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Originally Posted by fantasyfan
A section I found deeply moving and beautifully written was the section in which Vera describes her psychological meltdown following the death of Roland.
I think, too, that her lover also had something of the devastating disillusion of the patriotic nobility of War that we see in Sassoon and Owen. I somehow doubt that the poetry of Rupert Brook would hold the same splendour for him or Vera that it did early in the conflict.
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In the context of Rupert Brooke, I always think of Kipling, who encapsulated this change in attitude in himself. The jingoist poet who wrote pamphlets for the War Propaganda Bureau and wangled a commission for his 16-year old son who had been rejected because of poor eyesight and would die at Loos, Kipling would write in 1918 the famous couplet:
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If any question why we died.
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
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And in 1924:
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I could not dig; I dare not rob;
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine young and defrauded young.
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To bring this back around to Brittain, at least somewhat, I was struck by a passage I didn't highlight at the time, about how her generation would no longer fall for the lies and that every nation was equally guilty. In 1933, the Oxford Union famously passed the notion,
that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. Of course most of them would, but there was a fatal delay at least in part because worn out nations looked cynically at all attempts to rally arms.