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

by Vera Brittain

  In Sussex, by the end of January, the season was already on its upward grade; catkins hung bronze from the bare, black branches, and in the damp lanes between Hassocks and Keymer the birds sang loudly. How I hated them as I walked back to the station one late afternoon, when a red sunset turned the puddles on the road into gleaming pools of blood, and a new horror of mud and death darkened my mind with its dreadful obsession. Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet evening in early spring.

  I had arrived at the cottage that morning to find his mother and sister standing in helpless distress in the midst of his returned kit, which was lying, just opened, all over the floor. The garments sent back included the outfit that he had been wearing when he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics - the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry. Those gruesome rags made me realise, as I had never realised before, all that France really meant. Eighteen months afterwards the smell of Etaples village, though fainter and more diffused, brought back to me the memory of those poor remnants of patriotism.

  ‘Everything,’ I wrote later to Edward, ‘was damp and worn and simply caked with mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone 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 the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were 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 thickly coated with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.’

  Edward wrote gently and humbly in reply, characteristically emphasising the simple, less perturbing things that I had mentioned in another part of my letter.

  ‘I expect he had only just received the box of cigarettes and the collars and braces I gave him for Christmas and I feel glad that he did get them because he must have thought of me then.’

  So oppressively at length did the charnel-house smell pervade the small sitting-room, that Roland’s mother turned desperately to her husband:

  ‘Robert, take those clothes away into the kitchen and don’t let me see them again: I must either burn or bury them. They smell of death; they are not Roland; they even seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. I won’t have anything more to do with them!’

  What actually happened to the clothes I never knew, but, incongruously enough, it was amid this heap of horror and decay that we found, surrounded by torn bills and letters, the black manuscript note-book containing his poems. On the fly-leaf he had copied a few lines written by John Masefield on the subject of patriotism:

  ‘It is not a song in the street and a wreath on a column and a flag flying from a window and a pro-Boer under a pump. It is a thing very holy and very terrible, like life itself. It is a burden to be borne, a thing to labour for and to suffer for and to die for, a thing which gives no happiness and no pleasantness - but a hard life, an unknown grave, and the respect and bowed heads of those who follow.’

  The poems were few, for he had always been infinitely dissatisfied with his own work, but ‘Nachklang’ was there, and ‘In the Rose Garden’, as well as the roundel ‘I Walk Alone’, and the villanelle ‘Violets’, which he had given me during his leave. The final entry represented what must have been the last, and was certainly the most strangely prophetic, of all his writings. It evidently belonged to the period of our quarrel, when he was away from his regiment with the Somerset Light Infantry, for it was headed by the words:

  HÉDAUVILLE. November 1915:

  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.

  What did he mean, I wondered, as I read and re-read the poem, puzzled and tormented. What could he have meant?

  Five years afterwards, as I motored from Amiens through the still disfigured battlefields to visit Roland’s grave at Louvencourt, I passed, with a sudden shock, a white board inscribed briefly: ‘HÉDAUVILLE’.

  The place was then much as it must have looked after a year or two’s fighting, with only the stumpy ruins of farmhouses crumbling into the tortured fields to show where once a village had been. But over the brow of a hill the shell-torn remnants of a road turned a corner and curved steeply downwards. As the car lurched drunkenly between the yawning shell-holes I looked back, and it seemed to me that perhaps in November 1915, this half-obliterated track had still retained enough character and dignity to remind Roland of the moorland road near Buxton where we had walked one spring evening before the war.

  5

  At the beginning of February my night-duty ended, and with tears falling into my trunk I packed up to move from my quiet hut to Denmark Hill. When I reached the hostel my dreariest apprehensions were realised, for I had to share a room with five other women, most of whom belonged to a new batch of V.A.D.s with strange accents and stranger underclothes whom Betty described as ‘the second Derby’s Army’.

  ‘I wonder,’ I wrote in my diary after the first afternoon under a new Charge-Sister in my old sixty-bed hut, ‘if ever, ever I shall get over this feeling of blank hopelessness . . . Resistance requires an energy which I haven’t any of - and to try to acquire it just to face bravely a world that has ceased to interest me . . . hardly seems worth while.’

  It was just at this moment that Edward wrote to say that his orders to go to the front had come at last and he was leaving London for France on February 10th. The date was memorable for other reasons, since it brought conscription into operation in England for the first time in history, but about this I neither knew nor cared when my mother and I saw him off from Charing Cross on one of those grey, unutterably dismal afternoons in which a London February seems to specialise. With him went two other officers who were also joining the 11th Sherwood Foresters - the one, Captain H., a big, bluff, friendly man who afterwards became his company commander; the other a plump, insignificant subaltern who lived long enough to find death and presumably glory in the final advance on the Western front.

  As I dragged myself back to Camberwell my feet seemed weighted with lead, and I realised that there had still, after all, been something capable of increasing the misery of the past few weeks.

  ‘I cannot cherish any optimistic hopes about the front now . . .’ my diary recorded. ‘Yet I cannot feel very acutely - I don’t feel anything but an utter, utter weariness . . . It is all so unbelievable. He - to be standing in water and mud, when I can remember him in a brown holland overall, and everyone was always so careful to see that he didn’t get his feet wet . . . I do not think about him in the same invariable way as I thought and think about Roland. But when I do think about him, which is very often indeed, I realise how it is to him all my hopes of the future are anchored, upon him that my chances of companionship and understanding in the future depend.’

  A week later a letter came to say tha
t he was already in the trenches.

  ‘It is quite easy for me now,’ he wrote, ‘to understand how Roland was killed; it was quite ordinary but just unlucky . . . I do not hold life cheap at all and it is hard to be sufficiently brave, yet I have hardly ever felt really afraid. One has to keep up appearances at all costs even if one does.’

  He did not go into dramatic details of the perils that surrounded him, but remembering the vividness of Roland’s descriptions I knew only too well what they were. Over the uninspiring task of mackintosh-scrubbing in the ward-annex I moped and dawdled, trying to read between the lines of his letter and wondering whether he would ever come back.

  That afternoon my new Charge-Sister, a dark, attractive young woman of perhaps thirty, sent for me to come to her in the little office attached to each ward. She was very angry, and for about five minutes scolded me for my slackness, dreaminess, and general lack of interest in my work.

  ‘Do you realise,’ she concluded, ‘that you spent half an hour scrubbing that one mackintosh?’

  Taken utterly aback, and perhaps sensing some human quality behind the external indignation, I suddenly sobbed out that I had indeed no interest in the ward or the work; my fiancé had recently been killed, my only brother had just gone to the front, and I thought, and wanted to think, about nothing else.

  When I looked up a moment later, furiously scrubbing my eyes with a wet handkerchief, the Sister’s face had lost its severity. Like most of the ‘Bart’s’ nurses she was a kind, well-educated girl, who realised that, when a certain stage of desperation has been reached, neither scolding nor sympathy for the time being avail.

  ‘I’m sorry, nurse,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll look at it from another point of view,’ and she sent me off duty for the rest of the day. So I went up to the hostel and, angry and humiliated, wept again.

  In the evening, after supper, when I was already in my dressing-gown preparing to go to bed with a splitting headache, our Matron came round with the Principal Matron on a tour of inspection of our cubicles. I had been sitting forlornly beside the shrine, on which all my books were laid out, but as the two Matrons came in I moved back into the shadow to hide my tear-stained face, wondering miserably whether in all my life I should be allowed privacy again.

  The Principal Matron, a bulky, red-faced woman, stood over my books, not noticing me, and examined their titles. Suddenly she gave an exclamation of horror and pointed to Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival, a favourite of Roland’s and mine which had recently been added to the small collection.

  ‘Who,’ she demanded, ‘is reading that disgusting book?’

  Our Matron, who may or may not have noticed my glowering, reddened eyes, but who still remembered to be sorry for me, made some soothing remark about ‘Nurse Brittain’ having been a student, and the two passed on.

  ‘The only conclusion of this disturbing day,’ I wrote in my diary after getting, still ruffled, into bed, ‘is that at all costs I must preserve my self-respect - preserve the self which he loved and I have lost . . . I only wish I could see a little light in all the depths and blackness - only wish I knew what my obvious duty was. Perhaps it is not impossible to regain one’s self-respect. Even Lyndall - his ideal - had her weak times and was strong again.’

  A day or two afterwards, looking anxiously as usual at the casualty list in The Times, I noticed with cold dismay that Geoffrey’s name was among the wounded. Almost immediately my mother, who had heard from his family, wrote to tell me that he was now a patient at Fishmongers’ Hall, in the City; he had escaped with shell-shock and a slight face wound from a heavy bombardment in front of Ypres, which had caused many casualties among the 10th Sherwood Foresters.

  On my next afternoon off duty I went to Fishmongers’ Hall, and found him, in a green dressing-gown, huddled over a gas-fire with a rug across his knees. Though the little wound on his left cheek was almost healed, he still shuddered from the deathly cold that comes after shell-shock; his face was grey with a queer, unearthly pallor, from which his haunted eyes glowed like twin points of blue flame in their sunken sockets. Ill and nightmare-ridden as he looked, I was impressed once again by his compelling, devotional beauty.

  At first our conversation was slow and constrained, but as he grew accustomed to me, and I did not mention Roland, he began to talk, as though throwing off a burden of memory with painful relief. He was not, he told me, a successful officer as he knew Edward to be; in the trenches he always felt afraid, not of the danger but of completely losing his nerve with a suddenness that he had once seen overwhelm another officer.

  ‘It’s awful the way the men keep their eyes fixed on you!’ he said. ‘I never know whether they’re afraid of what’s going to happen to me, or whether they’re just watching to see what I’ll do.’

  After the bombardment, he went on, he had stayed with his men, whom he had ordered to ‘rapid fire’ against hordes of advancing Germans. When they were practically surrounded he told them to retreat, but he still worried perpetually over this decision, wondering whether they should all have stayed to face certain and unavailing death. As he talked, he clasped and unclasped his hands; I had never seen any face so overshadowed with sorrow and anxiety as was his when he spoke of his brief but unforgettable weeks in Flanders.

  ‘I think he is the kind of person who suffers more than anybody at the front,’ I wrote later to Edward. ‘I wonder if you mind its horrors and trials as much as he does. I expect you do, but being calmer in your nerves and more confident of your own powers you can bear it better. I wish they would send him to Egypt or Salonika, where not much is going on in the way of actual fighting: physically I should think he is quite strong; it seems to be his nerves that get quickly overstrained.’

  Before I left Fishmongers’ Hall, Geoffrey asked me if I would go and see him again in spite of the fact that he couldn’t be charming. I did go, and gladly, for I soon came to feel a deep regard for him; I found a strange consolation in his diffident shyness and his intense consciousness of the loss of which we never spoke except in letters. He even took me, one afternoon, to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, followed by tea at Fuller’s in Regent Street, and almost lost the tickets in his agitation over this extremely bold and unusual adventure.

  After leaving hospital he went before a succession of Medical Boards. He always told them that he ‘felt quite fit’, and was ready to go back to France, but they continually prolonged his period of light duty until he had been in England for nearly six months.

  6

  Roland’s death, Edward’s departure and Geoffrey’s readiness to take up once more a life which he knew must break him physically or mentally in a very short time, all increased my certainty that, however long the War might last, I could not return to Somerville while those whom I loved best had sacrificed, and were sacrificing, everything that they cared for in the world. I even began to face, bitterly and reluctantly, the possibility that I might never return at all. The Germans were now hammering remorselessly at Verdun, and pessimists had already begun to discuss the chances of a ten-year war. ‘The first seven years will be the worst!’ was now an accepted slogan amongst the men, and even the spirit of the Punch cartoons, once so blithely full of exhortations to stand up ‘For King and Country’, had changed to a grim and dogged ‘Carry On!’

  So on a half-day in March, I went up to Oxford to discuss the uncertain future with the Principal of Somerville. My first-year friends, Marjorie and Theresa, met me at the station, and later gave me tea - to which they invited my Classical tutor - in their Oriel study overlooking the High Street. Perhaps it was the wandering ghosts of bygone conversations among generations of men in that old college room which broke down the normal barrier between tutors and students, for we talked of the War and those who went to it and those who died, until my tutor and I forgot our hostesses, who sat, quite silent, on either side of the blazing fire. People realised in these days, she said, how much more than physical existence a man’s life meant, and how much life
was gained by laying down the physical side of it.

  At that stage of the War, mercifully preserved from knowledge of a world seventeen years older, in which second-rate masculine ability would struggle helplessly with almost insoluble problems because the first-rate were gone from a whole generation, we were still able to believe that a country which laid down the best of its life would somehow surely find it. Nothing thus given up, my tutor maintained, was ever lost, and those who died were not really gone but were with us always, canonised for us more truly than the saints. She was thinking, I knew, of a distinguished life which had been cut short by a bullet in Mesopotamia, and I, she knew, was thinking of Roland, whom I had dreamed of in my coachings with her when we were reading the Iliad, and who now was dead. Then, all at once, she was gone and we three were alone, staring at each other, shy, surprised, queerly exalted.