Testament of Youth

I have spent the past month submurged in the sadness of World War One and a thoughtful person's wise response to the great loss endured by an entire nation. This is the true story of Vera Brittain, a young British woman who had just begun studies at Oxford when the war broke out. Once her brother and friends had joined the war on moral grounds, Brittain no longer felt that being a student counted for anything. Wanting to make a difference, she signed up to be a volunteer war nurse and continued that position in several different hospitals until the war ended four years later.

The best part of this book, in my opinion, is the very thoughtful style of writing. Rarely can one find such careful use of language; it is inspiring that she takes such care with each word and sentence. Here, I will share some lovely quotations.

An interesting comment on nursing:

"Four impressionable years spent in a number of very different hospitals convinced me once for all that nursing, if it is to be done efficiently, requres, more than any other occupation, abundant leisure in colourful surroundings, sufficient money to spend on amusements, agreeable food to re-establish the energy expended, and the removal of anxiety about illness and old age; yet of all skilled professions, it is still the least vitalised by these advantages, still the most oppressed by unnecessary worries, cruelties, hardships and regulations."

Her comment when she moved out of her parents' home for the final time (at age 26):

"But I was clearly enough aware that parents brought up in the nineteenth-century tradition would have preferred, not unnaturally, a happily married daughter producing grand-children to a none-too-triumphant Oxford graduate floundering unsuccessfully in that slough of despond which lies just inside the gateway of every path to the literary life. So I welcomed the late December day when I could remove my disappointing spinsterhood, together with my typewriter and rejected manuscripts, to the penurious but unhumiliating independence of Bloomsbury." p. 545.

The comment by her friend, after their tour of post-World War One destruction in Germany:

"There is such beauty, and such kindness... even in this unbeautiful place the crouses, late flowering this year, and the very small buds upon the hawthorns have an almost disquieting loveliness. If only the birds would sing loud enough to drown the cry that rises from the folly, folly of people in this stupid planet!" p. 568.

I was slightly annoyed throughout the book that Brittain felt that she represented her generation of British youth when actually she was a small minority: member of upper class, educated at Oxford, etc., until finally on page 574 she discovered that:

"For the first time, during those General Elections of 1922 and 1923, I came into intimate contact with the homes of the poor, and learnt, as my provincial middle class upbringing had never permitted me to learn, the semi-barbarous conditions - intensified beyond calculation by the War and its consequences- under which four-fifths of the population are obliged to live in a confused and suffering world I saw the men fighting one losing battle against economic depression and increasing unemployment, while the women waged another against excessive procreation combined with an accumulation of wasteful, interminable domestic detail, and the babies fought yet a third against under-nourishment, over-clothing, perpetual dirt and inadequate fresh air and sunshine. ...This new knowledge did not make me philanthropically minded- the attempt to alleviate such anxious misery with soup and blankets seemed to me a mere self-deception an endeavour to delude one's intelligence into a sense of having one's duty and being thenceforth absolved from further responsibility. But it made me politically minded once and for all; I knew that for the rest of my life I could never again feel free from the obligation of working with those who were trying to change the social system that made this grim chaos possible, and I began to turn more definitely towards the Party which represented the spirit as well as the substance of that democracy to whose future I was for ever bound by the common experiences of the war."

While she often bemoans the fact that so many lives of the men of her generation were wasted on the battlefield, Brittain ends her ten-year account with a hopeful event: her "late in life" marriage (at age 30). So she succeeds in both worlds: she becomes a successful writer and journalist, gets to participate in monumental historical events and changes, and gets to marry and have children as well.

Besides making me think more about how I form each sentence that I write, Brittain also is a good example of a person who does not waste time. From the battlefield, her brother writes, "It is wonderful that you manage to write a play in spite of all your work; I never have time to do anything... and I dream of things and never do them... this sort of routine is so deadening; it is a life of thinking about little details the whole time... the brain must be essentially a machine of memory and after that the rule of life is expediency" p397. How often as a home maker I lose sight of my long-term goals because I become distracted with the small and tedious "little details" of the day. Thanks to Ms. Brittain I will try to do better!