Testament of Youth

“‘You never really cared for Roland; you only wanted to marry him out of ambition! If you’d really loved him you couldn’t possibly have behaved in the way you’ve done the past few weeks!’”

This harsh accusation from Mina, one of Brittain’s closest friends from her time at St. Monica’s, a private girls’ boarding school in Surrey, takes place in 1916. They are the last words Brittain recalls ever hearing from Mina as well as the first mention to the reader of Roland Leighton, Brittain’s fiancé. These words foreshadow the difficulty Brittain experienced upon losing her fiancé, as well as the challenges presented by living in a society marred by wartime grief and confusion. As well, they reflect the importance most women gave to marriage, a notion to which Brittain, whose ambitions were academic in nature, did not subscribe.

“It is, and always has been, difficult to estimate what manner of person Edward really was at the close of his Uppingham years, and it becomes harder as time marches on.”

Here, Brittain writes about her younger brother Edward, introducing him to the reader by way of his school experiences at Uppingham School. In this passage, Brittain notes poignantly that descriptions of Edward’s adolescent self contribute little to an actual discussion of his potential and his true nature, explorations of which were cut short by the war. By stating outright that the passage of time makes predictions about her brother even more difficult, Brittain calls the attention of the reader to the significant length of time which has passed from his premature death at the age of 22 to the publication of this memoir fifteen years later in 1933.

“All through the journey back to Buxton next morning I was indescribably cross; I answered my mother’s conversational efforts in surly monosyllables and couldn’t find a polite word to say.”

After attending Uppingham School’s Speech Day, an event that celebrates the awards and accomplishments of students moving on from the school, Brittain travels home with her mother, her emotional state tumultuous for reasons that she does not yet understand. She had been invited to attend by Roland Leighton, a friend of her brother’s, and the time they have spent together so far has left a deep impression on her. Because Brittain has been preparing for her Oxford entrance examinations with great focus, she is not yet aware that her distracted state and irritation stems from being separated from Roland, with whom she has fallen in love. 

“Having himself escaped immersion in the public-school tradition, which stood for militaristic heroism unimpaired by the damping exercise of reason, he withheld his permission for any kind of military training, and ended by taking Edward daily to the mills to divert his mind from the War.”

Both Brittain and her father blame Uppingham School for Edward’s romantic attitudes towards the war, but her father’s attempts at distracting Edward prove to be unsuccessful. Public schools in England are fee-paying boarding schools historically linked with the ruling classes; this social demographic in particular suffered great losses in the war as many of the junior officers who died in action were products of a similar education as Edward and his schoolmates. Brittain’s sardonic tone in this passage reveals an undercurrent of hostility towards the system that she believes exploited young men and their naive idealism, contributing to the grief and suffering of an entire nation.

“To be alone with one another after so much observation was quite overwhelming, and for a time conversation in the Grand Hotel lounge moved somewhat spasmodically.”

In 1915, Victorian conservative values were still in place and social mores prohibited young women and men to spend time together unchaperoned, particularly if they were interested in each other romantically. After spending time together at Uppingham School and again in London, supervised by one of Brittain’s aunts, Roland and Brittain crave time alone. They successfully engineer a plan by which they are able to meet alone in Leicester for a few hours while Brittain is traveling to Oxford on the train, but the awkwardness proves to be a challenge for them. 

“Oxford that term was full of music, which brought continually thoughts of Roland and the War, tear-making, unbearable—and yet from which I could never keep away.”

During Brittain’s last term at Oxford, the summer term during which Roland is at the front in France, she finds solace in the music of the chapel services she regularly attends. Music stirs deep emotion in Brittain while also it also serves as a reminder of the realities of her life; studying and playing tennis, while comfortably distracting, are troubling to Brittain because once the activity ends, the shock of real life is difficult to bear. Brittain’s preference to live in reality demonstrates her strength of character as well as her resilience and need to live truthfully. 

“We took our dinner with us and stayed out till twilight. I felt that I liked her, and Oxford, more than—apart from the ignorant dreams of 1913—I had ever cared for either before; I realized how precious individuals and places become the moment that the possibility of leaving them turns into fact.”

At this point in the autobiography, Brittain and her friend Norah H. are enjoying a picnic after punting. Brittain’s insight into the potential depths of meaning one can experience through loss foreshadows the many losses she is to endure as the war carries on. Her time at Oxford proves to be more special to her for its brevity, just as her attachments to individuals she loses prematurely through distance and death possess a unique position in her memory.

“‘Do I seem very much of a phantom in the void to you? […] I must. You seem to me rather like a character in a book or someone whom one has dreamt of and never seen.’”

This passage from one of Roland’s letters to Brittain, only weeks before his death, angers Brittain because it, like other passages in other letters from this time, suggest that Roland is giving up on the optimism that she relies on. This frustration is compounded by the fact that Roland is writing to her less frequently, which he knows will worry her. Though Brittain admits that her enraged response to the letter containing this passage is irrationally furious, their exchange evidences the extreme stress each of them are experiencing, for vastly different reasons. 

“Roland’s family, at their Keymer cottage, kept an even longer vigil; they sat up till nearly midnight over their Christmas dinner in the hope that he would join them, and, in their dramatic, impulsive fashion, they drank a toast to the Dead.”

Roland’s loved ones are expecting him home for Christmas as his most recent correspondence from him announced he will be on leave from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve 1915. In anticipation, Brittain buys new clothes and obtains special permission from the matron of her hospital so that her time off might overlap with Roland’s. On the morning of the 26th, Brittain receives a phone call from Roland’s sister Clare with news of his death caused by wounds on December 23. Ironically, Roland’s family’s toast to the Dead on Christmas proves to be a toast to Roland himself, which heightens the pathos of the tragic event. 

“‘Everything is so exactly the same as it was before, which brings it all back so vividly,’ I wrote to Edward. ‘It seems unendurable that everything should be the same.’”

After Roland’s death, Brittain no longer finds satisfaction in her work as a V.A.D.; the daily routines at the hospital in Camberwell that once gave her comfort and a sense of closeness to Roland now torment her. Brittain cannot bear the irony of life continuing on after the loss of Roland despite the enormous change she herself is experiencing. In writing to her brother Edward, who has also lost a deeply admired and beloved friend, of her most private feelings, Brittain can keep the pain of her grief close, thereby staying faithful to Roland even in death.

“But when I do think about him, which is very often indeed, I realize how it is to him all my hopes of the future are anchored, upon him that my chances of companionship and understanding in the future depend.”

Brittain’s attachment to her brother Edward deepens after Roland’s death; though Edward does not dominate her thoughts like Roland does, Brittain’s concern for Edward as he leaves for the front in February 1915, only weeks after Roland’s death, intensifies. Her reliance on Edward for “companionship and understanding” reveals Brittain’s sense of isolation and loneliness; only Edward appears to comprehend Brittain in a full and satisfying way. This acknowledgement of Edward’s importance to Brittain is as foreboding as it is tender; when Edward dies at the front in, Brittain is truly alone. 

“There was compensation, however, in the New Year flowers— golden oxalis and white arabis and red campions and miniature celandines—which were already springing up on the patch of rocky ground in front of the Sisters’ quarters.”

Brittain’s year in Malta is warm and restful, and she finds herself happy for the first time in many months. Brittain provides many descriptions of the natural landscape of Malta to communicate its beauty to the reader; these flowers that bloom in the inhospitable ground around the time of New Year 1917 symbolize the unexpected happiness and equanimity Brittain is able to experience in Malta, an island surrounded by submarine warfare during a particularly mournful time in Brittain’s young life. 

“There was nothing left in life now but Edward and the wreckage of Victor—Victor who had stood by me so often in my blackest hours. If he wanted me, surely I could stand by him in his.”

Upon hearing the news that Victor’s head wounds, which he sustained at the battle at Arras in spring 1917, have resulted in permanent blindness, Brittain decides that she will seek permission to leave Malta, where she is not needed, and return to England, where she feels she might be needed. As well, she remembers a personal ad Roland had sent her two years before in which a woman whose fiancé has been killed offers herself in marriage to any officer blinded or severely wounded; Brittain’s decision to offer herself to Victor enables her to keep her love for Roland close to her and within the inner circle of love and friendship she, Roland, and Victor share along with her brother Edward.

“One of the things I like best to remember about the War is the nonchalance with which the Sisters and V.A.D.s in the German ward took for granted that it was they who must be overworked, rather than the prisoners neglected.”

After Victor dies, Brittain requests to go to France to work so she can be nearer to Edward. While working in the ward housing German prisoners at the No. 24 General Hospital in Étaples, Brittain treats the German wounded as she would treat the English wounded, just as all the Sisters and her fellow V.A.D.s do. That Brittain is so fond of this memory reveals the importance she places on compassion and personal ethics during wartime and a sense of pride in her own ability to maintain these qualities even when so disturbed by tragic personal losses.

“However long I may be destined to survive my friends who went down in the Flood, I shall never forget the crushing tension of those extreme days. Nothing had quite equalled them before—not the Somme, not Arras, not Passchendaele—for into our minds had crept for the first time the secret, incredible fear that we might lose the War.”

Brittain’s description of the atmosphere during the German spring offensives of 1918 marks a significant change in attitude, both in herself and in the wider English population. Up until this point in the war, the English maintained a sense of optimism due to the widely-accepted certainty that the Allies would win the War. Though ultimately the Germans failed, and were soon defeated through an Allied counteroffensive, Brittain’s memory of rattled faith is vivid. 

“Angels of Mons still roaming about, I thought. Well, let them roam, if it cheers the men to believe in them!”

During the German spring offensive of 1918 on the Western Front, Brittain nurses countless wounded English soldiers who talk of increasingly strange happenings in the trenches. Brittain talks with the soldiers about their experiences, learning that many of them had met men during battle who had died days before. The effect of these supernatural sightings seem to encourage the wounded men, who felt protected by these wandering spirits; though Brittain appreciates that the men feel better having seen ghosts of old friends and compatriots, she feels no such angels exist for her. 

“The more assiduously I pursued him in the hope of learning the details that I sought, the more resolutely he faded out of my existence, until, after the Armistice, I lost sight of him altogether.”

After learning of her brother Edward’s death on the Asiago Plateau, Brittain pays a visit to his commanding officer in the hospital to learn what happened. The version of Edward’s death she receives feels incomplete, but when Brittain pushes for more detail, he cooperates less and less. After the publication of Testament of Youth, Brittain receives a letter from Edward’s commanding officer, explaining that the night before the battle, Edward learned that the military police had read one of his letters. In this letter, the police found evidence of Edward’s gay relationships, and Edward was certain to have been court-martialed for these illegal affairs. The commanding officer suggests that Edward may have deliberately put himself in harm’s way to avoid disgrace.

“An obscure rage burned in my tired brain as I obeyed her, and this, by the next morning, had translated itself into a determination to leave at once.”

Brittain describes her reaction to the incident that drives her to quit civilian nursing and return to a military hospital. Her emotional state is already fraught when the staff-nurse to whom Brittain reports insists she continue cleaning until the exact time her shift ends. The rigidity and the tedium that characterize civilian nursing drains Brittain’s sense of purpose; as well, she feels she is treated patronizingly, which is unacceptable to her after her years of patient and skillful tending to the war’s wounded. Fortunately, a position at a military hospital in London soon becomes available to her, and Brittain works here until April 1919, six months after the end of the war. 

“Still partly dominated by old ideals, timeworn respectabilities and spasms of rebellious bitterness, it sometimes seized fleetingly the tail of an idea upon whose wings it was later to ascend into a clearer heaven of new convictions.”

When Brittain returns to Oxford to resume her studies, she changes course, deciding to read History at Oxford with a focus on International Relations instead of English. This decision is based on an urgent need in Brittain to understand how the events of World War I could have ever happened in the first place; she feels she has a vocation to learn more in order to prevent such a catastrophe from taking place ever again. Her diary entries and letters at this time offer proof of Brittain’s growing interest and eventual commitment to pacifism. 

“No doubt the post-war generation were wise in its assumption that patriotism had ‘nothing to it,’ and we pre-war lot were just poor boobs for letting ourselves be kidded into thinking that it had.”

Brittain’s return to Oxford is difficult. She is plagued by insomnia, hallucinations, and interminable painful memories and visions; her sense of optimism and youthful idealism have disappeared, which render her incompatible with many of her younger fellow students who did not witness the atrocities of war. The tension between the members of the same generation, separated only by a few years, makes friendships with anyone not associated with the war impossible. Only when Brittain becomes friends with Winifred Holtby, a younger student and WAAC (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps), is she able to experience genuine camaraderie. 

“My classes, I knew, were never first-rate; I was too anxious to write myself, and to take part in political movements, to feel any great enthusiasm for teaching children about the writers and politicians of the past.”

After earning their degrees from Oxford, Brittain and Winifred share a flat in London and commit themselves to working and writing. In order to earn more money, Brittain takes one-day-a-week teaching posts at two different schools in London. Throughout her three year teaching career, Brittain enjoys her time with her pupils, but she knows that she is distracted by her own goals as a novelist and a rising star lecturer with the League of Nations Union, an organization that promotes the goal of international harmony and other ideals of the League of Nations.

“So we decided to pool our savings and go that autumn to the occupied areas and bankrupt countries of Central Europe, in order to learn for ourselves what the War had meant to those people whose agony had been even more cruel and more prolonged than our own.”

Brittain’s angst at losing her lover, her brother, and two dear friends persists, but at no point in her life do her emotions devolve into resentment and hatred towards Germany. She understands, like Roland, Edward, Victor, and Geoffrey, that the senselessness of the war applies to the enemy as much as to themselves. Upon losing the war, the suffering of German citizens worsens, and both Brittain and Winifred feel compassion for their situation—one that Brittain is sure that Roland, even with his high-minded ideals and commitment to country, would not have approved.

“Yet always, after a tumult of thought, I was forced to conclude that it is only by grasping the nettle, danger, that we pluck this flower, safety; that those who flee from emotion, from intimacy, from the shocks and perils attendant upon all close human relationships, end in being attacked by unseen Furies in the ultimate stronghold of their spirit.”

As Brittain’s love affair with G. intensifies, she is struck by the possibility of marriage looming in her future. At this time, she reflects on her past self, understanding that as long as she stays single, she is trapped in the grim disappointments and sadness of the past. Marriage to G. is a forward movement, but one that is daunting for its potential to cause her even more pain. Ultimately, Brittain avoids the temptation to never marry, and she plans a life with G. in America, marrying him on June 17, 1925.