Vera Brittain was born in 1893 to a family with a comfortable income and
middle-class attitudes. Home life oppressed Vera profoundly, and she was a
rebel from the start. ‘The disadvantages of being a woman have eaten
like iron into my soul.’ She had quickly realised that being female was
a handicap in those days, and she struggled for recognition as an
individual and independent person with the right to have further education
and a career. She deeply envied her much-loved younger brother, Edward,
who could leave home without having to get married to do it.
1913 was a significant year for Vera. A series of lucky chances led to her
being accepted to study at Somerville College Oxford (an idea her father
at first rejected entirely, as being an unsuitable step for a girl). She
also met her brother Edward’s school friend Roland Leighton, and they
fell in love. All three were going to study in Oxford: the future looked
bright.
But in 1914 everything changed. War was something new and unsettling for
Vera to understand. In the only way she knew then, she responded to the
sense of crisis it created. Conditioned to the traditional public school
view that a soldier’s life was a manly and heroic one, she urged her
brother to enlist - once again in direct conflict with her father. She was
still ignorant of the power and techniques of propaganda: to her, the
cleverly-designed recruiting advertisements were honourable and sincere.
War, in short, was part of the man’s world from which Vera felt unfairly
excluded, a world in which one bravely went to battle when it seemed
necessary and honourable to do so. As she said later, she was ‘carried
away by the wartime emotion and deceived by the shining figure of
patriotism’.
But three weeks after the war began, she was already writing this: ‘It
was very hard to believe that not far away men were being slain
ruthlessly.... The destruction of men, as though beasts, whether they be
English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march
of civilisation.’ She was starting to understand what war really means.
‘Testament of Youth’ tells the story: how she left Oxford to train as
a nursing auxiliary, how she went on to nurse wounded soldiers in England,
Malta and France, and how one by one the friends she cared most about were
killed, including her fiancé Roland and, in 1918, her brother
Edward. In France, some of the suffering men in her care were German
prisoners-of-war, and here she recognised a tragic and terrible absurdity:
she was working hard to save lives, while her brother had been trying to
destroy them. Vera now saw that there was nothing ‘holy’ or ‘just’
about war; and she never forgot what she had learned from it. She said
later that her pacifism was ‘rooted in my experience of war’.
"Testament of Youth’was published in 1933. In that year Vera
went to France and visited the First World War battlefields and the
cemetery where her fiancé was buried. (Her brother Edward was
buried where he was killed, aged 22, in Italy.) In Thiepval she stood
beside the British memorial to 73,367 men who had died in the battle of
the Somme and whose bodies had never even been found. This, she bitterly
understood, was one of the horrifying results of ‘my generation’s
pursuit of heroism’.After 1918 Vera put her hopes for a peaceful future
in the League of Nations (later to become the United Nations): for a while
she still believed that armed force could be justified as a last resort to
maintain ‘collective security’. But she grew disenchanted as the years
passed and no real international commitment to lasting world peace seemed
to exist, nor any determined and imaginative pursuit of it even by its
promoters. In 1934 she wrote an article calling for a ‘real peace
crusade’ with banners and slogans, and an end to ‘perpetual pamphlets
and the dreary droning of tired voices in somnolent lecture halls’.
1936 was the year in which, with the threat of another war, the peace
movement divided into those who supported ‘peace but not at all
costs’, and those who rejected war absolutely. Many of these
‘absolutists’ became members of the Peace Pledge
Union, which had just
been founded. In April, on another visit to Europe, Vera chanced to
encounter a ‘Pilgrimage of Peace’ organised by a group of French
pacifists: 1,600 men and women were affirming an Oath of Peace in Verdun
Cathedral. In June she was a guest speaker at a Peace Rally in Dorset,
where on impulse she abandoned her prepared speech and talked instead
about her experience in Verdun. On the train back to London she talked
with Dick Sheppard, the PPU’s founder, and ‘found myself more and more
sympathetic with the complete pacifist outlook’. By January 1937 she was
a PPU member, and remained an active supporter for the rest of her life.
People have been drawn to pacifism for many reasons. For Vera, it was her
belief that the best rule for human behaviour, either as individuals or as
groups and nations, was ‘Treat people as you would like them to treat
you’. She was a realist: she knew that world peace was an ideal that
would be difficult to reach, at least quickly. As long as war is possible,
she said, ‘righteous reasons will be found for it’. But that did not
mean that the ideal should be abandoned; on the contrary, it was vital to
keep it in people’s minds. This is why Vera became a public speaker for
peace - and she was a popular speaker, who expressed her views clearly and
simply, and whom people came specially to hear. No ‘dreary droning’ to
half-asleep audiences when Vera was on the platform.
Her listeners heard her views on other matters close to her heart, too.
She had recognised that oppression and injustice of all kinds were the
breeding-grounds of war. She said ‘the struggle against war, which is
the final and most vicious expression of force, is fundamentally
inseparable from feminism’; she also saw, and said, that the anti-war
struggle was linked to ideals of democracy and socialism, and to the
abolition of slavery, tyranny, colonisation and racism throughout the
world.
Vera Brittain was the sort of person who acted on her principles as well
as talking about them. By 1938 she was publicly protesting against the
treatment of Jews in Germany and finding ways to help refugees escape to
Britain. When the Second World War began she gave up time and energy to
help people whose homes had been bombed. She worked very hard for the
PPU’s food relief campaign, set up to help the starving peoples of
European countries occupied by German troops. This was a project that
proved controversial, as some people believed that such aid would make the
war last longer, and others thought it would help ‘the enemy’. But
Vera saw this work as a practical way of being a pacifist: helping to ease
the suffering caused by war.
Above all, she believed that people should know the truth about what was
happening. From 1940 to 1946, she produced her fortnightly ‘Letter to
Peace-lovers’, which gained 2,000 subscribers (some of them in the armed
forces) and provided them with all the reliable information she could
obtain. She also provided advice and support in facing extensive
propaganda against pacifists. The government acknowledged that Vera
Brittain’s ‘Letters’ were one of the most successful anti-war
publications - and she was blacklisted and restricted from travel as a
result. (This meant that she couldn’t visit her much-missed children who
had been evacuated to America.)
Vera spent most of the war in London, enduring like everyone else the
disruption, food shortages, air raids, exhaustion, anxiety, and lack of
sleep. She also visited PPU groups around the country, especially those in
devastated cities such as Coventry and Plymouth. Perhaps her experiences
of bombing gave her even more inspiration as she embarked on her most
famous, and most controversial, campaign.
This was against ‘saturation bombing’: the wholesale bombardment of
German cities in order to destroy them, civilian populations and all, as a
way of forcing the Nazi government to give in. Vera was an active member
of the Bombing Restriction Committee, set up in 1942, the year in which
RAF fighting policy was changed from ‘precision bombing’ to ‘area
bombing’. In one of her Letters, Vera said the British should decide
whether ‘we want the government to continue to carry out, through its
Bomber Command, a policy of murder and massacre in our name. Has any
nation the right to make its young men the instruments of such a
policy?’
In 1944 she published her book ‘Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really
Means’, in which she provided eye-witness reports of its effects. She
vividly pressed home her argument: there was no evidence that the war
would be shortened by such destruction - in fact its victims were more
likely to want revenge. In any case, if the military intention was to
limit slaughter and destruction by bringing the war to a quick end, it was
senseless and illogical to try to do it by adding yet more slaughter and
destruction to the already horrifying toll.
The response to ‘Seed of Chaos’ in Britain and America was immediate:
Vera became the focus of a rising tide of anger and abuse. With
characteristic spirit she said: ‘when people abuse you and defend
themselves, you know you have got under their skin and uncovered a bad
conscience!’ But as pacifists have discovered throughout their history,
their views may also be heard and praised, and sometimes by unlikely
listeners. One military expert wrote to Vera to tell her of his
‘profound respect for your courage in upholding claims for human decency
in a time when war fever is raging’.
Her work did not stop when the war ended. Vera was one of the first people
to point out publicly that it was unjust for the whole German nation to be
collectively punished for Nazism: after all, many German non-Jews had
protested against the regime and had also been sent to the concentration-
and death-camps. She also showed how the Nazis’ worst crimes against
humanity had actually been made possible by the war. (It was discovered
that Vera, too, had been unpopular with the Nazis - whom her abusers had
accused her and other pacifists of supporting. Her name had been entered
in the Gestapo’s ‘Black Book’, which listed 2,820 people to be
arrested at once if Britain was successfully invaded. Pacifism was seen by
the Nazis as a very real threat.)
Vera continued to work for the PPU, and was its chairperson from 1949
until 1951. At this point (she was now approaching 60) she felt she had
done all she could for ‘organised’ peace work. Now, with ‘the same
principles but different approaches’ she wanted to return
single-mindedly to writing. Her ‘Testament of Experience’, describing
her life - and her work for peace - was published in 1957. She also
continued to write articles about major issues, and she was a regular
contributor to ‘Peace News’, the PPU’s newspaper. She wrote in
support of such ideas and projects as the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament; independence for colonised countries; the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa (‘Peace News’ was banned in South Africa as a
result); and political nonviolent protest as taught by Gandhi in India.
After a fall in 1966 Vera was never really well again, and in 1970 she
died. A memorial service was held for her at St Martin-in-the-Fields,
crowded with family, friends, and people from all the organisations she
had worked with and for. Her daughter(Liberal politician Shirley Williams)
said that when Vera died ‘she believed that as a writer she had been
forgotten, the fading voice of a dying generation’. But in less than ten
years Vera Brittain’s work, and her courageous personality, were being
rediscovered. ‘Testament of Youth’ was made into a hugely popular
television drama series, and hasn’t been out of print since. Indeed, it
is now on school and college reading lists everywhere. Vera would be
delighted, not only because her book is so appreciated, but also because
it’s one of the growing number of recommended books which warn us all
against the grief and horrors of war
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