Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

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

"It…makes me so, so angry and impatient with most of the soulless non-entities one finds around one here. 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…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."

-From a letter from Roland to Vera

And so, farewell. All our sweet songs are sung,
Our red rose–garlands withered;
The sun-bright day--
Silver and blue and gold--
Wearied to sleep.

The shimmering evening, like a grey, soft bird,
Barred with the blood of sunset,
Has flown to rest
Under the scented wings
Of the dark-blue Night.

Would he ever write any more such poems, I wondered...

"Really," I wrote to Roland, "if feminism gains a hearing after this War is over, the leaders of the movement will have to be picked and chosen, I think the kind that shout and order about and find fault will have to be eliminated."

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['m]...thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of [soldiers] gave me, and for my early release from the sex inhibitions that...thanks to the Victorian tradition...dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforks her into an incompletely visualized and highly disconcerting intimacy-beset many of my female contemporaries..."