Testament of Youth (excerpts)
Roland's Departure...
" I think it is harder now the spring days are beginning to come," I wrote in reply to Roland's letter, " to keep the thought of war before one's mind-especially here, where there is always a kind of dreamy spell which makes one feel that nothing poignant and terrible can ever come near. Winter departs so early here " (I was comparing Oxford with Buxton, where it lasts until May) " and during the calm and beautiful days we have had lately it seems so much more appropriate to imagine that you and Edward are actually here enjoying the spring than to think that before long you may be in the trenches fighting men you do not really hate. In the churches in Oxford, where so many of the congregation are soldiers, we are always having it impressed upon us that ' the call of our country is the call of God.' Is it ? I wish I could feel sure that it was. At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die."
At the end of the term, just when I was least expecting it, the blow descended abruptly. During the last week, I had been really ill with a sharp attack of influenza, which the amenities then obtainable at college were not calculated to cure with exceptional speed. At that time, illness among women students was regarded with surprise, and the provisions made for nursing were somewhat elementary. (It was partly owing to the suggestions of Winifred Holtby and myself at a college meeting after the War that a visiting nurse came to be attached to the Somerville staff.) Except in serious cases, the patient was usually isolated from her friends-who could at least have contributed to her comfort-and left to the care of the domestic staff.
After several days of existing for meal after meal upon the monotonous slops which constituted " invalid diet," and of getting up to wash in a chilly room with a temperature of 103 degrees, I began to feel very weak, and my mother, who was in Folkestone with my father visiting Edward, hurried up to Oxford in alarm. I was thankful to see her, and to be carried off home, three days before the official date for going down, after acting with immense effort the part of the child Victoria in the First Year Play, Stanley Houghton's The Dear Departed.
As my temperature was now normal, and I needed only rest and home amenities to compensate for the depressing after-effects of my illness, my mother left me in Buxton and returned to London to join my father. Lying luxuriously in my comfortable bed after a pleasant breakfast, with a sense of agreeable indifference to Press descriptions of thc Allied Fleet in the Dardanelles and the more recent incidents of the new submarine blockade, I lazily opened a letter from Roland which had been forwarded from Somerville. Ten minutes after reading it I was dressed and staggering dizzily but frantically about the room, for it told me that he had successfully manoeuvred a transfer to the 7th Worcestershire Regiment and was off to the front in ten days' time. Assuming that I was going down from Oxford at the official end of term, he had asked me to meet him in London, where he was staying for his final leave, to say good-bye.
As the letter had taken three days to reach me, I fell into a panic of fear that I should miss him altogether. After spending the whole day in writing, telephoning, and tottering down to the town through a sudden spell of bitter cold to send off telegrams, I did endeavour in the few lines that I wrote him that evening to restrain my desperation.
" I was expecting something like it of course but it is none the less of a shock for all that. It is still difficult to realise that the moment has actually come at last when I shall have no peace of mind any more until the War is over. I cannot pretend any longer that I am glad even for your sake, but I suppose I must try to write as calmly as you do-though if it were my own life that were going to be in danger I think I could face the future with more equanimity."
My parents returned the next day to find me still feverish and excited. As it would have been " incorrect " for me to go alone to London, and as I was, in any case, still hardly fit to do so, they agreed that Roland, who had telephoned that he could manage it, should come to Buxton for the night. My father, however, did inquire from my mother with well assumed indignation " why on earth Vera was making all this fuss of that youth without a farthing to his name ? "
When we had driven up in the taxi with me from the station, and we were left together in the morning-room, which looked across the snow-covered town to the sad hills beyond, the sudden effect of seeing him in my semi-invalid weakness after such agitation of mind brought me so near to crying that I couldn't prevent him from noticing it.
Fighting angrily with the tears, I asked him: " Well, are you satisfied at last"?
He replied that he hardly knew. He certainly had no wish to die, and now that he had got what he wanted, a dust-and-ashes feeling had come. He neither hated the Germans nor loved the Belgians; the only possible motive for going was " heroism in the abstract," and that didn't seem a very logical reason for risking one's life.
Mournfully we sat there recapitulating the brief and happy past; the future was too uncertain to attract speculation. I had begun, I confessed to him, to pray again, not because I believed that it did any good, but so as to leave no remote possibility unexplored. The War, we decided, came hardest of all upon us who were young. The middle-aged and the old had known their period of joy, whereas upon us catastrophe had descended just in time to deprive us of that youthful happiness to which we had believed ourselves entitled.
" Sometimes," I told him, " I've wished I'd never met you-that you hadn't come to take away my impersonal attitude towards the War and make it a cause of suffering to me as it is to thousands of others. But if I could choose not to have met you, I wouldn't do it-even though my future had always to be darkened by the shadow of death."
" Ah, don't say that ! " he said. " Don't say it will all be spoilt; when I return things may be just the same."
" If you return," I emphasized, determined to face up to things for both of us, and when he insisted: " ' When,' not ' if,"' I said that I didn't imagine he was going to France without fully realizing all that it might involve. He answered gravely that he had thought many times of the issue, but had a settled conviction that he was coming back, though perhaps not quite whole.
" Would you like me any less if I was, say, minus an arm ? "
My reply need not be recorded. It brought the tears so near to the surface again that I picked up the coat which I had thrown off, and abruptly said I would take it upstairs- which I did the more promptly when I suddenly realized that he was nearly crying too.
After tea we walked steeply uphill along the wide road which leads over lonely, undulating moors through Whaley Bridge to Manchester, twenty miles away. This was " the long white road " of Roland's poems, where nearly a year before we had walked between " the grey hills and the heather," and the plover had cried in the awakening warmth of the spring. There were no plover there that afternoon; heavy snow had fallen, and a rough blizzard drove sleet and rain in our faces.
It was a mournfully appropriate setting for a discussion on death and the alternative between annihilation and an unknown hereafter. We could not honestly admit that we thought we should survive, though we would have given anything in the world to believe in a life to come, but he promised me that if he died in France he would try to come back and tell me that the grave was not the end of our love. As we walked down the hill towards Buxton the snow ceased and the evening light began faintly to shine in the sky, but somehow it only showed us the more clearly how grey and sorrowful the world had become. (pp.127-130)
Roland in France...
ROLAND went to the front on March 31st, 1915. For those who cared to remember such things, it was Wednesday in Passion Week. " Je suis fiance; c'est la guerre ! " he announced before leaving to his mother, who accepted the news, which cannot altogether have astonished her, with commendable toleration.
In the interval between his leaving me and his crossing over to France, there was time for each of us to reinforce the other's courage with letters; time, too, for me to receive a large amethyst set as a brooch, and sent with a tiny card inscribed: " In Memoriam. March 18th, 1915." I held it l up in front of the fire; the red glow reflected in its surface made it shine like a great drop of blood.
" All that is left is to wait and work and hope,,, he had written to me from Maldon on the evening of the day that we said good-bye. " But I am coming back, dear. Let it always be ' when ' and not 'if.' As yet everything is incomplete, but last night, unreal as it seems to be, must have some consummation. The day will come when we shall live our roseate poem through-as we have dreamt it."
Determinedly I responded in the same confident strain: " It is hard that on that difficult path I can do nothing to help you face the Death you will meet with so often. But when you are fighting the fear of it-bravely, as I know you will-I too shall be facing that fear, and can at least be with you in spirit then.... Sometime after you had gone, I began again to dream of all that may still be after the War -when you return, and to plan out work to make me worthier of the future and to fill up the hours until the sorrowful time is past.... It would not be right for us to be given a vision of the Promised Land only to be told we were never to enter it. We shall dwell in it in the end, and it will seem all the fairer because we have wandered in the desert between then and now. . Good-bye, my dear, and as much love as you wish."
Confidence, however, was difficult just then, for immediately after Roland left me, the casualties began to come through from Neuve Chapclle. As usual the Press had given no hint of that tragedy's dimensions, and it was only through the long casualty lists, and the persistent demoralising rumour that owing to a miscalculation in time thousands of our men had been shot down by our own guns, that the world was gradually coming to realize something of what the engagement had been. The 6th Sherwood Foresters, which included many of the Buxton young men, had left for France three weeks earlier; they were incorrectly reported to have been involved in the battle, and rumours of death and wounds were already abroad. It was not an encouraging moment for bidding farewell to a lover, and, as often happened in periods of absorbing stress, a quotation from Longfellow slipped, unimpeded by literary eclecticism, into my diary: The air is full of farewells to the dying, And mournings for the dead; The heart of Rachel for her children crying Wiill not be comforted.
The determination to work hard and to plan out the days so that each moment would be occupied became singularly hard to fulfil, for I could not open a book without finding some subject that I had discussed with Roland or seeing words which reminded me of his characteristic phrases; I could not even seek solitude in a favourite refuge beyond the town without passing some road along which I had walked with him, or thinking that perhaps some day we should walk there again. Latin and Greek became even more irksome than before, and I began to feel that some kind of vigorous, practical toil would be better adapted to a chaotic wartime world. Rather lamely I tried-as the majority of Oxford dons, had I but known it, were trying also-to find some compelling reason for continuing the former when the latter seemed so much more appropriate.
" I suppose he is right," I argued with myself, " and the only thing, which is the hardest thing, is to work and wait- and certainly to hope, which one must do or die."
How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realize; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die. Roland's letters-the sensitive letters of the newly baptized young soldier, so soon to be hardened by the protective iron of remorseless indifference to horror and pain-made the struggle to concentrate no easier, for they drove me to a feverish searching into fundamental questions to which no immediate answers were forthcoming. (pp.135-37)
Roland's Leave...
Certainly the stage seemed perfectly set for his leave. Now that my parents had at last migrated temporarily to the Grand Hotel at Brighton, our two families were so near; the Matron had promised yet again that my own week's holiday should coincide with his, and even Edward wrote cheerfully for once to say that as soon as the actual date was known, he and Victor would both be able to get leave at the same time.
" Very wet and muddy and many of the communication trenches are quite impassable," ran a letter from Roland written on December 9th. " Three men were killed the other day by a dug-out falling in on top of them and one man was drowned in a sump hole. The whole of one's world, at least of one's visible and palpable world, is mud in various stages of solidity or stickiness.... I can be perfectly certain about the date of my leave by to-morrow morning and will let you know."
And, when the final information did come, hurriedly written in pencil on a thin slip of paper torn from his Field Service note-book, it brought the enchanted day still nearer than I had dared to hope.
" Shall be home on leave from 24th Dec.-31st. Land Christmas Day. R."
Even to the unusual concession of a leave which began on Christmas morning after night-duty the Matron proved amenable, and in the encouraging quietness of the winter's I war, with no Loos in prospect, no great push in the west even possible, I dared to glorify my days-or rather my nights-by looking forward. In the pleasant peace of Ward 25, where all the patients, now well on the road to health, slept soundly, the sympathetic Scottish Sister teased me a little for my irrepressible excitement.
" I suppose you won't be thinking of going off and getting married ? A couple of babies like you ! "
It was a new and breath-taking thought, a flame to which Roland's mother-who approved of early marriages and believed that ways and means could be left to look after themselves far better than the average materialistic parent supposed-added fuel when she hinted mysteriously, on a day off which I spent in Brighton, that this time Roland might not be content to leave things as they were.... Suppose, I meditated, kneeling in the darkness beside the comforting glow of the stove in the silent ward, that during this leave we did marry as suddenly, as, in the last one, we became " officially " engaged ? Of course it would be what the world would call - or did call before the War-a "foolish " marriage. But now that the War seemed likely to be endless, and the chance of making a " wise " marriage had become, for most people, so very remote, the world was growing more tolerant. No one-not even my family now, I thought- would hold out against us, even though we hadn't a penny beyond our pay. What if, after all, we did marry thus foolishly ? When the War was over we could still go back to Oxford, and learn to be writers-or even lecturers; if we were determined enough about it we could return there, even though-oh, devastating, sweet speculation !-I might have had a baby.
******
" When I went to her office for my railway-warrant in the morning, the Matron smiled kindly at my bubbling impatience, and reminded me how lucky I was to get leave for Christmas. At Victoria I inquired what boat trains arrived on Christmas Day, and learnt that there was only one, at 7.30 in the evening. The risk, I decided, of missing him in the winter blackness of a wartime terminus was too great to be worth taking: instead, I would go straight to Brighton next morning and wait for him there.
As Christmas Eve slipped into Christmas Day, I finished tying up the paper bags, and with the Sister filled the men's stockings by the exiguous light of an electric torch. Already I could count, perhaps even on my fingers, the hours that must pass before I should see him. In spite of its tremulous eager-ness of anticipation, the night again seemed short; some of the convalescent men wanted to go to early services, and that meant beginning temperatures and pulses at 3 a.m. As I took them I listened to the rain pounding on the tin roof, and wondered whether, since his leave ran from Christmas Eve, he was already on the sea in that wild, stormy darkness. When the men awoke and reached for their stockings, my whole being glowed with exultant benevolence; I delighted in their pleasure over their childish home-made presents because my own mounting joy made me feel in harmony with all creation.
At eight o'clock, as the passages were lengthy and many of the men were lame, I went along to help them to the communion service in the chapel of the college. It was two or three years since I had been to such a service, but it seemed appropriate that I should be there, for I felt, wrought up as I was to a high pitch of nervous emotion, that I ought to thank whatever God might exist for the supreme gift of Roland and the love that had arisen so swiftly between us. The music of the organ was so sweet, the sight of the wounded men who knelt and stood with such difficulty so moving, the conflict of joy and gratitude, pity and sorrow in my mind so poignant, that tears sprang to my eyes, dimming the chapel walls and the words that encircled them: " I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."
Directly after breakfast, sent on my way by exuberant good wishes from Betty and Marjorie and many of the others, I went down to Brighton. All day I waited there for a telephone message or a telegram, sitting drowsily in the lounge of the Grand Hotel, or walking up and down the promenade, watching the grey sea tossing rough with white surf-crested waves, and wondering still what kind of crossing he had had or was having.
When, by ten o'clock at night, no news had come, I concluded that the complications of telegraph and telephone on a combined Sunday and Christmas Day had made communication impossible. So, unable to fight sleep any longer after a night and a day of wakefulness, I went to bed a little disappointed, but still unperturbed. Roland's family, at their Keymer cottage, kept an even longer vigil; they sat up till nearly midnight over their Christmas dinner in the hope that he would join them, and, in their dramatic, impulsive fashion, they drank a toast to the Dead.
The next morning I had just finished dressing, and was putting the final touches to the pastel-blue crepe-de-Chine blouse, when the expected message came to say that I was wanted on the telephone. Believing that I was at last to hear the voice for which I had waited for twenty-four hours, I dashed joyously into the corridor. But the message was not from Roland but from Clare; it was not to say that he had arrived home that morning, but to tell me that he had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on December 23rd.(pp.232-36)
On Sex and Nursing...
On Sunday morning June 27th, 1915, I began my nurseing at the Devonshire Hospital. The same date, exactly ten years afterwards, was to be, for me, equally memorable. Between the one day and the other lies the rest of this book.
From our house above the town I ran eagerly downhill to my first morning's work, not knowing, fortunately for myself, that my servitude would last for nearly four years. The hospital had originally been used as a riding-school, hut a certain Duke of Devonshire, with exemplary concern for the welfare of the sick but none whatever for the feet of the nursing staff, had caused it to be converted to its present charitable purpose. The main part of the building consisted of a huge dome, with two stone corridors running one above the other round its quarter-mile circumference. The nurses were not allowed to cross its diameter, which contained an inner circle reserved for convalescent patients, so that everything forgotten or newly required meant a run round the circumference. As kitchens, sink-rooms and wards all led off the circular corridors and appeared to have been built as far from one another as possible, the continuous walking along the unresistant stone floors must have amounted, apart from the work itself, to several miles a day.
My hours there ran from 7.45 a.m. until 1 p.m., and again from 5.o p.m. until 9. 15 p.m.-a longer day, as I afterwards discovered, than that normally required in many Army hospitals. No doubt the staff was not unwilling to make the utmost use of so enthusiastic and unsophisticated a probationer. Meals, for all of which I was expected to go home, were not included in these hours. As our house was nearly half a mile from the hospital on the slope of a steep hill, I never completely overcame the aching of my back and the soreness of my feet throughout the time that I worked there, and felt perpetually as if 1 had just returned from a series of long route marches.
I never minded these aches and pains, which appeared to me solely as satisfactory tributes to my love for Roland. What did profoundly trouble and humiliate me was my colossal ignorance of the simplest domestic operations. Among other " facts of life," my expensive education had omitted to teach me the prosaic but important essentials of egg-boiling, and the Oxford cookery classes had triumphantly failed to repair the omission. I imagined that I had to bring the saucepan to the boil, then turn off the gas and allow the egg to lie for three minutes in the cooling water. The remarks of a lance-corporal to whom I presented an egg " boiled " in this fashion led me to make shamefaced inquiries of my superiors, from whom I learnt, in those first few days, how numerous and devastating were the errors that it was possible to commit in carrying out the most ordinary functions of everyday life. To mc, for whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism, the complications of sheer existence were nothing short of a revelation.
Despite my culinary shortcomings, the men appeared to like me; none of them were very ill, and no doubt my youth, my naive eagerness and the clean freshness of my new uniform meant more to them than any amount of common sense and efficiency. Perhaps, too, the warm and profoundly surprising comfort that I derived from their presence produced a tenderness which was able to communicate back to them, in turn, something of their own rich consolation.
Throughout my two decades of life, I had never looked upon the nude body of an adult male; I had never even seen a naked boy-child since the nursery days when, at the age of four or five, I used to share my evening baths with Edward. I had therefore expected, when I first started nursing, to be overcome with nervousness and embarrassment, but, to my infinite relief, I was conscious of neither. Towards the men I came to feel an almost adoring gratitude for their simple and natural acceptance of my ministrations. Short of actually going to bed with them, there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even today-thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy-beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single.
In the early days of the War the majority of soldier-patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side. Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, this day-by-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame. Since it was always Roland whom I was nursing by proxy, my attitude towards him imperceptibly changed; it became less romantic and more realistic, and thus a new depth was added to my love.
In addition to the patients, I managed to extract approval from most of the nurses-no doubt because, my one desire being to emulate Roland's endurance, I seized with avidity upon all the unpleasant tasks of which they were only too glad to be relieved, and took a masochistic delight in emptying bed-pans, washing greasy cups and spoons, and disposing of odoriferous dressings in the sink-room. The Matron described as " a slave-driver " by one of the elegant lady V.A.D.s who intermittently trotted in to " help " in the evenings after the bulk of the work was done-treated me with especial kindness, and often let me out through her private gate in order to save me a few yards of the interminable miles upon my feet. My particular brand of enthusiasm, the nurses told me later, was rare among the local V.A.D.s, most of whom came to the hospital expecting to hold the patients' hands and smooth their pillows while the regular nurses fetched and carried everything that looked or smelt disagreeable. (pp. 165-67)
On Lonliness...
that morning I left the reassuring study of The Times to take part in one of the first national " flag-days " organized during the War. As I wandered with my basket of primroses up and down the Buxton streets, blindingly white as they always became in the midday sunshine, my thoughts swung dizzily between the conviction that Roland would return and the certainty that he could never possibly come back. I had little patience to spare for my mother's middle-aged acquaintances, who patronised me as they bought my primroses, and congratulated me on putting aside my " studies " to " do my bit in this terrible War." I took their pennies with scant ceremony, and one by one thrust them with a noisy clatter into my tin.
" Those who are old and think this War so terrible do not know what it means to us who are young," I soliloquised angrily. " When I think how suddenly, instantly, a chance bullet may put an end to that brilliant life, may cut it off in its youth and mighty promise, faith in the ' increasing purpose ' of the ages grows dim."
The fight around Hill 60 which was gradually developing, assisted by the unfamiliar horror of gas attacks, into the Second Battle of Ypres, did nothing to restore my faith in the benevolent intentions of Providence. With that Easter vacation began the wearing anxiety of waiting for letters which for me was to last, with only brief intervals, for more than three years, and which, I think, made all non-combatants feel more distracted than anything else in the War. Even when the letters came they were four days old, and the writer since sending them had had time to die over and over again. My diary, with its long-drawn-out record of days upon days of miserable speculation, still gives a melancholy impression of that nerve-racking suspense.
" Morning," it observes, " creeps on into afternoon, and afternoon passes into evening, while I go from one occupation to another, in apparent unconcern-but all the time this gnawing anxiety beneath it all."
Ordinary household sounds became a torment. The clock, marking off each hour of dread, struck into the immobility of tension with the shattering effect of a thunderclap. Every ring at the door suggested a telegram, every telephone call a long-distance message giving bad news. With some of us the effect of this prolonged apprehension still lingers on; even now I cannot work comfortably in a room from which it is possible to hear the front-door bell.
" I dare not think too vividly of him just now," I wrote one black evening after several days without a letter; " I can scarcely bear to look at the photograph taken at Uppingham.... I have been trying to picture to myself what I should feel if 1 heard he was dead. It would be impossible to realise; life would seem so utterly empty and purposeless without him that it is almost inconceivable.... I only know that such an anguish could never be conquered in a life of scholastic endeavour . . . never among those indifferent, un-perceiving college women for the majority of whom war and love and grief might not exist. The ability to endure these things would come back in time, but only after some drastic change."
To this constant anxiety for Roland's life was added, as the end of the fighting moved ever further into an incalculable future, a new fear that the War would come between us-as indeed, with time, the War always did, putting a barrier of indescribable experience between men and the women whom they loved, thrusting horror deeper and deeper inward, linking the dread of spiritual death to the apprehension of physical disaster. Quite early I realised this possibility of a permanent impediment to understanding. " Sometimes," I wrote, " I have feared that even if he gets through, what he has experienced out there may change his ideas and tastes utterly."
In desperation I began to look carefully through his letters for every vivid word-picture, every characteristic tenderness of phrase, which suggested that not merely the body but the spirit that I desired was still in process of survival. To begin with, the tender phrases came often enough, blinding my eyes with sharp tears after I had read, with determined equanimity, his half-gay, half-wistful descriptions of danger or fatigue. (pp.142-43)
From: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago Press, 1986). First published 1933.