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

by Vera Brittain

  To-day, tours of the battlefields in France are arranged by numerous agencies; graves are visited in parties, and a regular trade has been established in wreaths and photographs and cemeteries. But that level of civilisation had not been reached in 1921, so Winifred and I hired a car in Amiens, and plunged through a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man. Along the road, at intervals, white placards were erected in front of tumbledown groups of roofless, windowless houses; were these really the places that we had mentioned with gasping breath at Étaples three and a half years ago? I asked myself incredulously, as with chill excitement I read their names: BAPAUME - CLÉRY - VILLERS-BRÉTONNEUX - PÉRONNE - GRIVESNES - HÉDAUVILLE. At Albert a circumspect row of Army huts, occupied by reconstruction workers, stood side by side with the humped ruin which had once been the ornate Basilica, crowned by its golden Virgin holding her Child aloft from the steeple. Was this, I wondered, apart from the huts, the place as Edward had known it?

  But the day’s real purpose was my visit to Louvencourt - as the words of the dead American poet, Alan Seeger, restlessly hammering in my head against the grinding of the car’s sorely tried gears, had reminded me at intervals all afternoon:

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  On some scarred slope of battered hill . . .

  As the car drove through the village to the cemetery, I realised with a shock, from its resemblance to a photograph in my possession, that the grey château half hidden by tall, drooping trees had once been the Casualty Clearing Station where Roland had drifted forlornly and unconsciously into death. We found the cemetery, as Edward had described it, on the top of a hill where two roads joined; the afternoon was bright and sunny, and just beyond the encircling wall a thin row of elms made a delicate pattern against the tranquil sky. The graves, each with its little garden in front, resembled a number of flower-beds planted at intervals in the smooth, wide lawn, which lay so placidly beneath the long shadow of the slender memorial cross. As I walked up the paved path where Edward had stood in April 1916, and looked at the trim, ordered burial-ground and the open, urbane country, I thought how different it all was from the grey twilight of the Asiago Plateau, with its deep, sinister silence. The strange irony which had determined the fates of Roland and Edward seemed to persist even after death: the impetuous warrior slept calmly in this peaceful, complacent earth with its suave covering of velvet lawn; the serene musician lay on the dark summit of a grim, far-off mountain.

  I left Louvencourt, as I thought, unperturbed; I had read the inscription on Roland’s grave and gathered a bronze marigold to keep in my diary without any conscious feeling of emotion. Whatever, I decided, might be true of 1918, I was beginning to forget the early years of the War and to recover from the anguish of its second Christmas.

  But late that night, back in the Paris hotel, I picked a quarrel with Winifred over some futile trifle, and went to bed in a fury of tears.

  11

  Piping for Peace

  THE SUPERFLUOUS WOMAN

  Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years,

  Recalling words

  Whose echoes long have died,

  And kind moss grown

  Over the sharp and blood-bespattered stones

  Which cut our feet upon the ancient ways.

  But who will look for my coming?

  Long busy days where many meet and part;

  Crowded aside

  Remembered hours of hope;

  And city streets

  Grown dark and hot with eager multitudes

  Hurrying homeward whither respite waits.

  But who will seek me at nightfall ?

  Light fading where the chimneys cut the sky;

  Footsteps that pass,

  Nor tarry at my door.

  And far away,

  Behind the row of crosses, shadows black

  Stretch out long arms before the smouldering sun.

  But who will give me my children?

  V. B. July, 1920.

  1

  Soon after we returned from Italy I became ill with jaundice, which kept me in bed for nearly three weeks. It was probably due, said my doctor, to a revival of the mysterious Malta germ which had remained latent since my leave in 1918, and might never completely vanish. But though this particular disease involves a good deal of discomfort and is supposed to be accompanied by colossal depression, I lay in bed after the first few days in saffron-hued contentment, happily drafting the middle chapters of The Dark Tide, which was then often referred to by Winifred and myself as ‘Daphne’, the name of the character who shared the role of heroine with another called ‘Virginia Dennison’. Italy, with its new scenes and experiences, had made all the difference; in spite of Asiago, in spite of Louvencourt, those weeks abroad had somehow healed the acutest soreness of the War’s deep hurt. After them, apart from occasional dreams, I had no more hallucinations nor night terrors nor insomnia, and by the time that I joined Winifred at the end of the year in the Bloomsbury studio which we had taken as the result of our determination to live independently together, I was nearly a normal person.

  From the moment that the War ended I had always known, and my parents had always tolerantly taken for granted, that after three years at Oxford and four of wartime adventure, my return to a position of subservient dependence at home would be tolerable neither for them nor for me. They understood now that freedom, however uncomfortable, and self-support, however hard to achieve, were the only conditions in which a feminist of the War generation - and, indeed, a post-Victorian woman of any generation - could do her work and maintain self-respect. After the Armistice my father, with characteristic generosity, had made over to me a few of his shares in the family business, in order that I might pay my own college bills and be spared the ignominy of asking him for every sixpence after so long a period of financial self-sufficiency.

  Although I could not live upon this tiny income and a growing accumulation of rejection-slips, it enabled me to give more attention to writing and politics than would otherwise have been possible, and less to the part-time lecturing and teaching which Winifred and I had alike decided were the most accessible and least exacting methods of earning our living until journalism could be made to pay.

  As both our families expressed a desire for a few weeks of our company before we finally left them for good, we postponed our joint migration to the end of 1921, and spent the interval after our return from Italy in planning future work and acquiring enough small ‘money-making’ jobs to occupy about three days a week. Almost daily I wrote long letters to Winifred, coloured by that curious mixture of maturity and childishness which was so long characteristic of our dislocated generation; they palpitated with schemes for writing and lecturing and travelling, and for the dissemination of those internationalist ideas the teaching of which, I still felt, alone justified my survival of the War. In this ingenuous eagerness for every kind of new experiment and reform I resembled many other contemporaries who were at last recovering from the numbing shocks of the wartime years; our hopefulness was due to a belief that the War was really over, and to a failure as yet to understand completely how deep-rooted and far-reaching its ultimate consequences must be.

  The prospects of interesting and suitable work seemed unexpectedly promising; I had already been offered some part-time teaching at a school in South Kensington, my aunt had invited me to give a course of six lectures on ‘International Relations’ at St Monica’s, and two pupils presented themselves to be coached for Oxford examinations while I was still at home. The elder of these, a nervous and propitiatory graduate from the University of Wales, lived in Anerley, completely lacked the most elementary rudiments of a literary style, and had incongruous aspirations after Lady Margaret Hall which, greatly to my own surprise, I actually helped her to fulfil.

  ‘I do wish her appearance
didn’t depress me so,’ I confessed to Winifred. ‘I have only seen the blue velours hat and long tweed coat twice, but am tired of them already. I have the feeling, too, that I shall never see anything else. Next time I will invite her to take the coat off - that will at least make a change . . . I am so glad I used to put on my best clothes for . . . Mr C . . . What a difference it makes to have something nice to look at!’

  After speaking often at college debates and hearing a number of Oxford dons lecture in that inimitable fashion which scorns the base vulgarity of mere technical competence, the prospect of becoming a lecturer who could give a tolerable discourse from a platform no longer seemed so wildly unattainable as it had appeared in 1913. Not only, before going to Italy, did I boldly accept the St Monica’s invitation, but I wrote still more daringly to the newly established headquarters of the League of Nations Union in Grosvenor Crescent and offered myself as a speaker on the League of Nations, that international experiment in the maintenance of peace and security which I felt, in common with many other students of modern history, to be the one element of hope and progress contained in the peace treaties. In reply I was asked to come to Grosvenor Crescent and be inspected by the secretary. The interview was arranged for me by Elizabeth Murray, my dazzling Somerville predecessor, now haughtily beautiful with her exquisite, adventurous clothes, her imperious figure and her short, waving dark hair.

  When I first saw the secretary, I felt that his handsome, melancholy face and reticent, dreaming eyes would have been more appropriate to a stained-glass window than to that rather turbulent office of emphatic young men and women, who waged a gallant, perpetual battle against shortage of funds, the lethargy of the public, and the well-meaning inefficiency of untrained volunteers. But his gentle courtesy was almost immediately over-shadowed by the startling presence of an anonymous, impressive individual in morning coat, spats, and monocle, who suddenly burst through an adjacent glass door into the middle of my interview, and without ceremony inquired of me in a sceptical drawl: ‘What makes you think you can speak?’

  I never learnt this intruder’s name, nor do I recall what explanation I gave for the incongruous juxtaposition of mature claims and an immature appearance, but I left the secretary’s office with a suitcase full of informative literature, and the encouraging impression that I should be invited to take meetings for the Union in the winter if he was satisfied with the specimen lecture that he had asked me to prepare.

  Upon this lecture and the series for St Monica’s I spent many hours that autumn, spurred to gigantic efforts by the deliberations of the Washington Conference and the unexpected success of the League in settling the dispute between Serbia and Albania. I felt my responsibility very keenly; already, I thought, I had begun to take part in that campaign for enlightenment which must inevitably lead a bewildered, suffering world into the serene paths of rational understanding.

  ‘You would have been amused,’ I told Winifred, who was herself preparing a course of lectures on ‘Personalities of Pre-Renaissance Italy’ to succeed my own series at St Monica’s, ‘if you could have seen me last night, dressed up in a hat and a fur, declaiming in front of the looking-glass! I am going to do it every day once, till I know the thing by heart and stop feeling a fool . . . I’m so glad I did “International Relations”, glad I am lecturing on them now, though in ever such a small way, glad to do anything, however small, to make people care for the peace of the world. It may be Utopian, but it’s constructive. It’s better than railing at the present state of Europe, or always weeping in darkness for the dead.’

  The half-realised onset of jaundice spoilt my first St Monica’s lecture, making me oppressively aware how trivial this event, so momentous to me, had appeared to everyone else. ‘How good it is for us,’ I recorded disconsolately, ‘to be mere business units . . . people whose colossal edifice of life means nothing more than an interrupted half-hour of preparation.’ But during my convalescence the reading of a newly published selection of internationalist essays, entitled ‘The Evolution of World Peace’, restored to me that sense of the cause’s momentous dignity which for the next few years was to drive me in pursuit of small, reluctant audiences conscientiously shivering in draughty town halls, in dusty clubs, in dimly lighted schoolrooms, or beneath the gaunt roofs of whitewashed Wesleyan chapels which continually eluded my frantic search for them through the wintry darkness of unknown streets. Joyously recognising, clearly and convincingly expressed, the motive which had set me reading History at Oxford, I copied from Mr F. S. Marvin’s editorial Introduction to the essays a paragraph which embodied, and still embodies, the inspiration of hopeful humanity’s quest after international harmony, although the eager confidence which illumined the minds of reason’s post-war exponents was so soon to fade into the dun stoicism of baffled yet persistent endeavour:

  ‘If we desire peace and co-operation in the world, and can find in history clear indications that co-operation is a growing quantity, then our desires become a reasonable ideal, we are fighting to enlighten mankind as to their true destiny and to hasten its realisation . . . It is the broad view and the long vision which alone can cure our fearfulness and fortify our steps . . . A longer vista lies before us than even anthropology can offer of the past. “Magis me movet illud longum tempus quum non ero, quam hoc exiguum.” ’

  2

  As soon as I had recovered sufficiently to go out again, I sent, with much trepidation, my specimen lecture to the League of Nations Union. It was long, persevering and dogmatic, and my inexperienced rehearsals before the looking-glass had failed to indicate to me the quite important fact that as it stood it would have taken at least three hours to deliver, and was indigestibly packed with enough information to keep a class of graduates busy for twelve or more study circles. My kindest friend could hardly have called it an attractive piece of popular propaganda, but the patient secretary signified his approval, and day after day I nervously anticipated a summons from the Union to address a large, critical and terrifying audience in some unfamiliar and remote part of England.

  But even in those days that cautious organisation never yielded to the temptation of impetuous action, and it proceeded to forget my existence until the early spring of 1922. My first invitation, therefore, to address an adult audience came not from Grosvenor Crescent, but from a clerical friend of Miss Heath Jones, who wanted to experiment with one or two lectures in his large, poor parish midway between London and Windsor, and had asked her to recommend a speaker. Could I, he inquired, give them addresses on the Russian Revolution and the League of Nations - the former to be as impartial as possible owing to the strength of Socialist influence in the parish?

  I didn’t know whether I could, but I said that I would, and plunged into a series of anxious days spent in reading up Bolshevism in the British Museum. To my dismay I discovered that this task was by no means as straightforward as it sounded, for in 1921 the entire resources of the Museum Library seemed unable to yield one document which gave an unbiased account of developments in Russia since 1917.

  ‘The Russian Revolution is almost driving me mad,’ I complained gloomily to Winifred. ‘Each book one picks up flatly contradicts the last. No one writes about it sanely - in one the Bolsheviks can do no right and in the others no wrong . . . I look wildly for facts and I can only find arguments . . . Some of the works on communal kitchens and nationalisation of women have none of the qualities of historians unless you count fury to be one.’

  With my letter I enclosed a list of inquiries about elementary facts to which, after looking through all the available material, I had failed to discover satisfactory replies:

  1. What are the main events of the Revolution, with approximate dates, from 1917 till to-day?

  2. When did the Allied blockade begin and who led it?

  3. Has it ended yet, and if so when did it, and why?

  4. What parts of Russia are Red and what parts are White?

  5. What has been happening in Russia this year?
<
br />   6. What is happening at the moment?

  These innocent questions led to a furious correspondence between London and Yorkshire which raged for several days on the subject of Bolshevism. At that time Winifred was strongly anti-Bolshevik, for a very close friend of hers, a young Russian who had been left parentless when still a schoolboy and brought up by her family as an adopted son, had been captured by brigands and presumably murdered in Georgia in 1919 while serving as an interpreter to one of the British contingents attached to Deniken’s army. To the numerous details that she sent, in reply to my letter, about the long tale of famine and typhus which was then as much a part of Russian history as its political reorganisation, she added a series of fierce arguments against the growing sympathy with Bolshevism which my reading had unexpectedly given me, until I was moved to protest that ‘if I gave a Socialistic parish a violently anti-Bolshevik lecture I should do as much harm as I should with an equally violent lecture in favour of Bolshevism . . . They are the only body in Russia to-day with any common ideas, any constructive policy, any power of organisation . . . In your notes you keep on saying that so-and-so is “in German pay”. It sounds very damning but that’s not the point . . . Germany did not make the Revolution, she only took advantage with her usual skill (which we call “diabolical” because it is hers, but which we should call “incomparable” if it was our own) of a situation which had already arisen.