Testament of Youth

by Vera Brittain

As Charles Morgan so truly says in The Fountain: ‘In each instant of their lives men die to that instant. It is not time that passes away from them, but they who recede from the constancy, the immutability of time, so that when afterwards they look back upon themselves it is not themselves they see, not even - as it is customary to say - themselves as they formerly were, but strange ghosts made in their image, with whom they have no communication.’

At sixteen he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous - not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.

VILLANELLE Violets from Plug Street Wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head; It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood— Think what they have meant to me— Life and Hope and Love and You (And you did not see them grow Where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest, it was better so.) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land These I send in memory, Knowing You will understand. R. A. L. Ploegsteert Wood, April 1915.

I realised then how precious individuals and places become the moment that the possibility of leaving them turns into fact.

On my first day at the hospital, a Scottish sergeant produced a comment of which the stark truth came finally home to me three summers afterwards. ‘We shall beat them,’ he said, ‘but they’ll break our hearts first!’

I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful. Modern warfare is merely a trade, and it is only a matter of taste whether one is a soldier or a greengrocer, as far as I can see. Sometimes by dint of an opportunity a single man may rise from the sordidness to a deed of beauty; that is all.’

The War has little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank-balance.

‘You see, if one goes on obviously mourning someone, other people come along and insist on entering in and pitying and sympathising, and they force one’s recollection into one’s outward life and spoil it all. But if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and thinks one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marrying the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep you; my remembrance would live with me always and be my very own. Do you understand a little?’

‘I could not look back, dear child,’ it began; ‘I should have cried if I had. I am writing this in a stationary taxi drawn up in a corner of Russell Square. The driver thinks I am a little mad, I think, to hire him and then only sit inside without wanting to go anywhere at all. But although it is past dinner-time I cannot bring myself to go . . . I don’t know what I want to do and don’t care for anything except to get you back again . . .’

I feel as if someone had uprooted my heart to see how it was growing.’

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. ‘No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right - ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.’

When one has known, one can never be again as one was before one knew.

did not then know that when the group of medical women who later organised the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in France and Serbia had offered their services to the War Office in 1914, they had been told that all that was required of women was to go home and keep quiet.

I slept, and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty,

If time did heal I should not have kept faith with Roland, I thought, clinging assiduously to my pain, for I did not then know that if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead.

When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: ‘We’ve won the War !’ They only said: ‘The War is over.’

One undergraduate, an ex-officer with three years’ service and a wound stripe, who returned the same term as myself, told me later that at his first interview the President of his college had addressed him thus: ‘Let me see, Mr X., you’ve been away a long time, I think; a very long time? It’s a pity - a great pity; you’ll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!’

Her sudden relegation to her old corner in the university has shaken her into confusion, but time will prove that she can survive the shock of peace as surely as she has weathered the storms of war.

What a hell of a time most European countries give their best citizens - the Liberals in Hungary, the anti-Fascisti in Italy, the pacifists in Germany, the liberty-loving in Russia - and all for what?

In spite of the feminine family tradition and the relentless social pressure which had placed an artificial emphasis on marriage for all the women born, like myself, in the eighteen-nineties, I had always held and still believed it to be irrelevant to the main purpose of life.

‘Another Stranger’ HÉDAUVILLE. November 1915. The sunshine on the long white road That ribboned down the hill, The velvet clematis that clung Around your window-sill, Are waiting for you still. Again the shadowed pool shall break In dimples round your feet, And when the thrush sings in your wood, Unknowing you may meet Another stranger, Sweet. And if he is not quite so old As the boy you used to know, And less proud, too, and worthier, You may not let him go— (And daisies are truer than passion-flowers) It will be better so. R. A. L.

Quite suddenly, too, I realised - for I was now old enough to realise - that the inevitable clash between the generations diminishes, also inevitably, with the passing of the years.

War, especially if one is the winner, is such bad form. There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation.

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 constant 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.

that the individuals from whom destiny demands too much are infinitely more vital than those of whom it asks too little. In one sense I was my war; my war was I; without it I should do nothing and be nothing. If marriage made the whole fight harder, so much the better; it would become part of my war