Vera Brittain (1893-1970) volunteered as a nurse during the First World War while her brother Edward and fiancé Roland served on the Western Front. Her memoir Testament of Youth covers the years before, during, and after the war. It's a powerful work on several levels. It captures the innocence and ideas of young people in England in the years leading to the conflict and the disillusionment in the years after which shaped the 20th Century.
The most vivid sections in Testament of Youth are Brittain's descriptions of working in the hospitals. Victorian pieties disappeared, Brittain recalls having not even seen a naked man before nursing, but after a week the sight was common. All the talk of heroism and English manhood rang hollow when witnessing men being terrified of looking at their ghastly wounds or listening to a man screaming and writhing in extreme pain as he died slowly through the night. The bodily harm wrought by modern weaponry on such a mass scale was horrific. Soldiers in paralysis from the constant bombing, if not broken physically, they were mentally. Disease also spread like wildfire in the hospitals, the rotten smell of death and infection permeating the wards.
Brittain's fiancé Roland was killed in December of 1915, and her brother Edward served on the Italian front and died in 1918. Brittain goes into detail on her grief, how it was handled by institutions and families. Her parents became shadows of their former selves. The sense of loss, something millions of families experienced during the First World War, leaves a deep sadness.
Brittan had a literary background, her studies at Oxford were interrupted by the war but she returned later and earned her degree. Testament of Youth employs many different literary methods. Some sections read like a diary, while other parts are more journalistic. Brittain includes her own poetry and those of her friends. One gets a sense of events happening in real time. Historians have the privilege to shape narratives, but not if you are living through them. Making sense of the rush of events was challenging, Brittain explains how newspapers routinely downplayed the horrors at the front.
Out of Brittain's tragic losses came a feminist and pacifist consciousness. She witnessed firsthand how institutions worked and acted against the interests of women. Nurses were put through long hours and poor living conditions, often at the mercy of insensitive doctors and head nurses. Nurses were expected to be cheerful and maintain and attractive appearance, they were to remain positive even in the grimmest of conditions.
Reading Testament of Youth adds a personal dimension to the First World War when compared to history books like The Sleepwalkers or The Guns of August in which powerful men treat the world like a chessboard. Brittain gets to both the helplessness and grief people experienced - and their resilience.
After the war Brittain became a writer and activist.
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