Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (2 page)

More insidiously, though, Brittain’s autobiography dramatises a conflict between a pre-war world of ‘rich materialism and tranquil comfort’ and the more liberated society that developed partly as a consequence of the war. Its avoidance of modernist idioms seems to underline this, while the autobiographical figure of Brittain herself embodies a central paradox: that though she proposes a form of egalitarian marriage and other radical reforms, and despite the fact that she envisages herself as a modern woman, she remains at heart a product of her Victorian bourgeois background.

For an understanding of
Testament of Youth
in a broader context, the book needs to be viewed as one of the large number of women’s autobiographies and biographical histories published in the twenties and thirties, which attempted to reconstruct and assess the pre-war period and the years between 1914 and 1918. Works like Beatrice Webb’s
My Apprenticeship
(1926), Ray Strachey’s
The Cause
(1928), Sylvia Pankhurst’s
The Suffragette Movement
(1931) and Helena Swanwick’s
I Have Been Young
(1935), adopted what had hitherto been a predominantly masculine form of writing in order to celebrate the achievements of women’s public lives. Vera Brittain, too, was concerned to place on record the unsung contribution of women to the war effort, though, ironically, much of the confidence and assurance of her autobiographical voice emanates from her passionate identification with her young male contemporaries and her experience of living vicariously through them. But in keeping with her fundamental belief in ‘the influence of worldwide events and movements upon the destinies of men and women’,
¹⁶
she was also anxious to write history in terms of personal life, and to illustrate what she had come to regard as the inextricable connection between the personal and the political.
¹⁷

The germ of the idea behind
Testament of Youth
can be traced back to March 1916, when Vera Brittain wrote to her brother Edward that ‘. . . if the War spares me, it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four . . .’
¹⁸
(her close friendship with Geoffrey Thurlow, the fifth member of her wartime circle, still lay in the future). The seventeen years between this statement and the appearance of her autobiography saw Brittain produce a bewildering number of fictional versions of her war experiences, some of which are preserved in the vast Brittain archive at McMaster University in Ontario.
¹⁹
As early as the summer of 1918 - at the time when Brittain’s earliest published utterances about the war, her
Verses of a V.A.D
.,
²⁰
were just appearing - she was close to completing her first war novel. Variously entitled ‘The Pawn of Fate’ or ‘Folly’s Vineyard’, and drawn from her spell as a VAD at Étaples in northern France, it centred on a melodramatic plot involving a senior nursing sister, based on Faith Moulson, the sister in charge of the German ward where Brittain had nursed in 1917.

Fear of potential libel action led Brittain to put this manuscript aside, and when she returned to plans for a war novel in the early twenties, after the publication of two other works of fiction,
The Dark Tide
(1923) and
Not Without Honour
(1924), it was to a more broadly conceived book. The survival of a variety of incomplete novel drafts, together with references in Brittain’s correspondence to several similar projects that appear never to have materialised, indicates the extent of her confusion as to how best to commit her experiences to paper. ‘The Two Islands’ contrasts the ‘sombreness of the Grey Island’ (Britain) with ‘the brightness of the Gold’ (Malta, where Brittain had served 1916-17), but portrays the deepening of the shadow that war cast over both of them. The Roland Leighton character, Lawrence Sinclair, killed at Loos, is little more than a cipher. This is probably because Brittain was still wary of how his family, especially his dominating mother Marie, would react to his appearance in a book by her. However, one of Roland’s characteristics, as a poet, has been transposed to the brother figure, Gabriel, whose loudly proclaimed hatred of women, depicted in his preference for being nursed by male orderlies rather than pretty young VADs, is an extreme version of Brittain’s view of her own brother Edward.
²¹
In ‘The Stranger Son’, another novel from the late twenties, Brittain makes a determined effort to write away from her direct experience through the character of Vincent Harlow who dramatises ‘the clash between the desire to serve one’s country, & the desire to be true to one’s belief that War is wrong’. But with ‘Youth’s Calvary’, she is entrenched in firmly autobiographical territory. Nominally it is still fiction, but surviving chapters show it to be a very close progenitor of
Testament of Youth
. Yet, without a first-hand narrative, and especially without the first-hand testimony provided by letters and diaries, ‘Youth’s Calvary’ altogether lacks the vivid immediacy of its famous successor.

Testament of Youth
’s eventual appearance came at the tail-end of the boom in the war literature of disillusionment that began a decade after the Armistice with the publication in 1928 of Edmund Blunden’s autobiography,
Undertones of War
, and of Siegfried Sassoon’s skilfully fictionalised
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
. In 1929 the spate of war books had reached its numerical peak: twenty-nine were published that year, including the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s
In Westen nichts Neues
as
All Quiet on the Western Front
, which sold 250,000 copies in its first year, Robert Graves’s
Goodbye to All That
, and Richard Aldington’s
Death of a Hero
.
²²

Vera Brittain made a close study of the war books of Blunden, Sassoon, and Graves, and they revived her own hopes of contributing to the genre. ‘I am reading “Undertones of War”’, she wrote at Christmas 1928; ‘grave, dignified, but perfectly simple and straightforward; why shouldn’t I write one like that?’
²³
Early in 1929 she went with Winifred Holtby to see R.C. Sherriff ’s trench drama,
Journey’s End
, the theatrical hit of the season; and towards the end of that year, she reviewed Aldington’s
Death of a Hero
in
Time and Tide
, finding it to be ‘a devastating indictment of pre-war civilization, with its ignorance, its idiocies and its values even falser than those of today’.
²⁴

In none of these works, however, did Brittain find adequate acknowledgment of the role of women in the war; indeed, she attacked Aldington’s novel for its misogyny and for the way in which it poured a ‘cynical fury of scorn’ on the wartime suffering of women. It was obvious to her that no man, however sympathetic, would be able to speak for women.

The war was a phase of life in which women’s experience did differ vastly from men’s and I make no puerile claim to equality of suffering and service when I maintain that any picture of the war years is incomplete which omits those aspects that mainly concerned women . . . The woman is still silent who, by presenting the war in its true perspective in her own life, will illuminate its meaning afresh for its own generation.
²⁵

By the time she wrote those words, at the beginning of 1931, she had already embarked on her own book, and clearly intended to be that woman.

Of course,
Testament of Youth
was very far from being the only account by a woman of her wartime experience, though it remains the best known.
²⁶
A large number had been published both during the war and in the years since, and for some of these, like Mary Lee’s 1929 novel,
It’s a Great War
, written from an American standpoint, Brittain had expressed warm words of commendation. She would also later read, ‘with deep interest and sympathy’, Irene Rathbone’s novel,
We That Were Young
(1932), based on Rathbone’s own experiences as a VAD, like Brittain, at the 1st London General Hospital in Camberwell. It conveyed, as no other book had done to date, the full horror of nursing the mutilated and wounded.
²⁷
In the later stages of writing
Testament of Youth
in the summer of 1932, Brittain was concerned that Ruth Holland’s recently published novel,
The Lost Generation
, anticipated her own theme. Overall it is difficult to avoid the impression that Brittain wanted to perpetuate the idea that hers was the one work about the war by a woman that mattered.
²⁸
On the other hand, none of these other books are of comparable stature to
Testament of Youth
, lacking its range and narrative power. As Winifred Holtby wrote on one occasion when Brittain needed particular reassurance, ‘Personally, I’m not in the least afraid of other people’s books being like yours. What other woman writing has
both
your experience
and
your political training?’
²⁹

However, it is the men in Vera Brittain’s story who typify the central founding myth on which
Testament of Youth
is based. Although in the early stages of the book’s evolution she claimed to be writing for her generation of women, she was subsequently to expand her claim to include her generation of both sexes.
³⁰
Certainly, nothing else in the literature of the First World War charts so clearly the path leading from the erosion of innocence, with the destruction of the public schoolboys’ heroic illusions, to the survivors’ final disillusionment that the sacrifice of the dead had been in vain.
Testament of Youth
is the
locus classicus
of the myth of the lost generation, and it is important to understand why this should be so. Brittain’s male friends were representative of the subalterns who went straight from their public schools or Oxbridge, in the early period of the war, to the killing fields of Flanders and France. As a demographic class these junior officers show mortality rates significantly higher than those of other officers or of the army as a whole. Uppingham School, where three of Brittain’s circle were educated, lost about one in five of every old boy that served. The Bishop of Malvern, dedicating the war memorial at another public school, Malvern College, said that the loss of former pupils in the war ‘can only be described as the wiping out of a generation’.
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The existence of a lost generation is not literally true, and is entirely unsupported by the statistical evidence;
³²
but, given the disproportionate death rate among junior officers, it is perhaps no wonder that Brittain believed that ‘the finest flowers of English manhood had been plucked from a whole generation’. Robert Wohl has shown how this cult of a missing generation provided ‘an important self-image for the survivors from within the educated elite and a psychologically satisfying and perhaps even necessary explanation of what happened to them after the war’.
³³

Vera Brittain had another aim in writing her book: to warn the next generation of the danger of succumbing out of naïve idealism to the false glamour of war. This gives
Testament of Youth
a significant difference of tone that sets it apart from the work of the war’s male memoirists. Whereas a writer like Edmund Blunden tries to evoke the senselessness and confusion of trench warfare by revealing the depth of the war’s ironic cruelty, Brittain, contrastingly, tries to provide a reasoned exposition of why the war had occurred and how war in the future might be averted. The publication of
Testament of Youth
at the end of August 1933 exactly matched the mood of international foreboding. It was the year in which Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, the Japanese had renewed their attack on Manchuria, and there had been difficulties over negotiations for disarmament at the League of Nations in Geneva. As a result, parallels between the tense world situation and the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914 were endemic in the press. Yet while Brittain often referred to
Testament of Youth
as her ‘vehement protest against war’, she was, at the time of writing it, still several years away from declaring herself a pacifist. In 1933, as the final chapters of her autobiography show, she clung to the fading promise of an internationalist solution as represented by the League of Nations. However, the process of writing her book undoubtedly hastened her transition to pacifism in 1937, for looking back at the tumultuous events of her youth, she could for the first time separate her respect for the heroism and endurance of her male friends from the issue of what they had actually been fighting for.

Testament of Youth
has been so often adduced as an historical source in studies of the First World War that it might be easy to forget that it is not history but autobiography and, moreover, autobiography that at a number of points uses novelistic devices of suspense and romance to heighten reality. This is particularly true of Brittain’s treatment of her relationship with Roland Leighton, where rather than dealing with the complex web of emotions that existed on both sides she creates a conventional love story. She had carefully researched the background to the war in historical records, like the
Annual Register
and in the collections of the British Red Cross Society and the Imperial War Museum, and also employed a patchwork of letters and diaries to bring the characters of her major protagonists alive, which provide the backbone of the finished book. But she was fearful of ‘numerous inaccuracies through queer tricks of memory’,
³⁴
and inevitably some mistakes slipped through the net. Her narrative of the period she had spent as a VAD at the 24 General at Etaples, from August 1917 to April 1918, does not possess the reliability of precise chronology and detail of earlier parts of
Testament of Youth
. She had ceased to keep a diary after returning from Malta in May 1917, and had only some letters to her mother, a few rushed notes to Edward, and a sometimes hazy recollection of events some fifteen years or so after they had taken place. For her - highly inaccurate - description of the Etaples mutiny, which had occurred in September 1917 while she was at the camp, she had been forced to rely on little more than the memory of Harry Pearson, an ex-soldier and friend of Winifred Holtby, who had had no direct involvement in the events either.
³⁵