Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 82

29 December 1893—29 March 1970

Never the Same Person Again

Youth should be a time of exuberance, love, and anticipation. But for those generations whose youth is blighted by war—for the god of war especially devours the young—it becomes a time of despair. Killed on the battlefield or spiritually wounded back home, the youths who endure war are all victims of it.

One of the most gripping accounts of how war especially ruins the young is Vera Brittain’s 1933 Testament of Youth, a memoir of World War I. Vera and her only brother, Edward, grew up in a comfortable middle-class household. Like so many other members of their generation, they were patriotically enthusiastic when war erupted between the European powers in 1914. Edward and all his chums immediately enlisted in the army. Vera, regretting that she couldn’t follow them as a soldier, soon dropped out of university to train as a nurse. During the war years she served at military hospitals in London, Malta, and France.

It didn’t take long for Vera’s initial support for the war to sour. As she treated soldiers maimed by bullet and shell or burned by poison gas—her descriptions of their wounds are both ghastly and heartbreaking—she came to realize that her earlier notions of war had been romantic nonsense. After a particularly grueling night nursing gas-poisoned soldiers, she wrote, “I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case.” She sensed that the harsh reality of war was changing her. “I feel I shall never be the same person again,” she confessed, “and wonder if, when the war does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh. One day last week I came away from a really terrible amputation dressing I had been assisting at—it was the first after the operation—with my hands covered with blood and my mind full of a passionate fury at the wickedness of war, and I wished I had never been born.”

This was written in 1915, scarcely a year into the war. By the time the fighting finally ceased three years later, Vera had lost, one by one, her fiancé, her beloved brother, and three of her childhood friends. Her Testament of Youth was an effort to come to terms with the disaster that had befallen her and her generation, and that had robbed them of their youth.

After the war, Vera returned to university. She studied history in the hopes of understanding “how the whole calamity of the war had happened, to know why it had been possible for me and my contemporaries, through our own ignorance and others’ ingenuity, to be used, hypnotized and slaughtered.” She became a leading figure in the pacifist and feminist movements in England, wrote books, and acquired fame. But she never ceased mourning the lives—her own included, perhaps—that the war had consumed.