Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  In writing an autobiography set against the backdrop of the first 25 years of the twentieth century, Vera was well aware that she was making a contribution to the wider history of women’s emancipation in Britain. Two chapters of almost a hundred pages precede the beginning of Vera’s narrative of the war, describing her attempts to escape Buxton as well as her personal struggles for a university education. In her review of Testament of Youth in the Daily Telegraph, Rebecca West saw this section of the book as ‘an interesting piece of social history, in its picture of the peculiarly unsatisfying position of women in England before the war’. And, in the three chapters that make up the final part of the book, following the granting of the vote to women over 30 in February 1918 – an event that passed unnoticed by Vera because of her absorption in her work as a VAD in France – Testament of Youth returns to feminist themes: to Vera’s post-war involvement in equal rights feminism, to her working partnership with Winifred, and, finally, to her engagement to George Catlin and the promise of a marriage that will be defined in feminist terms.

  Like other women who published autobiographies and biographical histories in the twenties and thirties – Beatrice Webb’s My Apprenticeship, Ray Strachey’s The Cause and Helena Swanwick’s I Have Been Young, for example – Vera understood that the story of a woman’s life could no longer be defined in terms of the purely personal. In light of the campaigns for the vote, and their experience of the war years, women could now see themselves as representative of the times, and their lives as a mirror of vast social change.

  However, in fulfilment of this aim, Testament of Youth sometimes misrepresents aspects of Vera’s early struggles for personal autonomy. Her description of getting to Oxford, for instance, overstates the single-mindedness of Vera’s pursuit of that goal, while exaggerating her bleak isolation from the rest of the household (studying for her Somerville exam ‘in a chilly little north-west room’ with ‘frozen hands and feet’). It ignores the considerable help, both practical and financial, that Vera had received from her parents – especially from her mother – so that Vera can portray herself as overcoming enormous odds to win a university education.

  Most significantly, though, and particularly to readers coming to the book for the first time today, Testament of Youth stands as Vera’s ‘vehement protest against war’. While recognising war’s ‘moments of grandeur’, Vera had wanted to show ‘that war was not glamour or glory but abysmal grief and purposeless waste …’. This underlying theme of war’s futility is expressed by the narrator’s frequent foreshadowing of future events. So, in November 1914, Vera bids farewell to Edward, who is off to begin his training with the 10th Sherwood Foresters, at the entrance to Oxford’s Little Clarendon Street, ‘almost opposite’, she adds, ‘the place where the Oxford War Memorial was to be erected ten years afterwards, “In memory of those who fought and those who fell”.’ Similarly, Vera tells us of the purchase of a ‘black moiré and velvet hat trimmed with roses’ that she ‘was to be indescribably happy while wearing it, yet in the end to tear off the roses in a gesture of impotent despair’.

  The beginning of the book also establishes the motif of a connection between war and celebration. As a child, noticing the banners flying to celebrate the relief of Ladysmith during the South African War, Vera is told that her father’s brother, Uncle Frank, serving in the army, will be coming home. ‘But Uncle Frank … never came home after all’, Vera remarks, ‘for he died of enteric in Ladysmith half an hour before the relief of the town’. This prefigures the death of Roland Leighton, some 15 years later, when Vera receives the news that he has been killed, during the celebrations for Christmas at the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

  In a similar fashion, though this time for benign effect, the unhappy associations of wartime partings at railway stations are reversed in Testament of Youth’s final pages, when Vera is joyfully reunited with her fiancé ‘G.’ as he returns home on the Waterloo boat train to marry her. This was emblematic of a theme that was central to the book, as it had been to many of Testament of Youth’s fictional progenitors: Vera’s desire to demonstrate that it was possible to overcome an overwhelming experience of loss and despair and renew one’s life again.

  A comparison between Vera’s war diary and letters and her narrative of her war experiences in Testament of Youth reveals many disparities. In some respects, this is not surprising. Inevitably there are differences of content and emphasis resulting from the passage of time and the changed point of view of the writer. When Vera looked at the diary again, with a view to publishing it just before the Second World War, she could only discover ‘a remote relationship’ between her mature and younger selves. Her portrayal of her love affair with Roland is one instance of how the passage of time has smoothed away some of the stresses and strains that wartime brought to bear on their relationship in order to produce a picture of a more conventional romance.

  But there are also more serious discrepancies to account for. The autobiography contains very little of the ambivalence towards the war – or of the bursts of jingoistic euphoria – that Vera had expressed in her contemporary records. The opening sentence of the book, explaining that ‘the Great War … came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans’, hardly tallies with her diary entries on the outbreak of war in which she is buoyed up by patriotic excitement, follows the international crisis closely, and echoes the bombastic rhetoric she reads in the press.

  What Vera may conceivably be doing here is providing an illustration of how fatal it can be to the personal destinies of ordinary men and women to remain in ignorance of current events – a strong component of her journalism of the early thirties, where women, especially, are singled out for criticism for their political lethargy – but other differences between Vera’s perspectives of 1914–18 and 1933 are starker still. In Testament of Youth, she reveals nothing of the part she had played, at the beginning of the war, in persuading Edward to volunteer, in determined opposition to their father’s wishes. Was this simply too painful a memory to relive? This appears probable, but it is none the less regrettable that Vera is unwilling to explore the roots of her own idealism in 1914 in anything more than a superficial manner. She recoils from probing too deeply her own motivation, while, in the powerful ‘Tawny Island’ chapter, acknowledging in more general terms the susceptibility of her generation to the glamour of war:

  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 call more persistently than at any later time.

  Although these anti-war views were without a doubt sincerely meant, there are parts of Testament of Youth in which one senses that Vera is fashioning her narrative to fit the prescriptions of the disillusionment school of war literature. One instance of this is her portrayal of Victor Richardson in his months at the Front before he was blinded and wounded, fatally as it turned out, at the Battle of Arras in 1917. Victor, as we have seen, enjoyed his life in the trenches, even to the extent of applying for a permanent career in the army. He had joked in one letter to Vera, at the end of October 1916, that he agreed with the Rifleman ‘who when some dear old lady said “What a terrible War it is,” replied “Yes … but better than no War”.’

  None of this is present in Vera’s retrospective account. She downplays Victor’s continuing support for the war – originating in his concern ‘to prevent the repetition in England of what happened in Belgium in August 1914’ – and portrays him instead, prior to his final battle, as full of unquestioning resignation to his fate, an attitude that he sums up in his final letter, through the words of the popular soldiers’ song, ‘We’re here because We’re here because We’re here …’

  Vera presents her own story in
Testament of Youth as a ‘fairly typical’ one. But it is more precisely understood as a portrait of the war as experienced by the English middle classes, and by volunteer soldiers and volunteer nurses in particular. The book is also the classic exposition of the myth of the lost generation. The young men in Vera’s story are representative of the subalterns who went straight from their public schools or Oxbridge, in the early part of the war, to the killing fields of Flanders and France. As a demographic class, these junior officers show mortality rates that are significantly higher than those of other officers, or of the army as a whole. Uppingham School, where Roland, Edward and Victor were educated, lost about one in five of every old boy that served. The Bishop of Malvern, dedicating the war memorial at another public school, Malvern College, observed that the loss of former pupils in the war ‘can only be described as the wiping out of a generation’. The existence of a lost generation is not literally true, and is entirely unsupported by the statistical evidence; but, given the disproportionate death rate among junior officers, it is perhaps no wonder that Vera had come to believe, as she writes in Testament of Youth, that ‘the finest flowers of English manhood had been plucked from a whole generation’.

  The experience of nursing German prisoners of war, in the ward to which Vera was assigned for about five weeks on her arrival at Etaples in August 1917, was to play a pivotal role over the course of the next 20 years, first in the development of Vera’s internationalism, and then, subsequently, her pacifism. The time she spent in the German ward provided her with the fundamental realisation that a dying man has no nationality.

  It comes, therefore, as a considerable surprise to discover in examining the scrupulous records kept by the commanding officer of the 24 General that, contrary to the accounts in Vera’s letters home in 1917, which describe the majority of her German patients as ‘more or less dying’, the statistics for the period show a very low mortality rate – in fact as low as 2 per cent among the prisoner-patients. How is one to account for this discrepancy?

  There is little doubt that after the relative quiescence of her time as a VAD in Malta, where Vera rarely encountered patients who were seriously ill, the ‘Active Service conditions’ of the 24 General offered a marked, even a welcome, contrast; nor can it be disputed that, in all the pressure and excitement of those first weeks at Etaples, Vera initially exaggerated the plight of her German patients in her letters home to her mother.

  When she came to write her account of Etaples in Testament of Youth, more than a decade later, this earlier exaggeration was allowed to colour the substance and tone of her description of the German ward. It should be added in extenuation that the parts of the book devoted to Vera’s period as a VAD in France do not possess the reliability of precise chronology and detail of earlier chapters, for the simple reason that Vera had ceased to keep a diary on her return from Malta in April 1917, and had only some letters to her mother, a few rushed notes to Edward, and a sometimes hazy recollection of events that had taken place more than a decade and a half earlier. Her description, for example, of the British Army’s only serious mutiny of the war, which took place at Etaples at the beginning of the second week of September 1917, is highly misleading. Not only does she place her account of the mutiny in October, she also maintains that she and other nurses were confined to their quarters in the first half of the month during the disturbances and their aftermath – a claim that hardly makes sense, given that, in September, during the actual period of the mutiny, Vera and her friends were allowed to move around Etaples and surrounding areas without any form of restraint.

  Equally, though, there is no escaping the fact that the chilling power of Vera’s largely fictional recreation of German prisoners dying in vast numbers fits appropriately with the overarching anti-war theme of Testament of Youth, and Vera’s determination to prevent another generation from drifting towards war. ‘I’ve been told that my book makes some people weep’, she said, underlining her intention during the lecture tour of the United States that followed the American publication of the book, ‘but I care much more that it should make them think.’

  Testament of Youth was to have an unforeseen and far-reaching impact on Vera’s life. At the time of its writing and publication, she was still some years away from declaring herself a pacifist. In 1933, as the final chapters of the book show, she continued to cling to the fading promise of an internationalist solution as represented by the League of Nations, with its ultimate sanction of the use of military force.

  However, the process of writing the book undoubtedly hastened her eventual conversion to pacifism, which occurred at the beginning of 1937. For, looking back at the tumultuous events of her youth, she was able for the first time to separate her respect for the heroism and endurance of her fiancé, brother and friends from idealism about the war itself and the issue of what they had been fighting for.

  Other factors were at work, too. Vera’s celebrity as a bestselling writer on both sides of the Atlantic increased her public exposure, and gave her new platforms from which to disseminate her views. Amid the spirit of neo-pacifism that prevailed in Britain at the beginning of the thirties, Vera’s readers now looked to her as ‘a minor prophetess of peace’. The series of international crises of the early to mid-thirties, culminating in the subjugation of Abyssinia by Mussolini’s forces, exposed the bankruptcy of the League of Nations as a voice for peace. Collective security – genuine internationalism of the kind that Vera had worked for since coming down from Oxford – seemed unattainable. Pacifism, and the refusal to sanction war under any circumstances, began to appear to some to be the only path that might guarantee peace in the long term. Personal tragedies may also have played some more indefinable role in pushing Vera towards a more radical affiliation. In the space of just two months, in 1935, Arthur Brittain committed suicide, and Winifred Holtby died of Bright’s disease at the age of 37.

  So when, in 1936, the charismatic figure of Canon Dick Sheppard asked Vera to become a signatory and sponsor of his new pacifist movement, the Peace Pledge Union, after some hesitation she agreed. Vera feared war even more than she feared the rise of Fascism in Europe. Ultimately, she felt that she should be one of the few who ‘are needed to hold up before humanity the, as yet, but not always, unattainable ideal’.

  She had not, as she once put it, become a pacifist ‘for reasons of Christianity’; and, indeed, in the two-and-a-half years that were left before the outbreak of the Second World War, she devoted much of her time to the search for political solutions that might avert conflict. But, after September 1939, and, even more, with the threat of invasion after the spring of 1940, Vera’s pacifism took on more of a religious hue. Its focus was the maintenance of civilised values in wartime. Her pacifism had a positive goal. In her fortnightly ‘Letter to Peace-Lovers’, Vera insisted that pacifists had an obligation to the community and to the society in which they lived. She argued that, although they could play no part in any activity which furthered the purposes of the ‘war machine’, pacifists had no right to remain resolutely passive while the world around them was in such a state of turmoil.

  This meant in practice that Vera worked, at every opportunity that presented itself, to relieve the suffering of the victims of war. She campaigned hard for food relief, to get supplies through to Britain’s fallen allies who were experiencing severe shortages because of Britain’s economic blockade of Germany and of all of occupied and neutral Europe. And, most significantly, she was one of the few who raised their voices to speak out against the Allies’ policy of the saturation bombing of German cities, attempting to stir the ‘uneasy’ consciences of the British people by making them face the truth of what was being done in their name.

  It was a courageous stand of conscience on her part, and not without personal cost to Vera herself. She was prevented by Government restrictions from travelling to the United States to see her children, who had been evacuated there, and consequently endured a separation from them for more than three yea
rs. And much of the American market for her books disappeared overnight when her protest against saturation bombing – called Massacre by Bombing in the United States, and Seed of Chaos in Britain – was published in the States in 1944.

  She could never renounce her pacifism, Vera once said, because it was so deeply rooted in the first-hand experience of war that she had so movingly described in Testament of Youth: in the horror of nursing the wounded and dying; in witnessing the dreadful suffering that modern warfare can inflict; in losing the people that she loved most.

  [i] For a brief excerpt from the diary account, see above, p. 78.

  5 From Book to Film 1934–2014

  The first plans for a big-screen adaptation of Testament of Youth were conceived 80 years ago.

  In the spring of 1934, nine months after the book’s publication, a Hollywood producer offered Vera $10,000 for the film rights. Elisabeth Bergner, the ‘exquisitely spiritual’ Austrian actress, was one casting suggestion to play Vera. Bergner had been a leading star of German theatre before moving to Britain following the Nazis’ seizure of power and winning acclaim there, in film as well as theatre. ‘She has your high forehead & delicate profile …’, Winifred told Vera, ‘[h]er red hair could easily be darkened’. Vera was more concerned about how Hollywood might sentimentalise or distort the story. ‘Of course a dignified, woman’s Cavalcade film could be made of it, but would it, by America?’[i]