Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (3 page)

The publication of Vera Brittain’s wartime diaries and correspondence has revealed the extent of the complexity and ambivalence underlying her contemporary responses to the war. The evidence of these private records demonstrates that while at times she could rail against the war with anger and distress, at others she took refuge in a consolatory rhetoric rooted in traditional values of patriotism, sacrifice and idealism of the kind espoused by the wartime propaganda of both Church and State, or the sonnets of Rupert Brooke. In her letters written after Roland’s death, for instance, her need to continue believing that the war was being fought for some worthwhile end - manifest in such gung-ho sentiments as, ‘It is a great thing to live in these tremendous times’,
³⁶
or her conviction that war is an immense purgation
³⁷
- is perhaps entirely understandable. But equally, in
Testament of Youth
, it is not surprising to find that this kind of ambivalence is largely absent, and that Brittain is reluctant to confront her own susceptibility as a younger woman to the glamour of war, and unwilling to probe too deeply the roots of her own idealism in 1914.
³⁸
For by the time she had completed her autobiography, Vera Brittain was ready to reject anything that identified war ‘with grey crosses, and supreme sacrifices, and red poppies blowing against a serene blue sky’.
³⁹

In 1989, while writing Vera Brittain’s biography, I travelled to the Somme to pay a visit to Roland Leighton’s grave at Louvencourt. Our party of four, including two of Vera Brittain’s grandchildren, spent the night in Albert, at the Hotel de la Paix, where Brittain herself had lunched in July 1933 during the second of her two visits to the cemetery where Roland was buried; and the next morning, which happened to be Remembrance Sunday, we made the hilly drive to Louvencourt. On the south-east side of the village, a large stone cross dominates the skyline, surrounded by acres of tranquil farmland. It is a small cemetery, of 151 Commonwealth and 76 French graves, beautifully cared for, as are all the military cemeteries of the First World War, by the Commonwealth Graves Commission. Roland’s grave is in the middle, not far from the memorial cross and cenotaph, and its inscription includes the closing line from W.E. Henley’s ‘Echoes: XLII’, ‘Never Goodbye’.

I found the visitors’ book in a little cupboard in the wall. Among its messages, I counted no fewer than ten people from around the world who, in the period of just two months, had come to this relatively out of the way area of the Somme in order to pay tribute to Roland Leighton - and to pay tribute to him because they had read about his brief life and early death in
Testament of Youth
. As Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain’s daughter, says in her preface, it is a precious sort of immortality.

More than seventy years after its first publication,
Testament of Youth
’s power to disturb and to move remains undiminished.
⁴⁰
Vera Brittain’s ‘passionate plea for peace’, which attempts to show ‘without any polite disguise, the agony of war to the individual and its destructiveness to the human race’,
⁴¹
is one that, tragically, still resonates in our world today.

Mark Bostridge
London, February 2004

Preface

It is now sixty years since the First World War ended, and few are still alive who survived that fearful experience at first hand. The War should now be a part of history; the weapons, the uniforms, the static horror of battles fought in trenches are all obsolete now. Yet the First World War refuses to fade away. It has marked all of us who were in any way associated with it, even at one generation’s remove through our parents. The books, the poetry, the artefacts of those four and a half years still speak to young men and women who were not even born when the Second World War ended.

Why are we so haunted? I think it is because of the terrible irony of the War; the idealism and high-mindedness that led boys and men in their hundreds of thousands to volunteer to fight and, often, to die; the obscenity of the square miles of mud, barbed wire, broken trees and shattered bodies into which they were flung, battalion after battalion; and the total imbalance between the causes for which the war was fought on both sides, as against the scale of the human sacrifice. As Wilfred Owen put it in ‘The Send-Off ’,

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells

There is another reason, too. The First World War was the culmination of personal war; men saw the other human being they had killed, visibly dead. Men fought with bayonets, with knives or even their bare hands. The guns themselves were on the battlefields, thick with smoke, the gunners sweaty and mudbound. War had not yet become a pitting of scientist against scientist or technologist against technologist. Death was not, on either side, elimination through pressing a button, but something seen and experienced personally, bloody, pathetic and foul.

My own picture of the War was gleaned from my mother. Her life, like that of so many of her contemporaries who were actually in the fighting or dealing with its consequences, was shaped by it and shadowed by it. It was hard for her to laugh unconstrainedly; at the back of her mind, the row upon row of wooden crosses were planted too deeply. Through her, I learned how much courage it took to live on in service to the world when all those one loved best were gone: her fiancé first, her best friend, her beloved only brother. The only salvation was work, particularly the work of patching and repairing those who were still alive. After the War, the work went on - writing, campaigning, organising against war. My mother became a lifelong pacifist. I still remember her in her seventies, determinedly sitting in a CND demonstration, and being gently removed by the police.

Testament of Youth
is, I think, the undisputed classic book about the First World War written by a woman, and indeed a woman whose childhood had been a very sheltered one. It is an autobiography and also an elegy for a generation. For many men and women, it described movingly how they themselves felt. Time and again, in small Welsh towns and in big Northern cities, someone has come up to me after a meeting to ask if my mother was indeed the author of
Testament of Youth
, and to say how much it meant to them. It is a precious sort of immortality.

I hope now that a new generation, more distant from the First World War, will discover the anguish and pain in the lives of those young people sixty years ago; and in discovering will understand.

Shirley Williams
August 1977

Author’s Acknowledgments

My very warm and grateful thanks are due to Roland Leighton’s family for their generosity in allowing me to publish his poems and quote from his letters; to my parents for permitting me to reproduce E. H. B.’s letters and his song ‘L’Envoi,’ as well as for their untiring assistance in the tracing of war letters and documents; to B. B. for the extracts from my uncle’s letters which appear in Chapter VII; to my husband for the letters quoted in Chapter XII and for much valuable criticism; and to Winifred Holtby, whose unstinted services no words can adequately acknowledge or describe, for the use of her letters and the poem ‘Trains in France,’ for her help in correcting the proofs, and for the unfailing co-operation of her constant advice and her vivid memory. I am, in addition, greatly indebted to Madame Smeterlin for correcting proof of the song ‘L’Envoi’; to Mr H. H. Price, of Trinity College, Oxford, for verifying the quotation from Cicero at the beginning of Part III; and to the officials of the Imperial War Museum for their courtesy and kindness on several occasions. I should also like to thank Miss Phyllis Bentley very gratefully indeed for much generous help and encouragement during the final year of this book’s vicissitudes.

Acknowledgments and thanks are due to the following for kindly permitting the use of copyright poems or long quotations: Miss May Wedderburn Cannan, for ‘When The Vision Dies’; Mr Rudyard Kipling for the quotation from ‘Dirge of Dead Sisters’ out of
The Five Nations
(copyright 1903 by Rudyard Kipling and reprinted by permission from Messrs A. P. Watt & Son, agents, Messrs Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, the Macmillan Company, Toronto, and Messrs Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., New York, Publishers); Miss Rose Macaulay, for ‘Picnic, July, 1917’; Mr Walter de la Mare for ‘The Ghost,’ out of
The Listeners
; Mr Wilfred Meynell for ‘Renouncement,’ by Alice Meynell; Sir Owen Seaman for ‘“The Soul of a Nation”’; Mr Basil Blackwell for the poems from
Oxford Poetry, 1920
and quotations from two numbers of the
Oxford Outlook
; Messrs Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, and Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, for quotations from the poems of W. E. Henley; Messrs John Murray, for ‘The Death of Youth,’ from
Verse and Prose in Peace and War
, by William Noel Hodgson; the literary executor, Messrs Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., and Messrs Dodd, Mead & Co., New York (copyright, 1915, by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.), for the sonnet (‘Suggested by Some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research’) by Rupert Brooke. I also want to express my gratitude to the authors of the poems quoted on p. 122 (from
London Opinion
) and p. 155 (from the
Westminster Gazette
), as well as my regret that I was unable to approach them personally, because in the one case the poem was signed only by initials and in the other the long-ago date of publication was unknown.

Finally, I am much indebted to the editors of
The Times
, the
Observer
,
Time and Tide
, the
Daily Mail
, the
Star
, and the
Oxford Chronicle
for the valuable assistance of their columns in the reconstruction of recent history.

V. B.
May, 1933

Foreword

For nearly a decade I have wanted, with a growing sense of urgency, to write something which would show what the whole War and post-war period - roughly, from the years leading up to 1914 until about 1925 - has meant to the men and women of my generation, the generation of those boys and girls who grew up just before the War broke out. I wanted to give too, if I could, an impression of the changes which that period brought about in the minds and lives of very different groups of individuals belonging to the large section of middle-class society from which my own family comes.

Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the War. It is true that to do it meant looking back into a past of which many of us, preferring to contemplate to-morrow rather than yesterday, believe ourselves to be tired. But it is only in the light of that past that we, the depleted generation now coming into the control of public affairs, the generation which has to make the present and endeavour to mould the future, can understand ourselves or hope to be understood by our successors. I knew that until I had tried to contribute to this understanding, I could never write anything in the least worth while.

The way to set about it at first appeared obvious; it meant drawing a picture of middle-class England - its interests, its morals, its social ideals, its politics - as it was from the time of my earliest conscious memory, and then telling some kind of personal story against this changing background. My original idea was that of a long novel, and I started to plan it. To my dismay it turned out a hopeless failure; I never got much further than the planning, for I found that the people and the events about which I was writing were still too near and too real to be made the subjects of an imaginative, detached reconstruction.

Then I tried the effect of reproducing parts of the long diary which I kept from 1913 to 1918, with fictitious names substituted for all the real ones out of consideration for the many persons still alive who were mentioned in it with a youthful and sometimes rather cruel candour. This too was a failure. Apart from the fact that the diary ended too soon to give a complete picture, the fictitious names created a false atmosphere and made the whole thing seem spurious.

There was only one possible course left - to tell my own fairly typical story as truthfully as I could against the larger background, and take the risk of offending all those who believe that a personal story should be kept private, however great its public significance and however wide its general application. In no other fashion, it seemed, could I carry out my endeavour to put the life of an ordinary individual into its niche in contemporary history, and thus illustrate the influence of world-wide events and movements upon the personal destinies of men and women.

I have tried to write the exact truth as I saw and see it about both myself and other people, since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest. I have also made as much use as possible of old letters and diaries, because it seemed to me that the contemporary opinions, however crude and ingenuous, of youth in the period under review were at least as important a part of its testament as retrospective reflections heavy with knowledge. I make no apology for the fact that some of these documents renew with fierce vividness the stark agonies of my generation in its early twenties. The mature proprieties of ‘emotion remembered in tranquillity’ have not been my object, which, at least in part, is to challenge that too easy, too comfortable relapse into forgetfulness which is responsible for history’s most grievous repetitions. It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation.