[desertblues]

Thanks all for the links!

Before I speak about the book, I read an interesting fact about World War I. It seems that the German put up an electric fence, the Wire of Death (375 km) on the border between the neutral Netherlands and the invaded Belgium. Several persons are electrocuted on that wire, many of them civilians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_of_Death

Spoiler:

The Netherlands are neutral, but it takes some maneuvering to remain that way, with the provocations from the other countries, such as trade embargoes. They are in a tight spot between England, Germany and Belgium. The German emperor Wilhelm II fleas to exile to the Netherlands in 1918. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Wilhelm II is to be prosecuted ‘ for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties. However, the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina refuses to extradite him, despite appeals from the Allies.
Modern historians blame this war not on the Germans; all countries are willing to go to war in 1914.

Some thoughts about this book while reading: I haven’t read Brittain’s diary as Issybird did, but I certainly intend to. I understand that the diary shows more details of Vera’s real story and is less of a construction than the Testament of Youth. Perhaps, as a survivor, Vera needs to reconstruct her memories in this way. Her war-experiences overshadow all and are her criterion for assessing all, even in retrospect.

Spoiler:

562.'Only gradually did I realize that the War had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of apprehension; in which love would seem threatened perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might, perhaps, have it again, but never again should I hold it.'

Therefore, I think, it is that I do miss certain aspects in the first part of her book, where she speaks about her youth. I find this too shallow, and feel that it doesn’t tell about the essence of her, except for her hunger to learn, to become someone. It strikes me as well that she hardly mentions the fun children do have or the foolish things they do.
She judges the Buxton of her youth and it’s view on the war with a very critical eye. I find her too critical in this aspect; what is more human than to try to translate dramatic events into more manageable pieces?

Spoiler:

131.'Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to lie. By the end of August, when Liege and Namur had fallen, and the misfortunes of the British Army were extending into the Retreat from Mons, the ladies of the Buxton élite had already set to work to provincialize the War.'

I do feel for her and her contemporaries when she talks about the last ‘care-free entertainment’ before the war. She describes beautifully the loss of her generation, the loss of her youth. As many of her young generation, she is propelled into a war she doesn’t want and matures too fast.

Spoiler:

120. 'I have written so much of Uppingham Speech Day because it was the one perfect summer idyll that I ever experienced, as well as my last care-free entertainment before the Flood. The lovely legacy of a vanished world, it is etched with minute precision on the tablets of my memory. Never again, for me and for my generation, was there to be any festival the joy of which no cloud would darken and no remembrance invalidate.'

In the second part of the book I applaud how she talks about her nursing in the war. As I mentioned before, it is believable and rings so very true. I can well imagine what she has gone through. For me this part of the book makes up for other deficiencies. She is a different person after her nursing of critical ill soldiers under unmerciful, harsh conditions; will never be the same.

Spoiler:

207.'On my first day at the hospital, a Scottish sergeant produced a comment of which the stark truth came finally home to me three summers afterwards.
‘We shall beat them,’ he said, ‘but they’ll break our hearts first!'

And just when one wonders how these nurses can bear the unending torrent of dying young and critical wounded men, Vera describes the their idealism. When reading this account I almost hear her disappointment at what follows after the war, and becomes the fundament for her pacifism.

Spoiler:

446. 'Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. When patriotism ‘wore threadbare’, when suspicion and doubt began to creep in, the more ardent and frequent was the periodic re-dedication, the more deliberate the self-induced conviction that our efforts were disinterested and our cause was just. Undoubtedly this state of mind was what anti-war propagandists call it - ‘hysterical exaltation’, ‘quasi-mystical, idealistic hysteria’ - but it had concrete results in stupendous patience, in superhuman endurance, in the constant re-affirmation of incredible courage. To refuse to acknowledge this is to underrate the power of those white angels which fight so naïvely on the side of destruction.'

B.t.w., I noticed that Vera hardly speaks about (other) famous war heroines, and I have come across some interesting ones: the famous British nurse Edith Cavell http://www.biographyonline.net/human...th-cavell.html , the courageous Australian Olive May King http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/king-olive-may-6962 or the Scottish doctor Elsie Ingles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsie_Inglis

She is less harsh on the German enemy than on the Buxton of her younger years. And I didn’t realize before that the Treaty of Versailles could have had that much influence on the young generation that lived the First World War, even if Vera doesn’t actually read it’s articles.

Spoiler:

563.'the beaten, blockaded enemy pay the cost of the War. For me the ‘Huns’ were then, and always, the patient, stoical Germans whom I had nursed in France, and I did not like to read of them being deprived of their Navy, and their Colonies, and their coal-fields in Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley, while their children starved and froze for lack of food and fuel. So, when the text of the Treaty of Versailles was published in May, after I had returned to Oxford, I deliberately refrained from reading it; I was beginning already to suspect that my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed, and I did not want to know the details of that betrayal.'

The disappointment in the Treaty of Versailles and the betrayal of society afterwards seems to have set her on the path for a search of the meaning of life; at an too early age.

Spoiler:

565.’ We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence; our lives, and our children’s lives, will be rational, balanced, well-proportioned, to exactly the extent that we recognize this fundamental truth. It may be that our generation will go down in history as the first to understand that not a single man or woman can now live in disregarding isolation from his or her world. I don’t know yet what I can do, I concluded, to help all this to happen, but at least I can begin by trying to understand where humanity failed and civilization went wrong. If only I and a few other people succeed in this, it may be worthwhile that our lives have been lived; it may even be worthwhile that the lives of the others have been laid down. Perhaps that’s really why, when they died, I was left behind.'

The world is changed after this war. It is the end of three empires, the Austran-Hungarian, the German and the Russian. For the women however, things don’t change that much. The women are more confident after the war; dresses in shorter skirts, cut their hair, smoke and frequent café’s, but in their professional life they are discriminated against for years to come.
It must have been devastating for women, who don't grow up with the morals of the Victorian age but are formed in the war, to realize that society isn’t waiting for their input. And in effect, for women some things change, but not as quickly as they would like. For example, English women factory workers during the war are being paid about half of the salary of the men, and have to get back to their kitchens afterwards.

Spoiler:

684 'during the wartime preoccupation with ‘heroes’, it rose again directly after the War owing to the fact that, unlike men, they had inconsiderately failed to die in large numbers. The reason universally given for limiting the vote to women over thirty was that the complete enfranchisement of adult women would have meant a preponderant feminine vote.
This excessive female population was habitually described, none too flatteringly, as ‘superfluous’,'
685.'As a generation of women we were now sophisticated to an extent which was revolutionary when compared with the romantic ignorance of 1914. Where we had once spoken with polite evasion of ‘a certain condition’, ‘a certain profession’, we now unblushingly used the words ‘pregnancy’ and ‘prostitution’.

It is very interesting to read about her pacifism, the Congresses she visits and so on in the last section of this book. However, I prefer the middle part, where she writes about her work as a VAD. This is the most authentic piece about herself, I feel.

Once married, Vera paints her husband in a mellow, romantic light, but he must have been a disappointment for her in her later years. She yields to his remarks on her book and changes parts of it. (!!) I find this difficult to believe of a woman who has gone through difficult times in the war and has made her way in life, despite many obstructions.

Spoiler:

In his introduction of the book, Bostridge speaks about 'the strong objections of her husband, the political scientist George Catlin, to his own appearance in the book’s last chapter. Catlin scrawled his comments in the margins of the typescript: ‘intolerable’, ‘horrible’, ‘pretty terrible’. (…) Believing that his wife’s book would hold him up to ridicule among his academic colleagues - not least, one suspects, because of the account of the continuing importance to her of her intimate friendship with Winifred Holtby - he begged Brittain to make changes to certain passages, and prayed that ‘this spotlight’ would pass swiftly. She complied by reducing him to a more shadowy figure in the final draft, though she bitterly regretted that the theme of her post-war resurrection, symbolized by her marriage, had been irretrievably weakened.'