Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Sitting on the rocks’ edge in the front of the night quarters on 1 May, Vera suddenly resolved to go home ‘for Edward’s sake & Victor’s, & if he wishes it, to devote my life to the service of Victor, the only one (apart from Edward, who is different) left of the three men I loved. For I loved Geoffrey …’. Aware of the strength of Geoffrey’s religious faith, she could not feel that Geoffrey had gone so completely as she felt Roland had, and as she sat on the rocks she sensed she was not alone, but that Geoffrey was standing there all the time beside her.

  Vera knew that she could comfort Edward in the loss of his friends as no one else could. ‘I can feel his need of me as strongly across all these miles as if he had actually expressed it’, she wrote to her Uncle Bill, her mother’s younger brother. She had intended to continue nursing until the war was over – and had only just renewed her contract – but her priority now seemed clear. Her intention was to offer to marry Victor.

  By 12 May, Vera’s resignation had been accepted and she had permission to return to England. Ten days later she left Malta. ‘I hated to go, for I had been very happy there.’ The threat from submarine warfare had made sea travel too dangerous, and she returned by a complicated overland route that took in Rome and Paris. By 28 May she was back home, at her parents’ new London flat at Oakwood Court, off Kensington High Street, relieved that she had arrived in time to see Edward, who, after almost a year’s convalescence and home duty, would shortly be going out to France again.

  Edward meanwhile had been keeping Vera informed about Victor’s progress, which was promising. ‘He is perfectly sensible in every way’, Edward had assured Vera, ‘and I don’t think there is the very least doubt that he will live.’ Victor had been told that he would probably never see again, but ‘was marvellously cheerful’. He had been through some ‘rather bitter’ days, but had quickly rallied, and was attempting to learn Braille, and receiving visits from Captain Ian Fraser from St Dunstan’s, the charity for blind servicemen. Captain Fraser had encouraged Victor to think of leading an independent life in the future, despite his loss of sight. Victor talked of entering the Church, or of becoming a schoolmaster.

  For ten days Vera was in constant attendance at Victor’s bedside at the Second London General in Chelsea, which specialised in treating servicemen with badly damaged eyes. Although they talked at first of nothing more consequential than the hospital routine and the visits of his friends, Victor’s mental faculties did not appear to be in any way impaired. The matter of their future does not appear to have been touched upon, though her very presence there may have signified to Victor something of her intention. Certainly Victor’s father Frank, and his aunt Miss Dennant (his mother’s sister, whom Frank Richardson afterwards married), were aware of Vera’s willingness to offer Victor ‘a very close & life-long devotion if he would accept it’.

  However, on 8 June, Victor’s situation took a dramatic turn for the worse. In the middle of the night, he experienced what he described to the nurse as a click in his head, like a miniature explosion. He subsequently became very distressed and disoriented, and by the time his family and Vera reached the hospital he was delirious and unable to recognise them. On the morning of 9 June, a telephone call to Oakwood Court, where the Richardsons were staying with the Brittain family, informed them of Victor’s death.

  Later Vera wrote of her recognition of the limits of her magnanimity, and of the likelihood that Victor’s death had spared them both from a relationship that would have become increasingly difficult to sustain. At the time, however, his death left her with a feeling of despair ‘at not being allowed to do if not the best … at any rate the hardest thing I ever thought of doing … Not even to be permitted to ‘do good’ – that seemed too bitter an humiliation’.

  Nine days after Victor’s death, it was confirmed that he had been awarded the Military Cross ‘for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. His funeral in the small cemetery at Hove, his home town, was accompanied by full military honours. The Brighton Gazette reported that:

  The gallant young officer was the eldest son of Mr. F. V. Richardson of 65 Wilbury Avenue, and 15 Cambridge Road, Hove. The cortege was met at the entrance of the cemetery by a bugle and drum band, under Drummer-Sergeant Pratt, and a firing party. The hearse passed on, and the squads followed a slow march. The coffin was enveloped in the Union Jack, and resting upon it were officer’s cap and sword. The coffin bore the inscription: ‘Lieut. Victor Richardson, King’s Royal Rifles, died 9th June, 1917, aged 22 years’.

  The common loss of their three beloved friends in just 18 months reaffirmed the bond between brother and sister that had survived unbroken since childhood. At first Edward had seemed distant and withdrawn on weekend leave at Oakwood Court at the beginning of June. But his letter to Vera, written a couple of days after Victor’s death, expressed his love for her, even as he acknowledged that everything that had seemed of value in life had tumbled down like a house of cards. ‘We started alone, dear child’, he wrote in conclusion,

  and here we are alone again; you find me changed, I expect, more than I find you; that is perhaps the way of Life. But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother.

  Edward returned to France in the last week of June. Unable to face another railway station parting, out of superstition that this might ensure that they would never meet again, Vera said her farewells at Oakwood Court, and watched Edward’s departure in a taxi from the windows of the flat before returning his violin to its case and putting the instrument away. Within weeks, Vera had returned to the VAD headquarters at Devonshire House to request a posting on the Western Front to be near Edward, and to fulfil her own ‘small, weary part in this War’ to the bitter end. She had broken her contract in order to return from Malta. But a sympathetic Red Cross official, learning that Vera had returned home to marry a man blinded at Arras, overlooked this breach of the rules, and arranged for her to join a small draft of nurses travelling from Dover to Boulogne at the beginning of August. On 4 August, the third anniversary of the outbreak of war, Vera arrived at Etaples, a small fishing port in the Pas de Calais, surrounded by windswept dunes and pinewoods, which had been transformed into the British Army’s largest-ever hospital and reinforcement camp.

  The ‘Etaples Administrative District’ provided not only hospitals but also prisons, stores, railway yards and port facilities, as well as infantry depots through which more than a million officers and men had passed, by September 1917, for regrouping and training on their way to the Front. The poet, Wilfred Owen, who was at Etaples at the beginning of 1917, and again in the autumn of 1918, just a couple of months before his death, remembered the place as a ‘vast, dreadful encampment’, ‘a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept … before the shambles’.

  The first hospital at Etaples was opened in the spring of 1915. Two-and-a-half years later there were nearly 20 military hospitals, housed in timber buildings and under canvas. The vast encampment has been described as resembling a large town, or small city, several thousand of whose population changed on a daily basis.[i] Etaples was also the scene, during the second week of September 1917, not long after Vera’s arrival there, of the British army’s only serious mutiny of the war, when hundreds of young men demonstrated on the streets against the conditions in the camp, culminating in violent scenes on the Three Arch Bridge. One soldier, Lance Corporal Jesse Short, was quickly court-martialled and shot on a charge of incitement.

  Etaples was to be the climax of Vera’s nursing experience, representing real active service conditions at last. ‘Well, Malta was an interesting experience of the world’, she wrote to her mother on arrival, ‘but this is war. There is a great coming & going all day long – men marching from one place “somewhere” in France to another, ambulances, transports etc passing all the time … Everyt
hing of war that one can imagine is here, except actual fighting, & one can even hear the distant rumble of that at times’. The northern end of the camp contained a series of eight hospitals, and it was to one of these, No. 24 General, on the brow of a hill, extending in long lines of wooden huts at right angles from the road and interspersed with tents and marquees, that Vera found herself posted. She worked in a hut and slept under canvas.

  The 24 General had been sent to France in 1915, and, by August 1917, formed the largest of the military hospitals at Etaples, with a capacity for accommodating 3,130 patients in its beds. Vera was quickly assigned to Ward 29, the centre for the treatment of sick and wounded German officers and men, which contained just over 400 patients at the time of her arrival. ‘It was with very mixed feelings that I followed my guide to the German ward’, she remembered in the draft of an article written the following year. ‘To the majority of British people … the word “German” has gradually come to indicate not so much an individual as the personification of those powers of evil against which an heroic Army is striving to prevail’. To be ‘cast into the midst’ of a number of people, of ‘hostile nationality’, was therefore ‘a slightly alarming experience’.

  Yet she soon realised that it was impossible to feel any antipathy towards her German patients as they were far too ill, ‘& utterly dependent’ on her, for that. In the operating theatre attached to the ward, the medical officer, assisted by a nurse, performed acute operations, while Vera and two orderlies dressed wounds – gunshot wounds penetrating the chest or abdomen, badly smashed heads and amputated limbs. More than half the cases were empyemas (a condition in which pus and fluid from infected tissue collects inside a body cavity).

  The tragic and fundamental absurdity of the situation in which she might be involved in saving the life of a man, whom, a short time before, Edward could have been trying to kill, was not lost on her. From trenches outside Ypres, Edward observed that ‘It is very strange that you should be nursing Hun prisoners, and it does show how absurd the whole thing is’. Vera saw the experience, as she wrote in an article for her old school magazine, as an opportunity to live up to the Red Cross motto, ‘Inter Arma Caritas’, reinforcing her conviction that a dying man has no nationality.

  In the second week of September, Vera was transferred to a British hut specialising in acute medical cases. Here she watched in the early days of December as the first victims of mustard gas from the Battle of Cambrai began to arrive on the convoys. In a letter to her mother, dated 5 December 1917, which she afterwards described as her ‘first angry protest against war-time hypocrisy’, she drew attention to the plight of the pathetic, dying Tommies:

  I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war … could see a case – to say nothing of 10 cases – of mustard gas in its early stages – could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blinded eyes … all sticky & stuck together, & always fighting for breath … saying that their throats are closing & they know they will choke. The only thing one can say is that such severe cases don’t last long … and yet people persist in saying that God made the War, when there are such inventions of the devil about …

  Like her nursing of German prisoners, Vera’s care for mustard gas victims was contributing to her scepticism about the war, to the extent that she would later pinpoint this as the period when she began to think along pacifist lines and, more precisely – in the case of her mustard gas patients – as the moment when she ‘definitely ceased to regard the War as an instrument of God or even of human justice.’ But she was still a long way from taking a formal position against the war. Indeed, as a nurse serving close to the front line, it’s difficult to see how she could possibly have done so, or how she might have developed these flashes of outrage into a sustained argument against the war. Moreover, the first shock and horror of the gas cases soon wore off. By February 1918, Vera was writing in a much more matter-of-fact fashion to her mother about ‘the gassed cases’ that were crowding into her ward. ‘I find the work quite interesting & it is conveniently regular – I mean the treatment is practically the same for everybody so you can simply go straight through it.’

  In an early letter home from Etaples, Vera had commented on the ‘charmingness’ of the other VADs and nursing sisters, while reassuring her parents that the women she worked with were all ‘ladies’, and of similarly middle or upper middle class origins. With one of the Queen Alexandra nursing sisters, Faith Moulson (later disguised as ‘Hope Milroy’ in Testament of Youth), who took charge of the German ward soon after Vera’s arrival there, Vera was to establish a lasting friendship. With her calculated delight in shocking people by her outrageous remarks, her dramatic manner and mode of speech, and her ‘half-scornful control of everything and everybody’, Faith Moulson radiated unconventionality. Eight years older than Vera, Faith came from a long line of bishops – one uncle was the Bishop of Manchester – and had trained as a nurse as a rebuke to the clerical atmosphere of her family. She ‘is quite my best friend here’, Vera told her mother, ‘quite a different type from the usual trained nurse as not only is she very clever & original … but she comes from a very good family …’. Off duty, they were constant companions, taking long walks, or drives in a fiacre throughout the countryside around Etaples, where the landscape ‘is really lovely, especially on a stormy day, when the lights and the shades on the sand hills with their little clumps of dark pines, & the long expanse of sand & the distant sea are most beautiful.’

  In the third week of January 1918, after just under six months’ continuous ward duty in France, Vera was granted permission to return home, where Edward was also on leave. That autumn had been a harrowing time for him. In the mud and cold of the Ypres Salient, he had spent only three-and-a-half days out of the line, and experienced several close brushes with death. In November, Edward and the 11th Sherwood Foresters were suddenly posted to Italy, to join the Allied reinforcements on the relatively quiescent Italian front in the Alps above Vicenza. Following the humiliating rout of the Italian army at Caporetto, in October 1917, the task of breaking the Austrian offensive had assumed a new and pressing importance.

  It was an unsatisfactory leave. After more than three years of war, Arthur and Edith Brittain were showing signs of breaking under the strain. Mrs Brittain seemed obsessed with the price of butter and the difficulty of obtaining good servants. Mr Brittain, with nothing else to do, brooded depressively about his health, having retired far too early for a man of his relative youth or vitality (he was barely 50 when he left the paper business). To add to this, Vera was confined to bed for a week with a feverish illness. By the time she had recovered, only three days’ leave remained, during which she and Edward snatched a few visits to theatres and concert halls.

  On 21 March, two months after her return to Etaples, the hospitals were overwhelmed with a new influx of wounded and dying men, as Ludendorff, the German commander, began a last desperate bid for victory against the Allied armies in the West. For three weeks, exhausted doctors, nurses and VADs worked frantically to cope with the never-ending rush of convoys, all the time suppressing the fear that the Germans might actually be in the process of winning the war.

  However, by the second half of April it was clear that the German offensive would fail. But Vera would not be in France to witness the Allies’ recovery. At the end of March, while the fighting was still at its height, she received a letter from her father informing her that, as her mother was in a nursing home with ‘a complete general breakdown’, it was her duty to leave France and return to Kensington immediately.

  Family obligations were one area in which voluntary nurses and volunteer soldiers were clearly differentiated. A soldier on active service could not, of course, return home, however badly he might be needed by a family member. A VAD, by contrast, who did not face punishment for breaking her contract, or for deciding – as many did – that one six months term away from home was lon
g enough, often bowed to family expectations to put their needs above those of the country. It wasn’t uncommon for VADs to feel torn by a conflicting sense of duty, as the unmarried daughter felt forced to conform to the standards set by an earlier generation of women.

  Vera gave in to parental pressure, though not without a terse reminder to her mother that, while she could put in an application to resign, it might be months before she was released. In the event, she arrived at Oakwood Court at the end of April, to find the flat empty and her father in a local hotel. She immediately brought her mother back from the Mayfair nursing home where she was staying and took charge of the household. But it was with a heavy air of resentment that she tried to readjust to the dull monotony of civilian life.

  At the beginning of the third week of June, the newspaper headlines were dominated by reports of an Austrian offensive on the Italian front, during which there had been heavy fighting. Edward had not written since 3 June, and, as the days passed and no word came from him, Vera wandered restlessly around the flat, barely able to conceal her fear. Edith Brittain was staying with her mother at Purley, and Vera and her father were just finishing tea on the afternoon of 22 June when they were interrupted by a sudden loud knock at the door.