My year of marinating in all things WWI continues with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. It had been on my list from earlier in the year simply because it was mentioned everywhere I looked for recommendations on the best books of the period. I bought my mass-market hardback copy on eBay for just a few pounds after being very surprised that there wasn’t a Folio Society edition. There’s a very good forward by Mark Bostridge, a biographer of Vera Brittain, and a short introduction by her daughter, the politician Shirley Williams.

Veria Brittain was born in 1893. The book is an autobiography of her life up to 1925 when she married George Catlin. It splits into three main sections; her provincial upper middle class Edwardian childhood in Buxton; her experiences as a nurse during WWI, which included work in London, Malta, and France, and her post war life as a struggling novelist and journalist. As a young Edwardian lady, she struggled against the prevailing social conventions, and insisted, against the initial reluctance of her parents, to be allowed to go to Oxford. She eventually prevailed and entered Oxford at age 20 just in time to see the outbreak of the war. Feeling that she should make the same sacrifice as her brother Edward and his school friends, she leaves Oxford and enlists as a nurse. At around the same time she falls in love with Edward’s friend Roland Leighton, and it’s this love affair which forms the emotional core of the book. They barely meet or talk before deciding to get engaged; almost their entire relationship takes place via letters. But Leighton is tragically killed shortly before his planned Christmas leave in 1915. The remainder of the book deals with Brittain’s struggle with loss as in due course two other of Edward’s friends, one of whom she plans to marry after he’s badly injured, and then Edward himself, near the end of the war, are all killed in action. The post war chapters deal with her struggles with exhaustion and loss, and the long slow process of rebuilding her life. She finds solace in the friendship of Winifred Holtby, who she meets after returning to Oxford to resume her studies. They live together in London after graduating and immerse themselves as budding writers in the struggles of the post war feminist and pacifist movements. This includes a fascinating trip to post war Germany where they find a resentful country devastated by war, but with a grim thirst for revenge.

Much of the narrative is driven by exchanges of letters. Brittain and Leighton write each other poems and long passages of purple prose. One couldn’t imagine the generation of today, or even my 1980’s lot of being so literary. The war years for Brittain are unremittingly grim as she slaves away in one hospital after another, nursing horribly maimed and wounded soldiers - including German soldiers in the hospital at Etaples. She is exhausted, cold, and wet for much of the time. Her only break comes when she is transferred to Malta, where the duties are comparatively light and there is the compensation of fine weather and the beautiful island. She ends the war in misery, working again back in London, and with the death of her brother ending her last hope that at least one of her close male friends will survive.

As with all the other memoirs of the war that I’ve read, it is astonishing how young they were to be thrust into such a maelstrom, and how much responsibility was heaped on them long before they were ready. Brittain herself was only 21 when she started work as a nurse in life-or-death care. Her brother Edward was a Captain at just 22 responsible for a whole company of soldiers. As Brittain herself says, it was a lifetime of experience lived in a few short years. The book is also fascinating social history. Brittain’s experiences parallel the seismic shifts in British culture driven by the war, especially in its impact on women. Brittain herself was expected and assumed to be married in her early 20’s and then devote herself to a lifetime of child rearing and house keeping. By the end of the war, she’d put all thoughts of marriage aside, convinced that all the best men had been killed and many of the remainder wounded. In her age group there were 120 women for every 100 men, so for many women there was a pressing practical need to discover a vocation other than domesticity. Many had experienced positions of real responsibility during the war and were understandably reluctant to give them up. Brittain’s active role in the post war feminist movement gives us a front row seat at many of the debates of the time. It’s to her great surprise, and some reluctance, that she later finds herself in a letter writing romance with an Oxford don as she turns 30.

The book is ardently anti-war. How could it be anything otherwise when the protagonist has everyone that she loves destroyed by it. But yet, she writes in this memorable paragraph about the contradiction she couldn’t help but feel at having the experience of being swept up in the whirlpool of tumultuous historic events:

“It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem - a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any other time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.”

For someone like me, who has the luck and luxury of living during a time of long peace, when wars are always small and distant, and world events never impinge much on day-to-day existence, it seems ridiculous to imagine that my life might have been more vital, more sharp with relief, if I’d been swept up by war or revolution. You can’t compare what you don’t know. However it hasn’t escaped my notice that people I have encountered who’ve experienced war are not always regretful or haunted by it. An older colleague who’d been in the navy during the Falklands war said it was the best time of his life. The elderly father of my landlady in Hook told me he’d thoroughly enjoyed his time serving in the army in Northern Europe in WWII (and brought out his box of souvenirs to show me, including a giant swastika flag!). My grandfather John had happy memories of his time as a naval officer in WWII. As an avid armchair reader of military history and memoir I’m always relieved that I can read about it in comfort rather than experience it directly. But perhaps that’s because I’m 60 not 20. In the words of Roger Waters, have I “exchanged a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage”?

This book well deserves its place in the canon of WWI literature. It’s a superb read, beautifully written, and emotionally compelling; a front row seat at the sharp end of history. It sits well alongside Robert Graves and Seigfied Sasson, and must be the one of the best accounts of a woman’s experience of the first quarter of the 20th century.