In this second reading from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, we see a lot of the trials that she is put through as a young woman throughout the course of the war.  She sees death on a daily basis and very seldom gets thanks for what she does as a nurse.  But perhaps the most harrowing part of her story is the death of those closest to her.  Last week, I discussed the amount of psychological depth that we get from Brittain, and I feel that this depth is shown even more so in this second group of readings.  All four of the men that she knows that are actual soldiers in the war die: her fiancé, Roland; her brother, Edward; and her friends, Victor and Geoffrey.  These deaths happen throughout the war, and in each case, she experiences a different reaction.  These reactions are what I would like to focus on in this blog. 

The first death that she experiences is the death of Roland.  In last week’s reading, the two young lovers get engaged and decide to wait to get married for three years or until the end of the war.  Very early into this week’s reading, Brittain discusses how she was excited that her, Edward, and Roland all have leave to see each other at Christmas which almost seems a “Christmas miracle.”   However, Brittain creates a strong sense of foreboding in the short chapter which makes the reader wonder if something may be wrong.  Brittain states that: “When, by ten o’clock at night, no news had come, I concluded that the complications of telegraph and telephone on a combined Sunday and Christmas day had made communication impossible” (236).  Personally, I automatically feared the worst.  On top of this, she also mentions Roland’s family’s disturbance at his lack of contacting them.  As a capstone on this tension, Brittain chooses to tell us in the very last sentence of “Part I” that his lack of communication was due to his death. 

As “Part II” begins, we see Brittain’s style lends itself well to the subject matter.  While we only got a simple sentence declaring his death at the end of “Part I,” we get the full force of its effect in “Part II.”  Specifically, in the chapter IV of “When the Vision Dies,” Brittain tells us that the weeks “unroll themselves like a kaleidoscope through [her] mind” (240).  Honestly, as she discusses this group of vignettes, it makes me think of both the fragmentation of Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Modernist tradition of stream-of-consciousness.  While this book has been written after these things had appeared, I definitely feel that they had their effect on the composition of Brittain’s mourning scenes.  She gives us a sharp collection of images: drinking coffee in a hotel, standing out on Brighton’s shore, riding an omnibus, Edward composing a “haunting memorial hymn” for Roland, her being on duty as a nurse, and her bursting randomly into tears in a store (240).  All of these are also displayed in present tense—rather than in Brittain’s usual past tense.  We get the sense that, for her, the images are still very much alive.

Her experiences with the other deaths are much different.  Victor’s death seems a shock, because he had already lost his sight.  He seemed to be in his right mind, and then he suddenly got worse.  She seems in utter disbelief about Geoffrey’s death.  She says that her emotions were “not logical at all,” and she was so spiritually struck by his death that she felt that his “presence was somewhere with [her] on the rocks” of the shore that she sat on (343).  With Edward’s death, however, we definitely see the biggest amount of disbelief.  Her brother, someone she had loved and cherished as companion her whole life, was now sucked away by the war as well.

Ultimately, these deaths make her immune to the feverous anxiety that leads up to the end of the war.  With no one to worry about, she works tirelessly in her nursing duties to past the time.  In her reflections on the end of the war, she explains how all of these deaths led to her becoming a pacifist.