Reprint

Vera Brittain’s wartime memoir

Testament of Youth was first published in 1933 and Virago has now published a centenary edition with a new introduction by Mark Bostridge. He explains how this ‘autobiographical account of the cataclysmic impact of the conflict on young men and women who were just reaching maturity in August 1914 immediately became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic’. He writes: ‘One hundred years on from 1918 and the Armistice that finally silenced the guns, Testament of Youth is the most widely read British autobiography of the First World War….it remains the most moving and eloquent account of the suffering and bereavement inflicted by the 1914–18 war, while offering a variety of windows onto different perspectives of the conflict: from that of the volunteer nurse, serving with the British armies at home and abroad; to the young subalterns in the trenches of Flanders, France and Italy; and to the English middle-classes at home, encountering unexpected and unwelcome social changes arising from wartime.’

Here is Vera Brittain writing about her time at the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell – the military extension of St Bartholomew’s Hospital: ‘My first ward was a long Tommies’ hut in the open park, containing 60 beds of acute surgical cases. The knowledge of masculine invalid psychology that I gradually acquired in my various hospitals stopped short at the rank of quarter-master-sergeant, for throughout the War I was never posted to British officers’ ward for longer than a few hours at a time. Apparently my youth and childish chocolate-box prettiness gave every Matron under whom I served the impression that if I were sent to nurse officers I should improve the occasion in ways not officially recognised by the military authorities.

‘When I began to work in the long hut, my duties consisted chiefly in preparing dressing-trays and supporting limbs – a task which the orderlies seldom undertook because they were so quickly upset by the butcher’s-shop appearance of the uncovered wounds. Soon after I arrived I saw one of them, who was holding a basin, faint right on the top of the patient. “Many of the patients can’t bear to see their own wounds, and I don’t wonder,” I recorded.’

Also included in this edition is the 1977 preface by Vera Brittain’s daughter, Shirley Williams. ‘My own picture of the War,’ Williams writes, ‘was gleaned from my mother. Her life, like that of so many of her contemporaries who were actually in the fighting or dealing with its consequences, was shaped by it and shadowed by it. It was hard for her to laugh unconstrainedly; at the back of her mind, the row upon row of wooded crosses were planted too deeply. Through her, I learned how much courage it took to live on in service to the world when all those one loved best were gone: her fiancé first, her best friend, her beloved only brother. The only salvation was work, particularly the work of patching and repairing those who were still alive. After the War, the work went on – writing, campaigning, organising against war. My mother became a lifelong pacifist. I still remember her in her seventies, determinedly sitting in a CND demonstration, and being gently removed by the police...’ Testament of Youth, An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925, Virago, 608pp, £14.99, Oldie price £11.22 inc p&p