Testament of Youth
by
[Macmillan, $2.50]
THE captains and generals have departed, leaving their memoirs behind; the elder statesmen have given us their recollections of how it began and ended; in the prose of Remarque and the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen we read the experiences of sensitive volunteers under fire. But for seventeen years it has remained for a woman to tell the feminine — as opposed to the masculine— story of what happened to her lost generation: not alone a story of bereavement or of bitter disillusion, but the truer, more searching account of the ardor, the heartbreak, and the steel-tempered fortitude with which the young women of 1914 fought through their four years behind the lines. This Vera Brittain has done in her autobiographic Testament of Youth.
Five feet two and, as she tells us, ‘of a chocolate-box prettiness,’Miss Brittain came up to study at Oxford in the autumn of 1914. At her brother Edward’s graduation from Uppingham the previous June (the last gay party of her youth, though she could not know it) she had fallen in love with ‘the record Prize boy,’Roland Leighton, son of the novelist, and himself at the outset of a career in classics and literature. He too was to have gone up to Oxford, but became instead one of Kitchener’s mob. Incapable of the quiet, ‘selfish’ life, with her lover and brother in uniform, she withdrew at the end of her first year to take up nursing. She and Roland were engaged at the time of his first leave in 1915; they might perhaps have been married on his second, planned for Christmas Eve, 1915. But on the night of the twenty-third he was shot in the stomach while repairing the wire, and died the next day. This tragedy, the replica of a million others, was repeated for Miss Brittain when later her brother, for whom she shared a devotion reminiscent of Katherine Mansfield’s, died of wounds. ‘I felt,’ she wrote in her journals, ‘that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.’
It fell to the lot of women everywhere throughout ‘Western civilization’ to meet such crises and go on beyond them. Miss Brittain drove herself mercilessly in her nursing, for ‘only a process of complete adaptation, blotting out tastes and talents and even memories, made life sufferable to someone face to face with war at its worst.’ She learned fortitude, compassion; and, if her spirit hardened, it did not despair. ‘I shall always remember,’ she had earlier written to her brother, ’all the things that both you and he meant and hoped to do and be, and, as far as I am able, they shall all be tulfilled.’ This ideal gave wings to her thought; it encouraged her to endure the harrowing ordeal of the hospitals, brought her back again and again to the books which she loved, and surely gave stimulus to her first writing, Verses of a V. .A. D., published in 1918. The growth of Miss Brittain from a desperate, heartbroken girl to the indefatigable writer who could throw herself with such courage into Oxford and the new movements ufter the Armistice, who could write a book on Women ‘s Work in Modern England and lecture on The Failure of Monogamy, and who dared finally to reopen her old wounds, is as splendid a record of intellectual fortitude as one could wish to read.
I hesitate to forecast the effect of this book on others. Some may sidestep it not wishing to be wrought up over an old story; some, particularly young readers, may find the English detail too multiple and too remote from their own experience; but for me this testament of lost Youth is very moving. It has a contemporary importance which, I believe, must be felt by all who were touched, however slightly, by the war. The story it tells is no afterthought: it is full of the war letters and poems which were written by an intimate and cultivated group of people; it draws color from the diaries which Miss Brittain kept through the four years; it reproduces, without a false note, the very conversations of those dead days. If ever there was a book to explain one generation to another without false pride or glory, and with unsparing truth — this is it.
EDWARD WEEKS