Depressing War Post

My previous post exhibits the poem "Violets from Plug Street Wood," which was written by a soldier in WWI for a British nurse. I ran across this poem in the book Testament of Youth, which is the memoirs of Vera Brittain, the recipient of the poem. (I read the book as a choice reading assignment for AP Euro; maybe Justin's not that far off in claiming that AP Comp borders on being a history class.)

I read Testament in November, and couldn't help comparing it to The Things They Carried. The two books are incredibly, completely different: one is a bitter, laconic loose collection of fiction stories about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, the other is a 660-page tome of precise chronological recollections based exactingly on the journal entries of a British V.A.D. in WWI. Two vastly different wars, two different times, countries, positions, sexes, approaches. Here comes the depressing part: they both end in almost exactly the same place.

Vera's memoirs go on to describe her return to England after the war and her work there, and it is clear that she and others of her generation suffered from a condition of horrible disconnect and sickening isolation. She says that, quite literally, "all her friends are dead." The older and younger generations, and those of her generation who stayed behind, seem smug, distant, and cruel; One professor said to a soldier returning to Oxford simply, "...you've been away a long time....It's a pity--a great pity; you'll have to work very hard to catch up with the others!" The general opinion, as Vera experienced it, had switched from the 1914 view that the War was more important than anything else to the view that the War was a useless waste of resources, and that those who participated were fools. Those of the War Generation were alone, disenfranchised, psychologically and emotionally scarred. Vera Brittain cannot have been the only one who had trouble forming new relationships because she was, as she said, "afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows."

Perhaps because she was publishing under her own name a work that was meant to be a historical record, and not allowing herself the slight separation that O'Brien did when he published "fiction," she seems loath to discuss certain personal aspects of her experiences. Brittain does, however, make it quite clear that she suffered for some time from psychosis and later had a second, shorter but complete mental breakdown. She was not at the font lines, but she suffered incredible strain, illness, trauma from attack and the sometimes constant sound of nearby shelling, and experience with an "inundation of blood and pus," with stuffing men's intestines back in their bellies and watching others die from mustard gas, opening a Christmastime package to find her love's shirt, still stained and with a hole torn in it, hearing his pointless last words, and meeting all of this with the ultimate disapproval of her war-weary country.

Most heartbreaking of all, she recovered enough from it to lead a creative life in journalism and dedicated her energies to the support of peace efforts and the League of Nations so that she could with fresh optimism and life do all her small part in preventing the similar suffering of others, then she married and had children, who would have been exactly the right age to be drafted into WWII.

If her children survived to reproduce, their children probably would have been a bit young to be drafted into Vietnam.