On Active Service: 7/2/16 “Dear Mother & Father, Hope you are both in the pink. Saw Stan while we were on fatigues today. Will write a letter soon as possible. Fondest Love, Ces.” Addressed to Mr & Mrs EE Brown, Kennington Ave., Bishopston, Bristol. Cancelled on 10th February, 1916 and passed by Field Censor 1975. The cover shows the Mairie and main street of Louvencourt, on the Front Line of The Somme. Vera Brittain’s fiancée, the poet Roland Leighton, is buried here. He was shot at nearby Hébuterne on a bright moonlit night by a sniper five weeks before this post card was sent. His final poem was found in his clothes after his death and appears to presage it: Headeauville - The sunshine on the long white road That ribboned down the hill, The velvet clematis that clung Around your window-sill Are waiting for you still. Again the shadowed pool shall break In dimples at your feet, And when the thrush sings in your wood, Unknowing you may meet Another stranger, Sweet. And if he is not quite so old As the boy you used to know, And less proud, too, and worthier, You may not let him go--- (And daisies are truer than passion-flowers) It will be better so. #wwipostcards #deltiology #rolandleighton #louvencourt (at Hanworth, Hounslow, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCEEjN6Da2p/?igshid=1acqvampdlsrq
Brittain’s study of her experience of the first world war as a nurse and then victim of loss remains a powerful anti-war and feminist statement
There were times when reading this book that I would look up and around at my clean, well-ordered life and shudder with relief. So vivid is the imagery of Vera Brittain’s prose that one becomes deeply immersed in field hospitals and trenches of World War 1, living with her for word from the front even as she nurses soldiers back to life or eases them into death.
For me, this book is successful and important on many levels. Because she waited 17 years to write and publish it, the writing has a perspective and maturity to it that really helps the reader to feel what she lost. And she lost pretty much everything.
Because Brittain was an early feminist, one reads about her efforts to live as fully and independently as men with something like awe. She was already a trailblazer as a female scholar at Oxford. But she could not live in that safe world while her brother, fiance and friends were fighting. So she became a nurse, and saw the very worst of what war does to people. Because the book is based largely on letters (What has history lost by the death of letter writing?), we feel the war in a fuller sense, as she lived it in hospitals and with her family back home, and as the soldiers lived it in their letters to her.
It’s always puzzled me that World War II overshadows World War I by a wide margin in scholarship and popular culture. It was World War I that ushered in what has steadily become more and more an age of irony, detachment, and scorn for any romanticism. The poetry that Vera Brittain writes, and that her fiance sends her from the front, is often flowery in a way that is completely dismissed today as sentimental drivel. But pay close attention to the imagery, which is devastating in its realism. The reality of war pushes out naive ideals of heroism, patriotism, and innate human goodness. Face evil head on and then encapsulate it in a poem to your fiance, along with some dried violets plucked from around the body of a dead soldier. We are all disillusioned now, as a matter of course. It’s tiresome.
Because Brittain was a pacifist and in the public eye, we see how, after the war, politics were messy and the desire to never repeat WWI led to an astounding range of vocal political parties and peace movements. This book is the first thing that has helped me to understand the appeasement policies of the 1930′s that are today, probably justifiably, reviled. But an entire generation of young men were wiped out in World War I. The few survivors looked around and wondered which cost was greater, peace or more death and destruction. Hitler made that choice for them.
Brittain traveled through Eastern Europe and saw for herself the early warnings of Fascism and the persecution of Jews. Because she’d been widely known for her pacifism, she fell out of favor during WWII and after, even though she supported the war throughout. It wasn’t until the 1970s that this book was rediscovered and began its journey to the well-deserved status of classic.
It’s not enough for me for a book to be “important.” It has to be readable. This book is sometimes funny. It’s always observant. Brittain had a gift for recognizing the absurdity in life, and the ability to see her own self honestly. She writes beautifully of her privileged and sheltered life before the war, and even more achingly beautifully of the war itself and the people in it.
I didn’t learn until after reading the book that a movie based on it came out just last year. I watched it, and enjoyed it, particularly Alicia Vikander as Brittain and Kit Harington as her fiance Roland Leighton. It’s well-done, but it can’t touch the heart wrenching pain of the book. Read it.
Violets from Plug Street Wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head; It is strange they should be blue.)
Violets from Plug Street Wood- Think what they have meant to me- Life and Hope and Love and You (And you did not see them grow Where his mangled body lay Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so.)
Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land These I send in memory, Knowing You will understand.
Villanelle’ poem written by Roland Leighton to Vera Brittain.
