Verified by 
“Day after day I had to fight the frightening sensation – to which, throughout my years of nursing, I never became accustomed – of seeing the covered stretchers come in, one after another, without knowing, until I ran with pounding heart to look, with fearful sight or sound or stench, what problem or agony or imminent death, each brown blanket concealed.”
In Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900 to 1925, the First World War is related as the monstrous grand-scale calamity that ended most of Vera Brittain’s dreams, aspirations, and expectations of happiness. Initially, she had assumed that “current events represented something that must be followed in the newspapers but would never, conceivably, have to be lived.”
As “the map of Europe was undergoing daily transformations,” Vera Brittain began living the war through correspondence from her fiancé, his Oxford friends, and her beloved only brother – all of whom would be sacrificed in the name of God, King, and Country (“that voracious trio”). Through their letters and home-leave conversations, she acquired a profound sense of how war transforms.
She also lived the war as a VAD – a member of Great Britain’s Voluntary Aid Detachment. From 1915 to 1918 – to battle the despair that came from the fear and then the mourning for those she held most dear – she served as a nurse in military hospitals in London, Malta, and close to the front lines in France. There, as a nurse, “so much human wreckage passed through [her] hands,” she was further transformed.
Disillusionment and bitterness replaced what she came to view as naïve idealism and delusions about battlefield glory. Her nursing engagements gave her grounds to deride grandstanding home-front speechmakers who delivered "exalted consolations of battlefield glory and death."
The lead-up to, the vivid carnage of, and agonizing aftermath from “The War to End All War” were well captured in a 2014 movie
The many casualties and mortal wounds of the First World War were conveyed tellingly (but without over-the-top gore) in the cinematic adaptation of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth.
The movie created wait-lists for that memoir at libraries, and required re-stockings at some book shops. In the approach to the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, was there an uptick in the requests for and sales of that memoir?
I was told that A&E’s 5-part four-and-a-half-hour miniseries of 1980 may only be available on VHS; or on BBC disks that don't respond to the vintage DVD players still in use on this side of “The Great Salt Pond.”
With almost daily breaking news of the latest single-handed extended-magazine and bump-stock high-capacity carnages, how much capacity does the viewing public have for the horrors of decades past?
Coming hard on the horror-heels of so many Halloween fright-nights and so many gore-filled victim-targeted shot-to-shock flicks, can recollections of actual large-scale carnage register?
To its great credit, the 2014 film compressed 660 pages of autobiography and delivered, for me, two especially memorable scenes of war’s toll: The heroine, who chooses to abandon university studies where she is "buried in books," hurries to open a newspaper to full pages headed "Fallen in Combat." And there's a most compelling 50 seconds of the film which pans the muddy terrain adjacent to the huts serving as field-hospitals. The camera frame becomes wider and wider – to take in rows and rows of stretchers, and still more rows of stretchers, and still more, all bearing grievously-wounded soldiers.
For whom the war tolls, with impactful toils
The War that was to End All War took a very personal toll on Vera Brittain: those she loved best (her fiancé, her best friend, her beloved only brother) would be killed. Her sanctuary and salvation was work, “particularly the work of patching and repairing those who were still alive.”
From an upper-middle-class home, where she had become used to servants, maids, and cooks, she found what she described as a refuge in “fetching and carrying away everything that looked or smelt disagreeable.”
She wrote of her disdain for uninitiated VADs who expected to hold patients’ hands and smooth their pillows. Instead, she declared, “I seized with avidity upon all the unpleasant tasks of which [other VAD probationers] were only too glad to be relieved, and took a masochistic delight in emptying bed-pans, washing greasy cups and spoons, and disposing of odiferous dressings in the sink-room.”
Septic wounds, sputum cups and bed-pans held no terror. Privations and hardships were to be endured in solidarity with the troops in the trenches.
Nursing literary ambitions – war, the ultimate clinical trial
Forthrightly, Vera Brittain owned up to poetical literary aspirations that pre-dated the War. The toils and tolls of war changed her beat. What she saw, heard, smelled, and touched armed her with observations and encounters she journaled and voiced autobiographically on behalf of WW I England’s “depleted generation.”
Her fear: The humiliation of being sent home as “unsuitable” to the demands, the drudgery, and the disgust of dealing with the “butcher-shop appearance of uncovered wounds.”
Her personal goal: Whether shivering or sweltering, fatigued or repulsed, she was intent on managing to remain calm, balanced, and efficient... and thus “regimentally useful” – “warding off panic and thus putting on a fair show of self-control.”
Her resolve: “We all acquired puffy hands, chapped faces, chilblains, and swollen ankles ... but somehow managed to stay on duty with colds, bilious attacks, neuralgia, septic fingers and incipient influenza.”
Her tolerance: being obliged to “dress – unaided, and without emotion – the quivering stump of a newly-amputated limb.”
Assaults on the senses – what she saw, heard, smelled and inhaled
Evacuated from the front-lines in France, and then hurried to London docks, bodies arrived “saturated with bloody mud” which, even at a distance, could not mask the “grotesque, appalling, mutilations of bodies and limbs and faces.”
“After the Somme, I had seen men without faces, without eyes, without limbs, men almost disemboweled, men with hideous truncated stumps of bodies....”
“... blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy blood-stained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me....”
“…. congealed blood fastened them firmly to the canvas of the stretcher, and we had to cut it away before we could get them free.”
In field hospitals, she took in the rolling eyes that were a passage onto the “grotesque by-paths of delirium.”
As a purposefully-engaged VAD, in “an atmosphere heavy with sepsis,” she had to smell and inhale “suppurating (festering) wounds.”
What she had to work with, and deal with
Bed-sheets that had “the consistency of muslin curtains and others more hole than sheet.”
“... daily dressings were not a mere matter of changing huge wads of stained gauze and wool, but of stopping hemorrhages, replacing intestines, and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes.”
“... saturated dressings and yet more gruesome remains heaped on the floor.”
She had to make her way through a kind of battlefield, an arena, where she contended with “a regular baptism of blood and pus,” in which the mutilated bled to death with “hemorrhages too deep-seated to be checked.”
What she heard, and could not, would not, forget
There were those “unfortunate patients whose wounds were so grievous that they advertised themselves.” The chorus: “The groans of anaesthetized men” which “made the ward a Bedlam.”
Cries of many delirious patients combined with the ravings of others coming round from anesthetic would turn the hospital hut into pandemonium: Convulsions and choking in continuous grotesque paroxysms.
A testament to what could not, and should not, be forgotten
Vera Brittain steeled herself to witness patients who “bore their dreadful dressings with stoical fortitude” and “waited phlegmatically for death.”
Her memory could not, and would not, dispatch the images of “restless, agonized biting of lips” which asked, in a whisper, how long the heavily-bandaged and semi-sedated young man had to wait before he died. Her chronicle related what had been expected: The wait was not very long. The screening partitions were positioned round his bed by the next afternoon.
Her memory was scorched with the ravages visited by mustard gas: youthful bodies were “burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-colored suppurating blisters.” Eyes were fused by a sticky emulsion of flesh. These doomed patients fought for breath; in strained whispers, they would try to report that their scorched throats were closing. They knew that they would soon choke and asphyxiate.
Anguish: on the home front, at The Front, and back home - no peace from war
Vera Brittain took home “a legacy of rough hands and swollen ankles, and a fine collection of exotic oaths.”
She also brought home disillusionment and ferocious resentments about military intelligence and the lack thereof. She rightly railed at HQ for its communication and coordination failures; its gross incompetence. She saw firsthand “how courageous lives were wastefully placed in jeopardy, and often thrown away, as a result of the crudest and most elementary failures of intelligence."
And from her hands-on waist-deep experiences, she harbored anguish and anger having witnessed failures to supply and sensibly administer hospitals.
Collateral damage: There were emotional and psychological wounds that did not heal. For some time, they festered. Though those wounds would not be cured by her writing, they were attended to, administered to and nursed by her Testament of Youth.
The post-traumatic, still stressful memoir
While the 660-page memoir (first published in 1933) does indeed deliver the horrors of “the war that was to end all war,” the reader has to make tactical maneuvers past moralizing letters, sonnets, elegiac poems, hymns, music scores, reports of London concerts and theatricals, and upper-middle-class domestic trials and tribulations.
Vera Brittain’s authentic and genuinely vivid war-service sensations quoted and paraphrased above were surgically extracted from 660 pages that are replete with patchworks of sententious letters and self-conscious hyper-intellectual diary outpourings.
I wondered, Did the dons at Oxford bother to teach syntax? speak to the virtues of brevity? advocate writing with readers in mind?
Perhaps, along with the shortage of butter and other short-supply items, there were, at Oxford, only just a few periods to be had in the depleted inventory, and thus a rationing of other punctuation marks.
My reconnaissance through the 660-page memoir (the small-print Penguin Classic) had me rush through the pages and pages of details of a young woman’s relatively privileged life and her expressive longings for a literary life. These accounts and yearnings are eventually reinforced by her pre-war correspondence and discussions with young men who were intent on not missing out on war’s imagined gifts of honors and glories.
For me, the social history became relevant as a prelude to Vera Brittain’s accounts of her war-time nursing service and how those experiences furthered her liberation from the strictures of Victorian mores.
It’s not hard to imagine her condemning ideologically-mandated and state-supported violence directed against women. She would likely be at the forefront in voicing outrage over the indignities and degradings, the oppressions and repressions – and reprisals – that are imposed upon and suffered by women.
A memoir’s mission: a battle against war and against the battles waged against women
Testament of Youth is part war history, and part crusade, from a very self-referential point of view. In her forward to the memoir, Vera Brittain explained that she hoped her assemblage of recollections would “rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the War.”
For her, the war was “an infuriating interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.” It visited “stark agonies on my generation in its early twenties.... Upon us catastrophe had descended just in time to deprive us of that youthful happiness to which we had believed ourselves entitled.”
As melodramatic, Oxford-oriented, hyper-intellectual, pretentious and sententious as Testament of Youth is, there are passages that speak about the plight of women in a way that should shame.
It’s a good guess that Vera Brittain would do more than resort to hashtags as to the young women and girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. She would likely be at the forefront of efforts to rescue women who are subjugated, trafficked, enslaved, defiled, and stoned to their deaths.
A feminist prescription for a semblance of dignity and respect: Nursing liberated many WW I women from Victorian mores.
Unlike women trapped in the world's repressive regimes, VAD nurses were duty-bound to uncover and touch male bodies. On their behalf, Brittain expressed herself “thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning” which the care of the wounded gave her – and thus provided “early release from the sex-inhibitions” of Victorian mores and expectations. Those strictures “dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualized and highly disconcerting intimacy.”
Brittain went on to explain, “Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, that day-to-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame.”
From her distinctly intimate perspective, she observed that “the War had little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank balance."
She would likely be at the forefront of movements to rescue women who are vehemently oppressed and mercilessly repressed. Factions that suppress and subjugate, degrade and “depart” might be hindered more significantly by searing, penetrating, and well-publicized exposés than by damage done by a drone strike. Wishful thinking, no doubt.
Roles for Women, Rights and Recognitions for Women
Vera Brittain noted that her parents “had been brought up by their own forebears to regard young women as perpetually at the disposal of husbands or fathers.” Into the 20th century, this thinking also lodged at medical colleges where very few women gained admission, even as so many men were called to serve as cannon fodder. Thus, the shortage of doctors at The Front.
The 2014 film has a female proctor warn the new admits, "Here at Oxford, we women have to work twice as hard as the men. And we have to be twice as good."
At World War One casualty-clearing-stations and battlefield hospitals, wounds hurriedly judged non-life-threatening were left unattended; if and when finally addressed, there was sepsis, and, frequently, finality. Overworked surgeons in overcrowded facilities could not reverse the deadly course.
In no small part, the medical reclamations that were achieved were attributable to VADs who stepped in to attend to the passed-over wounds and guts of war, despite all the obstacles, indignities, and hardships they had to endure. The women who served in those theaters of medical operations proved to be adaptable to army discipline, rigors, discomforts and deprivations; as adaptable as men; their equals for commitment and endurance.
If women managed warfare, would there be less PTSD?
However they were retrieved or recreated, Vera Brittain’s letters, along with her diary entries and story drafts, attest to her awareness and concern for what we now refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder. Along with a concern for servicemen’s and nurses’ PTSD, there are observations regarding the war’s impact on the home front.
Her contemporaneous chronicles noted that those back in England “practise that concealment of fear which the long years of the war had instilled.” That fear, she explained, “was thrusting inward until one’s subconscious became a regular prison-house of apprehensions and inhibitions which would later take their revenge.”
She went on to observe that “calamity can descend upon the unprepared heads of inoffensive citizens” and that “the War’s repressions were already preparing their strange, neurotic revenge.”
A 100th anniversary perspective: All is not quiet on the Eastern and Western Fronts
Her perspective impelled her to think prospectively: She hoped her chronicle of disillusionment and bitterness, her witness to acute suffering and pervasive bereavement – would “challenge that too easy, too comfortable relapse into forgetfulness which is responsible for history’s most grievous repetitions.”
Yes, her testament was and is thought-provoking, impactful and cautionary. Nuclear-tipped engagement would most certainly be most grievous.
And most certainly there are grievous repetitions as to women, which continue to be grievously repeated.
An ardent, seemingly unwavering, pacifist, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was a declaration of war, in a way – for it was and is a social-history document regarding the roles accorded to women, and the places and influence denied them. And so the memoir is surely bookcase-worthy.
A hundred years following The Armistice that ended the war which was to end all war, it is not hard to imagine what memoirist, feminist, and pacifist Vera Brittain would have to say about 21st century war – and the still-prevalent “wars” against women.
