Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  10

  When he had driven up in the taxi with me from the station, and we were left together in the morning-room, which looked across the snow-covered town to the sad hills beyond, the sudden effect of seeing him in my semi-invalid weakness after such agitation of mind brought me so near to crying that I couldn’t prevent him from noticing it.

  Fighting angrily with the tears, I asked him: ‘Well, are you satisfied at last?’

  He replied that he hardly knew. He certainly had no wish to die, and now that he had got what he wanted, a dust-and-ashes feeling had come. He neither hated the Germans nor loved the Belgians; the only possible motive for going was ‘heroism in the abstract’, and that didn’t seem a very logical reason for risking one’s life.

  Mournfully we sat there recapitulating the brief and happy past; the future was too uncertain to attract speculation. I had begun, I confessed to him, to pray again, not because I believed that it did any good, but so as to leave no remote possibility unexplored. The War, we decided, came hardest of all upon us who were young. The middle-aged and the old had known their period of joy, whereas upon us catastrophe had descended just in time to deprive us of that youthful happiness to which we had believed ourselves entitled.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I told him, ‘I’ve wished I’d never met you - that you hadn’t come to take away my impersonal attitude towards the War and make it a cause of suffering to me as it is to thousands of others. But if I could choose not to have met you, I wouldn’t do it - even though my future had always to be darkened by the shadow of death.’

  ‘Ah, don’t say that!’ he said. ‘Don’t say it will all be spoilt; when I return things may be just the same.’

  ‘If you return,’ I emphasised, determined to face up to things for both of us, and when he insisted: ‘ “When”, not “if ”,’ I said that I didn’t imagine he was going to France without fully realising all that it might involve. He answered gravely that he had thought many times of the issue, but had a settled conviction that he was coming back, though perhaps not quite whole.

  ‘Would you like me any less if I was, say, minus an arm?’

  My reply need not be recorded. It brought the tears so near to the surface again that I picked up the coat which I had thrown off, and abruptly said I would take it upstairs - which I did the more promptly when I suddenly realised that he was nearly crying too.

  After tea we walked steeply uphill along the wide road which leads over lonely, undulating moors through Whaley Bridge to Manchester, twenty miles away. This was ‘the long white road’ of Roland’s poems, where nearly a year before we had walked between ‘the grey hills and the heather’, and the plover had cried in the awakening warmth of the spring. There were no plover there that afternoon; heavy snow had fallen, and a rough blizzard drove sleet and rain in our faces.

  It was a mournfully appropriate setting for a discussion on death and the alternative between annihilation and an unknown hereafter. We could not honestly admit that we thought we should survive, though we would have given anything in the world to believe in a life to come, but he promised me that if he died in France he would try to come back and tell me that the grave was not the end of our love. As we walked down the hill towards Buxton the snow ceased and the evening light began faintly to shine in the sky, but somehow it only showed us the more clearly how grey and sorrowful the world had become.

  Time, so desperately brief, so immeasurably precious, suddenly seemed to be racing. At dinner that night I wore my prettiest frock, a deep blue ninon over grey satin, with a wide chiné sash, and afterwards, though my father kept Roland smoking and talking in the dining-room too long for my impatience, we were left to ourselves in the dim, lamplit drawing-room.

  Still too much bewildered and distressed by the love that had descended upon us with such young intensity to make any coherent plans for the future - even supposing that the War allowed us to have one - we nevertheless mentioned, for the first time, the subject of marriage.

  ‘Mother says that people like me just become intellectual old maids,’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he protested.

  ‘Oh, well, it’s probably true!’ I said, rather sharply, for misery had as usual made me irritable. ‘After the War there’ll be no one for me to marry.’

  ‘Not even me?’ he asked very softly.

  ‘How do I know I shall want to marry you when that time comes?’

  ‘You know you wouldn’t be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.’

  ‘That rather narrows the field of choice, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well - do you need it to be so very wide?’

  The rest was fragmentary. We sat on the sofa till midnight, talking very quietly. The stillness, heavy-laden with the dull oppression of the snowy night, became so electric with emotion that we were frightened of one another, and dared not let even our fingers touch for fear that the love between us should render what we both believed to be decent behaviour suddenly unendurable.

  I was still incredibly ignorant. I had read, by then, too much to have failed to acquire a vague and substantially correct idea of the meaning of marriage, but I did not yet understand the precise nature of the act of union. My ignorance, however, was incapable of disturbing my romantic adoration, for I knew now for certain that whatever marriage might involve in addition to my idea of it, I could not find it other than desirable. I realised as clearly as he did that a hereafter in which we should both be deprived of our physical qualities could mean very little to either of us; he would not be Roland without his broad shoulders, his long-lashed dark eyes, and above all the singularly attractive voice which I could never recall when he was absent.

  ‘“I want no angel, only she,” ’ Olive Schreiner had written in the strange little novel which had become our Bible: ‘“No holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me or give me nothing.” . . . For the soul’s fierce cry for immortality is this - only this: Return to me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the being that I am to-day. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.’

  So I, too, wanted to find no angel after the War, after the Flood, after the grave; I wanted the arrogant, egotistic, vital young man that I loved.

  The next day I saw him off, although he had said that he would rather I didn’t come.

  In the early morning we walked to the station beneath a dazzling sun, but the platform from which his train went out was dark and very cold. In the railway carriage we sat hand in hand until the whistle blew. We never kissed and never said a word. I got down from the carriage still clasping his hand, and held it until the gathering speed of the train made me let go. He leaned through the window looking at me with sad, heavy eyes, and I watched the train wind out of the station and swing round the curve until there was nothing left but the snowy distance, and the sun shining harshly on the bright, empty rails.

  When I got back to the house, where everyone mercifully left me to myself, I realised that my hands were nearly frozen. Vaguely resenting the physical discomfort, I crouched beside the morning-room fire for almost an hour, unable to believe that I could ever again suffer such acute and conscious agony of mind. On every side there seemed to be cause for despair and no way out of it. I tried not to think because thought was intolerable, yet every effort to stop my mind from working only led to a fresh outburst of miserable speculation. I tried to read; I tried to look at the gaunt white hills across the valley, but nothing was any good, so in the end I just stayed huddled by the fire, immersed in a mood of blank hopelessness in which years seemed to have passed since the morning.

  At last I fell asleep for some moments, and awoke feeling better; I was, I suppose, too young for hope to be extinguished for very long. Perhaps, I thought, Wordsworth or Browning or Shelley would have some consolation to offer; all through the War poetry was the only form of liter
ature that I could read for comfort, and the only kind that I ever attempted to write. So I turned at once to Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, only to be provoked to new anguish by the words:

  O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,

  Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men

  Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart

  Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?

  But the lovely cadences stirred me at last to articulateness; there was no one to whom I wanted to talk, but at least I could tell my diary a good deal of the sorrow that seemed so fathomless.

  ‘I can scarcely bear to think of him,’ I wrote, ‘and yet I cannot bear to think of anything else. For the time being all people, all ideas, all interests have set, and sunk below the horizon of my mind; he alone I can contemplate, whom of all things in heaven and earth it hurts to think about most.’

  Certainly the War was already beginning to overshadow scholarship and ambition. But I was not ready, yet, to give in to it; I wanted very badly to be heroic - or at any rate to seem heroic to myself - so I tried hard to rationalise my grief.

  ‘I felt,’ I endeavoured subsequently to assure myself, ‘a weak and cowardly person . . . to shrink from my share in the Universal Sorrow. After all it was only right that I should have to suffer too, that I had no longer an impersonal indifference to set me apart from the thousands of breaking hearts in England to-day. It was my part to face the possibility of a ruined future with the same courage that he is going to face death.’

  So I finished up the miserable morning by looking through some of the short verses that he had left with me, and especially one in which - as in two or three of his poems - some prophetic instinct led him to a truer knowledge of the future than the strong, dominant consciousness that felt certain of survival:

  Good-bye, sweet friend. What matters it that you

  Have found Love’s death in joy and I in sorrow?

  For hand in hand, just as we used to do,

  We two shall live our passionate poem through

  On God’s serene to-morrow.

  4

  Learning versus Life

  VILLANELLE

  Violets from Plug Street Wood,

  Sweet, I send you oversea.

  (It is strange they should be blue,

  Blue, when his soaked blood was red,

  For they grew around his head;

  It is strange they should be blue.)

  Violets from Plug Street Wood—

  Think what they have meant to me—

  Life and Hope and Love and You

  (And you did not see them grow

  Where his mangled body lay,

  Hiding horror from the day;

  Sweetest, it was better so.)

  Violets from oversea,

  To your dear, far, forgetting land

  These I send in memory,

  Knowing You will understand.

  R. A. L. Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915.

  1

  Roland went to the front on March 31st, 1915. For those who cared to remember such things, it was Wednesday in Passion Week. ‘Je suis fiancé; c’est la guerre! ’ he announced before leaving to his mother, who accepted the news, which cannot altogether have astonished her, with commendable toleration.

  In the interval between his leaving me and his crossing over to France, there was time for each of us to reinforce the other’s courage with letters; time, too, for me to receive a large amethyst set as a brooch, and sent with a tiny card inscribed: ‘In Memoriam. March 18th, 1915.’ I held it up in front of the fire; the red glow reflected in its surface made it shine like a great drop of blood.

  ‘All that is left is to wait and work and hope,’ he had written to me from Maldon on the evening of the day that we said good-bye. ‘But I am coming back, dear. Let it always be “when” and not “if”. As yet everything is incomplete, but last night, unreal as it seems to be, must have some consummation. The day will come when we shall live our roseate poem through - as we have dreamt it.’

  Determinedly I responded in the same confident strain: ‘It is hard that on that difficult path I can do nothing to help you face the Death you will meet with so often. But when you are fighting the fear of it - bravely, as I know you will - I too shall be facing that fear, and can at least be with you in spirit then . . . Sometime after you had gone, I began again to dream of all that may still be after the War - when you return, and to plan out work to make me worthier of the future and to fill up the hours until the sorrowful time is past . . . It would not be right for us to be given a vision of the Promised Land only to be told we were never to enter it. We shall dwell in it in the end, and it will seem all the fairer because we have wandered in the desert between then and now . . . Good-bye, my dear, and as much love as you wish.’

  Confidence, however, was difficult just then, for immediately after Roland left me, the casualties began to come through from Neuve Chapelle. As usual the Press had given no hint of that tragedy’s dimensions, and it was only through the long casualty lists, and the persistent demoralising rumour that owing to a miscalculation in time thousands of our men had been shot down by our own guns, that the world was gradually coming to realise something of what the engagement had been. The 6th Sherwood Foresters, which included many of the Buxton young men, had left for France three weeks earlier; they were incorrectly reported to have been involved in the battle, and rumours of death and wounds were already abroad. It was not an encouraging moment for bidding farewell to a lover, and, as often happened in periods of absorbing stress, a quotation from Longfellow slipped, unimpeded by literary eclecticism, into my diary:

  The air is full of farewells to the dying,

  And mournings for the dead;

  The heart of Rachel for her children crying

  Will not be comforted.

  The determination to work hard and to plan out the days so that each moment would be occupied became singularly hard to fulfil, for I could not open a book without finding some subject that I had discussed with Roland or seeing words which reminded me of his characteristic phrases; I could not even seek solitude in a favourite refuge beyond the town without passing some road along which I had walked with him, or thinking that perhaps some day we should walk there again. Latin and Greek became even more irksome than before, and I began to feel that some kind of vigorous, practical toil would be better adapted to a chaotic wartime world. Rather lamely I tried - as the majority of Oxford dons, had I but known it, were trying also - to find some compelling reason for continuing the former when the latter seemed so much more appropriate.

  ‘I suppose he is right,’ I argued with myself, ‘and the only thing, which is the hardest thing, is to work and wait - and certainly to hope, which one must do or die.’

  How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die. Roland’s letters - the sensitive letters of the newly baptised young soldier, so soon to be hardened by the protective iron of remorseless indifference to horror and pain - made the struggle to concentrate no easier, for they drove me to a feverish searching into fundamental questions to which no immediate answers were forthcoming.

  ‘It seems delightfully incongruous,’ he wrote from Armentie‘res, ‘that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour’s walk from the trenches . . . A bullet whizzed uncomfortably near my head on the way in last night. I myself cannot yet realise that each little singing thing that flies near me holds latent in it the power of death for someone. Soon perhaps I may see death come to someone near and realise it and be afraid. I have not yet been afraid . . . There are three German graves a little further down along the trench. There is no name on them, but merely a piece of board with “German Grave - R.I.P.” scrawled on it. And yet somebody once loved the man lying there.’

  Torn by inward conflict and continually keyed up to the highest pitch by the
constant reading and writing of letters, I spent the rest of the vacation in riding my bicycle about the hills and dales, feverishly inventing analogies and distinctions between life and death, soul and intellect, spirit and immortality. Certain Derbyshire names - Ashwood Dale, Topley Pike, Chee Tor, Miller’s Dale, King Sterndale - always bring back to me those desperate struggles after a philosophy of life.

  ‘Sorrow, and the higher joy that is not mere happiness, and you, all seem to be the same thing just now,’ I explained haltingly to Roland. ‘Is it really all for nothing - for an empty name - an ideal? Last time I saw you it was I who said that and you who denied it. Was I really right, and will the issue not be worth one of the lives that have been sacrificed for it? Or did we need this gigantic catastrophe to wake up all that was dead within us? . . . In the light of all that you have seen, tell me what you think . . . Surely, surely it is a worthy ideal - to fight that you may save your country’s freedom from falling into the hands of this terrible and ruthless foe. It is awful to think that the very progress of civilisation has made this war what it is . . . Just to think that we have got to the stage of motors, aeroplanes, telephones, and 17-inch shells, and yet have not passed the stage of killing one another . . . . For me I think the days are over of sheltered physical comfort and unruffled peace of mind. I don’t think they will ever come again.’