Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (23 page)

On May Morning at sunrise, I went to Magdalen Bridge with the usual trio to hear the Magdalen choir sing their annual hymn, ‘
Te Deum Patrem colimus
’, from the summit of the tower. The song gave me a choked feeling; I could only think how Roland and Edward ought to have been there, and were not. When it was over we rode off on our bicycles and breakfasted in a copse beyond Marston, at the edge of a field already golden with cowslips. Vivid green grass covered the ground in the copse, thick as a carpet and patterned gaily with half-opened bluebells and yellow primroses rooted in the red sandy soil. Above our heads the rooks cawed softly, and through the delicate network of branches we could see glimpses of milk-blue sky.

Much of my time that term was passed - for to pass it quickly had become my chief object - in an apparently light-hearted absorption in tennis. Without much difficulty I got into the Somerville six - for which I sometimes played first couple but usually second - because one of its senior members had encountered me the previous year in a match between Buxton and a Manchester club. Thanks chiefly to the long-limbed and devoted B., who was as usual my partner, we had put up a terrific fight against a really first-class team, and the Somervillian, who had been playing for the Manchester club, had left the courts with the impression that I was B.’s feminine equivalent at volleys and rallies.

I could not help enjoying the college matches - my limbs were too muscular, my love of strenuous activity in the sun and air too keen - but beneath the pleasure lay a miserable feeling of guilt. ‘Tennis now is like Nero fiddling while Rome was burning,’ I solemnly decided after the
Lusitania
disaster. During one very hard match, when grave reports and long casualty lists had come for days from Festubert, the rhythm of the balls resolved itself into a sentence from one of Roland’s letters: ‘Some-one - is get-ting hell - but - it - isn’t you - yet.’ Exhausted by the long-drawn-out play, and tormented almost to desperation by the ceaseless beat of the sinister phrase, I flung myself on my bed afterwards and tried to get some comfort from the volume of Wordsworth which had been the delight of my scholarship work in that long-ago that was already beginning to be labelled ‘pre-war’. But I opened the page straight away at the sonnet:

Surprised by joy - impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom,
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find ? . . .

At the moment it seemed prophetic, and I hid my face in the pillow and cried.

New College Chapel and the Cathedral services, with the haunting beauty of their organ melodies, really provided better consolation than tennis-matches; they kept one’s mind face to face with the poignant facts, instead of creating a diversion inevitably followed by the sharp shock of recollection. Habitually, on Sunday evenings, I sat with ‘E. F.’ or Marjorie in the Cathedral, gazing at the grey walls stained crimson and purple by the light shining through the coloured glass of the windows, and winking back the tears that came whenever the organ rolled suddenly through the building, in the endeavour to prevent my companion from discovering the existence of an emotion of which she was already well aware. Oxford that term was full of music, which brought continually thoughts of Roland and the War, tear-making, unbearable - and yet from which I could never keep away. Like a lost soul I haunted New College and Christ Church, cherishing my sorrow.

It drove me quite early in the term to open the question of provisional notice with the Principal, for the decision to nurse was already growing into a determination to remain away from Oxford until the War was over, although I knew that - in those early days before the W.A.A.C., the W.R.N.S. and the W.R.A.F. existed - the obstacles to worth-while service for girls under twenty-three were only to be overcome by consistent prevarication. The Principal listened patiently to my aspirations after Red Cross experience, and characteristically replied that, although my Exhibition might complicate matters a little, everyone must decide such a question for themselves. When I wrote later from Buxton to tell her that I had definitely decided to go down for a year, she answered with generous kindness, wishing me luck in my undertakings, and feeling sure that in the end my work would benefit greatly from this experience of the deeper and more serious side of life.

The time had not yet come when the fear of a feminine stampede into war-work inspired numerous authoritative proclamations to women students, bidding them - as women before and after Joan of Arc have so often been bidden - to stay where they were. Three years later, when Winifred Holtby, in spite of academic pronouncements, went down after a distracted year at Somerville to join the W.A.A.C., her inconvenient gesture inspired a Sunday-night address from the Principal on the duty of remaining at college. But in 1915 neither the demand for war-workers nor the response to it had reached its alarming stage, and I was left, uncriticised, to make such arrangements as I chose.

So I wrote off at once, outlining a nursing scheme, to Mina and Betty, who had both recently expressed to me their anxiety to ‘do something’. Betty seemed favourable, but Mina became tentative, and asked me if I quite understood what a probationer’s work in hospital really meant.

‘Of course I know,’ I told her indignantly; ‘I shall hate it, but I will be all the more ready to do it on that account.’ To my diary I gave my reason more explicitly: ‘He has to face far worse things than any sight or act I could come across; he can bear it - and so can I.’

Truly the War had made masochists of us all.

5

One chilly May evening the English tutor invited Marjorie and myself into her room at Micklem to see her Milton manuscripts. When we had looked at them we moved closer to the fire and she showed us her latest acquisition from Blackwell’s - the newly published first edition of Rupert Brooke’s
1914
. Those famous sonnets, brought into prominence by the poet’s death on the eve of the Dardanelles campaign, were then only just beginning to take the world’s breath away, and I asked our tutor if she would read us one or two.

For the young to whom Rupert Brooke’s poems are now familiar as classics, it must be impossible to imagine how it felt to hear them for the first time just after they were written. With my grief and anxiety then so new, I found the experience so moving that I should not have sought it had I realised how hard composure would be to maintain. Silently I struggled for it as I listened to the English tutor’s grave, deliberate voice reading the sonnets, unhackneyed, courageous, and almost shattering in their passionate, relevant idealism:

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary—

But not, oh, surely not,

all the little emptiness of love?

Was that really what Rupert Brooke had felt? Was it what Roland would come to feel? Almost more bearable was the sonnet on ‘The Dead’, with what might become its terribly personal application:

These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy . . .

How would Rupert Brooke have written, I wonder, had he lived until 1933? Would the world of 1914 really have seemed to him old and cold and weary, compared with the grey and tragic present? Would he still have thought that Holiness and Nobleness and Honour described the causes for which those sacrifices of youth and work and immortality were offered? His poems made all too realistic a letter that came the next day from Roland.

‘One of my men has just been killed - the first . . . I did not actually see it - thank heaven. I only found him lying very still at the bottom of the trench with a tiny stream of blood trickling down his cheek into his coat . . . I do not quite know how I felt at that moment. It was not anger - even now I have no feeling of animosity against the man who shot him - only a great pity, and a sudden feeling of impotence. It is cruel of me to tell you this . . . Try not to remember; as I do.’

A few days afterwards the Liberal Government of the Parliament Act and the ultimatum to Germany vanished into history, and its place was taken by a Coalition which suffered from the delusion that victory depended mainly upon an increased output of shells. ‘There is a political crisis now,’ I noted on May 20th; ‘a national non-Party Government is to be formed for the duration of the War.’ The entry for May 24th contained yet further impersonal items of information: ‘There were 316 officers in the casualty list. Italy has formally declared war’ - an event which was to affect me so personally, so deeply, but which at the time, with my mind on the Western Front, I barely noticed in passing. By May 28th I had become entirely egotistical again, owing to the humiliating fact that my tutor had reproached me for going out to dinner without her permission.

‘It is a queer, incongruous feeling,’ I protested in my diary, with an indignant disregard of grammar hardly appropriate to the holder of an exhibition in English Language and Literature, ‘for I who know and think only of the one big thing in my life to be corrected on account of something small and unimportant by someone who does not know!’

This high-souled indifference to ‘small and unimportant’ college regulations evidently became something of a problem to my English tutor that summer term, for my diary, after describing the excitement at Oxford on May 31st over a big Zeppelin raid on London, again records the necessity for reproof - followed, of course, by typical outbursts of righteous indignation - on at least two subsequent occasions. But Roland, writing at the beginning of June, recalled the larger issues to my mind by describing an incident which was, perhaps, one of the minor results of the ‘political crisis’:

‘The Prime Minister, of all persons, was responsible for the abrupt ending of my last letter. He was brought along to have an informal look at us, and it was arranged that he should see the men while they were having a bath in the vats. We only had about half an hour’s notice and had to rush off and make arrangements for the “accidental” visit. I and two other subalterns being at the moment in a mischievous mood decided to have a bath at the same time and successfully timed it so that we all three welcomed Asquith dressed only in an identity disc. I still don’t quite know what he was doing over here when he is wanted so much in England; but perhaps the shell question had something to do with it. He looked old and rather haggard, I thought.’

A week or two before the end of term it was a relief to see Edward, who had been stationed all that summer in the south, and get once more into close contact with the things that mattered. He came from Maidstone on his motorcycle to spend the week-end with me, and we sat and talked in the garden at Micklem. Since we had last been together, many of our Buxton contemporaries had been killed on the Aubers Ridge and in the Dardanelles, where Edward warned me that his regiment might be going. Several acquaintances had disappeared during one engagement of the Manchesters in Gallipoli, including a broad, smiling young man who had squeezed my hand behind the scenes at the Buxton Opera House during a performance of
Raffles
in which we had both been acting. The idea of Frank as part of the Dardanelles tragedy seemed so incongruous as almost to be fantastic.

‘Somehow,’ I told Roland, ‘death always seems further removed from one’s “summer friends” - from the kind of people with whom one dances and plays games and perhaps flirts a little - even than from the beloved people who are part of one’s very existence. These latter belong to the whole - to the dark shadows as well as the sunlit patches, but it gives one the shock of incongruity to imagine the Angel of Death brooding over one’s light and pleasant acquaintances, and to think of them with all their lightness and pleasantness shed away.’

By the time that Edward and I had accustomed ourselves to face death, as it were from a distance, through the medium of these ‘summer friends’, the long-postponed darkness of a June evening shrouded the quiet garden. When the light had gone it somehow became easier to stand up to our own future and confront the end of things for ourselves, though I listened with chill misery to his confirmation of my dread that Roland could not help but come back changed. ‘They’re all changed,’ he said, ‘after two or three months out there.’ Nevertheless, he felt convinced of Roland’s safe return.

‘Tonius’ll get through all right,’ he insisted, and quoted a sentence from a letter that Roland, with typical arrogant confidence, had written to Victor a few days before: ‘I wanted to get into the Army and I got there; I wanted to go to the front, and I went to the front; now I want to come back and I shall come back.’

Of himself, Edward told me, he felt less certain; with a sad wistfulness reminiscent of Maeterlinck’s
Prédestinés
, he visualised the early close of his little tale of years in a world rendered too dear and lovely by its rich undertones of music, its soaring pinnacles of sound.

‘It would be just part of the irony of life if I don’t come back, because I’m such a lover of peace,’ he declared, ‘but I can never imagine the end of the War or what it’ll be like; I believe now it’ll last for years and I’ve no notion what I would do if it were ended.’

That night I sat long and sorrowfully over my diary. ‘If it is really to go on for years, what shall we do?’ I asked it. ‘I wonder if courage and endurance will bear the strain?’