World War I

The thing that made a stark and moving impression on me was the beginning of part five, chapter four; where Vera Brittain spoke of the late poet Rupert Brook’s tragic poem of death and war in WWI and how she is comparing to 1933 and how he (the poet) would have fared had he lived into old age at the beginning of another world war, instead of being struck down in his prime.

The vivid impression is the grief of the death of such young people, but also the people’s complete helplessness in the tangles of this war and how she felt so unprepared not only by her upbringing; her provincial life, but the fact that nothing could prepare any of them for the life of this terrible event.   Before this war, most people, especially the young men, believed in the honor and nobleness of  fighting for one’s country and King.  Now they were caught in the helpless throes of a war machine which ate up young lives, but gave no glory; no honor.

Vera Brittain's day with her suitor, Roland, what sticks out to me the most because she is wondering if he will still be the same man she fell in love with before the war. This really hits me because it is what so many young women of the time were thinking when they met with their suitors during the war. So many men were changed by the war, mentally and physically and they were the ones who even came home. Vera Brittain's experience with Roland was interesting and indicative of the effects of the war. The fact that Vera Brittain did not know what to say to him and how to make him feel better about the war, reminded me how nervous these young women must have felt not knowing what to do to help those they loved. I think that this part of the book illustrates how shocking this war was to the British public as well as the men sent off to fight in the war. The culture was so unprepared for this war to occur and so when it did occur found themselves adjusting forcibly to the war in order to survive. 

What I found most signficant about Brittain's writing so far is not only her representation of the loss of individualism, but her awareness of it while the war is still in its early stages.  Beginning with her first experience witnessing a death, she seems immediately aware of the growing distance of human specificity: "reasonable as I try to be I cannot make myself feel that the individual, whatever it may have been, has really vanished into nothing and is not.  I merely feel as if it had gone away into another place, and the worn-out shell that the men carried away was not Smith at all" (177).  Both Vera and Roland echo this sentiment throughout the memoir.  Hitherto I had assumed that the so-called "loss of individualism" had been an afterthought of society, a label applied to describe retrospective conclusions concerning the social effects of the war.  However, while Brittain's memoir was written after the war, the above quote is taken from the diary she was keeping DURING the actual events.  The very same day of this soldier's death, Brittain was able to observe her indifference and his alienation from self.  This amazes me, because it means that the experiences inspiring the sentiment must have been tenfold what I imagined them to be, somehow.  

Also, I find it strange that Brittain expresses this notion while simultaneously divulging so many specificities about her relationship with Roland and her inability to ever forget him.  Was not this Smith also loved by a family and friends?  Is Brittain unable to realize this possibility?  Or was it the mere circumstance of his death, "like this in the midst of strangers, with Sister beside him of all people, and no one really to care very much" (176) which removes him from an identity in her eyes?  

It seems a strange disconnect that the emerging technologies which forced a much more impersonal war should cause, probably, much more personal attentions in recuperating from it, and yet did not.  With wounds more deadly and horrific than ever before, one would think that soldiers would spend much more time in the hospital with the personal attention of doctors.  However, as later stated in the book, the shortage of nurses and doctors often meant that men who could have survived would die because of lack of timely attention.

Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" most emphasizes the great difficulty Vera felt in communicating and identifying with people who had a more first hand experience of the war. this was most apparent to me when reading the passages concerning her relationship with Roland. In their letters, Vera and Roland share deep and emotional conversations. However, when they are reunited during time Roland has off-duty, Vera describes there initial meeting as follows, "Just as we had parted we shook hands without any sign of emotion," Here, the warmth seen in their letters is replaced by an uncomfortable awkwardness upon their meeting. This moment sets the tone for the rest of Vera's description of this visit, with very little signs of affection exchanged between the two. Vera even frames her own service as a nurse during the war as a sort of way of aiding Roland by proxy. Ultimately, Vera crafts an image of a relationship suffering great strain due to the war.

The main thing that stands out to me from Vera Brittain’s The Testament of Youth is that most of the war’s true victims were extremely young. Those fighting or helping with the fighting, such as Vera working as a nurse, were my age, and many were even years younger. These people, many just children really, witnessed and were involved in some of the most heinous acts there are to see. These events were so horrendous that they numbed the soldiers and nurses by making them grow old much too quickly. This meant that the young people of this time were not given the slow and steady growth that other modern generations were given. These people lost out on forming their own identities, and those who had an identity lost theirs. The only identities for the soldiers and nurses of this time were related to their duties; soldiers were simply soldiers and nurses simply nurses. As they were shaped by war, war became all they knew; the concept of war was almost their identity itself, and thus they could not imagine a world without it. The youth the 1910s were simply identified by their duties, and after years of war, they were set-up to be lost in a different world when the fighting was over.

So far, I’ve found Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth to be extremely moving. It’s such a real, human account of the war. Yes, you can read the statistics, memorizing the battles and the number of casualties, but this autobiography contains more meaning than even the most horrific of the statistics.

Personally, Vera Brittain’s account of her relationship with Roland holds the most significance for me. As a twenty-year-old female in a long distance relationship, I feel like I can empathize at least partially with her distress. Being away from someone you love is not pleasant situation. However, unlike me, Brittain also endured the haunting thought that each of Roland’s letters could be his last. Through Brittain’s writing, I am forced to view WWI as something that left a massive impact on Europe as a whole, not just the soldiers on the front. For every British woman like Brittain, there were also French, Italian, Russian, German, American, Serbian, Indian and Austrian women, all who desperately wanted their fiancés and husbands to return safely home. The War’s effects reached far beyond the front, invading intimate personal relationships all across the world. 

Though Vera talks much of her suffering in waiting for news about Roland, the center of the pain and evidence of the war's effects is found in Roland's letters to Vera. In his descriptions of the trenches in "Learning Versus Life", part 13, he says "The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country's Glory or another's Lust of Power. Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests..." This particular recounting caught my attention because I realized THIS was the correspondence between two young people in love. These were the kinds of letters they sent. There seems to be very little fervid romance and instead, tragedy and pain and practicality. Even their engagement seems somewhat practical and pragmatic rather than romantic. I realize this is a society still relatively fresh out of the Victorian Era, but I feel that the war has stolen the fire from these young people's hearts and crushed their romance, replacing it with a calculating, strained relationship based on letters about death, decay, and sadness. Even Vera's choice to become a nurse was a masochistic decision, made only because she knew Roland was suffering and felt ridiculous living a comfortable life during such terrible times.

The primary thing I've noticed in reading "The First World War" is the speed with which diplomatic relations unraveled and everything spiraled out of control. What started as a seemingly innocuous event and a small blip in the history books quickly became one of the most deadly and all-encompassing wars in human history. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the retaliation by Austria-Hungary and the overreaction by the Russian empire in their quick defense of Serbia created a domino effect among the major players in Europe that unraveled previous alliances and treaties. It is truly astounding that the assassination of one man could lead to the sixth-deadliest conflict in recorded history and the creation of the Lost Generation.  

Roland writes this in one of his letters from the trenches in France, followed by Brittain's response to it:

" 'I have sometimes wondered whether I should mind being killed after all, but on days like this I cannot help wanting passionately to live. Life is very attractive, if only as a toy to play with.'

  A toy to play with! And to me it appeared a giant to contend with! " (Brittain pg. 199)

Roland, who before this was an optimistic intellectual, has since had his sense of life warped by the war. He now views it a small gift which, though still preferable to death, is only a minor phenomenon which he happens to be experiencing. In some way, he is dissociating himself from the war by viewing himself as a vessel through which Britain is fighting. To me, this is the most significant effect of the War. As their letters continue, they are consumed with death and the uncertainty of the future.

If there is anything psychologically tragic that the War caused in those who were a part of it, it was this inability to count on anything as permanent. Earlier on, in the story on the bottom half of page 167, Brittain describes how the conpany commanded ordered machine gun to be turned on the peaceful Saxons mending barbed wire above their trenches. That this was later described as "a smart piece of work" is evidence of the fact that human life went from being more precious than anything to being hardly worth considering. Roland and Vera deal with this indirectly, as they continually discuss a future in which Roland has died; they are forced to consider the ramifications of death even before it has come.

     In Camberwell Versus Death, Part 3, Vera Brittain addressses the ability of war to change people.  It is evidenced in her letters to and from Roland that they both felt as though they were being changed by the war's presence.   Brittain wrote about this feeling of change in one letter to Roland, "I wonder how much really all you have ssen and done has changed you.  Personally... I feel I shall never be the same person again" (page 215 in my edition).  Roland echoes this sentiment in a responding letter, saying, "I wonder if your metamorphosis has been as complete as my own.  I feel a barbarian, a wild man of the woods..." (page 216).

     Of all of Vera Brittain's experiences that I have read about so far, this aspect of her life and observations is most significant to me because everybody was thinking the same thing; if not about themselves then about their loved ones on the front.  Families wondered if their fathers, sons, brothers, or husbands would come back home the same as they were when they left, and worying that they wouldn't.  Brittain worried about the "almost physical barrier" (215) that seemed to be between Roland and her, and I got the sense that she was concerned that Roland was no longer the man she fell in love with, and was afraid that she would not love the man who returned to her.

     The war had a way of changing people's perspectives on life, as evidenced by the following quote: "The War... 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).  With these kinds of changes in Brittain's, and presumably the country's, perspective, it is no wonder she worried about who she or Roland were becoming.