Since Dolores O’Riordian died recently, I’ve been re-fascinated with The Cranberries. While reading Testament of Youth, the song “Zombie” was playing through my mind for a couple reasons. For one, they specifically mention 1916 because of the Easter Rising (they’re Irish)  of WWI: “It's the same old thing / Since nineteen-sixteen / In your head, in your head, they're still fightin' / With their tanks, and their bombs / And their bombs, and their guns / In your head, in your head, they are dyin'” ("Zombie" The Cranberries). The other reason I thought of them is because of the fight that Brittain and Roland have near the end of the "Learning Versus Life" in Testament of Youth when Roland asks, “Do I seem very much a phantom in the void to you?” And tells her that “I must. You seem to me rather like a character in a book or someone whom one has dreamt of and never seen. I suppose there exists such a place as Lowestoft, and that there was once a person called Vera Brittain who came down there with me” (216). This caught my eye because of the effect the war is having on the two of them. They can’t see each other very often, can only communicate by letter, and because of that, have essentially become “zombies” to one another. By this I mean that each one is doing someone for the war, on their own, and so, as The Cranberries say, it is happening “in your head.” Neither one can be with one another, and as Brittain says herself, “the War kills other things besides physical life” (218) to which she is referring to Roland’s individuality being changed.

There is, from the moment they get engaged, a strangeness between them that, from the way Brittain describes her feelings, seems to stem from the constant presence of death surrounding them. While she tells him that she thinks he will not die, and he agrees, she also explicitly tells him that if he dies, she would immediately marry someone else so that the outside world would believed she'd moved on so she could mourn on her own (185-6). So, while she tells him she does not think of his death, it is obvious that she does, understandably so. The Cranberries song interested me so much while reading this because it sums up what they are both feeling and not feeling. It explains that in their heads these things are happening to one another but they can’t truly explain what that means to each other in real life. Readers see this when Brittain is leaving on the train and she looks out the window after boarding and he is walking away without looking at her (189). He tells her later in a letter that this is because he could not stand having to say goodbye again because his grief would overwhelm him (190). Both of them during times together have such a hard time expressing themselves, and it seems to be because of the looming idea of death that The Cranberries sing about in "Zombie."