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

by Vera Brittain

  As the sun rose, the Britannic lurched and swayed drunkenly through the Archipelago, leaving far behind the three cruisers which were supposed to be her escort into the perilous ægean.

  ‘How fast we can go when we like!’ I thought admiringly, crouching in my dressing-gown with half a dozen others beside a prohibited porthole. I did not know until weeks afterwards that an enemy submarine was actually chasing us as we sat there so serenely without our lifebelts, nor realise that the beautiful ship was already doomed by a threat which was destined, in as lovely a dawn, to be cruelly fulfilled in that very place.

  3

  Nine hours later we lay anchored in Mudros harbour, waiting to tranship. Never before had I seen so many vessels of all kinds, great and small, old and new, British and French and Levantine. Hospital ships gleamed white and enormous above the small black cargo-boats that ran inconspicuously through the Mediterranean to take refuge in the estuaries of large rivers; gaunt Dreadnaughts lay close beside little sailing vessels, with ancient rigging so fantastic that they seemed, in the brilliant incredible light which flooded the harbour, to be no longer the property of the Levantines from the tumble-down village on the sinister shore, but the old beautiful ships of the Greeks awaiting the Persian fleet.

  Behind the camps and the miserable hovels of the fishermen, range upon range of savage hills enclosed the multitude of ships within a lost, incongruous world. Above these hills, as the sun set, the distant peaks of Samothrace burst into flame, and away to the right a cone-shaped mountain summit stood out darkly against the majestic red reflected from the western sky. One of the Sisters told me that this mountain was Achi Baba, a dominant memorial to the lost gallantry wasted in the Dardanelles. ‘It gave me,’ my diary records, ‘a queer thrill to be so near, so very near, that dreadful Unknown Land - that most unknown of all this War’s unknowns - to women, at any rate.’

  All afternoon and evening I stood on the deck, gazing as in a trance upon that momentous curve of Lemnos in the rich desolation of the Ægean. From this harbour, as John Masefield was even then recording, the men on the transports bound for Gallipoli had gone ‘like kings in a pageant to the imminent death’. Not far away, two days before the landing at Cape Helles, Rupert Brooke had died, and had become part of some magic island in that blue, unearthly sea. With a pang I remembered my English tutor reading his sonnets at Oxford just after Roland had gone to the front, and thought how strange it was that I should be near to Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field’ so long before I was likely to see Roland’s.

  I learnt soon afterwards that Rupert Brooke had been buried on the Island of Skyros, in an olive grove above a watercourse at the foot of Mount Khokilas. By cloudy moonlight the men of his company had carried him in his uniform up the silent hill, and over his head they placed a big wooden cross and put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of the larger cross an R.N.V.R. interpreter wrote in Greek: ‘Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks.’

  That night we transhipped to another hospital boat, the small Union Castle liner Galeka, and under cover of the darkness slipped quietly out of the harbour. Above our heads in a deep indigo sky the great pale stars shone over us, looking so much larger and nearer than they had ever seemed in Buxton or Oxford or Camberwell. It was fortunate that we had the stars to give a lofty illumination to our adventure, for our new quarters, in contrast to the superb luxury of the Britannic, filled us with rueful dismay.

  By one of the characteristic wartime muddles of officialdom, the Galeka had been ordered to take many more passengers than she was able to accommodate, with the result that a hundred V.A.D.s were obliged to occupy two big ‘wards’ in the hold, which all too recently had been used by convalescent Tommies suffering from dysentery and kindred ailments. These quarters, whether for men or for women, were singularly ill-suited to a semi-tropical, submarine-infested sea. Apart from tiny portholes high above our heads and one or two electric fans, there was no method of changing or moving the hot, fœtid air, and only a narrow, ladder-like staircase, difficult to negotiate except in calm weather, provided a means of exit to the upper decks. If an enemy torpedo had struck the ship, we should have been trapped as surely as rats in a sealed sewer.

  Our ‘beds’ at night were swinging iron cots, made up with the same blankets and mattresses as the sick men had used. Sleep, owing to the stuffy heat and the persistent flies, was almost impossible. Privacy, however great our need of it - and a few of us had begun inexplicably to suffer from headaches and acute diarrhœa - proved equally inaccessible, for each ward had only one washhouse, a rough annex containing several tin basins in a row, and one privy, with five tin commodes side by side and sociably free from partitions. To young women delicately brought up in fastidious homes, it was a perturbing demonstration of life as lived in the publicity of the slums. Several girls solved the ablution problem by not washing at all, but the other difficulty was less easily remedied. We began by using the five-seated privy one at a time, but the waiting queues became so lengthy that this form of individualism soon proved impracticable.

  However, I was not long in a condition to be oppressed by such inconveniences. On the third morning in the new ship, a feverish discomfort that I had endured for two days turned suddenly to shivering fits and a stiffening of the limbs. Shamefaced but rather alarmed, I reported sick, and was greeted with the words: ‘What? Another!’ and sent to my cot in the sweltering hold. Sixteen V.A.D.s altogether retired there that day, smitten by a mysterious disease which later caused quite a mild sensation, followed by an epidemic of research amongst the medical officers in Malta.

  Indescribably hot, aching in every limb and semi-delirious, I was hardly conscious of anxious visits from the Matron and the chief Medical Officer, but lay listening to the groans of my fellow-sufferers, and watching the legions of indeterminate insects crawling along the wooden flooring above my head, until I fell feverishly asleep. When I did have to visit the communal lavatory, my soaring temperature rendered me equally indifferent to the altruistic friends who helped me there, and the strangers already in occupation. During the stuporous night the drowsiness of fever at last quenched my terror of torpedoes, although the danger was far from over. Throughout our journey from Mudros to Malta, an enemy submarine which no boat could locate lurked unmolested in the Mediterranean; it sank the Cunarder Franconia on October 4th, and the same day torpedoed a French transport, the Gallia, quite close to us, with a loss of six hundred lives. Altogether, the situation seemed a curious comment on my father’s fear, two or three years earlier, that if I went to a finishing school in Paris I might develop appendicitis.

  When the Galeka at last docked in the Grand Harbour at Valletta on October 7th, I awoke to find the Principal Matron of Malta standing by my side, looking down at me. A handsome woman of classic proportions, she seemed somehow to restore their lost heroic quality to our vicissitudes, and I grinned apologetically at her from my lowly cot.

  ‘This one can smile, at any rate!’ I heard her remark in a singularly gracious voice to the Matron of the Galeka.

  In the afternoon I was carried off the boat on a stretcher, and pushed into one of the ambulances which were taking the convoy of sick nurses to Imtarfa Hospital, seven miles away in the centre of the island. I dozed fitfully throughout the ride, and realised Malta only as a waking dream of brilliant white buildings against a bright blue sky. The scintillating air seemed to echo with the clang and clatter of half the bells in the world; I believed them to be imaginary noises ringing in my head until a Sister in the hospital told me that the day was a festa.

  ‘There seem to be so many saints,’ I explained later to my mother, ‘and so many things that happen to them, and every time there is a festa, which is always on the day that you want to go to Valletta. I think saints are a very good idea if you are fond of holidays.’

  At Imtarfa occurred an uncomfortable delay upon which I commented with
some feeling in a subsequent letter to Edward. ‘When we arrived at the hospital we were left waiting for at least twenty minutes with the hot afternoon sun pouring right in to the ambulance; several A.S.C. men came and gazed in with great interest, but no one attempted to move us. Finally the Matron came out and asked indignantly why we weren’t brought in, and one of the men said it was the orderlies’ work, not theirs, and the orderlies were having their tea! Typical, n’est-ce pas? When I think of the number of meals I have postponed or cut short or missed altogether in order to help with convoys - and in other people’s wards too, I think how unduly altruistic women are!’

  For some reason my anonymous germ behaved more malignantly than anyone else’s; I had left England for Malta without having had a day’s rest since the beginning of the rush after the Somme, and the invader probably took advantage of my need for a holiday. Days passed in the drowsy discomfort of fever, with large doses of castor oil as the only interruption to the monotony of burning head and aching limbs. Almost the end of October had come before I was able to drag myself to a chair on the stone balcony outside my ward, and look across a deep, rocky valley to the domes and towers of Cittá Vecchia, the old Maltese capital, drowsing in a heat more radiant and profound than the warmest English midsummer.

  In those first normal hours I fell in love with the island; a secret rapture which the years have not dimmed made me thank heaven that I had defied the nightmare sea and bidden farewell to melancholy, tragic England. It was all so different from Buxton, and so infinitely different from Camberwell! At the end of the summer the grass all over the island was parched and withered; from a distance the surface of the uplands resembled the stretched skin of a great tawny lion. A macabre fascination, such as I had realised in Mudros, seemed to radiate from the dazzling light which drenched this treeless barrenness, making black and sharp-edged the tiny shadows cast by the clumps of tropical shrubs - cactus and prickly pear and eucalyptus - that fringed the dusty white roads or leaned against the ubiquitous stone walls. In the hospital garden immediately below the balcony, pastel-blue plumbago and pink geranium foamed with luscious generosity over sulphur-hued balustrades.

  It’s just like the illustrations to Omar Khayyam, I thought.

  They say the lion and the lizard keep

  The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.

  That’s what it reminds me of. But it’s like the Bible too. That rough track dipping steeply down into the valley and then winding up to walled Cittá Vecchia might be the road from Bethany to Capernaum.

  Whenever I could escape from my fellow-patients in the stone-floored ward with its wide-open doors and windows, I sat alone on the balcony, happy and at peace in this strange, new country as I had never been since the War began. Occasionally, as strength returned to insecure legs, another patient and I made expeditions in a carrozza to Cittá Vecchia across the valley, where we encountered the characteristic Maltese odour of unwashed humanity, centuries-old mud, and goats. We debated quite hotly which were the more numerous and which smelt worse, the monks or the goats, without coming to any permanent conclusion.

  Never before had I realised the sense of spiritual freedom which comes with southern warmth and colour and beauty. Night after night the sun set exuberantly all over the sky. Beneath its glories of orange and violet, of emerald and coral and aquamarine, the dusty flats surrounding Imtarfa turned into purple moorlands. I began to understand why Roland, hating the grey abnegations of Protestantism, had turned from mud and horror and desolation to the rich, colourful glamour of the Catholic Church.

  For Imtarfa, and indeed for the whole of Malta, the sick V.A.D.s remained interesting patients even when the last of them - myself - was up and about, and Lord Methuen himself, the Governor of the Island, came up to pay us an official visit.

  ‘Everyone here is trying to trace the origin of our disease,’ runs a letter to Edward written at Imtarfa. ‘We have had quite twelve doctors in here, sometimes five at once. Three of them are lady doctors, all very charming too, in khaki tussore coats and skirts, dark blue ties and solar topees. I am getting quite tired of giving my name (and wish it was Jones so that I didn’t have to spell it every time), my age, my detachment number, particulars of what I had to eat lately, etc., etc. They have taken blood tests of various kinds from us, for malaria, dysentery, etc., from our ears, fingers and wrists. They still don’t seem able to decide whether we have been poisoned by something we had to eat or whether we just picked up some unoccupied germ that was wandering about the Mediterranean.’

  Food poisoning of an obscure type was the final tentative verdict, and the Britannic and the Galeka were both detained for several days in their respective harbours while investigations were made. The Principal Matron professed herself ‘very unhappy’ about the quarters allotted to the V.A.D.s between Mudros and Malta, and the Galeka had to undergo a thorough disinfection before leaving Valletta. It was a work of supererogation on the part of the sanitary squad, for she was torpedoed and sunk in the Channel on her next voyage home.

  After nearly three weeks of treatment I was passed fit for light duty, and sent across the island to join Betty at St George’s Hospital on a lovely peninsula of grey rock and red sand almost encircled by the sea.

  4

  I was still at Imtarfa when I received my first letters from England.

  In Malta the arrival of the mail - which was often held up so long by storms, submarines and the censors at various ports that letters dispatched on widely different dates overtook one another on the way out - became the chief event of the week. We awaited the P. & O. liner that brought it with a perturbing mixture of pleasant anticipation and sick dread, for owing to casualties at the front, and air-raids and other troubles at home, neither life nor happiness nor peace of mind could be counted on for more than a few days at a time.

  My worst fears now were for Geoffrey in France; he had grown into a very dear friend whose intelligent understanding never failed the most exacting demands, and my admiration for his determined endurance of a life that he detested was only enhanced by his shy self-depreciation and his frequent asseverations of cowardice. In letters it was possible to get behind the defences of this abrupt young man to a sensitive mind as responsive to beauty as it was considerate towards human pain and fatigue.

  ‘Promise me faithfully this one thing,’ I urged Edward in reply to his first letter from home; ‘if anything important happens to either you, Geoffrey or Victor, will you cable to me at once? You have no idea what one feels out here when one realises it is October 20th and the last one heard of anyone was October 9th . . . It gives me a queer feeling to read Geoffrey’s letter of October 9th and remembering that “out here we are here to-day and gone tomorrow”, to think that he has had time to die a thousand deaths between then and to-day. The other day I got hold of a weekly Times of October 13th and looked down the casualty list in absolute terror, fearing to see Geoffrey’s name.’

  ‘I never thought,’ I added, ‘that there was Tah’s to look for too’ - for Edward’s letter had contained the surprising news that Victor had gone unexpectedly to the front by transferring from the Royal Sussex Regiment into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. ‘On the Monday after you left,’ he wrote, ‘a wild telegram from Tah announced that he was going to France. I met him in town, helped him with all his shopping (and you can imagine he needed some help) - it was an awful business as he didn’t like most things and knew nothing about anything; occasionally he would suddenly take a violent dislike to a most necessary article of clothing and refuse to have it until I had wasted aboutan hour conjuring up an imaginary situation in which he couldn’t possibly do without the thing in question.’

  My mother, after describing the move from Macclesfield to Kensington, told me that they were having a portrait of Edward in uniform painted by a Chelsea artist, Mr Graham Glen. Even my work-driven uncle at the bank wrote a long letter, enclosing a fragment of philosophy which had recently come to England from the French trenches
:

  ‘When you are a soldier you are one of two things, either at the front or behind the lines. If you are behind the lines you need not worry. If you are at the front you are one of two things. You are either in a danger zone or in a zone which is not dangerous. If you are in a zone which is not dangerous you need not worry. If you are in a danger zone you are one of two things; either you are wounded or you are not. If you are not wounded you need not worry. If you are wounded you are one of two things, either seriously wounded or slightly wounded. If you are slightly wounded you need not worry. If you are seriously wounded one of two things is certain - either you get well or you die. If you get well you needn’t worry. If you die you cannot worry, so there is no need to worry about anything at all.’