Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  One consequence of the heavy influx of casualties from Loos was that after a long period of waiting Vera’s orders to commence nursing at a military hospital finally came through. On 18 October she left Buxton and arrived at the nursing hostel on Champion Hill in south-east London, ready to begin work at the First London General in Camberwell the next day.

  A converted teachers’ training college, the First London General was the military wing of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Vera’s was the second attachment of VADs to arrive there. This was nursing-proper. Her patients were often the seriously wounded or dying, and Vera had rapidly to accustom herself to ‘the butchers’ shop appearance’ of the wards and the ‘holes in various parts of people that you could put your fist into’. The hours were longer – often 12½-hour days at a stretch – and the living quarters spartan and inadequately equipped, with just one bathroom for 20 occupants. The military-style discipline and regulations represented a marked contrast to anything Vera had experienced so far, their strictness reflected in the Red Cross specifications for the VAD uniform: collars were to be stiff, white, 2⅛ inches deep; cuffs stiff, white, 3⅜ inches deep; belts stiff, white, 3 inches deep. Anything that smacked of individualism was to be stamped out. Additionally, Vera was to experience something of the friction between VADs and the professional nurses, who regarded these novices with hostility and resentment, and were both wary of entrusting them with serious responsibilities and concerned that after the war they might be competing with them for jobs (with state registration still several years away, trained nurses suffered from understandable concern about their professional status).

  Vera as a VAD at the First London General Hospital, Camberwell.

  Vera’s initial probationary month at the First London General left her barely any time to keep up with her diary, though she continued to be conscientious in ensuring that Roland never went short of regular letters. His letters, by contrast, were becoming more intermittent. In the third week of October, just as she was starting at the new hospital, he wrote apologising for his cruelty in having kept her letterless for so long, while admitting that he was becoming immersed in his world at the Front as the only way of stifling ‘boredom and regrets’.

  Vera responded acerbically – she had already warned Roland that she could be much harsher with her pen than in person – asking him not to get ‘too absorbed in your little world out there – even if it makes things easier’. His silence throughout the next few weeks was broken only by a cool, impersonal note in which he commented on his ‘metamorphosis’ into ‘a wild man of the woods, stiff, narrowed, practical’. His next letter was scarcely any better. He asked if he seemed like ‘a phantom in the void’ to her; she seemed to him ‘rather like the character in a book or someone whom one has dreamt of & never seen’.

  This was too much for Vera. ‘Most estimable, practical, unexceptional Adjutant’, she replied, before going on to admit that she was unable to write as freely as she wanted in case it should be the last letter he ever read. All the same she reminded him with brutal frankness that the war killed other things besides physical life, and that she sometimes felt ‘that little by little the Individuality of You is being as surely buried as the bodies are of those who lie beneath the trenches of Flanders and France’.

  This brought a reply from Roland full of penitence and remorse. He had been ‘a conceited, selfish, self-satisfied beast’. They were reconciled, and his letters became once more warm and vital. Nevertheless, they continued to display an oddly dispassionate quality, as if he was looking in at their relationship from the outside. In one, he went some way towards admitting that he had fallen in love with Vera as the incarnation of an ideal, Lyndall, the feminist heroine of his favourite novel, The Story of an African Farm. ‘Apropos of which I may remark that the unfortunate Olive Schreiner is too often made responsible for things over which she had no control whatever.’

  Roland had managed to obtain Christmas leave from 24 to 31 December. ‘Life seems quite irradiated now when I think of the sweet hours that may be ahead’, Vera wrote to him on 7 December, barely able to contain her excitement at the news. Ten days later she wrote to Roland to confirm that the Matron of her ward had given her leave at the same time as his. ‘And shall I really see you again – and so soon?’ Her parents had recently taken up residence at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, following Arthur Brittain’s decision to take early retirement from the paper mills. The Leightons were also nearby. They had let the Lowestoft house, and had rented a cottage at Keymer, seven miles outside Brighton. The plan was that Roland would spend Christmas Day with his family and be reunited with Vera on Boxing Day.

  At the Grand Hotel Vera waited impatiently for news of Roland. Having received no message from him on Christmas Day, she assumed that his crossing had been delayed, or that communication by telephone or telegram had been difficult, and went to bed expecting to hear from him the next day.

  The following morning Vera had just finished dressing when she was called to the telephone. She ‘sprang up joyfully’. However, the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t Roland’s as expected, but his sister Clare’s. And the purpose of her call was not to tell Vera that Roland had arrived home, but that he had died of wounds, after being shot through the stomach by German sniper fire while repairing the wire in front of a trench, at a casualty clearing station, on 23 December.

  It would take months for Vera and Roland’s family to piece together the circumstances of his death. Hardest for Vera to bear would be the absence of any final message from Roland in his last hours.

  What did eventually reach her was the manuscript of Roland’s poem ‘Hédauville’, probably his last, and undoubtedly his finest effort. Dated November 1915, from the period of their epistolary estrangement, and recalling their walks in countryside around Buxton, the spring before the war, the poem seemed strangely prophetic, but of exactly what?

  The sunshine on the long white road

  That ribboned down the hill,

  The velvet clematis that clung

  Around your window-sill,

  Are waiting for you still.

  Again the shadowed pool shall break

  In dimples round your feet,

  And when the thrush sings in your wood,

  Unknowing you may meet

  Another stranger, Sweet.

  And if he is not quite so old

  As the boy you used to know,

  And less proud, too, and worthier,

  You may not let him go –

  (And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)

  It will be better so.

  Was Roland foreseeing his own death and predicting that Vera would meet someone else? Or was he trying gently to suggest that their love, so difficult to sustain in wartime, was cooling and that Vera will eventually find happiness elsewhere?[i]

  The text of the telegram to Roland’s family, informing them of his death, copied by Vera into her notebook, together with quotations from Laurence Binyon’s poem of remembrance, ‘For the Fallen’ (‘They shall not grow old…’), and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

  There was of course no way she could ever know. Vera’s own poetic response to Roland’s death (and the favourite among modern readers of all her war poems) gives a stark picture of her grief and heartbreak, and remains affecting despite, or because of, its ‘numbed banality’:

  (TO R.A.L. DIED OF WOUNDS IN FRANCE, DECEMBER 23RD, 1915)

  Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,

  And I shall see that still the skies are blue,

  And feel once more I do not live in vain,

  Although bereft of You …

  But, though kind Time may many joys renew,

  There is one greatest joy I shall not know

  Again, because my heart for loss of You

  Was broken, long ago.

  [i] Harry Ricketts (Strange Meetings. The Poets of the Great War) has recently lent some credence to this latter view by pointing out that Roland’s
poem is an imitation – in subject matter, stanza form, and its extra delaying line in the final verse – of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Chilterns’. Brooke’s poem had ended with ‘a brisk brush-off’ to some former girlfriend: ‘And I shall find some girl perhaps/And a better one than you,/With eyes as wise, but kindlier,/And lips as soft, but true./And I daresay she will do.’

  3 To the Bitter End 1916–1918

  As she struggled to come to terms with the shock of Roland’s death, Vera poured out her feelings into her diary and letters. The return to his family, in mid-January 1916, of Roland’s belongings – including the uniform in which he had been killed – became the subject, in both a diary entry and a lengthy letter to Edward, of some of Vera’s most moving and memorable writing. Her instincts as a writer, and the power of her observation, confronting the truth head on without restraint, reasserted themselves even as she battled to cope with her grief.

  She had been paying a visit to the Leightons at Keymer, and arrived ‘at a very opportune though very awful moment.’ Roland’s possessions from the Front had just been unpacked and were lying all over the floor. ‘Everything’, she told Edward, ‘was damp & worn and simply caked with mud’.

  And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone else who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn those things when living, the smell was the smell of graveyards & the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it was not the usual clean smell of earth, but it was as though it was saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time … There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition – the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head – with the badge coated thickly with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it. The clothes he was wearing when wounded were those in which he came home last time. We discovered that the bullet was an expanding one. The hole where it went in front – well below where the belt would have been, just beside the right-hand bottom pocket of the tunic – was almost microscopic, but at the back, almost exactly where his back bone would have been, there was quite a large rent. The under things he was wearing at the time have evidently had to be destroyed, but they sent back a khaki waistcoat or vest … which was dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of khaki breeches also in the same state, which had been slit open at the top by someone in a great hurry – perhaps the Doctor in haste to get at the wound …

  Unable to bear the sight – or smell – Marie Leighton ordered her husband to remove Roland’s clothes, and burn or bury them. They detracted from his memory, she declared, and spoilt his glamour. Using kettles of boiling water to melt the frozen earth, Robert and Clare Leighton buried them in the back garden.

  Vera’s grief at Roland’s death was intensified by the absence of a final message from him, apart from the enigmatic poem in an exercise book returned with his blood-stained belongings. Additionally, she was distressed that his death appeared not to have served any military purpose. Wasn’t there a curious rashness, she asked herself repeatedly, about his decision to go out to mend the wire in front of a trench in such bright moonlight? And might this be defined as the act of heroism to which he had so long aspired, or was it merely folly? She received the news of Roland’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism, a decision he had kept from both her and his family, with fewer misgivings. She was glad after all that he had had some hope of a life in the next world during his last months in this one.

  Whatever the doubts that continued to possess her, Roland’s death had left Vera with an overwhelming need to go on believing that he had died for some larger purpose, and that the war was being fought for some definite end. ‘I do condemn War in theory most strongly’, she wrote in early 1916, ‘… but there are worse things even than War and I do believe even wholesale murder to be preferable to atrophy and effeteness. It is better to do active harm and definite wrong than to drift and make no effort in any direction … And when the War in question is a War on War, all the usual objections are changed into the opposite commendations.’

  The timing of Edward’s departure for France with the 11th Sherwood Foresters could hardly have been worse. Six weeks after Roland’s death, following many delays and false alarms, Edward was seen off at Charing Cross by his mother and Vera. Once in the trenches, he described his early impressions of his new life for his sister’s benefit. He now understood, he wrote, how Roland had been killed: ‘it was quite ordinary but just unlucky.’ By the end of March, Edward and his battalion had moved to the town of Albert, on the Somme, with its famous Golden Virgin and Child leaning from the spire of its basilica (one of the most powerful myths among British troops was that the war would end when the statue fell). From here, one evening at the beginning of April, Edward cycled to Louvencourt to visit Roland’s grave. Removing his cap in front of the grave, he prayed that he might be worthy of Roland’s friendship. But he didn’t remain there long, unable to feel that ‘He’ was present (like Vera, Edward had begun to apotheosise Roland in their correspondence).

  An early photograph of Roland’s grave at Louvencourt (marked by the large cross in the foreground), before the construction of the cemetery there, pasted by Vera into her notebook. The lines of verse are from W. E. Henley’s ‘Echoes XLII’, a favourite poem of Roland’s. A quotation from them was to be inscribed on his headstone.

  In Edward’s absence, the third member of the Uppingham Triumvirate, Victor Richardson, assumed a new significance in Vera’s life. Still stationed at Woolwich Arsenal on light duties following his recovery from illness, Victor met Vera regularly for dinner in London at the Trocadero, where he provided a sympathetic ear for her problems. It was Victor who attempted to unravel the sometimes contradictory accounts of Roland’s death that Vera was receiving, and to reassure her that his life had not been thrown recklessly away, telling her that it was the duty of a good officer to safeguard his men by going ahead to inspect the wire in front of a trench, to see that all was safe before the rest of the wiring party followed. Victor more than lived up to his nickname of ‘Father Confessor’ as he counselled Vera with compassion and understanding.

  Another friend of Edward’s, Geoffrey Thurlow, a fellow officer from his original battalion, also offered her friendship and solace. Educated at Chigwell School, in Essex, Geoffrey was up at Oxford for one term, in the autumn of 1914, studying at University College, before he decided to enlist. As a second lieutenant in the 10th Sherwood Foresters he had befriended Edward, and their friendship survived their separation when Geoffrey was sent out to France ahead of Edward in October 1915.

  Vera had met Geoffrey Thurlow when he spent a weekend in Buxton, shortly before she left home for the First London General, and had immediately been struck by him. She described him as ‘strange, though very pleasant looking’, with close-set blue eyes, a decided chin, and thick, wavy brown hair. Geoffrey had sent her a brief but heartfelt letter of condolence from France on learning of Roland’s death. Not long afterwards, Vera learned from The Times’s casualty list that Geoffrey had been wounded in action southeast of Ypres. In late February 1916, she visited him while he was recovering in bed at Fishmongers’ Hall Hospital, near London Bridge.

  Geoffrey’s face wound was healing, but he was clearly suffering from the after-effects of shock. Vera found him ‘very interesting to talk to’, as she reported to Edward, though both of them were constrained by shyness and reserve. Several days later, Vera returned for another visit, on this occasion with her mother. This time Geoffrey was sitting up in a chair, huddling over a small gas stove to ward off the chill. He talked openly of the German attack in which most of his men had been killed, and of being virtually surrounded; and agonised over his decision whether to retreat or face certain death. Later, when he knew Vera a little better, he was to confess to her that he felt forced to overcome his ‘funk’ in order to fight, and
that he believed himself to be of no ‘earthly use’ as an officer, being ‘disgustingly windy’ and lacking in courage.

  Geoffrey’s candour about such matters must have made a deep impression on Vera. Most officers felt an obligation to present themselves to the outside world as completely fearless. As the psychiatrist of war neurosis, W. H. R. Rivers, was to note in 1918, according to the ‘social standards’ of the day, ‘fear and its expression are regarded as reprehensible’. Vera was also aware that Geoffrey was ‘a non-militarist at heart’, as she described him in her diary, who had put aside his objections to war ‘for Patriotism’s sake’. As their friendship grew, so did her respect for him. On her third visit to the hospital, Geoffrey overcame his reticence and asked Vera to accompany him to a concert at the Queen’s Hall during his convalescent leave. After he was passed fit and returned to France in August they would write frequently to one another with an increasing sense of intimacy and understanding.

  Vera’s friendships with Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow were vital in relieving her sense of desolation in the period immediately following Roland’s death, as she began to make uncertain plans for her future. She had returned to Camberwell on 3 January, far too soon after Roland’s death, and immediately found hospital work intolerable and almost impossible to bear. She was depressed and often lonely, irritated by the petty restrictions imposed on VADs, and seriously considering giving up nursing when her contract expired in April. The uninspiring tasks she had once undertaken with such dedication as an expression of solidarity with Roland were now carried out cursorily or not at all. Off-duty she lay for hours thinking about Roland, going over in her mind ‘all the times I saw Him & all the details of His death until there seems nothing worth having left in the future at all; it is a shame that everything worth while should come to an end so soon in one’s life.’