Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (63 page)

And silver in the summer morning sun
I see the symbol of your courage glow—
That Cross you won
Two years ago.

Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago,

May you endure to lead the Last Advance,
And with your men pursue the flying foe,
As once in France
Two years ago.

In the meantime my sudden dread had somewhat diminished, for the newspapers, though they had plenty to say about the new German advance on the Aisne, remained persistently silent about Italy, and instead of further hints of imminent peril, a present came for me from Edward of a khaki silk scarf, and a letter, begun on May 30th and finished on June 3rd, which told me that he was again in hospital.

‘Thanks awfully for sending off the cat though of course it hasn’t arrived as parcels take so long now. However there isn’t as much hurry for it now as there was . . . It so happens, quite unexpectedly too, that the time when I wanted it particularly is not yet . . . If the War goes on much longer nobody will go back to Oxford in spite of the concessions; I often think I am too old now to go back.’

On June 3rd he continued in pencil.

‘I am now in hospital and oddly enough not so bored as before because it is rather a relief to be down in the foothills again and not to have anything to do for a change. It is just a form of P.U.O. which everybody is having just now but fortunately not all at quite the same time. I shall be back again in a few days. I have now finished
Fortitude
and find it excellent . . . I rather think leave has been reopened while I have been away, but of course I am about 20th on the list.’

Temporarily reassured about his safety, I went on grieving for the friendly, exhausting, peril-threatened existence that I had left behind at Etaples. To my last day I shall not forget the aching bitterness, the conscience-stricken resentment, with which during that hot, weary June, when every day brought gloomier news from France, I read Press paragraphs stating that more and more V.A.D.s were wanted, or passed the challenging posters in Trafalgar Square, proclaiming that my King and Country needed me to join the W.A.A.C., or the W.R.N.S., or the W.R.A.F.

And it was just then, a few days before midsummer, that the Austrians, instigated by their German masters, decided to attack the Allies on the Asiago Plateau.

3

On Sunday morning, June 16th, I opened the
Observer
, which appeared to be chiefly concerned with the new offensive - for the moment at a standstill - in the Noyon-Montdidier sector of the Western Front, and instantly saw at the head of a column the paragraph for which I had looked so long and so fearfully:

‘ITALIAN FRONT ABLAZE
GUN DUELS FROM MOUNTAIN TO SEA
BAD OPENING OF AN OFFENSIVE

‘The following Italian official
communiqu
é was issued yesterday:

‘From dawn this morning the fire of the enemy’s artillery, strongly countered by our own, was intensified from the Lagerina Valley to the sea. On the Asiago Plateau, to the east of the Brenta and on the middle Piave, the artillery struggle has assumed and maintains a character of extreme violence.’

There followed a quotation from the correspondent of the
Corriere della Sera
, who described ‘the Austrian attack on the Italian positions in the neighbourhood of the Tonale Pass.’ ‘Possibly,’ he suggested,

‘this is the prelude of the great attack which the Austrian Army has been preparing for so long a time . . . the employment of heavy forces proves that this is not a merely isolated and local action, but the first move in a great offensive plan. The Austrian infantry and the
Feldjäger
have not passed. The Italian defenders met them in their first onslaught and immediately retook the few small positions that had been lost in the first moments of the fighting. This success on the part of the Italian defence is a good augury for the future.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I thought, feeling suddenly cold in spite of the warm June sunlight that streamed through the dining-room window. True, the
communiqu
é didn’t specifically mention the British, but then there was always a polite pretence on the part of the Press that the Italians were defending the heights above Vicenza entirely on their own. The loss of a ‘few small positions’, however quickly recaptured, meant - as it always did in dispatches - that the defenders were taken by surprise and the enemy offensive had temporarily succeeded. Could I hope that Edward had missed it through being still in hospital? I hardly thought so; he had said as long ago as June 3rd that he expected to be ‘back again in a few days’.

However, there was nothing to do in the midst of one’s family but practise that concealment of fear which the long years of war had instilled, thrusting it inward until one’s subconscious became a regular prison-house of apprehensions and inhibitions which were later to take their revenge. My mother had arranged to stay with my grandmother at Purley that week in order to get a few days’ change from the flat; it was the first time that she had felt well enough since her breakdown to think of going away, and I did not want the news from Italy to make her change her plans. At length, though with instinctive reluctance, she allowed herself to be prevailed upon to go, but a profound depression hung over our parting at Charing Cross.

A day or two later, more details were published of the fighting in Italy, and I learnt that the Sherwood Foresters had been involved in the ‘show’ on the Plateau. After that I made no pretence at doing anything but wander restlessly round Kensington or up and down the flat, and, though my father retired glumly to bed every evening at nine o’clock, I gave up writing the semi-fictitious record which I had begun of my life in France. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself even to wrap up the
Spectator
and
Saturday Review
that I sent every week to Italy, and they remained in my bedroom, silent yet eloquent witnesses to the dread which my father and I, determinedly conversing on commonplace topics, each refused to put into words.

By the following Saturday we had still heard nothing of Edward. The interval usually allowed for news of casualties after a battle was seldom so long as this, and I began, with an artificial sense of lightness unaccompanied by real conviction, to think that there was perhaps, after all, no news to come. I had just announced to my father, as we sat over tea in the dining-room, that I really must do up Edward’s papers and take them to the post office before it closed for the week-end, when there came the sudden loud clattering at the front-door knocker that always meant a telegram.

For a moment I thought that my legs would not carry me, but they behaved quite normally as I got up and went to the door. I knew what was in the telegram - I had known for a week - but because the persistent hopefulness of the human heart refuses to allow intuitive certainty to persuade the reason of that which it knows, I opened and read it in a tearing anguish of suspense.

‘Regret to inform you Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. killed in action Italy June 15th.’

‘No answer,’ I told the boy mechanically, and handed the telegram to my father, who had followed me into the hall. As we went back into the dining-room I saw, as though I had never seen them before, the bowl of blue delphiniums on the table; their intense colour, vivid, ethereal, seemed too radiant for earthly flowers.

Then I remembered that we should have to go down to Purley and tell the news to my mother.

Late that evening, my uncle brought us all back to an empty flat. Edward’s death and our sudden departure had offered the maid - at that time the amateur prostitute - an agreeable opportunity for a few hours’ freedom of which she had taken immediate advantage. She had not even finished the household handkerchiefs, which I had washed that morning and intended to iron after tea; when I went into the kitchen I found them still hanging, stiff as boards, over the clothes-horse near the fire where I had left them to dry.

Long after the family had gone to bed and the world had grown silent, I crept into the dining-room to be alone with Edward’s portrait. Carefully closing the door, I turned on the light and looked at the pale, pictured face, so dignified, so steadfast, so tragically mature. He had been through so much - far, far more than those beloved friends who had died at an earlier stage of the interminable War, leaving him alone to mourn their loss. Fate might have allowed him the little, sorry compensation of survival, the chance to make his lovely music in honour of their memory. It seemed indeed the last irony that he should have been killed by the countrymen of Fritz Kreisler, the violinist whom of all others he had most greatly admired.

And suddenly, as I remembered all the dear afternoons and evenings when I had followed him on the piano as he played his violin, the sad, searching eyes of the portrait were more than I could bear, and falling on my knees before it I began to cry ‘Edward! Oh, Edward!’ in dazed repetition, as though my persistent crying and calling would somehow bring him back.

4

After Edward was killed no wealth of affectionate detail flowed in to Kensington, such as had at least provided occupation for Roland’s family at the end of 1915. Roland had been one of the first of his regimental mess to suffer wounds and death, but the many fellow-officers who would have written of Edward with knowledge and admiration had ‘gone west’ before him in previous offensives - the Somme, Arras, the Scarpe, Messines, Passchendaele - that he had either missed or survived. Of the men with whom he had lived and worked in Italy before the Asiago Battle, I hardly knew even the names.

As time went on, however, we did get three letters - from the officer who was second in command of his company, from his servant, and from a non-combatant acquaintance working with the Red Cross - which told us that Edward’s part in withstanding the Austrian offensive had been just what we might have expected from his record of coolness and fortitude on the Somme and throughout the 1917 Battles of Ypres. Of these letters, that from the private was the most direct and vivid.

‘I was out on Trench Duty with Capt. Brittain about 3 a.m. on the morning of the 15th June when we were caught in a terrific Barrage; we managed to get back to our Headquarters safely. About 8 a.m. the enemy launched a very heavy attack and penetrated the left flank of our Company and began to consolidate. Seeing that the position was getting critical Captain Brittain with a little help from the French led a party of men over driving the enemy out again. Shortly after the trench was regained Capt. Brittain who was keeping a sharp look out on the enemy was shot through the Head by an enemy sniper, he only lived a few minutes. He has been buried in a British Cemetery behind our lines . . . Allow me to express my deepest sympathy, Captain Brittain was a very gallant officer and feared nothing.’

The cemetery, so the Red Cross friend told us, was in the mountains, 5,000 feet up; he hadn’t seen it himself, but Edward’s burial the day after the battle was attended by his second in command and the quartermaster of the 11th, who described it to him; they were the only officers out of the line.

‘ “Brit.”,’ said the quartermaster, ‘was buried in his blanket with 4 other officers, he was placed lying at the head of the grave upon which a cross “In loving memory” with the names, etc., was placed.’

This seemed to be as much as any of our correspondents, who had not themselves taken part in the battle, were likely to tell us, but long before we received their brief information, I saw by the casualty list which contained Edward’s name that his twenty-six-year-old colonel had been wounded, obviously in the same action. Knowing that he, the only surviving officer who had been in the battalion with Edward since 1914, could tell me, if he chose, more than anybody else, I visited Harrington House - then the headquarters for information about the wounded and missing - until I tracked him down to a luxurious officers’ hospital in the region of Park Lane.

I had heard, from time to time, a good deal from Edward about his youthful C.O., for whom he seemed to have great respect without much affection. Ambitious and intrepid, the son of a Regular Army officer who could not afford to equip him for a peacetime commission, the young man had found in the War the fulfilment of his baffled longing for military distinction. Since 1914 he had been the regiment’s ‘professional survivor’, fighting unscathed through every action from the Somme to Asiago, and picking up out of each battle another ‘pip’ and a new decoration. When the 11th Sherwood Foresters were ordered to Italy he went there in command of the battalion; at the time of the Austrian offensive he had already been awarded the D.S.O., M.C., Croix de Guerre and several minor decorations, and from Asiago - which disabled him just sufficiently to keep him in England until almost the end of the War - he gathered the crowning laurels of the V.C.