We left Vera Brittain on June 16th, trying to absorb the news that her brother’s unit must have received the full weight of the new offensive on the Asiago Plateau. She continues the story, now, bringing us up through a week of growing terror to today, the worst day.
A day or two later, more details were published of the fighting in Italy, and I learnt that the Sherwood Foresters had been involved in the “show” on the Plateau. After that I made no pretence at doing anything but wander restlessly round Kensington or up and down the flat, and, though my father retired glumly to bed every evening at nine o’clock, I gave up writing the semi-fictitious record which I had begun of my life in France. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself even to wrap up the Spectator and Saturday Review that I sent every week to Italy, and they remained in my bedroom, silent yet eloquent witnesses to the dread which my father and I, determinedly conversing on commonplace topics, each refused to put into words.
By the following Saturday we had still heard nothing of Edward. The interval usually allowed for news of casualties after a battle was seldom so long as this, and I began, with an artificial sense of lightness unaccompanied by real conviction, to think that there was perhaps, after all, no news to come. I had just announced to my father, as we sat over tea in the dining-room, that I really must do up Edward’s papers and take them to the post office before it closed for the week-end, when there came the sudden loud clattering at the front-door knocker that always meant a telegram.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The War Office telegram, from Simon Jones’s blog, https://simonjoneshistorian.com/
For a moment I thought that my legs would not carry me, but they behaved quite normally as I got up and went to the door. I knew what was in the telegram — I had known for a week — but because the persistent hopefulness of the human heart refuses to allow intuitive certainty to persuade the reason of that which it knows, I opened and read it in a tearing anguish of suspense.
“Regret to inform you Captain E. H. Brittain M.C. killed in action Italy June 15th.”
“No answer,” I told the boy mechanically, and handed the telegram to my father, who had followed me into the hall. As we went back into the dining-room I saw, as though I had never seen them before, the bowl of blue delphiniums on the table; their intense colour, vivid, ethereal, seemed too radiant for earthly flowers.
Then I remembered that we should have to go down to Purley and tell the news to my mother.
…Long after the family had gone to bed and the world had grown silent, I crept into the dining-room to be alone with Edward’s portrait. Carefully closing the door, I turned on the light and looked at the pale, pictured face, so dignified, so steadfast, so tragically mature. He had been through so much — far, far more than those beloved friends who had “this loneliest hour” died at an earlier stage of the interminable War, leaving him alone to mourn their loss. Fate might have allowed him the little, sorry compensation of survival, the chance to make his lovely music in honour of their memory; it seemed indeed the last irony that he should have been killed by the countrymen of Fritz Kreisler, the violinist whom of all others he had most greatly admired.
And suddenly, as I remembered all the dear afternoons and evenings when I had followed him on the piano as he played his violin, the sad, searching eyes of the portrait were more titan I could bear, and falling on my knees before it I began to cry “Edward! Oh, Edward! ” in dazed repetition, as though my persistent crying and calling would somehow bring him back.[1]
This might be the lowest point of all, if Vera Brittain is our closest proxy to the losses of her “lost generation.” I deplore the indiscriminate use of the word “tragedy” to mean nothing more precise than “very bad thing,” but there is something of true tragedy, here, both in what Vera Brittain has gone through in her efforts to share the pain of the war, and cope with it, and in what her brother did, before he died.
Perhaps we can find some little relief in seeing Ivor Gurney safe, for the moment. But then again he too is a lost soul, and so miserable. Marion Scott arrived late last night, visited him this morning, and saw him again in the afternoon. She will report on the visit to Herbert Howells, giving the good news up front–“I found Ivor looking better than I feared!”–but making it clear that the situation is bad, very bad–and that she must see Howells in order to explain the worst of it in person. Pamela Blevins, the biographer of her friendship with Gurney, makes these surmises:
Neither Scott nor Howells left any written account detailing what they discussed in their private meeting about Ivor. But one thing is certain–Marion had seen for herself that Lord Derby’s War Hospital was the wrong place for someone as fragile as Ivor. Visiting Gurney later, John Haines affirmed the Scotts’ revulsion: ‘Warrington is the most detestable place I have ever spent six hours in, without exception, and the place would drive me mad, despite my lack of genius, in a very few weeks. How Gurney must dislike it I can well imagine.’
Marion and Annie Scott were appalled by conditions at Lord Derby’s although they never specified openly what so upset each of them. Whatever it was, they returned to London determined to get him away from the facility. Marion wasted no time. She consulted with Haines, who suggested a hospital in Cardiff, not far from an area ‘most beautiful with grand hills; which surely would have appealed to Ivor. Haines advised Marion to keep Ivor away firom Gloucester ‘until he is better than now: the father is too delicate and the mother too nervy’.[2]