Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain Read Free Book Online Page A

demands of everyday life, will perhaps give a better idea than anything else of the state of mind in which, before I had turned eighteen, I left school to ‘come out’ into the alien atmosphere of Buxton ‘society’.
     

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    It would not, I think, be possible for any present-day girl of the same age even to imagine how abysmally ignorant, how romantically idealistic and how utterly unsophisticated my more sensitive contemporaries and I were at that time. The naïveties of the diary which I began to write consistently soon after leaving school, and kept up until more than half way through the War, must be read in order to be believed. My ‘Reflective Record, 1913’, is endorsed on its title page with the following comprehensive aspirations:
‘To extend love, to promote thought, to lighten suffering, to combat indifference, to inspire activity.’

 

‘To know everything of something and something of everything. ’

     
    The same page contains a favourite quotation from Rostand’s ‘ Princesse Lointaine ’:
Ah! l’inertie est le seul vice, Maître Erasme,
Et le seul vertu, c’est . . . l’enthousiasme.

     
     
    One entry, made on December 20th, 1913, after a local dance, runs as follows: ‘It leaves me with a very unsatisfied feeling to have met so many stupid and superficial men with whom all the girls are obviously so pleased. How I wish I could meet a good strong splendid man, full of force and enthusiasm, and in earnest about his life! There must be such!’
     
    I have never shown this expression of my emotional aspirations to my husband, so I do not know whether or not he would regard himself as fulfilling the description.
     
    By 1916, the optimistic ideals of earlier years had all disappeared from the title-page of my ingenuous journal; they were replaced by a four-line verse from the writings of Paul Verlaine which has always seemed to me to represent more precisely than any other poem the heavy sense of having lived so long and been through so much that descended upon the boys and girls of my generation after a year or two of war:
Oh, qu’as tu fait, toi que voila‘
Pleurant sans cesse?
Dis, qu’as tu fait, toi que voila‘
De ta jeunesse?

     
     
    William Noel Hodgson, who when only twenty was killed on the Somme, similarly lamented this lost youth which we had barely known in one of the saddest little songs that the War produced. It brought me near to weeping, I remember, when after four years of hospitals, and last leaves, and farewells, I heard it sung by Topliss Green at the Albert Hall about 1919:
Take my Youth that died to-day,
Lay him on a rose-leaf bed,—
He so gallant was and gay,—
Let them hide his tumbled head,
Roses passionate and red
That so swiftly fade away.

 

Let the little grave be set
Where my eyes shall never see;
Raise no stone, make no regret
Lest my sad heart break, - and yet,
For my weakness, let there be
Sprigs of rue and rosemary.

     
    But again I anticipate. The naïve quotations from my youthful diary which I have used, and intend to use, are included in this book in order to give some idea of the effect of the War, with its stark disillusionments, its miseries unmitigated by polite disguise, upon the unsophisticated ingénue who ‘grew up’ (in a purely social sense) just before it broke out. The annihilating future Armageddon, of which the terrors are so often portrayed in vivid language by League of Nations Union prophets, could not possibly, I think, cause the Bright Young People of to-day, with their imperturbable realism, their casual, intimate knowledge of sexual facts, their familiarity with the accumulated experiences of us their foredoomed predecessors, one-tenth of the physical and psychological shock that the Great War caused to the Modern Girl of 1914.
     
    It is, of course, conceivable that young women brought up, like myself, in the provinces, were more childishly and idealistically ignorant than their London contemporaries;