Vera Brittain ( 1893-1970)

VERA BRITTAIN ( 1893-1970) Certainly the most famous First World War book written by a woman, not least because of its highly successful dramatization which appeared on British and American television, Testament of Youth was published in 1933 and based on the journals Brittain kept during the War. Though the book is sometimes criticized for the naivete of its attitudes, it still provides an unparalleled insight into the impact of the War on a young, middle-class woman. The fighting cost Brittain her brother, her fiance, and every other young man to whom she was close. The experience caused her to become a life-long pacifist. In the following excerpt, Edward is Vera's brother, Geoffrey and Victor ('Tah') his closest friends. In the first section, Vera discusses the painful memory of a rift between her and her fiance, Roland Leighton. In the second, about nine months later, Victor has been wounded in the head and lost his sight. Vera is in Malta, serving as a VAD nurse. Finally, in the third, Vera has returned to London, still nursing, and writes about her response (or lack of it) to the Armistice. Apart from all these novel experiences, my first month at Camberwell1 was distinguished by the one and only real quarrel that I ever had with Roland. It was purely an epistolary quarrel, but its bitterness was none the less for that and the inevitable delay between posts prolonged and greatly added to its emotional repercussions. On October 18th, Roland had sent a letter to Buxton2 excusing himself, none too gracefully, for the terseness of recent communications, and explaining how much absorbed he had become by the small intensities of life at the front. As soon as the letter was forwarded to Camberwell, I replied rather ruefully. Don't get too absorbed in your little world over there - even if it makes things easier ... After all the War cannot last for ever, and when it is over we shall be glad to be what we were born again- if only 1 The hospital where she trained to become a VAD. 2 Her hometown. 51 Y. M. Klein (ed.), Beyond the Home Front © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1997 52 Vera Brittain we can live till then. Life- oh! life. Isn't it strange how much we used to demand of the universe, and now we ask only for what we took as a matter of course before- just to be allowed to live, to go on living. By November 8th no answer had come from him - not even a comment on what seemed to me the tremendous event of my transfer from Buxton into a real military hospital. The War, I began to feel, was dividing us as I had so long feared that it would, making real values seem unreal, and causing the qualities which mattered most to appear unimportant. Was it, I wondered, because Roland had lost interest in me that this anguish of drifting apart had begun- or was the explanation to be found in that terrible barrier of knowledge by which the War cut off the men who possessed it from the women who, in spite of the love that they gave and received, remained in ignorance? It is one of the many things I shall never know. Lonely as I was, and rather bewildered, I found the cold dignity of reciprocal silence impossible to maintain. So I tried to explain that I, too, understood just a little of the inevitable barrier - the almost physical barrier of horror and dreadful experience- which had grown up between us. 'With you,' I told him, 'I can never be quite angry. For the more chill and depressed I feel myself in these dreary November days, the more sorry I feel for you beginning to face the acute misery of the winter after the long strain of these many months. When at six in the morning the rain is beating pitilessly against the windows and I have to go out into it to begin a day which promises nothing pleasant, I feel that after all I should not mind very much if only the thought of you right in it out there didn't haunt me all day ... I have only one wish in life now and that is for the ending of the War. I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again, and wonder if, when the War does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh. The other day I did involuntarily laugh at something and it felt quite strange. Some of the things in our ward are so horrible that it seems as if no merciful dispensation of the Universe could allow them and one's consciousness to exist at the same time. One day last week I Testament of Youth 53 came away from a really terrible amputation dressing I had been assisting at - it was the first after the operation - with my hands covered in blood and my mind full of a passionate fury at the wickedness of war, and I wished I had never been born.' No sudden gift of second sight showed me the future months in which I should not only contemplate and hold, but dress unaided and without emotion, the quivering stump of a newly amputated limb than which a more pitiable spectacle hardly exists on this side of death. Nor did Roland- who by this time had doubtless grown accustomed to seeing limbs amputated less scientifically but more expeditiously by methods quite other than those of modem surgery - give any indication of understanding either my revulsion or my anger. In fact he never answered this particular communication at all, for the next day I received from him the long-awaited letter, which provoked me to a more passionate expression of apprehensive wrath than anything that he had so far said or done. 'I can scarcely realize that you are there,' he wrote, after telling me with obvious pride that he had been made acting adjutant to his battalion, 'there in the world of long wards and silent-footed nurses and bitter, clean smells and an appalling whiteness in everything. I wonder if your metamorphosis had been as complete as my own. I feel a barbarian, a wild man of the woods, stiff, narrowed, practical, an incipient martinet, perhaps-not the kind of person who would be associated with prizes on Speech Day,3 or poetry, or dilettante classicism. I wonder what the dons of Merton4 would say to me now, or if I could ever waste my time on Demosthenes again. One should go to Oxford first and see the world afterwards; when one has looked from the mountain-top it is hard to stay contentedly in the valley ... ' 'Do I seem very much of a phantom in the void to you?' another letter inquired a day or two later. 'I must. You seem to me rather like a character in a book or someone whom one has dreamt of and never seen. I suppose there exists such a place as Lowestoft, and that there was once a person called Vera Brittain who came down there with me.' 3 Roland had won all the prizes when he left school, a matter of considerable pride to him, his family, and of course to Vera. 4 His Oxford college. 54 Vera Brittain After weeks of waiting for some signs of interested sympathy, this evidence of war's dividing influence moved me to irrational fury against what I thought a too-easy capitulation to the spiritually destructive preoccupation of military service. I had not yet realised - as I was later to realize through my own 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 one crossed the sea, making England and all the uninitiated marooned within its narrow shores seem remote and insignificant. So I decided with angry pride that - however tolerant Roland's mother, who by his own confession had also gone letterless for longer than usual, might choose to be-I was not going to sit down meekly under contempt or neglect. The agony of love and fear with which the recollection of his constant danger always filled me quenched the first explosion of my wrath, but it was still a sore and unreasonable pen that wrote the reply to his letter. Most estimable, practical, unexceptional adjutant, I suppose I ought to thank you for your letter, since apparently one has to be grateful nowadays for being allowed to know you are alive. But all the same, my first impulse was to tear that letter into small shreds, since it appeared to me very much like an epistolary expression of the Quiet Voice, only with indications of an even greater sense of personal infallibility than the Quiet Voice used to contain.5 My second impulse was to write an answer with a sting in it which would have touched even R. L. (modem style). But I can't do that. One cannot be angry with people at the front- a fact which I think they sometimes take ad vantage of-and so when I read 'We go back into the trenches tomorrow,' I literally dare not write you the kind of letter you perhaps deserve, for thinking that the world might end for you on that discordant note.

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