Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (64 page)

I did not, of course, know that he was destined for this superlative glory when in stoical desperation I went straight from Harrington House to his hospital. My mother, who had not yet received the letters from Italy, had said emphatically that she did not want to hear any details, but though I dreaded more than death whatever I might be self-condemned to learn, I was driven and impelled by a remorseless determination to find out as much as I could. All the same, I did wish that I had someone other than the colonel from whom to demand it, and half hoped, half feared, that he might be too ill to be interviewed by a stranger. But when I heard that he was severely but not dangerously wounded in the leg, I sent a message by a nurse to ask if Captain Brittain’s sister might see him for a moment. She returned almost immediately to fetch me, and, feeling half suffocated, I followed her up the stairs.

I found the colonel propped up in bed, with a large ‘cradle’ over his leg; his features looked pale and drawn, and his dark eyes burned intently from their sunken sockets as I came into the room. Quite obviously he did not want to see me, but this I understood; no wounded man ever did want to see the female relatives of a friend who had been killed; he always expected them to break down, or make a scene, or ask awkward questions. It was a hard young face, I decided; the luminous, vulnerable eyes were probably some accident of heredity. I resolved to be as brusque and brief as possible, and found in the colonel’s sister - a girl somewhat older than himself, with gentler features and the same surprisingly tender expression, who sat beside his bed - an unexpected ally in both the asking and the answering of questions.

‘I should have known you were Brittain’s sister - you’ve got the same eyes,’ he began abruptly, and then gave me a brief, matter-of-fact account of the battle without saying very much about Edward’s part in it. But the moment for describing his death had to come; he was ‘sniped’, the colonel said, by an Austrian officer just after the counter-attack which he had organised and led had regained the lost positions.

‘Where was he shot?’ I inquired, as steadily as I could.

Again the young man cast over me his keen, searching glance, as though I were a subaltern whose ability to go calmly ‘over the top’ he was trying to estimate; then he answered curtly: ‘Through the head.’

I looked at him in silent reproach, for I frankly did not believe him. At that late stage of the War - as I had realised only too well from the agitated efforts of Army Sisters to mitigate truth with compassion in letters describing the last moments of men who had died in hospital - the colonels and company commanders on the various fronts were so weary of writing gruesome details to sorrowing relatives, that the number of officers who were instantaneously and painlessly shot through the head or the heart passed far beyond the bounds of probability. But when, a few days later, the quite independent letters from Italy confirmed the colonel’s statement, I realised that he had not been trying to spare my feelings, and that Edward had escaped Victor’s fate only by the sudden death which he himself had repeatedly said that he would prefer to blindness.

Throughout his protracted convalescence I haunted the colonel quite shamelessly, for I still felt convinced that he knew far more than he chose to reveal. Later in the year an acquaintance of mine reported a conversation which she had heard in a railway carriage between a group of Sherwood Foresters who had been in the battle of 15th June. One of them remarked that he had had ‘a real good officer, a slim dark chap . . . and a regular
nut
. You’d have thought that he hadn’t an ounce of ginger in him, but Lord! miss, he didn’t know what fear was.’ This officer’s name, the man said, was ‘Brittain’, and he’d deserved the V.C. for pushing back the enemy ‘by sheer force’ in that ‘do’ on the Plateau.

This type of appreciative judgment from a private who admired his officer was, of course, common enough, but an inward certainty possessed me that it was not unfounded; I could bear, I felt, the colonel’s superior claim to the V.C. if only I knew why the men had thought that Edward deserved it too. So, still passionately determined to learn whatever of the truth remained undisclosed, I accepted the colonel’s occasional polite but reluctant invitations to luncheon or tea, tried to make him talk though I always felt embarrassed in his presence, and even forced myself to go to Buckingham Palace to watch him receive his Victoria Cross.

But it was all quite useless. Since adding the V.C. to his collection of decorations, the colonel appeared to have become nervously afraid that every young woman he met might want to marry him, and his fears were not altogether unnatural, for with his long row of ribbons, his premature seniority, his painful limp, and his pale, dark-eyed air of a weary Crusader, the tall young man was an attractive and conspicuous figure wherever he went. In those weeks when he sat so securely upon the pinnacle of his martial ambitions, he could hardly have been expected to realise that no decoration could make him appear to me other than a stiff young disciplinarian, impregnated with all the military virtues but limited in imagination and benevolence, or to believe that I was not fascinated by his medals, but merely anxious for information.

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.

Before he went back to the front just in time for the ending of the War, the 11th Sherwood Foresters and several other British regiments had left the demoralised Austrians to the mercy of the now jubilant Italians and returned to France, where the surviving officers from Edward’s company had been killed in the last great push. So whether Edward’s part in the vital counter-attack on the Plateau really involved some special act of heroism, I shall now never know.

5

Even if I had found out, it would have made little difference at the time, for as the sudden closing-down of silence upon our four years’ correspondence gradually forced on my stunned consciousness the bare fact that Edward was dead, I became progressively unable to take in other facts, or to estimate their value.

So incredible was our final separation that it made life itself seem unreal. I had never believed that I could actually go on living without that lovely companionship which had been at my service since childhood, that perfect relation which had involved no jealousy and no agitation, but only the profoundest confidence, the most devoted understanding, on either side. Yet here I was, in a world emptied of that unfailing consolation, most persistently, most unwillingly alive. I was even alive enough to unpack his possessions when they were returned to us from Italy, and to find amongst them
The Muse in Arms
, which had arrived just after the battle, with my poem inside, unopened and unread. I knew then that he had died without even being aware of my last endeavour to show him how deeply I loved and admired him.

The return of the poem began a period of isolation more bleak, more complete and far more prolonged than the desperate months in 1916 which had followed the death of Roland. My early diaries had been full of the importance of ‘standing alone’, ‘being sufficient unto one’s self’, and I sometimes re-read them with sombre cynicism during the time that, for nearly two years after Edward’s death, I had to be ‘sufficient unto myself’ whether I liked it or not. However deep our devotion may be to parents, or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire, and from June 1918 until about April 1920, I knew no one in the world to whom I could speak spontaneously, or utter one sentence completely expressive of what I really thought or felt. I ‘stood alone’ in very truth - and I hope profoundly that I may never repeat the experience. It lasted so long, perhaps, because I decided in the first few weeks after his loss that nothing would ever really console me for Edward’s death or make his memory less poignant; and in this I was quite correct, for nothing ever has.

During this period, one or two sympathetic friends wrote earnestly to me of the experimental compensations of Spiritualism. As always in wartime, the long casualty lists had created throughout England a terrible interest in the idea of personal survival, and many wives and mothers and sisters had turned to
séances
and mediums in the hope of finding some indication, however elusive, of a future reunion ‘beyond the sun’.

But I knew that this short cut to convictions which I longed to feel held no comfort for me. I remember walking down the shimmering Sunday emptiness of Kensington High Street on the hot summer morning after the telegram came, intoxicated, strangely
exaltée
, lifted into incongruous ecstasy by a sense that Edward’s invisible presence was walking there beside me. After that, everything relapsed into paralysis. I did not want to speak or even to think much about him, and I could find no relief, as after Roland’s death, by translating my grief into long replies to letters of sympathy. There was no rush to poems now, no black quotation book, no little library of consecrated volumes; we never had a late meal, nor changed one item of our dull routine. I felt enormously, interminably tired; that was all. One had to go on living because it was less trouble than finding a way out, but the early ideals of the War were all shattered, trampled into the mud which covered the bodies of those with whom I had shared them. What was the use of hypocritically seeking out exalted consolations for death, when I knew so well that there were none?

One day I remembered how Edward had told me that Geoffrey’s last letter, written two days before he was killed at Monchy-le-Preux, had ended with the words: ‘Till we meet again, Here or in the Hereafter.’ Had they met now in the hereafter, I wondered? On the whole I could not believe that they had. Edward, like Roland, had promised me that if a life existed beyond the grave, he would somehow come back and make me know of it. I had thought that, of the two, Roland, with his reckless determination, would be the more likely to trespass from the infinite across the boundaries of the tangible, and incur any penalties that might be imposed. But he had sent no sign and Edward sent none; nor did I expect one. I knew now that death was the end and that I was quite alone. There was no hereafter, no Easter morning, no meeting again; I walked in a darkness, a dumbness, a silence, which no beloved voice would penetrate, no fond hope illumine. Only, as I went mechanically about my daily occupations, three lines from Sir Walter Raleigh’s farewell verses kept beating through my brain:

Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust.

6

In July we closed the flat, and went for a ‘holiday’ in Cornwall through a melancholy country now extensively parcelled into allotments.

It was already the middle of the month; the Bolsheviks were busy murdering the Czar, and his allied avengers, after sending a hopeful expedition to Vladivostock, were completing their preparations for the landing at Archangel, when Foch’s great counter-attacking blow of July 18th, followed by Haig’s offensive on the Avre, turned the German advance for the first time into a retreat. But I had ceased to care what happened to the War; having now no hope, and therefore no fear, I did not open
The Times
even to read the casualty lists, and for weeks remained blankly unaware that the Germans had already begun to travel along the great road between Amiens and St Quentin in the opposite direction to that in which they had thundered in March.

I remember that July as a dry, bright month, reflecting in its external brassiness the dry, bright-eyed stoicism of those human automata upon whose love life could wreak no more wrong. Above the crisp Cornish turf the milk-blue harebells, hot in the sun, hung unswayed by the windless air. As I sat below two poppy-flecked fields of oats on the rocky coast of West Pentyre, and watched the camouflaged ships gliding across the smooth sea with the unreality of ships in a dream, my reflections grew so painful that I decided to stampede thought by continuing my wild novel of the War in France. But the plot became so lurid, and the characters and places so easily recognisable, that Roland’s father, to whom I showed the manuscript after it was completed, advised me to make no attempt to publish it if I wanted to keep out of the Law Courts. I was really quite safe; no publisher would have dreamed of accepting so crude a piece of semi-fiction, but I took his advice and put the manuscript away in a cupboard, where it has remained ever since.

On some utterly forgotten date, however, during those empty weeks, my small volume of war-poems,
Verses of a V.A.D
., was unobtrusively ushered into an indifferent world. Roland’s mother had arranged for its publication and wrote a short introduction, but my verses, naturally enough, caused not a second’s ripple upon the much-bestrewn waters of contemporary war literature. Only, in the ‘Shorter Notices’ section of
The Times Literary Supplement
- now known to the initiated as ‘the paupers’ burial-ground’ - a minute but surprisingly gracious review appeared, and even to-day I correspond at intervals with a Queensland sheep-farmer, who by chance came across the book while he was still in England with the Australian Expeditionary Force, and for some obscure reason found comfort in the raw little verses.

By mid-September, after Bessie, the hard-working maid, had been engaged, there seemed no longer any real reason why I should remain at home. I couldn’t feel much interest now in any kind of military service, but Edward’s death had made a wartime return to Oxford more than ever impossible, and the Army had become a habit which only the end of the War could break. Although the Turks in their thousands were surrendering to Allenby in Palestine, and the new British offensive between Arras and Albert had gained ground held by the Germans since 1914, it still did not occur to me that anything unusual was happening, and even the collapse of Bulgaria at the end of September seemed only to have a remote significance.