The Professor and Other Writings Page 3

  And as I started in, it all began coming back to me: the Head Girl self-righteousness; the smug rivalry with other women; the gruesome fascination with period bores like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Olive Schreiner. (In her wartime letters to the doomed Roland Leighton, her nineteen-year-old fiancé, Brittain is forever comparing their poetical puppy love to that of the unfortunately named “Lyndall and Waldo” in Story of an African Farm.) Nor did I find much at first to obviate my ill humor. I’ve got big irritable underlinings, I see, at just that point early in 1915 when Brittain, still at Somerville, contemplates enlisting as a VAD nurse:

  Janet Adie came to tea to help me learn to typewrite. She is feeling very busy because she now has the secretaryship of one of those soup-kitchen affairs on her shoulders. It does not sound very strenuous an occupation; these people who never had anything to do before don’t know the meaning of work…I was told I ought to join this & that & the other. Everyone seems to be so keen for me to give up one kind of work for another, & that less useful, but more understandable by them. The general idea seems to be that college is a kind of pleasant occupation which leads to nothing—least of all anything that might be useful when the results of war will cause even graver economic problems than the war itself. If only I can get some work at the Hospital in the summer. I wonder what they will say when they see me doing the nursing which seems to exhaust them all so utterly, & my college work as well! I always come out top in the end, & I always shall.

  Yet as I continued to read, something else began coming through too—something less rebarbative. I started noticing, amid all the boasts and bitchiness and careening ressentiment, a more vulnerable side to Brittain’s personality. I hadn’t remembered—at all—what a phobic and self-critical woman she was, or indeed how deeply she had had to struggle, throughout the First World War, with what she felt to be her own pusillanimity. Now among the myriad painful feelings the attacks of September 11 had evoked in me—grief, despair, outrage—perhaps the most shame-making had been a penetrating awareness of my own cowardice. I worried incessantly about crashes, bombs, sarin gas, throat slitting, eye gouging, burning, jumping, falling. I brooded over horrific illnesses—anthrax, smallpox, radiation sickness, plague—and imagined my own blood, teeming with bacteria, oozing thickly from my pores. I became afraid of bridges and tall buildings and the incendiary, blue-gold beauty of the city in which I lived. My childhood fear of flying revivified, I shed tears of self-disgust when I saw the pregnant Mrs. Beamer, whose husband had died on United Flight 93, take the same flight a few weeks later to show her resilience in the face of disaster. While straining to appear normal, I felt a vertiginous dread—of life itself—soar and frolic within me, like an evil biplane on the loose. I was not brave, it seemed, as men were, or even semi-stoical. I struggled with hysterical girlishness. It was an archaic and humiliating problem. I was female—and a wretched poltroon.

  Yet signs of similar struggle—against girl-frights of such magnitude that she “ached,” she said, “for a cold heart & a passionless indifference”—were everywhere in Vera Brittain’s journals. And perhaps because I was already alert to the theme, I found myself peculiarly affected by her testimony. I rapidly consumed the remaining diaries; reread Testament of Youth in a single great dollop; then turned to Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge’s excellent Brittain biography of 1995. Before I knew it, I was up to my ears again in Great War matériel, but this time with a difference. I was getting a weensy bit more honest. To confess in public that you are afraid of death—and violent death especially—is to break a powerful taboo. Simple people will pity you and say nothing; the sophisticated will accuse you of being insufferably bourgeois. (“Spirited men and women”—or so maintains the title character in Bellow’s Ravelstein—“were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death.”) Yet precisely in Brittain’s unsentimental revelation of her fear and candid hankering after the kind of physical bravery she saw in the men she knew at the front, I found not only a partial clue to the meaning of my war obsession, but a necessary insight into my own less admissible hopes and fears.

  Brittain’s own anxieties, to be sure, were to some degree part of a difficult family inheritance. As Berry and Bostridge point out, she was a delicate woman: small and gamine in appearance, even in her starched VAD uniform. (Her brother Edward, who won a Military Cross on the first day of the Somme and died in June 1918, a few days after my Uncle Newton, towers over her by at least a foot in family photographs.) And in many ways she was delicate in spirit, too. Insanity ran in the family—she worried greatly as an adult about a “bad, bad nervous inheritance” in the Brittain line—and she was prone all her life to irrational frights and fancies. In an unfinished autobiographical novel from the 1920s she recalls the panic produced in her as a child by the sight of a “leering” full moon:

  The little girl in the big armchair had gazed at it, tense with fear, till at last it grew into a face with two wicked eyes & an evilly grinning mouth. Unable to bear it any longer, she hid her face in the cushions, but only for a few moments; the moon had a dreadful fascination which impelled her, quite against her will, to look up at it again. This time the grin was wider than ever & one great eye, leering obscenely at her, suddenly closed in a tremendous & unmistakable wink. Four-year-old Virginia was not at any time remarkable in her courage…Flinging herself back into the chair, she burst into prolonged & piercing screams.

  Similar hallucinations plagued her later in life. In one of the stranger asides in Testament of Youth, she describes a “horrible delusion” she suffered after being demobilized in 1918. Returning to her studies at Somerville, traumatized and embittered by her war losses, she seemed to perceive, each time she looked at herself in the mirror, a “dark shadow” on her face, suggestive of a beard. For eighteen months she was tormented by this “sinister fungus” and feared she was becoming a witch. In the memoir she attributes the fantasy to the strain she was under and passes over it relatively quickly. (“I have since been told that hallucinations and dreams and insomnia are normal symptoms of over-fatigue and excessive strain, and that, had I consulted an intelligent doctor immediately after the war, I might have been spared the exhausting battle against nervous breakdown which I waged for 18 months.”) Yet one has a sense, here and elsewhere, of a woman painfully susceptible to mental distress. Despite her subsequent achievements as journalist, public speaker, and political activist—or so say Berry and Bostridge—Brittain had always “to fight hard for what little confidence she achieved, and even in old age the predominant impression she created among those meeting her for the first time was of a woman who seemed to be in a state of almost perpetual worry.”

  But cowardice, as Brittain herself knew well, was also something more or less imprinted on women. By coddling and patronizing its female members, society enforced in them a kind of physical timidity; then, with infuriating circularity, defined such timidity as effeminate and despicable. Both practically and philosophically, Brittain rebelled against the linkage. In Testament of Youth she recalls, broodingly enough, the violent “inferiority complex” she felt in the early days of the war with regard to her lover Roland. He had enlisted in the Norfolks and would soon have his courage “tested” in the most literal way possible. Yet while fearing for his safety, Brittain envied him the trial. When he admitted in a letter how proud he was to be going to the front—it relieved him of the appearance of a “cowardly shirking of my obvious duty”—she declared, with palpable chagrin, that “women get all the dreariness of war, and none of its exhilaration.” By “exhilaration” she meant, among other things, a certain exemption from self-contempt. Women got to hand out white feathers—notoriously—but the gesture took on its odium precisely because women themselves epitomized “cowardly shirking” so perfectly. They were the skulkers and moochers and tremulous babies of modern life, emasculated beings in need of protection, forbearance, and forgiveness.

  Everyone knows what Brittain did: made
herself as manly as possible by becoming a nurse on the Western Front. (Her subsequent beard-in-the-mirror fantasy suggests the psychic intensity of her rejection of conventional femininity.) It was as if by getting as close to the fighting as she could—within striking distance of long-range German artillery—she sought to subject herself to the same practical test of bravery imposed on Roland and her brother Edward. Her war diaries make unabashedly clear the impinging wish: to act as a man would and be emboldened thereby. “I had no idea she would get so thrilled as she seemed about the nursing,” she writes in 1915 after telling her classics tutor at Somerville that she is signing up for war service; “she seemed to put it quite on the level of a man’s deed by agreeing with me that I ought not to put the speedy starting of my career forward as an excuse, any more than a man should against enlisting.” Joining up was doing something “on a level” with a man—facing up to fear like a soldier—and “all part of the hard path I have assigned myself to tread.”

  Which is not to say that Brittain entirely mastered her fearfulness. During her two years of nursing she was often afraid, and sometimes abjectly so. On her way by ship to Malta, her first foreign posting, she dreaded being blown up by enemy mines. During an air raid on Etaples during the final German advance in 1918, her teeth “chattered with sheer terror.” But always there to sustain her was the faith that one might be inspirited—as if by magic—simply by mimicking, as far as possible, the stoic attitudes of men. Men had a certain mana, it seemed, a native supply of aplomb and insouciance that a courage-hungry woman might draw on. Blood transfusion technology, sadly, had yet to be perfected at the time of the First World War; thousands of soldiers who died from blood loss at casualty clearing stations might easily have been saved in later wars. Yet if hemoglobin could not be transfused, valor might be. By placing herself in harm’s way, or as near to it as she could get, Brittain seems to have hoped to absorb, as if by osmosis, the palpable gallantry of the men she loved and admired.

  After Roland’s death in 1915 by sniper bullet near Louvencourt, Brittain immediately elevated him, talismanically, to the role of chief exemplar and courage infuser. Since his death was less than glorious (he seems merely to have lifted his head up inopportunely while slithering on his stomach through No Man’s Land on a routine nighttime patrol), Brittain’s posthumous exaltation of him depended on some ambitious mental maneuvers. In the weeks after his death, she repeatedly sought to assure herself that despite the humiliating manner of his demise he was as brave an English warrior as any Arthurian knight. “I had another letter tonight from Roland’s servant,” she writes in February 1916,

  giving a few more illuminating details of His death. It proves Him conclusively not to have thrown His life away recklessly or needlessly. He was hit because he was the last man to leave the dangerous area for the comparative safety of the trench, and so was at the post where the Roland we worship would always have wished to be when he met Death face to face.

  “Worship” is the operative word. In Testament of Youth, Brittain presents herself as godless and disillusioned, but it is clear from the ardent tributes to Roland in the diaries that she viewed him, for a time at least, as a sort of new Jesus Christ, whose martial self-sacrifice had made possible the “salvation” of others—including her own. Almost as soon as Roland was killed, she began referring to him with a Godlike “He”: “Whether it was absolutely necessary for Him to go [on the fatal patrol] is questionable, but He would not have been He if He had not, for not only did He like to do everything Himself to make sure it was done thoroughly, but He would never allow anyone, especially an inferior, to take a risk he would not take Himself.” She herself became “His” principal devotee and disciple, the mystic practitioner of a new sort of imitatio Christi, as her entries from 1916 make clear:

  SUNDAY, 2 JANUARY.

  We had more details today—fuller, more personal, more interesting, & so much sadder…Two sentences—one in the Colonel’s letter & one in the Chaplain’s hurt me more than anything. The Colonel says, “The Boy was wonderfully brave,” and the Chaplain, “He died at 11 p.m. after a very gallant fight.” Yes, he would have been wonderfully brave; he would have made a gallant fight, even though unconsciously, with that marvelous vitality of his. None ever had more to live for; none could ever have wanted to live more…I can wish to do nothing better than to act as He has acted, right up to the end.

  MONDAY, 31 JANUARY.

  There was very much of a Zeppelin scare tonight. The Hospital was in utter darkness, passages black, lamps out, blinds down. I stood at the window of my ward, feeling strangely indifferent to anything that might happen. Since He had given up all safety, I was glad to be in London, which is not safe.

  SUNDAY, 22 OCTOBER.

  We had a simple sermon comparing harvest with the Resurrection of the Dead, & sang the hymn “On the Resurrection Morning” to end with. I don’t believe half the theology implied in these things, of course, & yet it is all a reminder. “I could not if I would forget”—Roland. But I never would, since in all this hard life He is my great & sole inspiration, & if it were not for Him I should not be here.

  In 1917, when Roland’s old school friend Victor, blinded by a bullet at Arras, lies dying in a London hospital, she admits that one reason she can’t bear to lose him is because in his “accurate, clear & reverent memory of Him, Roland seems to live still.” “All that I ask,” she concludes, “is that I may fulfill my own small weary part in this War in such a way as to be worthy of Them, who die & suffer pain.”

  In the nervy state that gripped me after September 11, such reflections struck me with new and incriminating force. Had I resisted Brittain for so long—cast her off as an important Not-Me—precisely because, deep down, I felt so much like her? I found out now, with a sudden embarrassed poignancy, precisely how much I sympathized, both with her anxiety and with the florid hope that the men she knew might infect her, so to speak, with physical courage. Not very butch of me, I know. Not very feminist. But I had to confess it: I admired and coveted—quite desperately at times—the insane, uncomplaining, relentless bravery of men.

  I hear the shrieks. I write this knowing full well that some readers will find such veneration wholly charmless, part of an objectionable idealization of war or some absurd reversion to worn-out sex roles. So let me try to be a bit more precise. It seems to have something to do, first of all, with walking. Walking, paradoxically, is one of the great leitmotifs of the First World War. (I say “paradoxically” because we are so used to imagining the nightmarish stasis of the trench world—a stasis more notional, perhaps, than actual. Even in times of relative quiet the typical front-line trench was an ant heap of comings and goings.) Under normal conditions British soldiers traveled to the battle sector by troop train; contemporary accounts of “going up the line” are full of descriptions of men crammed into creaking boxcars, and the slow, juddering rides towards Abbeville or Béthune. (How often the physical imagery of the First War anticipates, diabolically, that of the Second.) But on disembarking, soldiers usually had to march—sometimes for ten or twenty miles—toward billets, reserve trenches, and other staging-areas behind the lines. “This in fact,” Malcolm Brown writes in Tommy Goes to War, “was the classic progress ‘up the line’: train to the railhead, after which the Tommy had to fall back on the standard means of troop-transportation in the First World War—his own feet.” All the famous soldier songs of the time—“Here We Are,” “Tipperary,” “Mademoiselle from Armentières”—were first and foremost marching songs.

  The route was long, exhausting, and often indelibly frightening, especially for the tyro soldier seeing warfare up close for the first time. “Yesterday as we were jingling over the cobbles past the danger zone,” one subaltern quoted by Brown wrote,

  sure enough, away to the right came Ponk! Ze-e-e-e-e-e-ee-E-Bang! right over our heads. Again: Ponk: Ze-e-e-e-ee-E-Bang! A little nearer. The road just there is bare of cover, but a little way along on the right was a large bar
n, shell-holed. I would have given quids and quids just to run to that barn: but I am in front of my column, so I merely glance up in a casual way (what an effort) as if I’d been reared on shrapnel, whereas it’s my baptism!

  Another described his company being scattered by a German shell on their first march up the line near Bailleul: “My back and pack were struck by a shower of debris and flying dirt while quite a number of men fell and bled for their country. Jack Duncan was in front of me and he received a severe wound from this, our first shell. He was carried onto the pavement and left for the attention of the doctor.”

  Getting into the front-line trench itself meant further dreadful walking: a crabbed, head-down slog along battered communication trenches or over rotting duckboards, sometimes under heavy shelling or machine-gun fire. The journey to the front lines around Ypres—invariably made at night, through pools of mud and the reamy stench of dead animals and men—was notoriously ghastly. “The boards,” Leon Wolff writes in In Flanders Fields,

  were covered with slime, or submerged, or shattered every few yards. The heavy laden troopers (60 lb of clothing, equipment and weapons were carried per man) kept slipping and colliding. Many toppled into shell-craters and had to be hauled out by comrades extending rifle-butts. And falling into even a shallow hole was often revolting, for the water was foul with decaying equipment, excrement, and perhaps something dead; or its surface might be covered with old, sour mustard gas. It was not uncommon for a man to vomit when being extricated from something like this.

  And many fell, never to be dragged out. At Passchendaele, in the satanic months of October and November 1917, soldiers going up the line would often see the heads or hands of hapless predecessors protruding from the muck.