by Dylan Perles

The Destabilizing Power of the Damaged Body in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir, Testament of Youth, chronicles her experiences during World War I in part through the transcription of epistolary exchanges between Brittain and her fiancé Roland Leighton. He writes from the front lines, she from the hospital where she attends wounded soldiers. In one of these exchanges, Roland expresses doubt in the war for the first time, claiming that war is only “beautiful” in the “abstract.” Brittain replies, “Even War must end some time, and perhaps if we are alive in three or four years’ time, we may recover the hidden childhood again and find that after all the dust and ashes which covered it haven’t spoiled it much” (172). Unfortunately for Brittain, her optimism would fade as the war progressed until it was not only spoiled, but destroyed. Due to the expansive nature of Brittain’s memoir, which covers the pre-war years through the aftermath of the Great War, readers can track Brittain’s changing ideologies surrounding warfare and witness her transformation from a war-supporting nationalist to a pacifist who dedicated the remainder of her life to the anti-war movement.

I posit that the destabilizing power of the damaged body is the cause of such an abrupt shift. In terms of scale, technology, death, and injury tolls, World War I represented an unprecedented form of warfare. The First World War saw the implementation of chemical and aerial warfare for the first time in human history and included countless technological advancements such as mustard gas, explosive shells, flame throwers, tanks, fighter planes, and zeppelins, which left millions dead, wounded, and traumatized. As Caroline Sánchez-Palencia Carazo concludes, “The first modern world-scale conflict thus opened up an entirely new dimension of suffering to both victims and witnesses” (3). Brittain’s prolonged exposure to such unprecedented bodily suffering poisoned her against warfare. In her 1980 book Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva claims that the sight of a mangled body or a corpse creates a horror response because it is “death infecting life” (4). Kristeva’s argument about the polluting power of the damaged body, or what she calls the “abject,” can explain Brittain’s growing disillusionment with the war.  In the three sections that follow, I will explore Brittain’s changing perception of the so-called Great War, beginning with Brittain’s early glamorized view of war and the damaged body, through the pivotal moment of the return of Roland’s kit after his death, and ending with Brittain’s mounting resentment of the war after Roland’s death as she witnesses the comparable bodily suffering of other soldiers.

Part I.  “The Sacred Glamor of Nursing”:  The Romanticization of War and the Damaged Body

Like many British citizens in 1914, Brittain was not initially hostile to the war effort. In an August 1, 1914 diary entry Brittain writes, “According to the paper this morning, the last hope of peace is about to be abandoned, and Germany is mobilizing. I went up to the tennis club” (Brittain CY 83). Brittain’s tone is nonchalant, even bordering on indifference. She expresses interest in the upcoming fighting, but the international conflict is not her primary concern. She spends the remainder of the entry cataloging the events of her day with no additional mention of the impending war. In a diary entry dated two days later, Brittain’s tone shifts not to fear, but excitement: “To-day has been far too exciting to enable me to feel at all like sleep – in fact it is one of the most thrilling I have ever lived through, though without doubt there are many more to come. That which has been so long anticipated by some & scoffed at by others has come to pass at last – Armageddon in Europe!” (84). The tone, the diction, the exclamation point all guide the reader to the assumption that a naive, 20-year-old Brittain was pulled into the glamor of war. The thrill was so palpable that she even showed her beloved brother Edward appeals in The London Times and The Chronicle calling for able-bodied unmarried men ages 18-30 to join the army. Edward went to apply that night (88). Brittain lamented that she could not sign up herself, so, eager to do her part for the war effort, she ended her studies at Oxford to volunteer in a hospital which she deemed the “the next best thing” (Brittain 213). Brittain recollects that she threw herself into the most gruesome tasks (emptying bed-pans, washing greasy dishes, disposing of “odoriferous dressings”) in order to feel as connected to the front as possible. When adapting her wartime diaries into her memoir, Brittain reflects that she became swept up in the “sacred glamor” of nursing that she welcomed with the “fervor of a religious devotee” (166).

Brittain’s enthusiasm for the war and her beloved “British Tommys” caused her to participate in the generational romanticization of the wounded soldier as the masculine ideal. While seated at dinner with Roland, who was leaving soon for the front, she asks him if he would choose to die in battle if he were given the opportunity to select the circumstances of his death. Roland responds that while he does not wish to die, if he must, he would choose a valiant death in the thick of battle: “I should hate to go all through this War without being wounded at all; I should want something to prove that I had been in action” (116). For Roland, death is not ideal, but a wound is a necessity to prove that he is a soldier worthy of his country and not one of the “effeminate” men he despises (116, 166). Brittain became a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse soon after Roland left for France. She then echoes Roland’s romanization of the hypothetical wound and requests in a letter, “[I]f you must get wounded, try & postpone it until August, by which time I might be efficient enough to help to look after you” (Acton 252). A few months later, Brittain wistfully idealizes the possibility of caring for a wounded Roland herself, reflecting that it would be “too good to think of” and straight from a “sensational novel” (252). A concern for Roland’s personal safety is absent from these daydreams. Instead, Brittain focuses on the romantic characterization of the wounded male body with herself as its benevolent caregiver. At this point in the war, a wounded Roland symbolized valor and excellence. Tragically for both him and Brittain, the symbol will lose its aura after it is too late.

At the beginning of the war, the “sacred glamor” that Brittain describes extended beyond the practice of nursing the wounded bodies over which she presided. The wounded men in her care experience a sort of magical transference in which each man becomes an extension of Roland. In a diary entry written shortly after she begins her work at Devonshire Hospital, Brittain chronologically lists the tasks she performed and the men she helped. Brittain professes that when she looks after a solider it is like “nursing Roland by proxy,” whereby each man transforms into the “Beloved One” (Brittain CY 215). The phrase “nursing Roland by proxy” is one of the only phrases that survives the adaptation from diary to memoir, indicating the lasting significance of such a sentiment to Brittain even eighteen years later (Das 208).

Connected to the glamorized images of the wounded male bodies are the gender roles that such images complicate. Within the confines of the hospital, power shifts from the soldier to the nurse as the men’s bodies enter into the care of the women (Carazo 6). Testament of Youth demonstrates that the shift in power dynamics was just as jarring to the women as it was to the men, especially for the young V.A.D.s with no prior medical experience. Coming of age in an upper-middle-class English family meant that Brittain was raised to uphold certain feminine ideals which carried over from the Victorian era. After becoming a V.A.D., Brittain traded her sheltered and gendered upbringing for a world that was the exact opposite. For the first time in her life, Brittain was able to admire the male form: “In the early days of the War the majority of soldier-patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side” (Brittain 166). After being an unintentional voyeur of naked men for the first time in her life, it is no wonder that Brittain credited her time as a V.A.D. with the release of her “sexual inhibitions” as the male form became demystified (Das 207).

Part II.  “They Smell of Death; They Are Not Roland”:  The Abjected Corpse (Or Lack Thereof)

Brittain initially idealized the wounded male body (and by extension the war in general) during the first phase of the war. However, she eventually became hardened by the constant death and destruction to which she was subjected. As a result, she began to look at soldier’s (often permanently) damaged bodies not with veneration but with a horror of the abject. Abjection is a natural response to push away that which we find revolting or disturbing, something that threatens our daily life. According to Kristeva, a corpse is a prime example of the abject; a symbolic representation of death (such as a flat encephalogram) does not invoke the same horror response because it only signifies death. Blood, a wound, and, of course, a corpse is death in a tangible, bodily state which causes a horror response because it forces us to see the thin boundary between the living (the self) and the dead (the other) (Kristeva 3). Or, as Allyson Booth posits, “A corpse represents the conflation of absence and presence, embodying both proof that this person is here and proof that this person will never be here again” (4).  One notable paradigm of the abject “corpse” occurs when, after his death, Roland’s kit is returned to his grieving family. The kit brings about a dramatic change in Brittain’s perspective on the wounded and serves as a turning point in the story of her growing disillusionment with the war effort.

The moment in which Roland’s kit is returned to Brittain requires an understanding of the “war culture” of the first industrial global conflict, or what historian Ross Wilson identifies as “the means by which individuals, groups, and wider societies came to endure and understand the presence of the war in their lives” (40). The “war culture” of the period prior to the outbreak of World War I demanded the burial of the deceased. People of all classes would bury the returned body of their loved ones as a way both to accept and to find peace in their deaths. However, one crucial component of World War I war culture was the lack of bodies sent home. Due to the unprecedented carnage, the British government in 1916 decided that families no longer had the right to demand the bodies of their deceased loved ones. Instead, the soldier’s body was buried where it fell along the Western front. The bodies at the front were  buried near the trenches in cemetery plots in France and Belgium or behind the lines, even on the battlefield itself (Booth 1). As a result, “for the families of soldiers killed at the front, death was initially not a corpse at all, but a series of verbal descriptions” (2).  As a result, Booth coins the term “corpselessness” to describe the disconnect between civilians and the dead. For countless grieving families, including the Leightons, a returned kit belonging to the recently deceased was the nearest thing they had to a corpse. In the absence of a corpse, the kit becomes the abject.

Brittain remembers that the site of Roland’s bloody kit filled everyone with a “helpless distress” and a sense of “horror” (Brittain 251). Reeling from grief, Roland’s mother is plunged into the realm of the abject: “Take those clothes away… and don’t let me see them again: I must either burn or bury them. They smell of death; they are not Roland; they even seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamor. I won’t have anything more to do with them!” (252). A telegram bearing the news of Roland’s passing is functionally the same as Kristeva’s “flat encephalogram”–it is a symbolic death as opposed to an even more disturbing material death. What proves traumatic to Roland’s family about the presence of the kit is the way it makes the violent nature of his death palpable, leached of the “glamor” of his war-time heroism. Chipper and nationalistic propaganda served as the only representation of the conflict to which a civilian like Mrs. Leighton was exposed. Such accounts intentionally glossed over the authentic war experience which was, in reality, dark, dirty, violent, and traumatic. It was no wonder that a kit stained with blood and smelling like “graveyards” and “death” was so jarring to the grieving mother. Not only was her son killed, her glamorized view of the war in general was also ripped from her. Desperate to find her footing on this new terrain, Mrs. Leighton must recoil from the abject nature of the kit to stop herself from sinking even deeper into despair. Booth claims that the “corpselessness” of World War I meant that

[c]ivilians were in a position to speak about war and to speak about death without ever seeing the war dead. The experience may have been inaccessible, but the language never was. Civilians were therefore able to maintain a consistent vocabulary for talking about war throughout its duration: never having to confront its grisly details, they were never forced to modify their notions of “honor” or “heroism.” (Booth 1)

While the above may be true for some, it was not the case for Mrs. Leighton (and others) because she was forced to experience first-hand the gory and material effects of warfare even without the presence of her son’s body.

As a V.A.D., Britain was intimately aware of the violence that so stunned Mrs. Leighton, but that did not prevent Brittain from experiencing the abjection of Roland’s kit in her own way. The heartbreaking account of the return of Roland’s kit cited in the previous paragraph is located in her wartime memoir Testament of Youth, which was published in 1933, fifteen years after the war ended and eighteen years after Roland was killed. Brittain’s immediate response to the returned kit appears in Chronicle of Youth, her wartime diary published posthumously in 1982. The entry dated January 13, 1916 is surprisingly detached and lacking in emotion:

There were his clothes… and underclothing & accessories of various descriptions… All that was left of his toilet luxuries came back…  scented soap, solidified Eau-de-Cologne etc. We no longer wondered why he wanted them. One wants the most expensive things money can buy to combat that corruption…. The only things untouched by damp or mud or mold were my photographs, & his leather cigarette case, with a few cigarettes, a tiny photo of his Mother & George Meredith, & three little snapshots Miss Bevron took of us, inside… There was his haversack filled with letters… (Brittain CY 305)

Brittain’s diary entry is short and the bulk of it is devoted to an itemized list of everything in the kit. She continues by listing every person that Roland had a letter from and claiming that the “worst” things she and Mrs. Leighton found were a few unpaid bills (Brittain 306). The brief lines in which Brittain reflects that these items were once warmed by Roland’s body when he was still alive are perhaps the only moments in which the heartbroken fiancé shines through. There is no mention of Mrs. Leighton’s anguished cries or the villanelle that moved Brittain to tears in Testament of Youth. Though not as dramatic as Mrs. Leighton, Brittain’s itemized metonymy of Roland is also a response to abjection as she too pushes away that which she finds traumatic. Brittain’s displacement reveals the degree of her suffering. Acton claims that nursing diaries, unlike memoirs, have a tendency to be more graphic in their descriptions of emotional and physical pain because they are not subject to the editing process (266). Brittain’s diary entry following Roland’s death presents us with the antithesis of Acton’s claim. Perhaps the trauma is so intense that Brittain’s only response is to gain distance from the kit in all of its abjection even in the midst of private reflection.

The destabilizing power of Roland’s returned kit acts as a turning point for Brittain’s attitude toward the war, and she becomes unable to separate Roland’s death from the hypothetical death of her brother. Kristeva describes the corpse as “death infecting life” because seeing a corpse reminds us of our own mortality (4). She elaborates that abjection is a method of self-preservation because it allows us to “permanently thrust aside” what we must “in order to live” (3). Essentially, we need to expel the image of the corpse in order to remain in the realm of the living. For Brittain, her anxieties surrounding mortality are not about herself, but about the men she loves in the trenches, especially her brother Edward. Even in the wake of receiving her fiancé’s bloodied kit, Brittain is still unable to separate her sorrow for Roland from her fears about Edward. She reflects that she is glad that Edward was not there to see Roland’s kit because he too might be sent to the front some day and she would not want him to be “overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory” (Brittain 251). To Brittain, Roland’s kit not only infects her own life, but potentially Edward’s as well.

Finally, although Brittain is able to “thrust aside” her pain in order to continue her work, she is never again “optimistic” about the front after Roland’s death (Brittain 253). Kristeva argues that close contact with death is so unsettling because it threatens the border between life and death, safety and danger, understanding and confusion, order and chaos. In the weeks after Roland’s death, Brittain embarks on a quest for meaning, writing to anybody she can think of for information about Roland’s final moments in order to discover a reason or purpose for his death. Brittain discovers that Roland died in agony after being shot by a sniper while serving as a member of a wire-cutting party, a routine job that he and his fellow soldiers had performed countless times without incident (241). Roland Leighton, who dreamed, if he must die, of being found “dead in a trench at dawn,” and spoke of his desire to have a meaningful, heroic death, was killed in one of the least climactic ways possible (117). Desperate to find meaning in her beloved’s death, Brittain wrote in her diary, “All heroism is to a certain extent unnecessary from a purely utilitarian point of view… But heroism means something infinitely greater and finer, even if less practical, than just… doing one’s exact, stereotyped duty” (Brittain CY 243). Here we see Brittain trying, but ultimately failing, to find meaning in Roland’s death and, by extension, the war itself. The romantic wounded body that Brittain was so ready to glamorize at the start of the war is gone. All that remains is grief, trauma, and a growing disillusionment with the war.

Part III. “Men Without Faces, Without Eyes, Without Limbs”:  Loss of Faith Through Bodily Suffering

For Brittain, the image of the maimed soldier shifted from the romanticized ideal to the abject, registering the corporeal consequence of an unjust war. The dying body on the operating table is no longer a necessary sacrifice in the name of nationalism, it is no longer a symbol of masculinity and heroism, it is no longer a handsome Tommy reanimated by the female gaze. The dying body simply is what it is: dying. The magical transference of any wounded soldier for Roland that Brittain enacts with a romantic fervor at the start of the war takes on an entirely new form. Shortly after Roland’s death, Brittain writes an uncharacteristically graphic diary entry:

I got back just in time for a small operation in the ward – the cutting of an abscess in Holland’s thigh… All I had to do was to hold the hand lamp… & was thus saved from the embarrassment of handling instruments etc. But all the time my mind was with that operation at Louvencourt; it was Roland I saw struggling under the anesthetic with His beautiful eyes closed and his sturdy limbs all helpless; it was from Roland’s wound that I saw the blood pour out in a scarlet stream (Brittain CY 322).

Through Brittain’s diary entry, we see that the substitution of an unknown soldier for Roland has a disastrous effect rather than a calming one. “Beautiful eyes” and “sturdy limbs” are juxtaposed with the language of suffering: “abscess”, “messy”, “blood”, and, most importantly, “helpless.” Unable to separate the trauma of Roland’s death from the general trauma of war, Brittain loses faith in the nation’s war ideology.

After this pivotal moment, the language of war becomes a catalog of mangled limbs and damaged bodies. “After the Somme,” Brittain reflects, “I had seen men without faces, without eyes, without limbs, men almost disemboweled, men with hideous truncated stumps of bodies” (339). Brittain’s frantic list of injuries reveals the destabilizing aura of a body that has been eternally altered in the most horrific ways. It also provides insight into Brittain’s changing understanding of the “war culture” in which she finds herself. The bodily alterations that Brittain lists are so frightening to her because they seem to strip the men of their humanity. The wounded men in Brittain’s care have lost their sight, their sense of smell, their ability to touch: all things that allow people to interact with the world around them. For Brittain, the sight of a vital body tipping towards lifelessness proves terrifying as she watches men become mere objects devoid of sensory responses and basic human interaction.

To further understand Brittain’s anxiety we must once again turn to Kristeva. Kristeva claims that it is not merely the sensation of disgust that produces abjection but a disgust that stems from someone or something that disturbs or disrupts “identity,” “system”, and “order”—something “beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (5, 1). Kristeva evokes the example of criminals, arguing that when people commit a crime, especially a premeditated crime, they embody the abject because they act against the code of laws that mandate how citizens ought to behave in a society (4). In the case of Brittain’s wounded soldiers, it is not a premeditated rejection of societal norms, but a bodily divergence from vitality that invokes Brittain’s horror. The trauma she endures in the face of unprecedented bodily damage echoes the experiences documented by soldiers serving at the front. Sidney Rogerson, serving as an Officer in the 2nd Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, recalled the debilitating sight of a body that was reduced to “unrecognizable pieces” after shrapnel and shells caused unsalvageable damage: “Men do not easily or soon throw off the shock of seeing all that could be found of their comrades carried down for burial in one ground sheet” (Wilson 31).

As the war crawled dejectedly to a close, resentment and outright condemnation of the war reached its height among the ranks. Booth references an account from a subaltern who claimed that the mangled bodies he witnessed at Gallipoli caused him to break from his original sense of nationalistic duty. He claimed that all expressions of “heroism” and “glory” were eternally tainted by the sight of “vigorous young bodies” turned into “objects of horror” (2-3). Brittain shared the same disillusionment. Towards the end of the wartime portion of her memoir, she offers one of her bitterest indictments of the continued war effort:

We have heaps of gassed cases at present… there are 10 in this ward alone. 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 – to say nothing of 10 cases – of mustard gas in its early stages – could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes – sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently – all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke (Brittain 395).

Brittain, usually so composed even when writing about emotional subjects, can barely contain her outrage at the comfortable men in charge calling for continued fighting no matter the cost. It is telling that Brittain grounds her plea in a depiction of bodily suffering. She, unlike the gluttonous, wealthy Majors in their scarlet uniforms à la Siegfried Sassoon’s “Base Details,” knows all too well what delaying the inevitable means. Gone is the Vera Brittain who disclosed that Germany had declared war in one sentence of a two-page diary entry describing her afternoon at the tennis club (Brittain 83). Gone is the Vera Brittain who, in 1914, feared not the war itself, but that the British government would declare England’s neutrality (Rintala 28). Gone is the Vera Brittain who looked at her younger brother in his uniform and reflected that it was hardly fair to keep her loved ones from the chance to die for their country (Brittain 133). That Vera Brittain died along with 20 million women and men who lost their lives during the war. In her place stands a heartbroken V.A.D. in bloodstained hospital garments pleading for the end of a war that had destroyed everything and everyone it touched. While looking back on her experiences, Brittain dejectedly reflects that “the war kills other things besides physical life” (Brittain 218). In the case of Vera Brittain, the war killed her sense of optimism and hope, her youth, and the belief that war is justified.

Historical treatments of trauma in the First World War have typically given pride of place to the soldiers. However, war-time diaries and memoirs of World War I such as Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth reveal that women were just as immersed in the trauma of war as men, especially those who served as nurses and V.A.D.s. Cathy Caruth coined the term “speaking trauma” in 1996 to describe how one person’s traumatic experience can speak to or impact that of another person, which “tells the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (Carazo 7). Carazo argues that Caruth’s diagnosis can be retroactively applied to Vera Brittain. Certainly the events described in Testament of Youth reveal the degree to which Brittain was herself traumatized by the unrelenting stream of death and bodily destruction that she bore witness to over the course of the Great War. It is no wonder, then, that Brittain found herself unable to participate in the civilian celebrations on Armistice Day. She recalls in her memoir that she only had the stomach to say “the War is over” instead of the congratulatory “we’ve won the War!” (Brittain 460). By the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, all four of the men that Brittain loved were dead: her fiancé Roland Leighton, her friends Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson, and finally her beloved brother Edward Brittain who died just a few months before the end of the war. The pain of losing so many important people and the trauma of serving as a V.A.D. caused Brittain to feel out of place surrounded by those who only experienced the war as civilians. However, instead of retreating into herself or refusing to serve a world that had taken so much from her, Brittain committed an additional act of heroism and used the horror of her experiences to try to heal Europe in the aftermath of the war. To do so, she confronted the abject horrors of the Great War hospital and thrust aside her own anguish so others might live. Brittain devoted the rest of her life to “piping for peace upon an indefinite series of platforms” (598) on behalf of the League of Nations, the Peace Pledge Union, and the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship to save as many people as she could from the bodily destruction that plagued her dreams and caused her to lose faith in the war in the first place. As a result, Brittain’s memoir becomes not just a testament of lost youth and bodily harm, but of the resilience of a young woman who ensured that her survival would not be in vain.

Works Cited

Acton, Carol. “Negotiating Injury and Masculinity in First World War Nurses’ Writing.” First World War Nursing : New Perspectives, edited by Alison S. Fell et.al, 2013, pp. 252-283.

Booth, Allyson. “Figuring the Absent Corpse: Strategies of Representation in World War I.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal., vol. 26, no. 1, University of Manitoba Press, 1993, pp. 69–85.

Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913-1917. Morrow, 1982.

—. Testament of Youth. Penguin Books, 2005.

Das, Santanu. “The Operating Theater.” Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 204-228.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez,  Columbia UP, 1982.

Rintala, Marvin. “Chronicler of a Generation: Vera Brittain’s Testament.” Journal of Political &  Military Sociology, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1984, pp. 23–35..

Sánchez-Palencia Carazo, Carolina. “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 21.1, 2019, pp. 1-11.

Wilson, Ross. “The Burial of the Dead: The British Army on the Western Front, 1914-18.” War & Society, vol. 31, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 22–41.