Authors: Virginia Nicholson
a son’.
*
Angela du Maurier was an incurable romantic. Yet despite a catalogue of
infatuations she was destined to remain single. It had started at childhood
dancing classes, when she mooned around after a ‘little boy in a sailor suit’.
At ten she was sworn to a sweet little boy of eleven; they bowled their
hoops together, and kissed each other goodbye. The next object of her
passion was the local baker’s boy in Albany Street, followed in quick
succession by a village lad near their holiday home in Llanbedr, Arthur the
farm labourer, who rode her around behind him on his carthorse in return
for her pilfering her father’s cigars, the actor Bobby Loraine (‘my first big
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
love . . .’), the Prince of Wales, her first cousin Gerald, and the head girl of her school. At the age of fourteen it was all too easy to become besotted at the sight of myriads of gorgeous officers setting off to fight for their country: ‘It was wonderful, all these brilliant young men in khaki, about to be killed in action . . .’ Then after the war in it was hook, line and sinker for an older man who behaved with great gallantry and gentleness to the dewy-eyed ingeńue – and became her first ‘Grande Passion’. He was sweet,
and they parted with a tear. In her autobiography,
It’s Only the Sister
(),*
Angela du Maurier corroborates E. M. Delafield’s fictional representation of the marriage market. Now she was ready . . .
I wonder what most girls do think they are ready for, when all is said and done. In one word: marriage. I feel certain that nine girls out of ten have marriage as their goal at nineteen, whatever they may feel later. I certainly did, and Bet and I would swap ideas by the hour as to whom we’d have for our bridesmaids, where we would go for our honeymoons, what we would call our children, what sort of
husbands we’d
like
. And as each young man drifted into one’s life – and out of it again – one wondered.
Thus the women of Britain, ever-mindful that any husband is better than
none at all, looked on as war took from them their future mates. Even
before Monica Ingram was right – there weren’t enough men to go
round. In there were , more women than men in this country.
This was because more boy babies died; it was also because men emigrated
to the Colonies in large numbers. By nearly half a million men were
leaving these shores annually to service the needs of Empire in India,
Australia, Canada, Kenya . . . When war broke out many of these came
back to fight for King and country, only to be shot, blown up or gassed
alongside those who had stayed behind. Between and over
, British men were killed:† one in eight of those who set out to
* Her younger sister was the more famous Daphne, best-selling author of
Rebecca
,
Jamaica
Inn
and many other novels. Their father, Gerald du Maurier, was a celebrated actor-manager.
† Though it is outside the scope of this book, the tragedy was not of course confined to Britain. , American soldiers were killed in the First World War. Of the French troops far more were killed than the British – nearly . million, as against Britain’s ,.
Germany suffered even worse, with nearly . million dead. French and German women had much more to contend with than we did, and how single women in those countries adapted and reshaped their lives in the face of such tragedy must stir up speculation.
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fight, and per cent of Britain’s males under forty-five. A further ,,
were wounded. Helpless to prevent the slaughter, a generation of women
waited in vain for their boys to come home.
On Christmas Day a young nurse set out full of happy expectation
to await the arrival of her fianceón leave from his regiment. Looking out
at the choppy sea from the lounge of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, she
wondered what kind of a crossing he would be having. By ten o’clock that
night no news had come. She was disappointed but not over-concerned.
It was Sunday, and Christmas – no wonder he’d found it difficult to get a
message through. News would get to her in the morning. Next day she
dressed carefully; she wanted to look her best for her lover. The expected
call came to say she was wanted on the telephone and she dashed joyously
into the corridor. But the message brought the bitter destruction of all her hopes.
Two days earlier, the very day before he was due to go on leave, the
nurse’s fiance´, Roland Leighton, had set out to reconnoitre a communication trench which linked his battalion’s trenches to no man’s land. The wire defences were in need of repair, and Leighton wanted to be sure that
the route was clear before he took a party out to do the work. Unfortunately it was a moonlit night. Unknown to him the Germans had a machine-gun trained on this path, and he had hardly gone a step into view before he was
hit full in the stomach by a volley of fire. Two of his comrades risked their lives to carry him back to the British trench. At the dressing station the doctor gave him a huge dose of morphia, but nothing could save him.
Twenty-four hours later Roland Leighton died.
Battered by shock and grief, it was two months before Roland’s fianceé,
Vera Brittain, was able to put her feelings into words:
Perhaps –
(To R.A.L. Died of Wounds in France, December rd, )
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of You.
Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of Spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.
Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to the Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.
But, though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.
Vera Brittain spoke for the thousands like her. She spoke for May
Wedderburn Cannan (also a poet), whose fiance´ died of pneumonia in
Germany just after the end of the war early in (‘Now there was no
hope. It was the end of the world’). She spoke for Emily Chitticks, whose
boyfriend Lieutenant Will Martin was killed by a sniper’s bullet in
(‘My heart and love are buried in his grave in France . . .’). She spoke too for Marian Allen (‘How should you leave me, having loved me so? . . . It seemed impossible that you should die . . .’), for Olive Lindsay (‘Half of me died at Bapaume . . .’), for Barbara Wootton (‘Her blank, shut-in face . . .
told me what such a loss meant to her . . .’), for May Jones and for Gertrude Caton-Thompson.
Week after week, women across Britain waited for news from the Front.
The casualty lists posted at town halls nationwide produced either temporary deliverance from the suspense of waiting, or the obliteration of all hope.
Sometimes the family received the dreaded telegram ‘Missing, feared killed’, which only prolonged the agony. The statistics were devastating. Of the young men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine in , no less than per
cent died. Because army policy was to place all men from the same locality in a single regiment, entire communities of young men were obliterated when that particular regiment suffered attack. A man from New Cross in Kent lost
all five of his sons between and , while a mother from Watford saw
four out of her five killed; she lost the will to live and died soon afterwards.
When young ‘Pozzie’ Gibson was killed, his sergeant visited his mother in
the poorest part of Hunslet to break the news to her. ‘I’ve lost my only
boy,’ was all she had power to say, and spoke no more, mute with grief.
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In England, a mere twenty-eight ‘thankful villages’ eventually saw all the
men who had set out to the First World War return safely. With these
exceptions, not a community in the country was left unscathed by the
raging slaughter of those four dreadful years. Very little helped. On
November Maria Gyte of Sheldon in Derbyshire recorded the
deaths of ‘five dear lads’ from her village who had ‘found graves in a foreign land’. They included her son: Jack Brocklehurst died of wounds on Nov. th
Thomas Anthony Brocklehurst killed Oct. th
George Bridden died Oct. st of wounds
Tony Gyte died of wounds Nov. nd
Alfred Wildgoose died of malaria Nov. th
That Christmas the Gyte family were unable to celebrate:
Dec. th
. . . My dear lad Tony was missing from the family circle first time for
years. Oh Dear! What a dreadful war and what awfully sad homes there are this Xmas.
The worst I have ever known. No joy. No singing Xmas hymns. No decorations.
Lieutenant Will Martin was killed in the same year. On the back of a New
Testament tract a few piteous notes by his fianceé Emily Chitticks betray
her attempts to make sense of his death:
In loving Remembrance of my Dearly loved and loving fiance´, ‘Will’ . . .
Who made the supreme Sacrafice [sic] on March th
‘Greater Love hath no man than this; in that he lay down his life for his
friend.’ Until we meet again before God’s throne, Dearest, its [sic] only
‘Goodnight’.
Emily.
Met Will August th
Engaged to Will Oct th . . .
Killed in action March th
He nobly died doing his duty. Buried at Ecourt St Mein, France.
Deeply loved & so sadly missed.
Dying nobly while doing one’s duty was what was supposed to happen.
The reality offered less in the way of consolation to those, like Vera
Brittain, able to face it. His stomach riddled with bullets, Roland Leighton’s
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
shattering pain was only mitigated by a large dose of morphia. Nothing
ever compensated Vera for the fact that, under its effects, her lover’s final hours were passed in a state of oblivious stupefaction. No finer purpose appeared to have been served by his death, and he had forgotten her. As a
nurse her daily life entailed tending the acute surgical cases on her ward; she was no stranger to the ‘white eyes writhing . . .’, the blood ‘gargling from . . .
froth-corrupted lungs’ described so angrily in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce
et Decorum Est’. In spite of this it was hard for her to make allowances for ‘the compelling self-absorption of extreme suffering’. The hardest thing to bear was ‘the grief of having no word to cherish through the empty years’.
The men died like animals. Another nurse, Shirley Millard, recollected
the undignified suffering of the soldiers in her care:
They cannot breathe lying down or sitting up. They just struggle for breath. But nothing can be done. Their lungs are gone. Some with their eyes and faces entirely eaten away by the gas and bodies covered with burns . . . One boy, today, screaming to die. The entire top layer of his skin burned from his face and body . . .
How was one to go on living with the knowledge of such violent, degraded
deaths? How cruelly they corroded the human instinct for happiness. On a
bright Wednesday morning only a few months after Roland’s death Vera
accidentally found herself rejoicing in the beauty of a watery-blue spring
sky flecked with scuttling clouds. ‘Suddenly I remember – Roland is dead
and I am not keeping faith with him; it is mean and cruel, even for a
second, to feel glad to be alive.’
The hypocrisy of the warmongers made it worse. Emily Chitticks
accepted that dying for one’s country was worthwhile, but not all the young
women were so submissive. After the death of her fiance´ the novelist Irene
Rathbone rounded on the bien-pensant patriots in anguish: ‘What was the
use of winning the war . . . if none of the men who won it were to live?
The papers were for ever quoting ‘‘Who dies if England lives?’’ But after
all what
was
England?’
The dead infected the living with their absence, introducing a sense of
annihilating guilt and insecurity. ‘One recovers from the shock,’ wrote
Vera in her diary a year after Roland was killed, ‘but one never gets over
the loss, for one is never the same after it. I have got used to facing the
long empty years ahead of me if I survive the War, but I have always before
me the realisation of how empty they are and will be, since he will never
be there again.’ These men had not died as the old were supposed to die,
in the fullness of time, murmuring deathbed pieties to their assembled
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grandchildren before being seraphically removed to a better place. Their
violently truncated lives seemed against nature, unreasonable, unacceptable.
For decades after the war the fiction writers found their theme in its
residue of loss and grief. Vera Brittain’s
The Dark Tide
(), Margery Perham’s
Josie Vine
(), Irene Rathbone’s
We That Were Young
() and Ruth Holland’s
The Lost Generation
() all traced their heroines’