Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (67 page)

I detached myself from the others and walked slowly up Whitehall, with my heart sinking in a sudden cold dismay. Already this was a different world from the one that I had known during four life-long years, a world in which people would be light-hearted and forgetful, in which themselves and their careers and their amusements would blot out political ideals and great national issues. And in that brightly lit, alien world I should have no part. All those with whom I had really been intimate were gone; not one remained to share with me the heights and the depths of my memories. As the years went by and youth departed and remembrance grew dim, a deeper and ever deeper darkness would cover the young men who were once my contemporaries.

For the first time I realised, with all that full realisation meant, how completely everything that had hitherto made up my life had vanished with Edward and Roland, with Victor and Geoffrey. The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.

PART III

‘Longumque illud tempus, quum non ero, magis me movet quam hoc exiguum.’

Cicero, Ad Atticum, Book 12, Letter 18.

10

Survivors Not Wanted

THE LAMENT OF THE DEMOBILISED

‘Four years,’ some say consolingly. ‘Oh well,
What’s that? You’re young. And then it must have been
A very fine experience for you!’
And they forget
How others stayed behind and just got on—
Got on the better since we were away.
And we came home and found
They had achieved, and men revered their names,
But never mentioned ours;
And no one talked heroics now, and we
Must just go back and start again once more.
‘You threw four years into the melting-pot—
Did you indeed!’ these others cry. ‘Oh well,
The more fool you!’
And we’re beginning to agree with them.

V. B. From
Oxford Poetry
1920.

1

Early in April 1919, I said good-bye to Millbank and the War, taking home with me a legacy of rough hands and swollen ankles, and a fine collection of exotic oaths. Just as Victor had foreseen for himself if he survived, I found considerable difficulty during the next twelve months in avoiding these expressions in Oxford lecture-halls and Kensington drawing-rooms, to both of which they seemed to me peculiarly appropriate.

To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace. But when it came in, it appeared to an exhausted world as divine normality, the spring of life after the winter of death, the stepping-stone to a new era, the gateway to an infinite future - a future not without its dreads and discomforts, but one in whose promise we had to believe, since it was all that some of us had left to believe in. At that time, too, various authorities were busy being grateful to us who had once been young and were apparently, amazing as it seemed, still so regarded. Only two days after the Armistice, Sir Douglas Haig, in the special Order expressing his gratitude to ‘all ranks of the Army and the non-combatant and auxiliary services’, had actually included ‘the many thousands of women who by devoted work in so many capacities have assisted in the victory of our arms’, and no doubt many of these felt quite elated at being told - for as long as they were able to believe it - that ‘generations of free people, both of your own race and of all countries, will thank you for what you have done . . . your gallantry never failing, your courage most resolute, your devotion to duty unquestioning.’ Even the Army Council had expressed its thanks by the end of April to the V.A.D. nurses for ‘the keenness, self-sacrifice and devotion . . . so unstintingly given during,’ as they somewhat modestly expressed it, ‘the long and trying period through which the country has passed.’

Nevertheless, the year did not seem to have begun very auspiciously for those who still clung to the ingenuous notion that by their sacrifices they had created a world of sweetness and light for their descendants to inhabit. During the weeks immediately after the Armistice, my automatic existence at Millbank virtually obliterated for me the fact that, all over the country, eloquent platform heroes were busily engaged in Making Germany Pay and Hanging The Kaiser. But while I was making up my mind to go back to Oxford - not because I particularly wanted to go back, for I was not conscious of wanting to do anything, but because college seemed the one thing left out of the utter wreckage of the past, and I had a prejudice against leaving unfinished something that I had begun - I could not remain blind to the hectic reactions of my generation, frantically dancing night after night in the Grafton Galleries, while pictures of the Canadian soldiers’ wartime agony hung accusingly on the walls. Shocked by the spectacle, Mr Alfred Noyes described these nocturnal orgies:

The cymbals crash,
And the dancers walk;
With long silk stockings,
And arms of chalk,
Butterfly skirts
And white breasts bare;
And shadows of dead men
Watching ’em there—

and the older generation held up outraged hands in horror at such sacrilege, not understanding that reckless sense of combined release and anti-climax which set my contemporaries, who had lived a lifetime of love and toil and suffering and yet were only in their early twenties, dancing in the vain hope of recapturing the lost youth that the War had stolen.

Not having anyone left with whom to dance, I spent most of the blank and rather frightening days between leaving Millbank and returning to Somerville in roaming about London with a demobilised and erratically jubilant Hope Milroy, and in meditating, as the differences between our war and peace-time preoccupations forced themselves upon my mind, on the problems of an uncompanioned civilian life. How would the War ultimately have affected me? I wondered, looking with dull eyes into a singularly empty future, which seemed capable of being filled only by individual efforts that I did not feel in the least inclined to make. The immediate result of peace - the cessation of direct threats to one’s personal safety - was at first almost imperceptible, just as a prolonged physical pain which has turned from acuteness into an habitual dull ache can cease altogether without the victim noticing that it has gone. Only gradually did I realise that the War had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of apprehension; in which love would seem threatened perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might, perhaps, have it again, but never again should I hold it.

Meanwhile in Paris, the nucleus of a wild, international, pleasure-crazy crowd, the Big Four were making a desert and calling it peace. When I thought about these negotiations at all - which was only when I could not avoid hearing them discussed by Oxford dons or Kensington visitors - they did not seem to me to represent at all the kind of ‘victory’ that the young men whom I had loved would have regarded as sufficient justification for their lost lives. Although they would no doubt have welcomed the idea of a League of Nations, Roland and Edward certainly had not died in order that Clemenceau should outwit Lloyd George, and both of them bamboozle President Wilson, and all three combine to make the beaten, blockaded enemy pay the cost of the War. For me the ‘Huns’ were then, and always, the patient, stoical Germans whom I had nursed in France, and I did not like to read of them being deprived of their Navy, and their Colonies, and their coal-fields in Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley, while their children starved and froze for lack of food and fuel. So, when the text of the Treaty of Versailles was published in May, after I had returned to Oxford, I deliberately refrained from reading it; I was beginning already to suspect that my generation had been deceived, its young courage cynically exploited, its idealism betrayed, and I did not want to know the details of that betrayal. At an inter-collegiate debate a Hindu student remarked that here, at any rate, was ‘the Peace that passeth all understanding’ - and I left it at that.

I was not, of course, so clearly conscious of these anxieties and revulsions and suspicions as to-day, with full awareness of the direction in which I was about to move, I sometimes seem to myself to have been. Letters and articles written at the time show that my mind groped in a dark, foggy confusion, uncertain of what had happened to it or what was going to happen. Still partly dominated by old ideals, timeworn respectabilities and spasms of rebellious bitterness, it sometimes seized fleetingly the tail of an idea upon whose wings it was later to ascend into a clearer heaven of new convictions.

One of these half-found inspirations translated itself, trivially enough, into a determination to read History at Oxford instead of English, but the motive behind this superficial change of School was not really trivial. After the first dismayed sense of isolation in an alien peace-time world, such rationality as I still possessed reasserted itself in a desire to understand how the whole calamity had happened, to know why it had been possible for me and my contemporaries, through our own ignorance and others’ ingenuity, to be used, hypnotised and slaughtered. I had begun, I thought, by feeling exasperated about the War, and I went on by ignoring it; then I had to accept it as a fact, and at last was forced to take part in it, to endure the fear and sorrow and fatigue that it brought me, and to witness in impotent anguish the deaths, not only of those who had made my personal life, but of the many brave, uncomplaining men whom I had nursed and could not save. But even that isn’t enough. It’s my job, now, to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, in so far as one person can, from happening to other people in the days to come. Perhaps the careful study of man’s past will explain to me much that seems inexplicable in his disconcerting present. Perhaps the means of salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.

When I was a girl at St Monica’s and in Buxton, I remembered, I imagined that life was individual, one’s own affair; that the events happening in the world outside were important enough in their own way, but were personally quite irrelevant. Now, like the rest of my generation, I have had to learn again and again the terrible truth of George Eliot’s words about the invasion of personal preoccupations by the larger destinies of mankind, and at last to recognise that no life is really private, or isolated, or self-sufficient. People’s lives were entirely their own, perhaps - and more justifiably - when the world seemed enormous, and all its comings and goings were slow and deliberate. But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man’s inventions have eliminated so much of distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else. We were bound up together like this before we realised it; if only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn’t lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn’t matter to us, the Great War might never have happened. And though a few isolated persons may be better for having been in the War, the world as a whole will be worse; lacking first-rate ability and social order and economic equilibrium, it will go spinning down into chaos as fast as it can - unless some of us try to prevent it.

Henceforward, my thought struggled on, following the faint gleam through the darkness, people will count only in so far as they realise their background and help to create and to change it. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves
are
Providence; our lives, and our children’s lives, will be rational, balanced, well-proportioned, to exactly the extent that we recognise this fundamental truth. It may be that our generation will go down in history as the first to understand that not a single man or woman can now live in disregarding isolation from his or her world. I don’t know yet what I can do, I concluded, to help all this to happen, but at least I can begin by trying to understand where humanity failed and civilisation went wrong. If only I and a few other people succeed in this, it may be worth while that our lives have been lived; it may even be worth while that the lives of the others have been laid down. Perhaps that’s really why, when they died, I was left behind.

So, thus portentously, I decided to read History, and then, when I had gone down from Oxford, to get into touch with some organisation which thought and tried to act along these lines. I had heard, as yet, very little of the bitter tale of pacifism during the War - the Union of Democratic Control, with its interrupted meetings and police-raided offices; the imprisonment of E. D. Morel; the removal of Bertrand Russell from his post at Cambridge; the persecution and humiliation of conscientious objectors - but I had already started on the road which was ultimately to lead me to association with the group that accepted internationalism as a creed.

At Somerville the news of my intention to change my School was received without enthusiasm; in English I had been regarded as a probable First, but in the field of History I had forgotten even such information as I had once derived from Miss Heath Jones’s political and religious teaching, and a student’s ingenuous anxiety to remedy the errors of the ages could hardly be expected to count with an Oxford college in comparison with the possibility of increasing its list of Firsts. But although the hazy ignorance from which I set out to read the newly chosen subject was a permanent handicap throughout my university life, I never regretted the decision, for in studying international relations, and the great diplomatic agreements of the nineteenth century, I discovered that human nature does change, does learn to hate oppression, to deprecate the spirit of revenge, to be revolted by acts of cruelty, and at last to embody these changes of heart and mind in treaties - those chronological records of a game of skill played by accomplished technicians who can hardly, in any time or place, be described as leading the van of progressive opinion. Even after the Franco-Prussian War - one of the bitterest campaigns in history - the dead were remembered and soldiers’ graves were mentioned, for the first time in any international agreement, by the treaty of 1871. The more widely I read, the more clearly I seemed to discover that nobler prospects existed for humanity than had appeared possible when the Peace of Versailles was reluctantly signed by Germany in the Galerie des Glaces on June 28th, 1919 - and what was the sacrifice of a possible First compared to that knowledge?