The Professor and Other Writings (4 page)

But cowardice, as Brittain herself knew well, was also something more or less imprinted on women. By coddling and patronizing its female members, society enforced in them a kind of physical timidity; then, with infuriating circularity, defined such timidity as effeminate and despicable. Both practically and philosophically, Brittain rebelled against the linkage. In
Testament of Youth
she recalls, broodingly enough, the violent “inferiority complex” she felt in the early days of the war with regard to her lover Roland. He had enlisted in the Norfolks and would soon have his courage “tested” in the most literal way possible. Yet while fearing for his safety, Brittain envied him the trial. When he admitted in a letter how proud he was to be going to the front—it relieved him of the appearance of a “cowardly shirking of my obvious duty”—she declared, with palpable chagrin, that “women get all the dreariness of war, and none of its exhilaration.” By “exhilaration” she meant, among other things, a certain exemption from self-contempt. Women got to hand out white feathers—notoriously—but the gesture took on its odium precisely because women themselves epitomized “cowardly shirking” so perfectly. They were the skulkers and moochers and tremulous babies of modern life, emasculated beings in need of protection, forbearance, and forgiveness.

Everyone knows what Brittain did: made herself as manly as possible by becoming a nurse on the Western Front. (Her subsequent beard-in-the-mirror fantasy suggests the psychic intensity of her rejection of conventional femininity.) It was as if by getting as close to the fighting as she could—within striking distance of long-range German artillery—she sought to subject herself to the same practical test of bravery imposed on Roland and her brother Edward. Her
war diaries make unabashedly clear the impinging wish: to act as a man would and be emboldened thereby. “I had no idea she would get so thrilled as she seemed about the nursing,” she writes in 1915 after telling her classics tutor at Somerville that she is signing up for war service; “she seemed to put it quite on the level of a man's deed by agreeing with me that I ought not to put the speedy starting of my career forward as an excuse, any more than a man should against enlisting.” Joining up was doing something “on a level” with a man—facing up to fear like a soldier—and “all part of the hard path I have assigned myself to tread.”

Which is not to say that Brittain entirely mastered her fearfulness. During her two years of nursing she was often afraid, and sometimes abjectly so. On her way by ship to Malta, her first foreign posting, she dreaded being blown up by enemy mines. During an air raid on Etaples during the final German advance in 1918, her teeth “chattered with sheer terror.” But always there to sustain her was the faith that one might be inspirited—as if by magic—simply by mimicking, as far as possible, the stoic attitudes of men. Men had a certain
mana,
it seemed, a native supply of aplomb and insouciance that a courage-hungry woman might draw on. Blood transfusion technology, sadly, had yet to be perfected at the time of the First World War; thousands of soldiers who died from blood loss at casualty clearing stations might easily have been saved in later wars. Yet if hemoglobin could not be transfused, valor might be. By placing herself in harm's way, or as near to it as she could get, Brittain seems to have hoped to absorb, as if by osmosis, the palpable gallantry of the men she loved and admired.

After Roland's death in 1915 by sniper bullet near Louvencourt, Brittain immediately elevated him, talismanically, to the role of chief exemplar and courage infuser. Since his death was less than glorious (he seems merely to have lifted his head up inopportunely while slithering on his stomach through No Man's Land on a routine nighttime
patrol), Brittain's posthumous exaltation of him depended on some ambitious mental maneuvers. In the weeks after his death, she repeatedly sought to assure herself that despite the humiliating manner of his demise he was as brave an English warrior as any Arthurian knight. “I had another letter tonight from Roland's servant,” she writes in February 1916,

“Worship” is the operative word. In
Testament of Youth
, Brittain presents herself as godless and disillusioned, but it is clear from the ardent tributes to Roland in the diaries that she viewed him, for a time at least, as a sort of new Jesus Christ, whose martial self-sacrifice had made possible the “salvation” of others—including her own. Almost as soon as Roland was killed, she began referring to him with a Godlike “He”: “Whether it was absolutely necessary for Him to go [on the fatal patrol] is questionable, but He would not have been He if He had not, for not only did He like to do everything Himself to make sure it was done thoroughly, but He would never allow anyone, especially an inferior, to take a risk he would not take Himself.” She herself became “His” principal devotee and disciple, the mystic practitioner of a new sort of
imitatio Christi
, as her entries from 1916 make clear:

SUNDAY, 2 JANUARY
.

MONDAY, 31 JANUARY
.

SUNDAY, 22 OCTOBER
.

In 1917, when Roland's old school friend Victor, blinded by a bullet at Arras, lies dying in a London hospital, she admits that one reason she can't bear to lose him is because in his “accurate, clear & reverent memory of Him, Roland seems to live still.” “All that I ask,” she concludes, “is that I may fulfill my own small weary part in this War in such a way as to be worthy of Them, who die & suffer pain.”

In the nervy state that gripped me after September 11, such reflections struck me with new and incriminating force. Had I resisted
Brittain for so long—cast her off as an important Not-Me—precisely because, deep down, I felt so much like her? I found out now, with a sudden embarrassed poignancy, precisely how much I sympathized, both with her anxiety and with the florid hope that the men she knew might infect her, so to speak, with physical courage. Not very butch of me, I know. Not very feminist. But I had to confess it: I admired and coveted—quite desperately at times—the insane, uncomplaining, relentless bravery of men.

I hear the shrieks. I write this knowing full well that some readers will find such veneration wholly charmless, part of an objectionable idealization of war or some absurd reversion to worn-out sex roles. So let me try to be a bit more precise. It seems to have something to do, first of all, with walking. Walking, paradoxically, is one of the great leitmotifs of the First World War. (I say “paradoxically” because we are so used to imagining the nightmarish stasis of the trench world—a stasis more notional, perhaps, than actual. Even in times of relative quiet the typical front-line trench was an ant heap of comings and goings.) Under normal conditions British soldiers traveled to the battle sector by troop train; contemporary accounts of “going up the line” are full of descriptions of men crammed into creaking boxcars, and the slow, juddering rides towards Abbeville or Béthune. (How often the physical imagery of the First War anticipates, diabolically, that of the Second.) But on disembarking, soldiers usually had to march—sometimes for ten or twenty miles—toward billets, reserve trenches, and other staging-areas behind the lines. “This in fact,” Malcolm Brown writes in
Tommy Goes to War
, “was the classic progress ‘up the line': train to the railhead, after which the Tommy had to fall back on the standard means of troop-transportation in the First World War—his own feet.” All the famous soldier songs of the time—“Here We Are,” “Tipperary,” “Mademoiselle from Armentières”—were first and foremost marching songs.

The route was long, exhausting, and often indelibly frightening,
especially for the tyro soldier seeing warfare up close for the first time. “Yesterday as we were jingling over the cobbles past the danger zone,” one subaltern quoted by Brown wrote,

Another described his company being scattered by a German shell on their first march up the line near Bailleul: “My back and pack were struck by a shower of debris and flying dirt while quite a number of men fell and bled for their country. Jack Duncan was in front of me and he received a severe wound from this, our first shell. He was carried onto the pavement and left for the attention of the doctor.”

Getting into the front-line trench itself meant further dreadful walking: a crabbed, head-down slog along battered communication trenches or over rotting duckboards, sometimes under heavy shelling or machine-gun fire. The journey to the front lines around Ypres—invariably made at night, through pools of mud and the reamy stench of dead animals and men—was notoriously ghastly. “The boards,” Leon Wolff writes in
In Flanders Fields
,

And many fell, never to be dragged out. At Passchendaele, in the satanic months of October and November 1917, soldiers going up the line would often see the heads or hands of hapless predecessors protruding from the muck.

Animals, it seems, knew better—that such walking was intolerable. “In one official history,” Wolff notes, “there is a picture…captioned ‘Bogged,' of a mule in a shell-hole. His hindquarters are deep in the mud; only his head and shoulders protrude. In utter despair his head rests in the mud, eyes half-closed. Many mules had panicked, had fought merely to stand on visible portions of the planking, and could be made to move only with much coaxing and punishment.” The collapsing pack mule is a vignette out of Sterne's
A Sentimental Journey
—but here gone awry and nightmarish.

The most celebrated walking of all was that of soldiers going “over the top.” In order to stay in sync with the barrage and each other, attacking troops were strictly enjoined not to run. Once up over the parapet and into No Man's Land, they were required to proceed in a stylized, almost courtly fashion—one man every two yards, rifles at the port, bayonets fixed, everyone moving forward in slow and regular waves. And thus unfurled what one writer calls “the classic drama of the Western Front,” the solemn, pavane-like motion of men towards machine-gun fire and death:

There is something beyond uncanny in such scenes. On the first day of the Somme, defending German gunners watched in amazement as row upon row of British soldiers plodded calmly towards them, only to be cut down in swathes. For the oncoming troops, it took every ounce of courage not to break formation—even as hellfire raged, crumps exploded, and ground churned up around them. For the few who survived, the dream-like walk towards enemy trenches remained ever after, in the words of one historian, “an intensely personal journey etched in [the] memory like the Stations of the Cross.”

As Paul Fussell long ago pointed out, the passage over No Man's Land was indeed a Christ-like transit, a hideous stroll into the Valley of Death. Like the assault on the Somme, the Passion begins—kinesthetically and archetypally—in heroic pedestrianism: the tedious trudge “up the line” to the boneyard known as Golgotha. Jesus is the first man in history to walk unwaveringly towards his own death. And ultimate masculine fortitude—at least in the modern West—has never lost its association with this Christ-like, goal-oriented walking. It is striking how many accounts of the destruction of the World Trade Center obsessively replay the image of doomed firemen and police walking into the towers and up the fatal stairwells—with exactly the same steady, flowing motion of attacking soldiers in the Great War. In a 2001
Newsweek
report on the last minutes of Bill Feehan, a deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department killed in the collapse of the North Tower, he is seen exhorting his subordinates to walk just so: