy of war as she sorted through hundreds

of letters, poems, and documents of those agonizing years, choosing

carefully those which would most truly reflect what the period of

1914-1919 had meant to its youth. And it is a testament to Brittain's

veracity and her intent to leave a holistic account of the products of

war, t~~t she did not limit her Testament of Youth to that feminine

experience and perspective she sought to contribute.

Nevertheless, she did not lose sight of that perspective's sig­

nificance to the mending of the whole fabric of society, which had

·been torn so violently apart by war. And of those decades of violence

that have followed the one encompassed by Testament of Youth, decades

in which society has been, by necessity, conscious of meeting the emo- 86 tional needs of its return.ing race of warr.iors, she speaks to us a hidden truth of war's effect on women. Upon her return to Oxford, at the end of ·world War I, she says:

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 relation­

ship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of appre­

hension; in which love would seem threatened perpetually by

death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built

upon the shifting sands of chance.33

It is an expression of the quiet despair of women trained to meet the needs of the war-god-myth, and of their men. And, although seldom expressed or examined in the aftermath of war, in which the suffering of men is so much more visible, surely this feeling has become a sort of sixth sense for the millions of women who have shared Brittain's fate in sustaining such losses. And surely its effect must have a pro­ found, if sublimated, impact on the feminine psyche as a whole. Just aE the rending of men consisted of the call and the loss within war, so too, there were--·and remain--two sides to the feminine seam rent so ruthlessly in two by the violence that is war. The one is this quiet despair of loss sustained. Of the other, Brittain asserts:

Public opinion has made it a high and lofty virtue for us

women to countenance the departure of such as these and you

to regions where they will probably be slaughtered in a bru­

tally degrading fashion in WP~ch one would never allow ani-

mals to be slaughtered. • • • 'lb the saner mind i.t seems more 87

like a reason for shutting up half the nation in a criminal

lunatic asylum!34

Society had not been trained to discern· the effects of war on wo­ men--especially not its long-term effects. But her feminine instincts recognized that the needs of both men and women had to be recognized before the mantle of society could be·. truly mended.

Beyond that recognition1 on both sides of the split, its causes ID1d the purpose to which the mended garment was to be put were of fun­ damental importance if society itself were to be protected in the fu­ ture. For along with the immediate l~~acy of death and destruction, of pain and starvation, cal_lle that dehumanization-even ill the process of the 11 peace-mak:ing1'--in which lay the future possibility of yet another war. "• ... War kills other thi.."lgs besides physic~l life," she wrote in late 1915, j'and I sometimes feel that little by little the Individ­ uality of You is being as surely buried as the bodies are of those who lie beneath the trenches of Flanders and France."35 She found intoler­ able the thought of society's individuals reduced to a "mass of human 11 anything; and it was the vision of that potential mass which wo11ld come to her later as she composed "A l\Ulitary Hospital," with its "mass of human wreckage.," Surely we must wage a conscious struggle against that loss of individual identity, of individual thought and conviction, which was precisely what would allow future political machines to once agai.'1 bring the countries of the world Jnto war. Yet, its power was so great that she herself was eventually to experience that very deindivid­ uation which she dreaded so much on the behalf of others:

I had not realised--as I was later to realise through my own 88

mental surrender--that only a process of complete adaptation,

blotting out tastes and talents and even memories, made life

sufferable for someone face to face with war at its worst.

I was not to discover for another year how completely the

War possessed one's personality the moment that one crossed

"t"h e sea. • • 36

In the final analysis, however, although the war did eventually rob her o.f her loved ones and of her dream of becoming a litera.ry light in a prosperous and peaceful England, it by no means took from her her individuality. War had, in fact, by the time of the World War I armis- tice, so consumed the chaff of her provincial upbringing, along with her loved ones and her dreams, that she was left with only the seed of her Self and an intense grief. Yet, like the grain of wheat which brought forth a harvest out of i t·s ·own death, that very seed, nurtured by a faith she held in spite of herself, was eventually to issue in physical food for starving thousands and a spiritual food for millions more. 'lb her, the consequences of war were to be neither ignored nor justified: they demanded, out of their very-desperation, a healing.

L'{)ng befo:r:e the first War had ended, :Brittain had ceased blaming

God for its horror. She had concluded that one of its basic causes lay in the fact that, essentially, contemporary humanity--like all humanity before it--insisted on looking to some capricious God for both the causes and the remedies of "blunders and barbarisms for which we only were responsible, and from which we alone could deliver ourselves and our rocking civilisation!"37 It was a conclusion which, in 1933, was to undergird her writing of the lengthy a.••d detailed Testament of Youtl]., for which she first gaL~ed recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. 89

In the 1920's, it was also that conclusion which sent her "stump-

ing" on behalf·.of the League of Nations Union, along with friend and

colleague, W'in;ifred Holtby. "Piping for.Peace, 11 .she called it in the

thick volume which was to serve as a personal yet universal chronicle for her own generation 1 s restoration a.11d a future generation's warning.

And it was a 11 piping11 for which both her writing talent and her studies

in "Inte:r:national Relations" well qualified her. Her expertise, her

insigh-t, and the growirJg unrest in the EUrope of the 1920's heightened t1er dedication and provided impetus to her invol~ement with the League

of Nations Union. Her work on behalf of the Union led inevitably to an

enlarged interest in and knowledge of politics, both in her own country

and abroad.

Beginning in February of 1922, "for the greater part of the next

three years and sometimes as often as four times a week, I made speech-

es or led discussions on the League in almost every London suburb and

in: numerous small towns and villages all over the South of England and

11 t~e Midlands 9 3S she writes. Such exposure to the people of her own land was to broaden the view Brittain held o~· the ordinary "folk" and was to ElVentually serve as the contrasting backdrop for the ordinary

11 folk11 sha was to observe in starving poverty on the continent. But

aside from her involvement i.J.'"l the Union, her exposure to the debates

and opinions which occupied and issued from the League itself made her

almost bi.tter at times. She saw cynicism, expediency, and conflict of

interest, each and all, bearing the deciding weight in many of the

issues chosen for discussion, in many of the judgments reached.

Winifred Holtby, like Brittain an OY~ord woman and an aspiring writer, sha1:ed Brittain's stubborn but sometimes vacillating hope for 90

mankind. In 1924, the two made a brief journey through still-devas­ tated Germany·and were markedly impressed by the poverty, starvation, and despair they found among the people there. 'J!hey could not help but inwaJ:·dly protest as they contrasted it to the sense of English detach­ ment.which resu1ted from the safetyof their own reconstructed standard of l.ivi:ng. 'l1hey: decried the :i,r1herent vengeance written into the Treaty of Versailles, as they witnessed again and again its devastating effect on a people who they guessed would, of necessity, someday rise again in violent protest. The furor was not too far in the future.

By tht:: time the gathering ~·ascist cloud on the continent did threaten to break into the storm which would become World War II, Vera

Brittain had gained a respected reputation as a writer in both England and the United States. Having married George Catlin, an Oxford man who had 'become a professo:r: at Cornell University, Brittain returned with him to tbe United States in September, 1925. But her first academic year proved to be unhappy. She was preoccupied by two things; her seemingly vacuous life as a "faculty wife," which nevertheless left her

1Ht1e time for TNriting, and her sense of having forfeited ·a literary reputation which was just building for her in ~lngland. So the thirty­ year-old bride returned to England in August, 1926.

She had been fortunate in her choice of husb~'"lds. I.ate in 1923; he had written her from Ithaca: "For the moment, my hand is set to the plough of the Theory of Politics .. . . I do it chiefly because the War has left me with the feeling that nothing is more imperative than to clear up these conflicting political 4ogmata. 11 39 Their common bond, and one which was to sustain them through long periods of "detachment" as he lectured in the United States and she labored in England, was 91

that aesrch for world peace which they both held to be the single most

impor-tant item on man's agenda, if he were to surviv·e. They handled

their SeJ>arations well, therefore, and Brittain's subsequent visits to

the United States, on lecture-promotion tou.r.s for her books,· were far

more rewarding'than had been the months spent at the campus of Cornell.

During these years of·fitful international events, both she and

her husband became increasingly concerned with the possibility of an­

other glo'bal conflict. Decades later, she was to record the events

from 1925 to 1950 in her sequel to Testament of Youth. "Testament of

Bxperience,H she wrote, "continues the history of that generation,

which L~ the second half of its journey appears to be faced with the

most momentous challenge of all time. This challenge compels it to

surmou."lt its own 'impulse towards death,' or vanish with all man's

works in an orgy of annihilation."40

By the time she wrote this second volume, it seemed the ultimate

irony that the generation which had suffered such loss in the first

World War could be wedged into, or indeed manufacture, another conflict

of such proportions: like waking from a nightmare only to find that

it was reality~ Once more, she determined to chronicle personal, na­

tional, a.11d international events, hopefully to reflect that seeming

suicidal impulse which results is mass affirmation of a public policy

of death and destruction. Once again, her conviction that only an

understanding of ourselves and what we had already done could provide

·hope for a constructive future compelled her to document both deed and

disaster. 1be thread of a continuous yet repeated history joined the

two volumes in both theme and detail.

Indicative of the young woman!s .open-ended search for personal 92

communication between individual members of the human family as well as

among the family of nations is the detailed personal perspective of

both Testament of Youth and 'l'estament of Experience. 'l'he former, in

fact, may 3ometimes frustrate the readAr with an apparent excess of in­

significant detail from the writer's personal experience or thought.

Yet, after readL1g the entire vclumet one realizes that. it is precisely

that intense personal revelation, even those details found irksomely

mundane during- the reading, which have l:xn.t.."ld the reader not only to

Brittain, but to the generation for which she speaks. Nevertheless, the conciseness of }estament of .h;:.cperience, in deal­

ing with world events more precisely while remaining personal as au.to­

biography must, inserts the reader more profoundly into the experience

of the human family as a whole. One must suspect that this was precise­

ly its author's intention~ as she sought to recount events and reveal

th{:) complex, consuming human emotions of fear, anger, frustration, and

desire--for both revenge and power--which can foment a nation into the

exploding passion of war. This time, her years of study, travel, speak­

ing~, and w-riting brought a greater historical dimension to her work.

During her husband's trip to Leipzig in September, 1933, she re- cords, he C;)unted eighty persons at the Sunday evening service at

Bach's church, the Tomaskirche. But at a Nazi rally the following night, 3,000 German Christians gathered "where Protestant pastors

described Jews as !unbrotherly' and eulogised the Germans as 'God's · Creatlon. nA1 It was a manifestation of what she and 't/:inifred Hol tby

had feared would happen, almost a decade earlier, as they had observed

in the Cologne Cathedral " • • • the packed congregation of shabby, heavy-eyed men and women, their sunken faces stoically devoid of 93 emotion,n42 or along the Hohestrasse, "a moving crowd, steadily walk­ ing and. talking but never laughi.."'lg ••• • "43 The young women had rebelled at· that time against the harsh terms of "jUstice" which the victors had imposed on the vanquished and had speculated as to how their own country would have fared had the conclusion of the war been

:reversed. It was not only unjust, they were-certain, to dehumanize a people so thoroughly, but the potential consequences were far more bitter than such revenge was sweet. "The atmosphere in which these oppressed men and women moved so quietly to and fro was. • • apprehen­ sive, ,,44 the young Brittain recalled. .And she recalled, too, the pledge of a young and coldly cynical former German officer: "'One uay, • he exclaimed exultantly, 1 we will make war upon them and treat them as they have treated us! I am longing for that \o.•ar! 1 n45

It was a pledge \'lhose echo never .ceased in the mind of Vera Brit­ tain. And it promised a possibility ever more probable, she realized, as she journeyed with her husband to Germany in March, 1936. In her second chronicle, she draws a contrast between the two Colognes. In the Cologne of 1924, she recalls,

wnerever we went, we had found the German people sullen and

depressed from shame, poverty and malnutrition. The only

visible displays of food were in the Army canteens, where

cheerful 'I'ommies ate beef·-steaks before the envious infantile

eyes of future Nazi youth •••• a morose population •••

hardly speaking ru1d never laughing. Without money, enter­

tai..ryment or hope, they resembled a troupe of shades condemned to patrol some lampless Teutonic infe1~o.46 94

But the Cologne she and her husband encountered in 1936 was vast­ ly different~. It was a heightened :projection of that vengeful nation­ alism he had witnessed.threeyears earlier in Leipzig, for no:w they encountered "excited crowds surging through the m·ain thoroughfares leading to the Dom:platz" and a :Nazi rally for Hitler. "The whole story of German Fascism," she concluded, "lay in the· contrast between the t:wo Colognes."47

In the closing cha:p·ter of ~ament of Youth, Brittain,. shocked by the :post-war l!.l.lrope o:f such misery and humiliation, and by the lack of cou:unon human pity on the part of the victorious governments, had, in fact, prophesied this result. "This, this!--ruin, cruelty, injus­ tice, destruction-is what they fought and died for, 11 4S she had pro­ tested, thillicing of her own lost loved ones and the thousands of wound­ ed and dying who had moved in overwhelmi..."Jg tides through the hospital wards of her war experience.. And she came to realize that the blood- less battle of which she was now a part would not be settled by her own generation but would remain to challenge future generations. So, too, would the pi ti.ful results of the War which had devoured so much of her youth perpetuate themselves into yet another war if the victors' st~"lce were less than charitable, if they were to show less mercy than they would like to have received. Acknowledging the "courage and gen­ erosity'; of the war dead, she had condemned bitterly the "failure of courage and generosity on the part of the survivors. How terrible our responsibility is!"49 she had pleaded.

Brittain had hoped that the young, :with their fresh memory of the bloody price o.f that first War, could wrest from the established myopic governments r

internation~l conflict in ways that would forever silence the bombs

and bullets. The Cologne of 1936 showed her that it was now too late.

:Brief months after that revealing visit to Germany, Vera Brittain was invited to address a large open-air peace meeting in Dorchester •

.Also .invited was Canon H. R8 L. Sheppard, "preacher, broadcaster, peace crusader, and one of the most popular human beings ever to tread

London's crowded pavements, .. 50 popularly known as "Dick'' Sheppard. It was an occasion which she termed later as "a turning point in my 'f l ~ e. u51 Sheppard's uncompromising commitment to peace made her real- ize that her own "study of peace had been too superficial; to delegate responsibility to a set of fallible politicians at Geneva was to over- 2 S1IDp. 1' ~ f y ·net' pro bl em o f h uman v1o· 1 ence and repu d ~a· t e persona1 gu~· ••1 t u5

For Sheppard's concept of pacifism was not one of policy; rather, it was one of principle and it issued directly from the Sertnon on the

.E.Ven so, her decision to become a sponsor of Sheppard's peace movement was not immediate. Tb work for a political £Olicy of peace was oil& thing--and something not too many would argue against, depend- ing upon national and international circumstances. But to adhere to a

~.;hP-le of peace, especially at a time when war once again seemed highly poss.ible, could lead to public censorship, social condemnation, or even charges of treason. How could an ostracized writer hope to gain the public's trust for her own message of behalf of peace? And surely her perspective on that issue was valid and vital. Yet her study of history and international relations had shown her that poli- tical efforts always conformed to a policy of peace \vhich was based on expediency, on the achievement of peace between nations "in measurable time." It was a seemingly logical qualification for national policy.

Yet behind it continually lay the old habit of war, both as threat and expediency. On the other hand, peace as principle spoke nothing of

"in measurable time .. " In fact, tracing the source of Sheppard's conviction, she knew that had the eleven remaining disciples consider­ ed such a ]Ol·icy while: their country remained under Roman domination, they would have surrendered both the struggle and the peace. But even that consideration did not make her choice easy:

During the war my hospital service had often meant pain, and

sometimes terror •••• But that sorro·wful ordeal had always

lain safely within the confines of social approbation ••••

an accepted expression of patriotism, a form of humanitarian

co-operation with the war machine. 'rho ugh the conclusions

to which my experience led had been unequivocally stated

in Testament of Youth., such work for peace as I could com­

bine with writing had been offered to organisations which

were politically "respectable11 because they were ultimately

prepared to compromise with war.53

Now, she had been well-received as both author and speaker; her career :had been established. And, she confessed,

Everything in me recoiled from the prospect of exchar~ing

this welcome stimulua for public disapproval.· 1 was still

far from realising how obstructive such disapproval could

be, but 1 suspected that, once I stepped outside the borders

of officially endorsed peace-making, there could be no turn­

ing back. 54- 91

Nevertheless, shortly after Christmas, 1936, she relinquished her speaking assignments for the Leag11e of Nations Union and opted instead for membership in Sheppard= s Peace Pledge Union. · She had concluded that one's working for peace must not be limited to an effort which could hope to achieve that peace "in measurable time." It was rather the forgb1g together itself tha.t would eventually bind humanity ·in ·the common c~use against the horror and dehumanization of war. She knew that, regardless of what became of her literary career, this was the avenue she had long sought through which to express her ideas, her hopes, and her challenges for humanity.

Nor were her ~~ticipations of the consequences of her decision to remain ~~ulfilled. In September, 1939, when approached by the gov­ ernment to lend her writing ta.lents to its war effort, she found that

"every ino5.t.inct resisted this appeal. I did not intend to lease rrry mental integrity to the Government for the duration; this was not, I thciught 7 the function of writers, who should surely try to provide an oasis of sanity in the spiritual desert created by warring ideolo­ gies.1155 AJ.r.eady suspect because of her heavy involvement -in the peace

movement at a time of national crisis, she was 1 a year later, refused a permit to leave bngland for a·proposed visit to the United States.

She hoped to see her children, sent there under England's "seavacua- · tion" program, and tour to promote her latest book, .Ebgland's Ho-qr.

The denial carne as a shock to her, since she had only months before concluded a similar tour. Ironically, as long ago as November, 1915, she had recorded her realization that war had the capacity to "make real values seem unreal, and cause the qualities which mattered most to appear unimportant."56 98

But this realization turned to protest in late 1940, as she encounter­

ed the curtailment of her own liberties.

I ha,d still to learn how far a frightened democracy will go

in using such powers to impose conformity upon .its intellec­

tual or moral dissenters, and thus repudiate the very ends

for which it professes to be fightir~ •• • • the status and

righ-ts of the individual were challenged by the :&nergency

Powers (Defence) Acts; these permitted .any "suspect" to be

deta.ined indefinitely without appeal~ and provided no ma­

chinery by which the prisoner could discover the grounds for

his detention. • • • I could not believe that my work abroad, which in pre-war years had achieved such useful results, ''las

arbitrarily and curtly to be ended. Where was now the kb1d­

liness of l!}1gland? :Eblipsed, it seemed with some other vul­ nerable qualities, such as compassion and truth.57

She became more determined than ever to hold to her principles: not to revenge a wrong, not to punish, but to proclaim, to bring to remembrance \!hat it was England stood for-and what she had fallen to in the grip of a war mentality. There was no more effective way of doing this, Brittain felt, than by using her typewriter.

Already, in September, 1939, she had decided to dedicate her in­ sight and wri t:i.ng ability for the duration of the war to issuing what came to be a fortnightly Letter which would act as a reli1forcement of bonding and encouragement to the dispersed world membership of the

Peace Pledge Union. She had been motivated by the many letters she had received and the impossibility of anSl•i'e:r.L""'lg them all. The Letter 99 circulated until the second year after the war ended. Although its intent was not prophetic, in 'festament of Elcperience Brittain chose to quote some portions of its editions which actually proved to be so:

~ven supposing that we do destroy Hitler, we shall not again

be confi~ed by a ~Urope agreeably free from competitors

for ,power. The disappearance of Herr Hitler will probably

lead instead to a revolutiona~J situation in Germany, con-

trolled by puppets who own allegiance to another Power. We,

the democracies, will still be faced by totalitarianism, in

a form less clumsy but not less aggressive and even more sin-

ister in its ruthless exhausted might. (October 25, 1939)

One of militarism's subtlest and most damaging weapons is

misrepresentation; that is, the presentation of an honest

opinion or activity in such a fashion as to arouse the sus-

picions of others. (January 18, 1940)

(She herself was to fall victim to this device when "patriots" at- tempted "to discredit both her and her husband as fascists because of their stance in the cause of peace. "How quickly a State fighting to- talitarianism becomes affected by the enemy's values," 58 she surmised.)

'l1he chief consequence of this war will be the domination of

~1rope by Russia, strengthened and enlarged to a degree

which already leaves her with nothing to fear from Britain

and America. What conduct can we expect in Germany from

Soviet soldiers whose hatred has been aroused by acts of

cruelty committed within their own territory, and nourished 100

on a propaganda more brilliant and ruthless than that of any

other nation? (August, 1944)

Never did she forget the conditions she had seen in .i!.'urope after

1 the First •.forld War, conditions reflecting pitiless victors 1 which she

knew had caused the Second War. ~rhe vicious cycle ·Of pain which man

inflicted upon himself by his inflicting it on another--and usually in

the name of a flag which signalled little more than the division be­

tween them-was bound to continue, she knew, until humanity embraced

for one another pity, that 11 rebel passion"59 by which she had forfeit­

ed her once com.fortable popularity for the sake of peace. And so, to

further this end, once World War II had ended she used her Letters as

a stimulua for the "Save Europe Novv 11 campaign which was directed toward

alleviating poverty and hunger in E.\lrope.

Her participation in the effort to save the starving children of

.c.'urope actually began early in 1943, when she wrote the long pamphlet

One of These Little Ones out of her own response to the growing prob­

lem. Ti1e pamphlet proved extremely effective in gathering support , ; ond intensified Brittain's interest which was to extend also to the

deprived and miserable children of Germany. l'Ierely an expression of

the concern she had felt for two decades, it gained her greater sus­

picion amoz~ some of her countrymen who branded her everything from

.fool to fascist e Ironically, she was to be fully and immediately

exonerated from the latter title only when the War ended and Nazi files

revealed her Testament of Youth on the list of burned books, and her

and her husband numbered among those to be quickly eliminated upon

Germany's successful invasion of England.

But before that exoneration came, further alienation was incurr~4 101

because of her protests against other abuses of war. "Saturation" bombing of German cities and towns drew her into the :Bombing Restric­ tion Committee, where she sought to combat the propaganda which had veiled from the British public the real terror of the Government's war policy and the ironic contradiction between Churchill's position stated to the House of Commons on June 7th, 1935, and that proposed seven yeArs later, on June 2, 1942. In his earlier statement he had lamented, "It is only in the twentieth centu.._ry that this hateful con- dition of inducing nations to surrender by massacring the women and children has gained acceptance ••• among men.u60 But war had levelled his standard, and by 1942 he declared, "As the year advances, German citi(-::S., ha."t'bours, and centres of war production will be subjected to an ordeal the like of which has never been experienced by any country 61 in continuity, severity or magnitude." "Obliteration" bombing be­ came an integTal part of the Allied war policy and Brittain became intent on recording not only its horror, but also its implication for the futt

BeginnL~ in 1943, there was talk of the future necessity of re-· educat.ing Germany. Brittain saw beyond that need to the urgent task of re-educating the victors and well as the vanquished. In 1940 she had written ~land's HoU£, through which she had provided a sense of unity to the eountry whose various sections, being affected in vastly different ways by the war, had drawn apart .from one another in their understandL~g of just how the war was affecting England. With skill, 102 she had woven the experiences of the-many into a larger tapestry that

:portrayed the whole. It helped the various sections of the country to

better understand and commiserate with one another. But it also helped her to SRe the need for further growth in sensitivity to the needs of

+.he world at large, on the part of people in her own land. Her jour- neys, interviews with her fellow citizens, and observations of their various reactions to the war helped her to see their own great need for :post-war re-education. She garnered a collective sense of a lost era, an era that seemed now all too irh"locent. "That civilisation is unlikely to return, 11 she concluded, "for those who made it have killed it themselves. 1162

Nor could they possibly mold a new civilization for themselves unless they had a clear vision of what they had "achieved" through the old one. This was imperative. It was not ''What God Hath Wrought, 11 as som1-:: newspapers might proclaim on V .E. Day. She lmew man must acknow- ledge what he himself had done. And he must also ask himself, "Why?"

In her process of re-education, as she preserved her own records of what had happened, Brittain did not shrink from the specifips in re- lating the detailed accounts of witnesses of the saturation bombing of

German cities: "Charred adult corpses had shrunk to the size of chil- dren. Women were wandering about half-crazy•••• People went mad. in the shelters. They screamed and threw themselves, biting and clawing, 6 at the doors \ifhich were locked against them by the wardens. n 3 If

she could not 1 like the poets from the trenches of World War I, hold the mirror of horror to the public out of her own experience.; she could certainly use her talent to preserve the events as others had experienced them. History, both past and future, demanded that the "103 picture be kept clear and real-and before the public:

Reports from Dresden police that 300,000 died as a result of

the bombing didn't include deaths among 1 9 000,000 evacuees from the Breslau area trying to escape from the Russians • . .. • They had to pitchfork shrivelled bodies on to trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow graves on the outskirts

of the city. But after two weeks of work the job became too

much to cope with and they found other means to gather up the

deadw They burned bodies in a great heap in the centre of

the city, but the most effective way ••• was to take flame­ 6 t~xowers and burn the dead as they lay in the ruins. 4

Such was the literary heritage of war that Brittain determined to leave behind: i.ts true and factual image. The incinerated victims of those who ·had fought for the preservation of freedom and democracy were a remarkable ID.emorial indeed to the progress man had made since he had fought that 1'1•/ar to end all wars." Nevertheless, the British press 6 screamed "!o Pity! No Mercy! n 4 And those who would be moved to com­ passion or even common pity, were tagged with the newest wartime epi- thet; "qed sling." It seemed an ironic stance, indeed, for a 11 civil- ized" anrt "Christian" nation. Re-education, she became ever more con- vinced, must begin "at home."

Her own re~education began with her post-World-War II journeys in 1945; the bitterness, destruction, poverty, and starvation she en­ countered on the continent were like the re-reading of a familiar book.

And she knew that such detail had to be preserved within England's literature as a first step in the re-education of others. One poetic 104 response captured the essence of her message as it did the maturity of her expreseion: as always, she was taken with the plight o.f the chil- dren in particular;

The Sands run out; no dawn light stirs the sky;

From North to South flicker the fires of hell;

Within the walls of Europe's citadel

A million mothers watch their children die.

'f~hemselves half-famished, haunted by the cry

Of stricken youth for bread, they lift their prayer

·:ro friends who from starvation and despair

Have saved themselves, but now all aid deny.

For ruthless in their pride the statesmen go;

Indifferent that their noon is E'urope's night,

They disavow compassion for the plight

Of babes abandoned both by friend and foe.

0 women of the West, rise' now and speak,

Lest pity die, and strength betray the weak! "Europe's Children"66

Pity, not revenge--or even guilt--must be the foundation stone of a reconstructed world community. Of this she was certain. 'rherefore, re-education, as far as she was concerned, could not be merely the re- iteration or even the re-evaluation of war and its causes. The mirror· must reflect the truth of hope just as faithfully as it should the pain of horror.

'fu this end, she recorded the fifty-year history of the Fellow- ship of Reconciliation in The Rebel Passion, the book whose name is 105 derived from a statement by Gilbert :Hurray, "Pity is a rebel pas­ sion.1167 She sought to put befoz-e~the-public not just the possibility of humanity's hope, but the example of that hope's realization in the lives of men and women who had sacrificed much because they knew that

"peace was much more than the absence of war. It was a method of

WB.ging war on war-'the art and practice of turning enemies into friends. 11168 Their conviction had made the group's initiators choose the term 11 Reconciliaticn" rather than "Peace." 'l'o this end also, she sought to share the struggles of India in its own Search After Sunrise, a.s it strove d.""sperately to solve the problems of a ne\vly independent nation already torn by religious and linguistic, economic and caste differencesa She saw India as a mini-cosmos, holding the greater share of the world's sufferers. By relating to the rest of the world the ef­ forts of the '1949 Peace Conference in India, held to non-violently work out p.cobJ.ems of oppression, poverty, injustice, and religious strife, she wanted to hold out a premise and an inspiration for other nations.

It was a picture of promise rather than achievement, of hope rather thar. w~.tcc ess, because once again it was the truth she desired to pre­ serve. ~he repeated theme in both books is that pacifism is not passi­ vism.. IJike the members of the :F'ellowship of Reconciliation, Gandhi and his followers were non-violent but active. He himself had "sought to· end war and violence by making individuals self-sufficient, and free­ 69 ing them from their bondage to national policies inspired b;y- war .. n

Brittain herself attempted to live by this active, non-violent code and her daughter, the Hon. Shirley Williams, informs us: "FJy mother became a life-long pacifist. I still remember her in her seventies, determinedly sitting in a CND demonstration, and being. gently removed 106

'"'0 by the police." 1

But her own example, drawn from a life that for all her sacrifice

remained relatively sheltered, was not enough.·· She knew this. It was

the point of her wri t·ings to leave us with a broader perspective, to

re-educate us'' at whatever po.int in history we might read her, by shar-

ing the personal experiences of those whose lives she touched: people

who had suffered but who could still hold out their hands in recon-

cili_a·tion. ·r11ere was the quiet Polish -woman, survivor of the Ravens-

bruck concentration camp: "'We should not try to repay them in kind, 1

she said, '• •• because killing is so terribly corrupting for the 1 killer, especially if he is young. 1117 There was the reflective

Japanese woman: 111 0ne aeroplane,' she said in her difficult English,

1 came over us when everyone was going to work, and in a moment the

tow-n is i:-1 flames •••• the Jilayc~ of Hiroshima tells me ••• 300,000

out of 400,000 people died there. They cried for water under the

ruins, or they ran about the streets with ribbons of skin hanging from

their hands and arms. 111 In the stillness that followed, this survivor

who had joined the Peace Conference in India ·added simply, "'This

bomb was an experiment on the human race. I want our society never to repeat that experiment.'"72 It was the compounded vision of hope that Brittain tried to cap-

ture i:n her writings, although she firmly believed that reality had to

be an integral part of that hope. She believed also that women would have to ta~e more initiative in bringing about justice and peace if

the struggle were to be successful. Both the tragic reality and .the vision of hope are expressed in he:r "Lament for Cologne": 107

You stood so proudly on the flowing Rhine,

Your history mankind's, your climbing spires

Crowned with the living light that man desires

'fu gild his path from bestial to divine.

'I'oday, consumed by war's unpitying fires,

You lie in ruins, weeping for yoUr dead,

Your shattered monuments the ftmera1 pyres

Of humble men whose days and dreams are fled.

Perhaps, when passions d.ie and slaughters cease,

The mothers on whose homes destruction fell

'vlho wailing sought their children -through the hell

Of London, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade,

Will seek Cologne's sad women, unafraid,

And cry, "God's cause is ours,. Let there be peace! 73

Vera Brittain wrote from the experience of the suffering she sought to share. Hers was·not a struggle to win the battle, but to bring 13·:2\me measure of truth, of compassion, into the conflict. She knew that, just as an individual must become recommitted to an inner truth every day, so must each succeeding generation of humanity evalu­ ate and commit itself anew. She hoped only to provide a humane basis, a productive and positive ground, on which the structure of world peace, of world reconciliation, might be built: this was the substance of her '.Pestament•

But i:..'1. all likelihood Brittain would. not have us slide out of a considera.ti.on of her work so placidly, at the end. And perhaps one last J.ook nt "Beowulf" is fi ttir.g, since the poem represents the 108

thought and intent of so much of our literary imagery of war, Brittain calls us to an active expression of the grief of war, to an active

:protest against its horrors. And, almost hidden, twenty-nine lines before the endof its almost three-thousand lines, the writer of

"Beowulfu observes:

&~d an aged woman with upbo1rnd locks

Lamented for Beowulf, wailing in woe.

Over and over she uttered her dread

Of sorrow to come, of bloodshed and slaughter,

Terror of battle, and bondage, and shame.74 109

Notes

1 uvera .B:r. 1 t+.,a1n. . Testament of Youth (Great Britain, 1933; rpt.

Gr.ea t Bri taj_n: Virago Ltd., 1978), p. 535. 2 ·v era .or1,. · tt a1n.· Testament of ~perience (London: Victor

Gollancz Ltd., 1957), p. ·13.

3 Testament of ~perience~ p. 472.

4 Testament of Youth, p. 93.

5 Vera Brittain. Poems of the War and After (New York: Nac-

I":.illan Co., 1934), p~ 12. 6 ~estament of Experience, p. 172.

7 Poems of the War and After, p. 16. 8 Testament of Youth, PP• 164-463. 9 Poems of the 'v/ar and Af~er, pp. 34-36. 10 Testament of JSXperience, P• 38. 11 ---'.Pestament of Youth, Po 95. 12 Testament of Youth, p. 97. 1 3 Ca S. Lewis, The Alle~ory of Love (1936; rpt. London: OYJord

Univ. PJ.•ess, 1938), p. 9.

14 'l'estament of Youth, p. 88.

15 Testament of l!.Xperience, p. 77. 16 Poems of the ltlar and Af.teE, pp. 25-27. 17 Testa~nt of Y~, :P• 116. 18 •.restament of Youth, P• 125. 19 Testament of Youth, P• 104. 110

21 Poems of the War and After, pp. 50-51. 22 Vera Brittain. Born 1925 (New York: Mac1''1illan Co. , 1949), p .. 58 .. 23 TestaJlent of EJcperience, P• 184. 24 Testarr.ent of ~erience, P• 187.

25 Testament of Youth, p. 467. 26 '.i:es tam en t of Youth, P• 471. 27 ·restament of Youth, PP• 291-292. 28 'l1estament of Youth, P• 141.

29 1 'l estament of Youth, PP• 287-288. 30 'I'estament of Youth, PP• 103-104. 31 Testament of Youth, PP• 197-198; quoted from a letter by Roland A. Leighton, fall, 1915. 32 •.restament of ElcEerience, P• 89.

33 '1.1 estament of Youth, p. 469o 34 1estament of Youth, P• 203. 35 •restam.ent of Youth, P• 218. 36 --•res+;ament of Youth, p. 217. 37 Testament of Youth, P• 369. 38 ----Testament of Youth, p. 553. 39 Testament of Youth, P• 612. 40 Testament of lJcEerience, P• 11. 41 ------.r.resta.men t of l!!xperience, P• 99. 42 Testament of Youth, P• 634. 43 Testament of Youth, P• 635. 44 Testament of Youth, P• 635. 45 Testament of Youth, p. 640. 111

46 Testament of EJq~erience, P• ·152. 47 Testament of l!!x:Eerience, P• 152. 48 Testament of Youth, P• 644· 49 ~['es tam en t of Youth, p. 645.

50 Testament of Ex:Eerience, p. 165. 51 Testament of Ex:Eerience, P• 164.

0::') ..1'- Testament of Ex:eerience, p. 167 • 53 Testament of BxEerience, P• 168. 54 'I'eatament of Ex:Eerience, P• 169. 55 ;Eestament of Bx:Eerience, P• 217. 56 ':Cestament of Youth, P• 215. 57 Testament of .i:!JcEerience, :PP• 260-266. 58 Testament of EX:Qerience, P• 246. 9 5 Vera Brittain. The Rebel Passion (Nyack, N. y. ~ Fellowship l'ublications, 1964), P• 15. 60 Testament of E.XEerience, P• 297. 61 •restament of Ex.E,erience, :p. 297.

62 Vera Brittaine England's Hour (New York: Nac!'ili11an Co.,

1941), p .. 181. 63 Testament of Exp~rience,. p. 325. 64 ·restarrHmt of ExEerien~, P• 352. 65 'Eestament of .t!XEerience, P• 325 • 66 Testament of EXperience, P• 289; quoted from ~iend,

Oct. 22, 1943, 6 7 'rhe Rebel Passion, p. 7; quoted from Gilbert Nurray's Intro- duction to 1~e Trojan Women, translated from the Greek of ~Uri:pides. 112

68 rf.he Rebel Passion, P• 34

69 Vera Brittain. Search After Sunrise (wndon: J'iiacNillan Co.,

1951), P• 78.

70 Testament of Youth, Preface.

71 Teatament of .i:i.X;perience, p. 393.

~rf") L. Search After Sunrise, PP• 83-84.

73 1 ~ament of Experienc~, Po 379; publi~hed in 'lhe Friend,

June 4, 1942.

74 J. 13. rn.~.'rapp, e d • ,:Phe Oxford ..AJJ.thology of .cl'J.glish Literature

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 97. 113

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