Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Author:Vera Brittain
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: World War I, Non fiction
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2009-05-06T22:00:00+00:00

10

Victor’s long letter had been written on March 24th from a sector near Arras. To-day, as I re-read his realistic phrases, they seem to me to be less infused with bitterness than with a completely adult and slightly sardonic philosophy. Accustomed though I was by 1917 to the sudden tragic maturities of trench life, the speed with which he had grown up moved me to intolerable pity.

The letter began with a keen criticism of Robert Service’s Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, which had just been sent out to him from England. He particularly resented, it seemed, a line in the poem called ‘Pilgrims’ which described death as ‘the splendid release’. That, he commented, was the phrase of ‘a Red Cross Man’, and not of a member of a fighting unit.

As Roland had done so often two years earlier, Victor went on to speculate why they were all out there; it was a meditation then very characteristic of the more thoughtful young officer, who found himself committed to months of cold and fear and discomfort by the quick warmth of a moment’s elusive impulse. Like Victor he usually concluded that, although the invasion of Belgium, and the example set by friends, and perhaps even ‘Heroism in the Abstract’, had a share in it all, the only true explanation that could be given by ninety per cent of the British Expeditionary Force was to be found in the words of an Army marching song to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’:

We’re here because

We’re here because

We’re here because

We’re here . . .

The acutely conscious and purposeful soldier such as Donald Hankey, the author of A Student in Arms, was, according to Victor, quite exceptional; a recent Punch essay in the Watch Dogs series on ‘a little word of six letters’ represented far more truthfully the Army’s view of the War. If taken literally it was, he said, ‘no exaggeration - “it is a shorter word than sanguinary” - and figuratively it really expressed the whole situation, but my one fear in case of my safe return is that I may be perpetually uttering it in the drawing-room.’

The letter closed with a final grave paragraph which told me that at the end of March the situation in France had been still unchanged, but was likely ‘on the day of the hunt’ to alter a good deal. ‘Well, Vera,’ ran its concluding words, ‘I may not write again - one can never tell - and so, as Edward wrote to me, it is time to take a long, long adieu.’

Such valedictory resignation seemed almost to have pushed him over the border of the tangible world already, I thought unhappily, reflecting that even if events failed to justify his pessimism, the submarines were steadily reducing my chance of seeing either him or Geoffrey before that indeterminate Mafeking which we called the end of the War. Civilians had now been forbidden to leave Malta, and for the time being no women either civilian or military were allowed on the Isonzo, the ex-destroyer mail-boat running between Malta and Sicily.

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