by Gill Paul
Luise and Jimmy stayed in Germany through the 1920s, during which time she became a respected art critic and intellectual, while Max lived in Paris and became a leading Surrealist artist who would marry four times altogether. After Hitler came to power in 1933 and the number of anti-Semitic laws grew ever larger and more oppressive, Luise came under suspicion from the regime and hurriedly relocated to Paris. In 1938, as war seemed to be on the way, she sent her son Jimmy to New York, hoping to obtain a visa to follow him shortly afterwards. In 1939 she and Max were both living in the Marseille area, waiting for their American visas to come through, when the Second World War began. His visa was awarded because of his fame as an artist but there was no sign of hers, which appeared to be tied up in bureaucratic red tape. Max tried claiming to consular officials that their divorce had not been legal and that they were still married, thus entitling her to travel with him, but this argument was rejected. Max then offered to remarry Luise but she refused, pointing out that it would be nothing but a charade. In the end he sailed for New York without her and she went into hiding in the Alpes-Maritimes, staying with the renowned French author Jean Giorno. She felt optimistic, writing to her son “Even if the Germans came to Vichy, the peasants here revere this poet of their work and land so much that they would hide me from them. … I’m in good hands.” But sometime in 1943 or early 1944 she was captured by German soldiers occupying the area and sent to a Paris detention camp. On July 31, 1944, she was herded onto one of the last trains east to Auschwitz, and was killed in the gas chamber in the months before the camp was liberated in January 1945.
Max is greeted by his son Jimmy on arrival in New York on July 14, 1941. He crossed the Atlantic with heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married early in 1942 and divorced in 1946.
Max moved to the South of France in 1953 with his fourth wife, American Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, and they split their time between there and Paris. A major retrospective of his work was shown in New York and Paris in 1975. The following year, during the last weeks of his life as he lay in bed after a stroke, Max mused to his son Jimmy about Luise, calling her “a remarkable woman” and saying that of all his four wives, “Lou is the only woman . . . I ever thought of going back to.” Theirs had been a strong, passionate love, a meeting of minds as well as a physical attraction, but in the end he had been too scarred by war for their relationship to work.
“Lou is the only woman … I ever thought of going back to.”
Roland
LEIGHTON
&
Vera
BRITTAIN
A handwritten draft of “Violets,” a poem Roland wrote in April 1915. He didn’t send Vera a copy till August that year as he was still revising it, but that April he did send her four little violets gathered from the roof of his dugout.
Roland Aubrey Leighton
BRITISH
Born: March 27, 1895
Rank & regiment: Lieutenant, 7th Worcestershire Regiment
Vera Mary Brittain
BRITISH
Born: December 29, 1893
War work: Voluntary Aid Department (VAD) nurse
Vera and Roland exchanged pictures in December 1914. He told her, “I should hate to go all through this War without being wounded at all; I should want something to prove that I had been in action.”
When Roland and Vera met in April 1914, they soon found they were kindred souls, with a shared love of literature and philosophy, and they continued their long conversations in letters that became increasingly dark after he arrived at the Western Front.
B oth Vera and Roland came from well-to-do backgrounds. His father was literary editor of the Daily Mail and his mother wrote adventure novels for boys; her father was a paper-mill owner and her mother sang. They met because he was a close friend of her younger brother Edward at Uppingham School in Rutland. Edward invited him home to Buxton for the Easter holidays, and Vera wrote later that within ten minutes of meeting him she was impressed by his “maturity and sophistication.” They spent the rest of the visit talking with each other about literature and religion, and he told her that at his mother’s urging he had recently had his palm read by a man who warned him that in a year or two he ran “a considerable risk of assassination.” They laughed it off, joking that his slight resemblance to the King of Portugal could provide the only possible motive!
According to Vera, “At nineteen, Roland looked twenty-four and behaved with the assurance of thirty . . . his large dark eyes looked contemplatively at the world from beneath black, strongly marked eyebrows.”
Soon after the visit, Roland sent Vera a copy of a book they had discussed, by feminist writer Olive Schreiner, and Vera was delighted to find that he shared her feminist views. It was a critical time for her. She very much wanted to study at Oxford University, but her father believed that education for women was simply a preparation for marriage. Against his wishes, she had been working toward achieving the necessary qualifications, and Roland encouraged her. He himself planned to be there in autumn 1914, along with Edward, and that strengthened her resolve. She wrote in her diary that Roland “seems even in a short acquaintance to share both my faults and my talents and my ideas in a way that I have never found anyone else do yet.”
They corresponded regularly and he sent her some of his poems, which she liked very much. Then in July they met again, when Vera came to his and her brother’s school-leaving ceremony. She was impressed by the fact that Roland won almost every academic prize, but alarmed by the headmaster’s jingoistic speech to the boys in which he said, “If a man can’t serve his country, he’s better dead.” All the boys at Uppingham were in the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC), which instilled in them a strong patriotism and a sense that they must do their duty.
Vera still had no inkling of the catastrophe that was about to be unleashed on the world. She had paid scant attention to the news stories about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and was merely looking forward to the autumn when they would all start at Oxford together. Roland was awarded the Classical Postmastership at Merton College and Vera managed to gain admittance to Somerville. And then war was declared and everything changed overnight.
Trying to get to the Front
Roland applied for a commission immediately, and Vera was relieved when he was turned down because of his less-than-perfect eyesight. However, he kept trying different regiments until at last he was accepted by one in Norwich. Her brother Edward obtained a commission with the 10th Sherwood Foresters. Only Vera would take her place at university that September, her excitement at attaining her goal tempered by anxiety over the safety of Edward and Roland. They were still only training, and she hoped against hope that they wouldn’t be sent overseas.
In December 1914, she was able to meet Roland in London and felt shy seeing him again after their “months of intimate correspondence.” He took her for tea with his mother and his sister Clare—his mother thoroughly approved of her—then at dinner that evening he gave her a beautiful bunch of tall pink roses. They were chaperoned by her aunt, but still managed to exchange a few affectionate words, and it was over that two-day period that Vera realized she had fallen in love with Roland—and that the feeling seemed to be mutual. After she left on New Year’s Eve, he wrote that he felt wretched, and concluded, “You are a dear, you know.”
The spires of Oxford University rise above the town; Vera, Roland, and Edward were looking forward to studying there in the fall of 1914.
Vera and Roland yearned to be alone together and contrived to escape the chaperones by meeting in Leicester and taking a train journey to Oxford, during which they made plans to travel together once the war was over. They admitted they had been keeping each other’s letters, and he kissed her hand. After that their correspondence took on a new emotional intensity, marred only for Vera by Roland’s desire to get to the Front. He felt ashamed still to be at home when men were coming back wounded, and in March 1915 he managed to obtain a tr
ansfer to the 7th Worcestershire, which was heading out to the Western Front. Vera rushed to London to see him off on the train, angry and worried by his decision, her heart filled with dread. He sent her an amethyst brooch as a keepsake, but she wrote expressing her doubts about the fighting: “Certainly war seems to bring out all that is noble in human nature, but against that you can say it brings out all the barbarous, too.”
Her anxiety seemed misplaced at first, as Roland wrote that less than half an hour’s walk from Armentières, where he was stationed, life carried on as normal. The trenches there were relatively quiet at first, but in May he wrote that he had been under shellfire, and that “horror piled on horror till one feels that the world can scarcely go on any longer.” Shortly after that, a man in his unit was killed. Roland had been speaking to him just moments earlier, walked off and when he came back found him lying in the bottom of the trench “with a tiny stream of blood trickling down his cheek into his coat.” In a wood nearby he found the body of a soldier that must have lain there for some time, almost submerged in the moss and violets, an experience that became incorporated in “Villanelle,” a poem he wrote for Vera that was destined to become one of his most famous: “It is strange they should be blue/Blue when his soaked blood was red.”
Vera began work as a VAD nurse on June 27, 1915. The first dressing she helped to change made her feel “sick and faint.”
So as to do something for the war effort, Vera volunteered to help at a local hospital and was initially set to darning socks. In June 1915 she arranged to take time off from university and started working at the Devonshire Hospital, where she was kept frantically busy emptying bedpans and changing dressings. She tried to remain positive in her letters to Roland, to boost his flagging morale: “Even War must end sometime, and perhaps … we may recover the hidden childhood again and find that after all the dust and ashes which covered it haven’t spoilt it much.” But he was gloomy. Recalling their last evening together, he wrote, “It all seems so far away now. I sometimes think I must have exchanged my life for someone else’s.”
In August he came home on leave, looking thinner and older. They planned to visit her family and then his, but balked at the chaperones dictated by the age. “Would it make things better if we were properly engaged?” Roland asked shyly. Vera argued that she did not want her relationship to be labeled as one that society saw as “correct,” and dreaded the conventional congratulations and advice from their elders. Her feminist ideals meant she didn’t want to give her father the opportunity to quiz Roland on how he planned to support her, since she had long ago decided that she would work and be financially independent. She didn’t want a ring, which she saw as a “token of possession.” Roland agreed with her and they decided not to tell her parents of their engagement until after that visit. When she did break the news, no one was surprised. Edward remarked, “You’re only giving a name to what has existed for quite a long time.”
“It all seems such a waste of youth, such a desecration of all that is born for beauty and poetry.”
All too soon, it was time for Vera to get back to her work in the hospital. They kissed as Roland saw her off on the train and tears welled up in his eyes that he struggled to hide. Each had promised they would not look back after saying farewell, but she turned to watch him walking quickly down the platform with his head bent and shoulders hunched.
“I sometimes think I must have changed my life for someone else’s,” Roland wrote to Vera in June 1915.
Back in the Trenches
Roland’s initial enthusiasm for fighting was utterly extinguished by the horror of the trenches that autumn: “Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing … look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been Its ribs,” he wrote to Vera.
She got work at a VAD military hospital in Camberwell in London, where she changed dressings on gangrenous wounds and amputation stumps, and helped men suffering from shellshock. It was tough, distressing work, but still she tried to stay positive; in fact, she and Roland quarreled by letter over his negativity. In November he wrote, “It all seems such a waste of youth, such a desecration of all that is born for beauty and poetry,” even questioning whether it would have been better if they had never met, or at least had not met until after the war was over. He told Vera she seemed to him like a character in a book, and she admitted in her diary that she couldn’t visualize his face any more.
And then word came that Roland would get leave over Christmas. It was just what the couple needed, so she made sure she was able to take a week off work at the same time. On Christmas Eve 1915, she helped to decorate the ward at her hospital, then on Christmas morning took a train to Brighton, where she had arranged to meet Roland in the lounge at the Grand Hotel after his boat train arrived. There was no sign of him by ten o’clock that night, so she assumed, since it was Christmas Day, that there had been problems with transport. The following morning she was called to the hotel telephone and she rushed to answer, expecting to hear his voice. Instead it was that of his sister Clare, saying that Roland was not coming. He had been shot through the stomach while repairing the barbed wire in front of his trench, and had died in a military hospital on December 23.
THE VADS
The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was formed in 1909 by both male and female volunteers, but during the war it was mostly staffed by women, as the men were fighting. They worked in military hospitals both at home and overseas, providing support to the medical staff, but the fact that they were not fully qualified nurses caused some resentment at first. As the war went on and they gained experience, they were more welcome and proved invaluable, with about 38,000 VADs helping with the war effort on the Western and later on the Eastern Front. Several women who served as VADs went on to become famous. Apart from Vera Brittain, there were Agatha Christie, popular mystery story writer; Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator; and Freya Stark, the explorer and travel writer.
British VAD dressing station: The matron sits at the back supervising while a nurse dresses a wound on a soldier’s hand.
Over the following weeks, Vera received letters from his fellow officers and a Catholic priest who had buried him, explaining what had happened in Roland’s final hours. His unit had taken over an old trench, which was in pretty bad shape, and not one of the previous occupants had thought to warn them that the Germans had a machine gun trained on a gap in the hedge at the exact point where the wire was torn. When Roland crawled out in the moonlight, he was hit immediately. No purpose had been served by his death. Not one other life had been saved. He was simply gone.
Vera visited Roland’s family at their home in January just as a package arrived containing his belongings, including the uniform he had been wearing when shot—“the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood”—and felt sheer rage at the gruesome awfulness of the war.
She returned to work in Camberwell, utterly grief-stricken but determined to keep herself busy. On top of the strain of losing her fiancé, news came that her brother Edward had arrived at the Western Front in February, from where he wrote to her of the hazards of “stray shots that ricochet off a sandbag” and the dangers of going out on patrol in no-man’s-land. On July 1 he was shot in the thigh and arm at the Battle of the Somme and sent back to London. Vera arrived at work to be told her brother was in J Ward and, filled with relief, she dashed there to see him. He received a military cross for his valor at the Somme, but after a few months, as soon as his wounds had healed, he was sent back to the Front to fight.
No-man’s-land: Roland wrote “The dug-outs have nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men.”
WAR CEMETERIES
The scale of military casualties in the First World War was utterly unprecedented, with some estimating that as many as 10 million w
ere killed. Those who died in hospitals were placed in a cemetery nearby, and the location was generally registered, as it was for Edward Brittain and Roland Leighton. However, as the fighting moved back and forth with increasing fierceness, thousands were buried where they fell, with perhaps a basic cross or marker, and some simply remained on the ground to be covered in mud, like the soldier Roland found in the wood. After the war, families wanted to visit their loved ones’ graves and many of the fighting nations established a registration service. Where no grave could be found, the missing were listed on memorials, and both war cemeteries and memorials are maintained to this day.
Edward Brittain’s gravestone in Granezza, just south of Asiago, in northern Italy.
There are over a hundred military cemeteries in Belgium, containing the remains of soldiers of many different nationalities.
Wanting to prove herself worthy of Roland, Vera volunteered to serve as a VAD overseas and was sent to Malta, where she cared for patients whose ships had been blown up in the surrounding waters, before going on to Étaples in France, where she found herself nursing acutely ill German soldiers, some with suppurating blisters caused by mustard gas. Such was their suffering, she saw them only as human beings, not as the enemy.
Vera in the 1920s: Her first novel, The Dark Tide, was published in 1923.
In June 1918 Edward was sent to the Italian Front, where his luck finally ran out. He was shot in the head by a sniper on June 15, 1918, and died instantly. This was the loss that truly broke Vera’s heart. On Armistice Day, she struggled through the crowds in London, thinking of “gifted, ardent, ambitious” Roland, who died doing a task of routine maintenance; of “musical, serene” Edward, who loved peace but had fought so courageously.
