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

by Vera Brittain

  ‘The following Italian official communiqué was issued yesterday:

  ‘From dawn this morning the fire of the enemy’s artillery, strongly countered by our own, was intensified from the Lagerina Valley to the sea. On the Asiago Plateau, to the east of the Brenta and on the middle Piave, the artillery struggle has assumed and maintains a character of extreme violence.’

  There followed a quotation from the correspondent of the Corriere della Sera, who described ‘the Austrian attack on the Italian positions in the neighbourhood of the Tonale Pass.’ ‘Possibly,’ he suggested,

  ‘this is the prelude of the great attack which the Austrian Army has been preparing for so long a time . . . the employment of heavy forces proves that this is not a merely isolated and local action, but the first move in a great offensive plan. The Austrian infantry and the Feldjäger have not passed. The Italian defenders met them in their first onslaught and immediately retook the few small positions that had been lost in the first moments of the fighting. This success on the part of the Italian defence is a good augury for the future.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I thought, feeling suddenly cold in spite of the warm June sunlight that streamed through the dining-room window. True, the communiqué didn’t specifically mention the British, but then there was always a polite pretence on the part of the Press that the Italians were defending the heights above Vicenza entirely on their own. The loss of a ‘few small positions’, however quickly recaptured, meant - as it always did in dispatches - that the defenders were taken by surprise and the enemy offensive had temporarily succeeded. Could I hope that Edward had missed it through being still in hospital? I hardly thought so; he had said as long ago as June 3rd that he expected to be ‘back again in a few days’.

  However, there was nothing to do in the midst of one’s family but practise that concealment of fear which the long years of war had instilled, thrusting it inward until one’s subconscious became a regular prison-house of apprehensions and inhibitions which were later to take their revenge. My mother had arranged to stay with my grandmother at Purley that week in order to get a few days’ change from the flat; it was the first time that she had felt well enough since her breakdown to think of going away, and I did not want the news from Italy to make her change her plans. At length, though with instinctive reluctance, she allowed herself to be prevailed upon to go, but a profound depression hung over our parting at Charing Cross.

  A day or two later, more details were published of the fighting in Italy, and I learnt that the Sherwood Foresters had been involved in the ‘show’ on the Plateau. After that I made no pretence at doing anything but wander restlessly round Kensington or up and down the flat, and, though my father retired glumly to bed every evening at nine o’clock, I gave up writing the semi-fictitious record which I had begun of my life in France. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself even to wrap up the Spectator and Saturday Review that I sent every week to Italy, and they remained in my bedroom, silent yet eloquent witnesses to the dread which my father and I, determinedly conversing on commonplace topics, each refused to put into words.

  By the following Saturday we had still heard nothing of Edward. The interval usually allowed for news of casualties after a battle was seldom so long as this, and I began, with an artificial sense of lightness unaccompanied by real conviction, to think that there was perhaps, after all, no news to come. I had just announced to my father, as we sat over tea in the dining-room, that I really must do up Edward’s papers and take them to the post office before it closed for the week-end, when there came the sudden loud clattering at the front-door knocker that always meant a telegram.

  For a moment I thought that my legs would not carry me, but they behaved quite normally as I got up and went to the door. I knew what was in the telegram - I had known for a week - but because the persistent hopefulness of the human heart refuses to allow intuitive certainty to persuade the reason of that which it knows, I opened and read it in a tearing anguish of suspense.

  ‘Regret to inform you Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. killed in action Italy June 15th.’

  ‘No answer,’ I told the boy mechanically, and handed the telegram to my father, who had followed me into the hall. As we went back into the dining-room I saw, as though I had never seen them before, the bowl of blue delphiniums on the table; their intense colour, vivid, ethereal, seemed too radiant for earthly flowers.

  Then I remembered that we should have to go down to Purley and tell the news to my mother.

  Late that evening, my uncle brought us all back to an empty flat. Edward’s death and our sudden departure had offered the maid - at that time the amateur prostitute - an agreeable opportunity for a few hours’ freedom of which she had taken immediate advantage. She had not even finished the household handkerchiefs, which I had washed that morning and intended to iron after tea; when I went into the kitchen I found them still hanging, stiff as boards, over the clothes-horse near the fire where I had left them to dry.

  Long after the family had gone to bed and the world had grown silent, I crept into the dining-room to be alone with Edward’s portrait. Carefully closing the door, I turned on the light and looked at the pale, pictured face, so dignified, so steadfast, so tragically mature. He had been through so much - far, far more than those beloved friends who had died at an earlier stage of the interminable War, leaving him alone to mourn their loss. Fate might have allowed him the little, sorry compensation of survival, the chance to make his lovely music in honour of their memory. It seemed indeed the last irony that he should have been killed by the countrymen of Fritz Kreisler, the violinist whom of all others he had most greatly admired.

  And suddenly, as I remembered all the dear afternoons and evenings when I had followed him on the piano as he played his violin, the sad, searching eyes of the portrait were more than I could bear, and falling on my knees before it I began to cry ‘Edward! Oh, Edward!’ in dazed repetition, as though my persistent crying and calling would somehow bring him back.

  4

  After Edward was killed no wealth of affectionate detail flowed in to Kensington, such as had at least provided occupation for Roland’s family at the end of 1915. Roland had been one of the first of his regimental mess to suffer wounds and death, but the many fellow-officers who would have written of Edward with knowledge and admiration had ‘gone west’ before him in previous offensives - the Somme, Arras, the Scarpe, Messines, Passchendaele - that he had either missed or survived. Of the men with whom he had lived and worked in Italy before the Asiago Battle, I hardly knew even the names.

  As time went on, however, we did get three letters - from the officer who was second in command of his company, from his servant, and from a non-combatant acquaintance working with the Red Cross - which told us that Edward’s part in withstanding the Austrian offensive had been just what we might have expected from his record of coolness and fortitude on the Somme and throughout the 1917 Battles of Ypres. Of these letters, that from the private was the most direct and vivid.

  ‘I was out on Trench Duty with Capt. Brittain about 3 a.m. on the morning of the 15th June when we were caught in a terrific Barrage; we managed to get back to our Headquarters safely. About 8 a.m. the enemy launched a very heavy attack and penetrated the left flank of our Company and began to consolidate. Seeing that the position was getting critical Captain Brittain with a little help from the French led a party of men over driving the enemy out again. Shortly after the trench was regained Capt. Brittain who was keeping a sharp look out on the enemy was shot through the Head by an enemy sniper, he only lived a few minutes. He has been buried in a British Cemetery behind our lines . . . Allow me to express my deepest sympathy, Captain Brittain was a very gallant officer and feared nothing.’

  The cemetery, so the Red Cross friend told us, was in the mountains, 5,000 feet up; he hadn’t seen it himself, but Edward’s burial the day after the battle was attended by his second in command and the quartermaster of the 11th, who described it to him; they wer
e the only officers out of the line.

  ‘ “Brit.”,’ said the quartermaster, ‘was buried in his blanket with 4 other officers, he was placed lying at the head of the grave upon which a cross “In loving memory” with the names, etc., was placed.’

  This seemed to be as much as any of our correspondents, who had not themselves taken part in the battle, were likely to tell us, but long before we received their brief information, I saw by the casualty list which contained Edward’s name that his twenty-six-year-old colonel had been wounded, obviously in the same action. Knowing that he, the only surviving officer who had been in the battalion with Edward since 1914, could tell me, if he chose, more than anybody else, I visited Harrington House - then the headquarters for information about the wounded and missing - until I tracked him down to a luxurious officers’ hospital in the region of Park Lane.

  I had heard, from time to time, a good deal from Edward about his youthful C.O., for whom he seemed to have great respect without much affection. Ambitious and intrepid, the son of a Regular Army officer who could not afford to equip him for a peacetime commission, the young man had found in the War the fulfilment of his baffled longing for military distinction. Since 1914 he had been the regiment’s ‘professional survivor’, fighting unscathed through every action from the Somme to Asiago, and picking up out of each battle another ‘pip’ and a new decoration. When the 11th Sherwood Foresters were ordered to Italy he went there in command of the battalion; at the time of the Austrian offensive he had already been awarded the D.S.O., M.C., Croix de Guerre and several minor decorations, and from Asiago - which disabled him just sufficiently to keep him in England until almost the end of the War - he gathered the crowning laurels of the V.C.

  I did not, of course, know that he was destined for this superlative glory when in stoical desperation I went straight from Harrington House to his hospital. My mother, who had not yet received the letters from Italy, had said emphatically that she did not want to hear any details, but though I dreaded more than death whatever I might be self-condemned to learn, I was driven and impelled by a remorseless determination to find out as much as I could. All the same, I did wish that I had someone other than the colonel from whom to demand it, and half hoped, half feared, that he might be too ill to be interviewed by a stranger. But when I heard that he was severely but not dangerously wounded in the leg, I sent a message by a nurse to ask if Captain Brittain’s sister might see him for a moment. She returned almost immediately to fetch me, and, feeling half suffocated, I followed her up the stairs.

  I found the colonel propped up in bed, with a large ‘cradle’ over his leg; his features looked pale and drawn, and his dark eyes burned intently from their sunken sockets as I came into the room. Quite obviously he did not want to see me, but this I understood; no wounded man ever did want to see the female relatives of a friend who had been killed; he always expected them to break down, or make a scene, or ask awkward questions. It was a hard young face, I decided; the luminous, vulnerable eyes were probably some accident of heredity. I resolved to be as brusque and brief as possible, and found in the colonel’s sister - a girl somewhat older than himself, with gentler features and the same surprisingly tender expression, who sat beside his bed - an unexpected ally in both the asking and the answering of questions.

  ‘I should have known you were Brittain’s sister - you’ve got the same eyes,’ he began abruptly, and then gave me a brief, matter-of-fact account of the battle without saying very much about Edward’s part in it. But the moment for describing his death had to come; he was ‘sniped’, the colonel said, by an Austrian officer just after the counter-attack which he had organised and led had regained the lost positions.

  ‘Where was he shot?’ I inquired, as steadily as I could.

  Again the young man cast over me his keen, searching glance, as though I were a subaltern whose ability to go calmly ‘over the top’ he was trying to estimate; then he answered curtly: ‘Through the head.’

  I looked at him in silent reproach, for I frankly did not believe him. At that late stage of the War - as I had realised only too well from the agitated efforts of Army Sisters to mitigate truth with compassion in letters describing the last moments of men who had died in hospital - the colonels and company commanders on the various fronts were so weary of writing gruesome details to sorrowing relatives, that the number of officers who were instantaneously and painlessly shot through the head or the heart passed far beyond the bounds of probability. But when, a few days later, the quite independent letters from Italy confirmed the colonel’s statement, I realised that he had not been trying to spare my feelings, and that Edward had escaped Victor’s fate only by the sudden death which he himself had repeatedly said that he would prefer to blindness.

  Throughout his protracted convalescence I haunted the colonel quite shamelessly, for I still felt convinced that he knew far more than he chose to reveal. Later in the year an acquaintance of mine reported a conversation which she had heard in a railway carriage between a group of Sherwood Foresters who had been in the battle of 15th June. One of them remarked that he had had ‘a real good officer, a slim dark chap . . . and a regular nut. You’d have thought that he hadn’t an ounce of ginger in him, but Lord! miss, he didn’t know what fear was.’ This officer’s name, the man said, was ‘Brittain’, and he’d deserved the V.C. for pushing back the enemy ‘by sheer force’ in that ‘do’ on the Plateau.

  This type of appreciative judgment from a private who admired his officer was, of course, common enough, but an inward certainty possessed me that it was not unfounded; I could bear, I felt, the colonel’s superior claim to the V.C. if only I knew why the men had thought that Edward deserved it too. So, still passionately determined to learn whatever of the truth remained undisclosed, I accepted the colonel’s occasional polite but reluctant invitations to luncheon or tea, tried to make him talk though I always felt embarrassed in his presence, and even forced myself to go to Buckingham Palace to watch him receive his Victoria Cross.

  But it was all quite useless. Since adding the V.C. to his collection of decorations, the colonel appeared to have become nervously afraid that every young woman he met might want to marry him, and his fears were not altogether unnatural, for with his long row of ribbons, his premature seniority, his painful limp, and his pale, dark-eyed air of a weary Crusader, the tall young man was an attractive and conspicuous figure wherever he went. In those weeks when he sat so securely upon the pinnacle of his martial ambitions, he could hardly have been expected to realise that no decoration could make him appear to me other than a stiff young disciplinarian, impregnated with all the military virtues but limited in imagination and benevolence, or to believe that I was not fascinated by his medals, but merely anxious for information.

  The more assiduously I pursued him in the hope of learning the details that I sought, the more resolutely he faded out of my existence until, after the Armistice, I lost sight of him altogether.

  Before he went back to the front just in time for the ending of the War, the 11th Sherwood Foresters and several other British regiments had left the demoralised Austrians to the mercy of the now jubilant Italians and returned to France, where the surviving officers from Edward’s company had been killed in the last great push. So whether Edward’s part in the vital counter-attack on the Plateau really involved some special act of heroism, I shall now never know.

  5

  Even if I had found out, it would have made little difference at the time, for as the sudden closing-down of silence upon our four years’ correspondence gradually forced on my stunned consciousness the bare fact that Edward was dead, I became progressively unable to take in other facts, or to estimate their value.

  So incredible was our final separation that it made life itself seem unreal. I had never believed that I could actually go on living without that lovely companionship which had been at my service since childhood, that perfect relation which had involved no jealousy and no agitation, but only
the profoundest confidence, the most devoted understanding, on either side. Yet here I was, in a world emptied of that unfailing consolation, most persistently, most unwillingly alive. I was even alive enough to unpack his possessions when they were returned to us from Italy, and to find amongst them The Muse in Arms, which had arrived just after the battle, with my poem inside, unopened and unread. I knew then that he had died without even being aware of my last endeavour to show him how deeply I loved and admired him.

  The return of the poem began a period of isolation more bleak, more complete and far more prolonged than the desperate months in 1916 which had followed the death of Roland. My early diaries had been full of the importance of ‘standing alone’, ‘being sufficient unto one’s self’, and I sometimes re-read them with sombre cynicism during the time that, for nearly two years after Edward’s death, I had to be ‘sufficient unto myself’ whether I liked it or not. However deep our devotion may be to parents, or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire, and from June 1918 until about April 1920, I knew no one in the world to whom I could speak spontaneously, or utter one sentence completely expressive of what I really thought or felt. I ‘stood alone’ in very truth - and I hope profoundly that I may never repeat the experience. It lasted so long, perhaps, because I decided in the first few weeks after his loss that nothing would ever really console me for Edward’s death or make his memory less poignant; and in this I was quite correct, for nothing ever has.