In the course of reading sections of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, I found myself concentrating on passages in which the author seems to be responding to the shifting value of life. There is a continuous consideration of this value as the chapters pass, and as the death toll mounts both in Brittain’s personal sphere and in the world at large, the value of life becomes almost indistinguishable.
The letters between Brittain and Roland give us our first glimpse into the fear, the feeling of value being lost. In Brittain’s fist month at 1st London General, she describes a “quarrel” that she has with Roland, which is quite insignificant except for the consideration it evokes. Brittain reminisces, “The War, I began to feel, was dividing us as I had so long feared that it would, making real values seem unreal, and causing the qualities which mattered most to appear unimportant” (215). The author worries that this division will bring about an inability to recognize value, especially the value of their own love for each other. And we might applaud Brittain, for it took more than just the loss of Roland to bring about this inability, but the loss of Roland, Geoffrey, Victor, and Edward.
As these close personal friends, fiancé, and in Edward’s case beloved brother march solemnly towards death, the author continually presents us with passages that consider the value of life, as if Brittain means to remind herself before she forgets for good. One especially interesting passage includes a poem titled “The Soul of a Nation” by Sir Owen Seaman. The poem offers us an interesting juxtaposition between the perception of important “Themes” of conversation which were popular before the war, and what seems important in 1918, nearly four years in. What is profound about the poem is the enduring sense of nationalistic optimism, even as Seaman recognizes the War as an environment,
“Where those we love, whose courage laughs at fear,
Amid the storm of steel around the raining,
Go to their death for all we hold most dear.”
Brittain responds to the poem directly following its final stanza with the claim, “Sir Owen had been mistaken” (431). This harsh rebuke of Seaman’s nationalistic optimism shows Brittain’s process of understanding that Roland did not die for “all we hold most dear.” In fact, he died for nothing, for some trench wire, and therefore how can his life be assigned value? What was it actually worth?
It is interesting to contrast Sir Owen Seaman’s poem with a verse that Brittain includes some thirty pages later by Sir Walter Raleigh. The major plot point which occurs in the interval is none other than the death of her brother Edward, and observe the change in tone:
“Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have
And pays us but with earth and dust.”
It is hard to imagine a more fitting context for this verse (446). Here again we see this idea of value, as Raleigh determines that Time rewards with a payment of “earth and dust.” There is no optimism, not even a drop. Time takes everything, and does not pretend to uphold any greater cause while doing so. Such is the war, that takes lives, ideals, relationships, hopes, justifications, and any sense of worth and grinds it up into a smooth paste.
As the armistice is announced, Brittain describes a surreal scene in which a taxi strikes an elderly woman, “who in listening, like myself, to the wild noise of a world slowly released from nightmare, had failed to observe its approach” (461). In this scene Brittain metaphorically presents the armistice as an end in which nothing has ended, in which senseless death continues to take life with no offer of compensation or justification. This consideration of the value of life, though not the last, perhaps represents the most radical position that Brittain poses. The woman lives and dies in the space of two short paragraphs, and just as fleeting as her life is any sense of the value that it may or may not have held. In this scene we see the division which the author has feared come to its full realization, confirmed in the final words of the chapter, “the dead were dead and would never return” (463) These are striking words, and this is a subject that I certainly hope to return to throughout the semester.