Incessant Conflict: Vera Brittain’s Witness to the Female Trauma of the Great War 

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is a memoir lauded for its representation of the Lost Generation while also being a classic piece of feminist literature. When it was first published in 1933, reviews fixated on the sensationalism of the memoir, as Brittain certainly had a striking war experience. She left Oxford after one year to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, working in exotic places such as Malta and France where “the war stood no farther away from her than a hand’s breadth.”1 She also experienced unspeakable tragedies, losing her fiancé, brother, and two of her closest friends to the war. Her portrayal of these tragedies resonated with the public since an estimated 4.5 million British civilians also lost a close relative during the war.2 Many scholars ascribe a therapeutic meaning to Testament of Youth, claiming that Brittain wrote it to eulogize her beloved dead and immortalize them through her words. Fewer address the quality of her representation of women who left home to join the war effort. Through Testament of Youth, Brittain gives witness to the unique trauma endured by female nurses during the Great War. Her descriptions of the undervalued nature of nursing, the incomprehensibility of the chasm between her work and the home front, and thus the tension with her family, and the struggle of grieving her dead while remaining actively engaged in the war reveal the overlooked wartime trauma endured by these women. 

Vera Brittain was born on December 29, 1893, to a comfortable, middle-class family. She spent her childhood in the Pottery towns of England, but her family eventually settled in Buxton, Derbyshire, to send Vera and her brother to “‘good’ day schools.”3 As her love for learning grew, so did her discontent with her provincial existence. As she writes in Testament of Youth: 

Once I went away to school and learnt—even though from a distance that filled me with dismay—what far countries of loveliness, and learning, and discovery, and social relationship based upon enduring values, lay beyond those solid provincial walls which enclosed the stuffiness of complacent bourgeoisdom so securely within themselves, my discontent kindled until I determined somehow to break through them to the paradise of sweetness and light which I firmly believed awaited me in the south.4

This excerpt captures the spirit of her academic idealism and identifies the location for the fulfillment of these dreams— Oxford. This dream was planted at St. Miriam’s, a girls’ school run by Vera’s aunt and another college-educated headmistress. At St. Miriam’s, she was introduced to feminist ideas through one of her teachers; however, the ultimate goal of this education was to transform her into an “ornament to society.”5 Vera and her brother were of the generation that grew up in the shadow of the Victorian era. Technically speaking, they came of age in the Edwardian era, but their provincial, middle-class status meant they were raised thoroughly according to Victorian standards. Vera’s feminist education was entirely accidental to the institution’s stated goal of preparing gentlemen’s daughters for society and, by extension, marriage. 

Marriage was not only a social institution but also a financial prospect at the time. Women were financially dependent on the men in their lives and were perceived as burdens once they reached “the twilight state of aunthood.”6 The specter of the Victorian Aunt, the old, boorish spinster who sat in the corner, haunted girls of Vera’s generation. Despite this, single women were gaining independence by the turn of the twentieth century, with inventions such as the bicycle and images such as the Gibson Girl transforming the public image of unmarried women.7 This nouveau image of single life had yet to reach Buxton, or at least was not embraced by fashionable society. Thus, Brittain’s ardent vexation with the confines of her life as a young woman drove her to do the improbable. She worked ceaselessly to convince her father to let her attend college, where she knew she could finally be intellectually stimulated. Despite studying relentlessly, winning an exhibition, and entering the notoriously difficult women’s college of Somerville, the advent of the Great War jeopardized this dream. It was only because of her brother Edward’s vow that “if [Vera] could not be sent to Oxford he wouldn’t go either” that her father relented and granted her permission to leave home.8 

Brittain’s brother Edward, two years her junior, was her “dearest companion of those brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation.”9 She describes him as charming and easygoing but with a conviction under the surface “like a vein of flint in a soft rock.” He was “intelligent rather than intellectual,” and a passionate violinist and composer.10 He did well enough in school, but only really applied himself to music. Edward secretly planned to study music as well as classics at Oxford. Despite this “fitful interest in all non-musical subjects, the idea of refusing Edward a university education never so much as crossed [her] father’s mind.” Brittain claims her deep affection for her brother and his constant support of her scholastic dreams prevented any personal resentment from forming, but she despised the reality that “in our family...what mattered was not the quality of the work, but the sex of the worker.”11 

Through her brother, Brittain became close friends with his schoolfellows Roland Leighton, Victor Richardson, and Geoffrey Thurlow. She exchanged countless letters with all four before and during the war, but her letters with Roland hold a place of prominence due to their engagement in August 1915. From the start of their courtship, their relationship was one of intense intellectualism and deep emotional connection. They bonded over their shared stances on literature, religion, poetry, and feminism.12 Roland was initially safe from frontline duty due to his poor eyesight, which was a great relief to Brittain. However, once Roland was eventually sent to the front, she became distraught with worry. She writes that: 

I wanted very badly to be heroic—or at any rate to seem heroic to myself—so I tried hard to rationalize my grief. “‘I felt,” I endeavored subsequently to assure myself, “a weak and cowardly person....to shrink from my share in the Universal Sorrow. After all it was only right that I should have to suffer too, that I had no longer an impersonal indifference to set me apart from the thousands of breaking hearts in England to-day. It was my part to face the possibility of a ruined future with the same courage that he is going to face death.”13 

With that conviction, Brittain took a leave of absence from Oxford and joined the war effort as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse. 

British society did not perceive women’s work as particularly essential or heroic. One poster from the time, depicting the various ways society participated in the war effort, visually presented the Boy Scouts before female nurses, thus illustrating through this hierarchy of proximity to the front lines that young boys were more vital than adult women.14 Few people outside the hospitals had any real idea of what the V.A.D. nurses did, for the public’s perception of female volunteers was based on the über-patriotic women of towns such as Vera Brittain’s own Buxton, who formed volunteer corps that “proudly drilled and marched about the town in uniform, though none of them know what precisely was the object of all this activity.”15 Male war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Rupert Brooke derided “women as part of the complacent masses perpetuating and romanticizing the conflict in their naïve imagination.”16 

Many women did embrace the national narrative that glorified the war as a righteous crusade, expressing excitement upon reaching the front as ambulance drivers or vowing to suffer as the men did. In doing so, they defied the heteronormative expectations that women should have a passive attitude towards war, resulting in what scholars call “gender blurring.”17 Removed from the Continent and thus insulated from the contagious fervor of war, American nurses decried the war as “a specimen of men’s stupidity... a colossal piece of atavism—of return to the age of the tiger and the ape.”18 Evidently, women’s attitudes toward the war were just as complex as men’s, but a perception of the foolishly patriotic, yet delicate, women persisted. 

This one-dimensional perception of female involvement tainted scholarship about the war, for any attempts to value women’s service were limited by presenting a unified women’s experience autonomous from men’s.19 Paul Fussell’s revolutionary work The Great War and Modern Memory barely mentioned any female writers from the war. Fussell valorized the inherently male-coded physical experience of war, valuing and recognizing time in the trenches over any other capacity of service or war encounters.20 This insistence on the masculinity of the soldier's experience ultimately neglects the vital forms of service performed by men and women removed from the battlefront, a disparity that still negatively affects service members in non- combat roles today.21

*****

What exhausts women in wartime is not the strenuous and

unfamiliar tasks that fall upon them, nor even the hourly

stress of death for husband or lovers or brothers or sons; it

is the incessant conflict between personal and national

claims which wears out their energy and breaks their

spirit.22

The reality of wartime service as a V.A.D. nurse was much more complex than has been credited. The V.A.D. was an organization through which female civilians could offer their individual services to medical organizations in the United Kingdom and military hospitals abroad.23 This structure meant that volunteers like Brittain were simply placed where there was a need for hands, often working alongside and under the Red Cross and other internal hospital staff nurses. As Brittain herself explained, “‘The V.A.D. members were not . . . trained nurses; nor were they entrusted with trained nurses’ work except on occasions when the emergency was so great that no other course was open.’”24 That being said, her definition of ‘trained nurses’ work meant being the first one to tend to the wounded as they arrived. Her daily duties consisted of tending to the wounded individually while they recovered, changing bandages, patrolling the ward at night, and assisting the men with eating and cleaning themselves. As Brittain described in her diary, “Consequently I am Sister, V.A.D. and orderly all in one (somebody said the other day that no one less than God Almighty could give a correct definition of the job of a V.A.D.!)”25 

Within these hospitals, a shift of power from societal norms in the nurse-soldier relationship had occurred. As Carazo explains, “within the confined hospital environment, the men’s bodies do not belong to themselves, but to the women... not only [being] infantilized and carefully tended,” but “controlled and even aggressively penetrated” in the course of medical treatment.26 This upended the strictly patriarchal order of Victorian society, but then again, War necessarily undermines the “natural” order of all things. The V.A.D. nurses particularly existed in a sort of “No (Wo)Man’s Land, occupying the space between the home front and front lines, between civilian and soldier status, between life and death.”27 Their unique status as contracted individuals meant they endured the war without a unit of fellow servicemembers with whom they could bond and share the mental load of their experiences. Brittain herself worked in six different hospitals during the war, leaving behind almost all her acquaintances each time she transferred. This meant V.A.D. nurses were deprived of what Siegfried Sassoon described as the “Battalion Spirit,”28 an integral aspect of the official war propaganda which enticed many to join by “appealing to a grandiose sentiment of belonging to a group (battalion, army, nation or continent).”29 

While the V.A.D. nurses operated as contracted individuals, the British War Office recruited female doctors in April 1916, ultimately sending eighty-five to the Mediterranean island of Malta. Brittain herself nursed in Malta, having signed up for foreign service after her fiancé’s death. She envied the women doctors’ “complete freedom to associate with their male colleagues,” for the V.A.D nurses remained beholden to Victorian- era rules forbidding unauthorized male contact. It seemed the War Office “evidently regarded Malta--where there was now so little serious illness-as a suitable place for such a desperate experiment.”30 Despite being directly employed by the War Office, these female doctors were refused the rank, grading, uniforms, rations, or billeting allowance granted to their male counterparts. This resulted in the devaluation of their experience, for women could not rise in the military hierarchy and were thus continually outranked by and forced to obey inexperienced new arrivals simply because they were male. The Medical Women’s Federation mustered to rectify this inequality, bringing their claims all the way to Winston Churchill himself, the Secretary of State for War. Many members of the War Office sought to silence the women, for they “feared that if commissions were granted to women in the RAMC they would immediately be applied for in other branches of the army.”31 The War Office needn’t have worried about female doctors upending the masculinity of the military establishment, for, as Brittain revealed in Testament of Youth, most embraced the traditional belief “that their wisest course was to model themselves upon their male predecessors, thus tending to repeat some of men’s oldest mistakes and to reproduce their lop-sided values.”32 

Many women felt they had to reject their femininity and its traditionally associated values for their contributions to the war to be recognized in the same vein as the men. Thus, the war resulted in the masculinization of the female body via the militarization of dress, speech, organization, and writing. Many also felt they had to minimize their own experiences of trauma, for “worthiness on the front, as well as access to the vault of war memory, were awarded by proximity to trauma” by those at home and indeed the men in the military.33 Theorists today understand trauma on a vastly different level, recognizing that one did not have to be in the trenches to experience trauma, and noting that the very violation of norms inherent in war is traumatizing.34 

As a nurse, Brittain interacted with men in their most vulnerable states and witnessed the most horrific results of warfare every day. She existed in “a world in which life or death, victory or defeat, national survival or national extinction had been the sole issues,” something the “society where no one discussed anything but the price of butter and the incompetence of the latest ‘temporary’” could never fathom.35 It is impossible to accurately represent “the incontestable reality of the body in pain,” the reality that steeped every grueling hour of nursing, “and yet there exists the primary impulse to give testimony to the traumatic experience.”36 This desire to record, and thus work to understand, the suffering they witnessed placed nurses in direct opposition to the societal expectation of sang froid in their profession.37 The humanity of the nurses was often overlooked, as the perceived sanctity of the nursing profession overshadowed its arduous and traumatizing nature. As Brittain attested, “That’s just the trouble...it’s considered so holy that its organisers forget that nurses are just human beings, with human failings and human needs. Its regulations and its values are still so Victorian that we even have to do our work in fancy dress.”38 

With the lack of close companions on the job and family back home who could never understand, Brittain constantly wrote in her diary and to her brother Edward, her fiancé Roland, and her two close friends Victor and Geoffrey, all of whom were serving on the front lines. All four died during the war. Modern scholars recognize the psychological stress caused by the conflicting duality experienced by these nurses, as they participated in the war both as active participants, as nurses, and as passive spectators in mourning their dead.39

******

As the War continued to wear out strength and spirits, the middle-aged generation, having irrevocably yielded up its sons, began to lean with increasing weight upon its daughters.40 

While Brittain was consumed by her war work, life went on at home. What resulted was a growing chasm between the civilian and military-associated populations, for neither could fathom what the other was enduring. In “Feminist Witnessing and Social Difference,” Ilya Parkins applies the sociological concepts of “otherness” and “strangeness” to approach the estrangement between two subjects. Essentially, in any relationship between two parties, there exists an underlying conviction that the other is different, that there is an uncrossable chasm between these two existences. Parkins focuses on the heterosexual relationship between Vera and Roland, analyzing the incomprehensibility of the difference between their gendered experiences of war, but her theory can be applied to another binary.41 Jean Pickering emphasizes that the inherent wartime binary of “us” and “them” permeated all facets of life. From the outset of the war, “they” were the Germans, but as time progressed “they” became those at the base camp or the civilian population, essentially any “other.” This battlefield binary, as Pickering presents it, informed how Brittain viewed her life's struggles and can be used to approach the complex trauma stemming from the tensions between the nurses and their loved ones.42 

Just as the male and female war experiences were incomprehensibly different, so were the experiences of the civilian and military populations. It was widely acknowledged that the trench experience was something the home front could never truly fathom, yet nurses were not afforded this same understanding. As previously discussed, their experiences were discounted and undervalued since they were not in the trenches and did not have military ranking. Brittain’s status as a young woman also complicated matters, for her family still believed her beholden to their authority. Economically, Brittain had more financial independence than ever, but was still viewed as a dependent. This shifting power dynamic between young working women and their families further contributed to a sense of otherness between the two parties. It resulted in “a cultural estrangement from the other that is not widely recognized or validated as such.”43 As in romantic relationships, members of a family often feel that they will always understand the other due to their established bonds, but this assumption blinds them to their “inability to recognize or relate to the gendered contours of the other’s experience.”44 This is something Brittain began to process in the writing of her memoir. 

When reflecting upon her relationship with her brother, she revealed that “I sometimes wonder whether either of us troubled completely to understand the other apart from our very close mutual relationship.”45 As Parkins addresses, relationships as close as theirs can blind both parties to the actual gulf between them, causing trauma when the reality of these differences is revealed. The incomprehensibility of the differences between Brittain and her family created a unique sense of isolation and estrangement from home, for those on both sides did not understand what they did not understand about the other’s wartime experiences. 

The home front was no paradise, despite being removed from the harsh realities of military life. Civilians began suffering breakdowns from the stress of war, for factors as diverse as the shortage of supplies, the death of loved ones, or the pressure of keeping households and businesses running.46 As the war stretched on, several of Brittain’s female friends left their war work and returned home. Their letters to Brittain “revealed within the lines a prolonged battle against increasing domestic depression.”47 Her family wrote frequently of the increasing difficulties with servants, but Brittain dismissed these struggles as trite compared to her own gory reality. She admits having no real sense of “the state of acute neurasthenia into which poor food, constant anxiety, frequent air-raids and the shortage of all necessities were steadily driving middle-aged London.”48 

While Brittain was working in France, her mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Brittain immediately received a summons from her father who claimed, “Your mother and I can no longer manage without you... it is now your duty to leave France immediately and return to Kensington.”49 This ultimatum meant Brittain had to decide between her family and her career. Either she would break her military contract to return home, as extended leave would certainly not be granted in this circumstance, or she would forever alienate herself from her family by prioritizing her war work. Brittain agonized over this decision, knowing that her gender largely factored into her family’s demands. She wrote that “if I were dead, or a male, it would have to be settled without me,” and envied her brother’s “complete powerlessness to leave the Army” despite what happened at home. Ultimately, she bowed to her family’s demands and broke her contract.50 

The historical ideological positioning of women as “private entities” limited to the domestic sphere had been shattered by the necessity of more women entering the war workforce, although the gendered binary of public and private life persisted.51 Brittain's provincial upbringing was strongly influenced by the Victorian values of propriety and domesticity. While men’s public and private lives align with our current conceptions, a women’s private life was “not a personal life but a domestic life.”52 The example of courtship can clarify this distinction, for this seemingly personal matter was the subject of frequent comment by all members of the family.53 Thus, women’s personal lives were beholden to the greater sphere of familial power, even in the rapidly modernizing world. This precedent connects to Brittain’s frustration about being summoned home, for her brother had not been. Men generally did not have their “family, duty, and conscience ranged against profession, ambition, and achievement,” a reality under which Brittain chafed.54 

Kate Kennedy, in her study of female war writers driven by the deaths of their brothers, introduces the idea that many young women lived vicariously through their brothers. Families operating under the Victorian value system often defined their daughters in relation to their brothers. As Kennedy explains: 

The successful femininity of the sister is a reflection on her relationship with her brother; her identity as a woman is implicated. Her effect on her brother, limited as it is by the passivity that characterizes women’s expected sphere of influence, seems not to have the same fundamental association with his sense of manliness. In short, the sister is only a woman by virtue of her relationship with her brother.55 

This one-sided co-dependency, whether truly experienced by sisters or simply ascribed to them by society, adds complexity to sibling relationships of the war era. If a girl’s relationship with her brother was how she experienced the public world and the masculine side of herself, then losing him to the war resulted in a sort of death for a facet of herself, too.56

*****

The War was over; a new age was beginning;

but the dead were dead and would never return.57

One of the most recognized functions of Testament of Youth is as a memorial to Vera’s beloved dead, particularly her fiancé Roland and her brother Edward. Countless forms of media depict the generational experience of losing a lover to the trenches; an entire generation of “Surplus Women” could attest to this, but few represent the complex tragedy of losing a sibling.58 Brittain gives witness to this underrated form of bereavement caused by the war—the love she had for her own brother seeps off the pages of her memoir.59 As previously discussed, she was eventually allowed to attend Oxford in part due to Edward’s stubbornness that their father treat them equally, meaning she did not have to experience higher education vicariously through him. Despite this point of equality, their family perceived each of their children’s wartime service completely differently. Unexpectedly, the war warmed her parents’ attitudes toward higher education. They “took [her] reincarnation as a student entirely for granted,” and her father “was now as ready to send [her] there as any modern father who considers the safeguard of a profession to be as much the right of a daughter as of a son.”60 

Despite this transformation, Oxford was not the haven it had once been for Brittain. Regardless of its position as one of the most prestigious institutions of the Western world, its female students were told by the Bishop of London that they “were all destined to become the wives of ‘some good man.’”61 As insulting as this seems to our modern consciousness, it was also statistically untrue. According to the 1921 National Census, there were only 18,082,220 males in England and Wales for 19,803,022 females, creating a generation of “Surplus Women.”62 The media attacked these women and analyzed the damage their lack of marriage and sexual destiny had on society and the women’s own psyches.63 This hypocrisy reflected the widely accepted narrative that dying for one’s country was glorious and worthwhile but dismissed the genuine pain and grief felt by the survivors. Both the government and the public demonized anyone espousing rhetoric contrary to this narrative and overlooked the unique trauma women faced because of the war. As Brittain explained, she “represented neither a respect-worthy volunteer in a national cause nor a surviving victim of history’s cruelest catastrophe.”64 Testament of Youth provides representation for the female war trauma diminished and dismissed by society, an aspect of gender studies and history that deserves greater attention.

Endnotes

1 Theodore Hall, “War and the Woman.: A Narrative, ‘Testament

of Youth,’ by Vera Brittain,” Washington Post,

November 1933, SM10.

2 Kate Kennedy, “‘A Tribute to My Brother’: Women’s Literature

and Its Post-War Ghosts,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 8,

no. 1 (2015): 8.

3 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (New York: Penguin Books,

1933), 29.

4 Brittain, Testament, 31.

5 Ibid., 37.

6 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women

Survived Without Men after the First World War

(London: Viking, 2007), 29.

7 Nicholson, Singled Out, 30.

8 Brittain, Testament, 93

9 Ibid., 27.

10 Ibid., 57.

11 Ibid., 58.

12 Ibid., 82-4.

13 Ibid., 133.

14 Costel Coroban, “Conflicting Attitudes to the War in Europe in

Women’s Diaries from the Great War,” Revista

română de studii Baltice şi Nordice 12, no. 1 (2020): 57.

15 Brittain, Testament, 139.

16 Carolina Sanchez-Palencia Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics, and the

Body at War in Brittain, Borden, and Bagnold,” CLCWeb:

Comparative Literature and Culture 21, no. 1 (2019): 4.

17 Coroban, “Conflicting Attitudes,” 58.

18 Ibid., 54.

19 Richard Badenhausen, “Mourning through Memoir: Trauma,

Testimony, and Community in Vera Brittain’s

Testament of Youth,” Twentieth Century Literature 49, no. 4

(2003): 422.

20 Ibid., 421.

21 Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics,” 4.

22 Brittain, Testament, 422-23.

23 Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics,” 4.

24 Brittain, Testament, 410.

25 Ibid., 394.

26 Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics,” 6.

27 Badenhausen, “Mourning through Memoir,” 427.

28 Ibid.

29 Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics,” 8.

30 Brittain, Testament, 328.

31 Leah Leneman, “Medical Women in the First World War--

Ranking Nowhere,” BMJ 307, no. 6919 (1993): 1592- 3.

32 Brittain, Testament, 328.

33 Coroban, “Conflicting Attitudes,” 59, 57.

34 Badenhausen, “Mourning through Memoir,” 425.

35 Brittain, Testament, 429.

36 Carazo, “Trauma, Ethics,” 2.

37 Coroban, “Conflicting Attitudes,” 63.

38 Brittain, Testament, 453.

39 Badenhausen, “Mourning through Memoir,” 422.

40 Brittain, Testament, 401.

41 Ilya Parkins, “Feminist Witnessing and Social Difference: The

Trauma of Heterosexual Otherness in Vera Brittain’s Testament of

Youth,” Women’s Studies 36, no. 2 (2007): 98.

42 Jean Pickering, “On the Battlefield: Vera Brittain’s Testament

of Youth,” Women’s Studies 13, nos. 1-2 (1986): 76.

43 Parkins, “Feminist Witnessing,” 98. Emphasis in the original.

44 Ibid.

45 Brittain, Testament, 56.

46 Kennedy, “A Tribute,” 14.

47 Brittain, Testament, 393.

48 Ibid.,

49 Ibid., 421.

50 Ibid., 422.

51 Parkins, “Feminist Witnessing,” 96.

52 Pickering, “On the Battlefield,” 78.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 79.

55 Kennedy, “A Tribute,” 17.

56 Ibid., 18.

57 Brittain, Testament, 463.

58 Nicholson, Singled Out, 22.

59 Kennedy, “A Tribute,” 8.

60 Brittain, Testament, 474.

61 Ibid., 485.

62 Nicholson, Singled Out, 22.

63 Ibid., 38.

64 Brittain, Testament, 493.