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

by Vera Brittain

  It did not seem, perhaps, as though we, the War generation, would be able to do all that we had once hoped for the actual rebuilding of civilisation. I understood now that the results of the War would last longer than ourselves; it was obvious, in Central Europe, that its consequences were deeper rooted, and farther reaching, than any of us, with our lack of experience, had believed just after it was over. In any case, the men who might, in co-operation with the women who were not too badly impaired by shock and anxiety, have contributed most to its recovery, the first-rate, courageous men with initiative and imagination, had themselves gone down in the Flood, and their absence now meant failure and calamity in every department of human life. Perhaps, after all, the best that we who were left could do was to refuse to forget, and to teach our successors what we remembered in the hope that they, when their own day came, would have more power to change the state of the world than this bankrupt, shattered generation. If only, somehow, the nobility which in us had been turned towards destruction could be used in them for creation, if the courage which we had dedicated to war could be employed, by them, on behalf of peace, then the future might indeed see the redemption of man instead of his further descent into chaos.

  10

  We returned to an England politically very different from that which we had left, for Mr Baldwin had replaced Mr MacDonald as Prime Minister, and the Conservative Party, numbering over four hundred in contrast to the hundred and fifty-two of discredited Socialism, were comfortably settled in office for another five years.

  In spite of this débâcle, I definitely became, for the first time, a member of the Labour Party when I had been in England for two or three weeks. My first vague realisation that poverty was the result of humanity’s incompetence, and not an inviolable law of nature, had come with the sixteen-year-old reading of Carlyle’s Past and Present, and though, during the War, my consciousness of political programmes and antagonisms was dim, I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic - all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases - giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security.

  For years now, since the War, I had been to Geneva and worked hopefully in the cause of the League; I had heard statesmen at the Assembly giving lip-service to peace and then going back to their own countries to support preparations for war; I had seen the delegates who really cared for peace ideals - Nansen of Norway, Branting of Sweden, Lord Cecil, Arthur Henderson, Mrs Swanwick - always in a minority; I had watched protocols and pacts brought forward, piously applauded and in practice turned down. I had heard disarmament lauded to the skies while everywhere countries were increasing their armaments, and had realised that few were better and a great many were worse than ourselves, who annually spent nearly five hundred million pounds upon the causes and consequences of war, and then declared that we couldn’t afford a national maternity service. I had now travelled through Germany and Austria and Czechoslovakia and Hungary; I had been in the occupied areas, and had talked to the Quakers in Essen and Vienna, and although a League of Nations existed, and French statesmen, like British and Japanese and Italian, sang hymns of praise to Geneva, I had found everywhere oppression, the conqueror grinding down the conquered by hunger and humiliation, the Conference of Ambassadors deciding against the evacuation of Cologne, hatred and fear dominant in a Europe vowed to charity and co-operation, and everywhere countries casting resentful or envious eyes upon their neighbours’ territories. I had witnessed all this until there seemed to be no words in which to describe the situation but the sad, disillusioned words of Ecclesiastes: ‘So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.’

  And at last I had come to believe that, although men did change slowly, and left the evidence of their progressive modifications in statutes and treaties, no change would come soon enough to save the next generation from the grief and ruin that had engulfed my own so long as the world that I knew endured - the world of haves and have-nots; of owners and owned; of rich and poor; of Great Powers and little nations, always at the mercy of the wealthy and strong; of influential persons whose interests were served by war, and who had sufficient authority to compel politicians to precipitate on behalf of a few the wholesale destruction of millions. So it was that I became a Socialist, in the belief that membership of the Labour Party would help me to work for a new order based upon the discipline of man’s strongest instinct - his instinct for possession.

  By the time that I reached this decision we were both once more absorbed in the familiar London life of writing articles and making speeches. Winifred had already begun to collect material for an historical novel on the life of Wycliffe which has so far proved abortive, but I was now too much preoccupied by the psychological stress of approaching marriage, and too uncertain whether I was glad about it or not, to give my mind for the time being to the construction of another book.

  ‘I am encouraged,’ I wrote to G., after going to a No More War Conference in Westminster through a black December fog which preceded a Christmas of gales and floods, ‘to continue my researches on the League by such remarks as that of Lord H., who in giving an inaugural address to the . . . Conference informed his audience that “Jaworsina was on the boundary line between Poland and Jugoslavia”! And by that of no less an authority than Miss R., who in a recent lecture asserted that Widows’ Pensions had been discussed in “both the Slovakias - Czechoslovakia and Jugoslovakia”! This poor Europe - what crimes are committed in its name!’

  In the course of my subsequent wanderings in and out of newspaper offices during the early months of 1925, I heard what purported to be the true story of the death of the Geneva Protocol, and shortly before the downfall of the Herriot Government in France, I passed on to G., for what it was worth, this certainly apocryphal tale.

  ‘Austen Chamberlain and the Cabinet,’ I told him, ‘looked at the Protocol and decided that they could not and never would read it. They therefore sent it to Lord Balfour, asking for a statement of his philosophical objections, and to the Ministerial departments asking for their comments. Lord Balfour produced a series of admirable philosophical objections rather drastically stated for the sake of clearness. The departments also produced their objections, and Lord Balfour was asked to work these into his own statement. Thinking that he was merely providing a memorandum for the Government at Geneva, Lord Balfour proceeded to do so, still being drastic for the sake of clearness. Austen Chamberlain went to Geneva with the memorandum in his pocket, and instead of using it as the guide Lord B. had intended it to be, read it aloud in its original form as the British contribution to the discussion! After he had finished there was a dead, affronted silence, in the midst of which M. Briand . . . was heard saying loudly: “Anybody would think that the Assembly, after being in labour for five months, had given birth to a mental defective!” ’

  Nevertheless, in spite of lethargy, and oppression, and unillumined conscientiousness in both high and low places, and a persistent backwoods influence which showed itself in a new defeat of the Peeresses’ Bill in England, and reached its maximum during the Scopes prosecution in Tennessee, the world did seem as though it were slowly beginning to reawaken after the long winter of war. In Austria and Hungary the nightmare currency was at last successfully stabilised; conversations were taking place in Düsseldorf between the coal, iron and steel magnates of France and Germany with a view to the conclusion of a commercial treaty between the two nations; by August the last of the French troops would have left the Ruhr, and with its freedom the acutest phase of war-hatred would surely have ended. Best of all, as one standard reference-book optimistically remarked, ‘during 1925 the prestige and influence of the League of Nations increased even more than it had done i
n 1924.’

  That spring, too, looked more personally hopeful for ourselves than had any previous year. Winifred was now contributing notes and occasional leaders to Time and Tide, while I had begun to write for the Nation and Athenæum, for though our second novels - as is the habit of second novels - had not been so well reviewed as the first, they had nevertheless pushed a little wider apart those adamant gates to journalism which had begun to open after Anderby Wold and The Dark Tide. If only, I thought, as I wrote and spoke of the problems of Central Europe, if only, all over the world - at Geneva, at The Hague, in the voluntary peace organisations of every country - we who in various ways had been through the War could get hold of the management of affairs before our minds had gone rusty and we’d forgotten too much! If only now, now, while we were still young, we could oust the old men and women, the worshippers of precedent, privilege and property, whose minds had been hard set before the War ! We might not, perhaps, know much about procedure; we should not be patient with counter-amendments and points of order and references back, but we would at least make things move.

  Such were the hopeful impressions of my conscious mind, but - as though my subconscious were determined to make one final protest against my belief that the worst phase of the War was all but over - I had just about this time the last of those dreams with which, for ten years, the griefs and losses of the past had haunted my nights. It confronted me, I told G., with an ‘Enoch Arden’ problem on this occasion, for I dreamed that while he was in America, regarding me as his future wife, news came that Roland had never really died, but had only been missing with a lost memory, and now, after indescribable suffering, had returned to England. In the dream his family invited me to their house to meet him; I went, and found him changed beyond recognition by cruel experience but unchanged towards myself, anxious to marry me and knowing nothing of G. in America. So sharp was the anguish of the decision to be made that I woke up quite suddenly, with the words of a familiar text sounding as clearly in my head as though someone had spoken them close beside me: ‘And whose shall she be at the Resurrection?’

  And then I remembered, with a startling sense of relief, that there was no resurrection to complicate the changing relationships forced upon men and women by the sheer passage of earthly time. There was only a brief interval between darkness and darkness in which to fulfil obligations, both to individuals and society, which could not be postponed to the comfortable futurity of a compensating heaven.

  11

  As spring matured slowly into summer, the imminence of those personal obligations, so much desired and yet so deeply dreaded, possessed more and more of my thoughts. Never before had I seemed to wait so long for May, with its warm winds and blossoming shrubs, yet when the lilac buds began to swell beneath the windows of our flat, and a chestnut-tree in Regent’s Park burst prematurely into crumpled, delicate leaves, I realised that the ultimate uncertainty about my marriage had still to be faced and overcome.

  So long, I knew, as I remained unmarried I was merely a survivor from the past - that wartime past into which all those whom I loved best had disappeared. To marry would be to dissociate myself from that past, for marriage inevitably brought with it a future; a new future of intimate relationships such as I once believed I had permanently renounced. I might, perhaps, even have the children that years ago I had longed for - children who would know and care nothing of the life that had been mine before I met their father, and who would certainly never ask me: ‘Mother, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ because the War itself would be to them less than a memory. It would not even convey as much to their minds as the South African War had conveyed to mine, for had I not heard the barrel-organs playing ‘We’re soldiers of the Queen, me lads!’ and seen the bonfires on Mafeking Night? For them it would merely possess the thin remoteness of a legend, the story-book unreality of an event in long-past history; it would be a bodiless something, taking shape only in words upon the lips of the middle-aged and the old.

  Should I, then, submit myself to the pain of a future so completely out of tune with the past? Should I, who had once dedicated myself to the dead, assume yet further responsibilities towards the living? Could I, a wartime veteran, transform myself into a young wife and mother, and thereby give fate once more the power to hurt me, to destroy my vitality and my creative ability as it had destroyed them in the years which followed 1914? If life chose to deal me a new series of blows through G. and his children, should I have the strength to survive them and go on working? I doubted it, and often felt that it would be better to avoid the risk altogether. Yet always, after a tumult of thought, I was forced to conclude that it is only by grasping this nettle, danger, that we pluck this flower, safety; that those who flee from emotion, from intimacy, from the shocks and perils attendant upon all close human relationships, end in being attacked by unseen Furies in the ultimate stronghold of their spirit.

  ‘You fear marriage, and America, and the cost of marriage, and me because I stand for these things,’ G. had written with intuitive comprehension of my hesitations only a few weeks before. ‘Of course you do . . . Marriage is a great risk properly faced with fear, and we all so face it . . . Marriage is not, as it is made out conventionally, sheer joy. It is, like all life’s valuable things, new pain. The best hope for us . . . is that we both recognise that . . . I offer you, I think, as free a marriage as it lies in the power of a man to offer a woman . . . I ask you to give what you want to give, no more . . . I hope you will never be condemned to regard marriage as in any sense an impoverishment . . . If it is, you should give it up. There are sacred duties one owes oneself and others through oneself . . . If when I die I shall have destroyed a few shams, done a very little for the better understanding of that social system which we must master as we have mastered Nature . . . I shall die satisfied . . . I know that your work is more to you than I am . . . for love . . . is good but it is long after our own work, the work the War imposed on us, the task imposed on us by our knowledge; a knowledge gained in bitter experience.’

  Yes, I thought, that was really the point; whatever might be true for our successors, for us love and marriage must be subordinate to work. Yet surely to sacrifice them completely, and in fear of their burdens to give them up, was to deny the vital principle which insisted that ideas and philosophies, like life itself, must be carried on?

  ‘For me,’ I told G., ‘the feminist problem ranks with your economic problem. Just as you want to discover how a man can maintain a decent standard of culture on a small income, so I want to solve the problem of how a married woman, without being inordinately rich, can have children and yet maintain her intellectual and spiritual independence as well as having . . . time for the pursuit of her own career. For the unmarried woman there is now no problem provided that she has the will to work. For a married woman without children there is only a psychological problem - a problem of prejudice - which can be overcome by determination. But the other problem - that of the woman with children - remains the most vital. I am not sure that by refusing to have children one even solves the problem for one’s self; and one certainly does not solve it for the coming womanhood of the race. But the need to solve it is so urgent that it is raised to the level of those cases where it is expedient that one man - and more than one man - should die for the people.’

  For weeks on end we exchanged similar letters, discussing how best I could combine writing and political work with temporary residence in America and the production of a family, and how we could help and not hinder each other’s ambitions and occupations. Never before had I realised so forcibly as in meditating upon this problem - a problem by no means mine alone, but intimately bound up with the sociology of the future - how time had moved on for the world and myself since 1915. When I sat before the stove in the dark hut at Camberwell and considered marrying Roland, the personal difficulties of the situation had not occurred to me as fundamental, and, indeed, hardly as difficulties. In those days the War, with its dreadful and c
onstant intimations of human mortality, made life itself infinitely more important than any way of living; in comparison with the tense anxieties of that moment, that remote post-war future had seemed curiously simple. In any case, a college first-year student temporarily transformed into a V.A.D.

  probationer could hardly be said to have a career to defend, but after six years of learning, and writing, and lecturing, the proposition appeared very different. Its solution was one which went far beyond both the person and the hour; the future of women, like the future of peace, could be influenced by individual decisions in a way that had never seemed possible when all individuality was quenched and drowned in the dark tide of the War.