Testament of Youth

by Vera Brittain

will the issue not be worth one of the lives that have been sacrificed for it? Or did we need this gigantic catastrophe to wake up all that was dead within us?

A wink from Hesper, falling Fast in the wintry sky, Comes through the even blue, Dear, like a word from you . . . Is it good-bye? Across the miles between us I send you sigh for sigh. Good night, sweet friend, good night: Till life and all take flight, Never good-bye.

What is to come we know not. But we know That what has been was good - was good to show, Better to hide, and best of all to bear. We are the masters of the days that were: We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered . . . even so. Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow? Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe— Dear, though it spoil and break us! - need we care What is to come?

‘It is quite impossible to understand,’ I commented afterwards, ‘how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure.’

Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but 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,

or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a fœtid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?’

‘It seems unendurable that everything should be the same.’

if the living are to be of any use in this world, they must always break faith with the dead.

‘A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident.’

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem - a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time.

It seems very hard that we should be the generation to suffer the War, though I suppose it is very splendid too, and is making us better and wiser and deeper men and women than our ancestors ever were or our descendants ever will be.

a profession, it seems, has only to be called a ‘vocation’ for irresponsible authority to be left free to indulge in a type of exploitation which is not excused by its habitual camouflage as ‘discipline’.

death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived

how far I and the other women of my generation who deliberately accepted a new series of emotional relationships thereby destroyed yet again the men who had once uncomplainingly died for them in the flesh.