Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1933 and Seaview Books, 1980
“I don’t want to see any more of these [post-war] results, but only to go back to that past in which abstract heroism was all that mattered, and men acted finely and bravely, believing that the end would be quite other than this.” Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
American textbooks and war
movies tend to skip over the “Great War” in their rush to highlight World War
II, but the devastating conflict of 1914-1918 had a profound effect on Europe
and Great Britain. Its influence on the attitudes of the British public is
comparable in many ways to Vietnam’s impact in America.
Vera Brittain’s memoir is deeply
individual, yet also representative of a generation that lost everything they
had been raised to believe in. Brought up in a typical late Victorian home by
genteel, middle class parents, the young Brittain was nevertheless unconventional
enough to pursue a nascent interest in feminism and seek out a stint at university.
When war began she volunteered as an army nurse and served in London, Malta,
and France. Her account is interspersed with letters and diaries she wrote
throughout this time, including frequent requests to her parents for sweets. Brittain
possesses a rare ability to analyze her fellow human beings with the harshness
of a social reformer while still conveying a sense of her own and others’
humanity, and she includes an abundance of humorous and poignant anecdotes. She
conveys the incredible suffering of the war and the profound, soul-shaking
questions with which she was battered. One by one all of the people she cared
most for died—her fiancé, his entire group of friends, and her only brother.
Testament of Youth is the story of a woman who endured experiences
common to many of her peers but who reacted more radically than most. Her sufferings
were all the more unbearable because she ultimately rejected the existence of
any reality beyond the material and struggled through bereavement with only the
cold comfort of a philosophy akin to existentialism. She resented what she saw
as the prudery, the stupidity, and the naïveté of Victorian morality. Her lonely
bitterness highlights the immense psychological cost of the war. That cost—of
lives, of youth, of idealism—is emphasized by Brittain. Throughout her story, she
laments for a world that must attempt to solve its problems without the help of
its bravest, most intelligent, and most idealistic men.
Brittain emerged from her
experience of war with a feeling of utter isolation, and was burdened under a
depression that lasted for two years following the Armistice. As she built a
career as writer and speaker, she found a new war to fight by spreading her
cause of feminism and fiercely pacifistic internationalism (it must be noted that Testament of Youth was published in 1933 before Hitler’s aggression forced Britain back
into battle).
Like Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, this memoir uses words to paint a compellingly vivid
picture. Not only does it deepen the reader’s understanding of Vera Brittain and
World War I, but it also adds to our understanding of humanity and human nature,
and the effect of suffering on a human soul.
The book includes haunting poetry written by
Brittain and her friends. This one, by a young man who died at the Somme when
he was twenty-years-old, is included.
Take my Youth that died to-day,
Lay him on a rose-leaf bed,—
He so gallant was and gay,—
Let them hide his tumbled head,
Roses passionate and red
That so swiftly fade away
Let the little grave be set
Where my eyes shall never see;
Raise no stone, make no regret
Lest my sad heart break,--and yet,
For my weakness, let there be
Sprigs of rue and rosemary.
William Noel Hodgson
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