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The textbook reading assignment features Vera Brittain (pages 220–221) and her experience with World War I. For this Unit 5 Discussion, post a response of 3–4 paragraphs in answer to the following questions:
What was Vera’s dream? Did she ever realize this dream?
Describe her wartime service and its impact on her.
Vera responded to war in writing. How did other people respond to war (see pages 222–223)? What is your reaction to their art?

VERA BRITTAIN (pg 220-223)

Named as if to represent those of her land and generation, Brittain was an intelligent, lovely young brunette from a well- to- do family in northern England. She wanted to be a writer and was eager to leave the confines of a small town and to change the second- class status of women. She studied hard to achieve her first dream, which was to go to college at Oxford. She passed the tough entrance exam, a great achievement in itself. Her dream was realized. But just as she arrived at Oxford for her first term in the fall of 1914, Europe went to war. Brittain and her new friends were swept away by the racing river of war enthusiasm. Eventually this included two friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow; her younger brother Edward; and her first love, Roland Leighton, also a new student at Oxford. As she watched her friends, family, and love go to war, Brittain felt a surge of pride and a deep confidence that they were all a part of something grand and wonderful, something world- changing. They were right, but not in the way they expected. As Brittain began to correspond with Roland and the others about their experiences, her feelings of pride and confidence gave way to mixed emotions about the war itself and about what might happen to her loved ones. All around her, people were losing theirs. The thought of losing those close to her in a war that more and more seemed terribly brutal, futile, and never- ending struck Brittain hard. Doubts and feelings of helplessness plagued her. Sometime in 1915, she decided to do what she could and volunteered as an army nurse. She served for the next three years in hospitals in London, in northern France, and on the Mediterranean island of Malta, growing more dis­illusioned by the day. She held out hope that she would be reunited, if only for a short time, with Roland for Christmas in 1915. While waiting for him to arrive, she received a telegram: Roland had been killed two days earlier and would never be coming home. Grieving, she pulled herself back into nursing and corresponded with Victor and Geoffrey and now her brother Edward, who was just old enough to enlist. Every day, she cared for soldiers from both sides of the war. Some lost limbs. Some lost eyes. Others were ill from battle fatigue. Still others suffered horribly from the shock of war, which we now call PTSD ( post- traumatic stress disorder). In 1917, Victor and Geoffrey were killed, and in the final year of the war, Edward was killed. In her unforgettable account of her war experience, Testament of Youth ( 1933), Brittain wrote that by the end of the war she was completely numb— to suffering, to loss, to any hope for the future— and felt too paralyzed to start over again. But she did. She returned to Oxford, formed friendships with those who had survived the war, and began to write. She also saw that the war had taken an especially hard toll on women, those who before the war were often viewed as little more than grown children to be pampered and patronized. Those women had proven themselves to be far more as they were called upon to take up the tasks left unmanned by war. They worked in shops, in factories, in schools, in hospitals, and in every other conceivable way to keep a nation going. So Brittain led the campaign for gender equality. She was labeled a “ feminist,” but to her, she was only doing what made good sense. Her Testament of Youth became a bestseller. Permanently affected by the shock of WWI, she became a pacifist, and years later, strongly opposed Britain’s entry into WWII.

HUMAN RESPONSES TO WWI

Perhaps the most profound legacy of the war is the human record, something that concerns us most as we survey global cultures. We have a rich cache of artifacts from World War I.

The War Memoir

Besides the story of Vera Brittain, we have memoirs, diaries, poems, and battlefield accounts. We have the diaries of Robert Lindsay Mackay, Thomas Frederick Littler, Edwin Evan Jones, William Whitmore, and scores of other accounts from many perspectives and nationalities. We have first- hand accounts of being torpedoed in the Aegean Sea, of a labor company at Ypres, of a young boy’s experience at the Battle of Gallipoli, of being held captive in the Ardennes Forest, and of narrow escapes and brave counterattacks. And we have poetry, the monuments of which include Rupert Brooks’ “ The Soldier,” John McCrae’s “ In Flanders Fields,” and Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori,” (“ It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.”). But not all of this material is serious and sober. People find humor in the unlikeliest of places, and I think you would agree that humor is another way for us to tell our stories and, by doing so, cope with the unthinkable. In addition to the works noted above, students of WWI have a col­lection of some 500 cockney war stories with titles like “ The Chef Drops a Brick” and “ Chuck Us Yer Name Plate.” All of these works offer us a record, and this entire record was an attempt to make sense of war, to find dignity in the trenches. This goes to the heart of the study of world cultures: all cultures attempt to find meaning even in the most desperate of circumstances, and most often, this comes down to us in writing. Writing became a means of coping, even of healing. Writing was a way to exercise memory so as to purge memory, to remove the toxins of war with the catharsis of language. As we remember, we often edit, and so later generations must appreciate that the memoirs we read are works of art in themselves, not simply “ accounts” of precisely what hap­pened. That doesn’t discount them. It actually enhances their value for us.

Deconstructing Art and Music

In many cultures of the past, post- war culture is a time of renaissance. It can repre­sent a rebirth as people struggle to understand what just happened and to synthesize the past for the benefit of the future. We can point to a few examples. The birth of Western philosophy, art, and architecture came after the horrendous Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. In East Asian history, Confucius gave up his life as a provincial bureaucrat to become a teacher of virtue after the collapse of the celebrated Zhou dynasty in China. Culture after WWI is another good example of this pattern. What occurred in the 1920s was one of the most exciting, most fruitful periods of cultural creativity in history. It was as if after being buried in trenches or being locked away in hospitals or war shelters, people came out into the sunshine and were viscerally determined to unleash all of the pent- up creativity that had lain dormant for years. They were also viscerally determined to have a good time, and the nightlife of the 1920s is legendary for excess and experimentation. All told, however, the result was something remarkable. Since it reflected the experience of war, postwar culture also possessed a fractured perspective and dark overtones. Fractured lives were reflected in the fractured lines of culture after WWI. Kathe Kollwitz, having lost a son herself to the war, led the way in sketching out what remained of human dignity after the war. Often done in charcoal or sepia, her sketches inspired sculpture and other monuments to WWI. The Fauvists and Cubists were more convinced than ever that their conceptual per­spective reflected the human condition. The Dada movement, an offshoot of the prewar avant- garde, collected everyday mundane material objects and displayed them, often with very little additional artistic rendering. The Bauhaus architec­tural movement also stressed everyday practicality termed functionalism as homes and buildings were rebuilt after war. Total war also produced tonal dissonance as composers took their cues to structure symphonies without recognizable themes or harmonies. Arnold Schönberg relished atonal works. Other composers in this same vein, like Igor Stravinsky, took as their vocation the reeducation of European music lovers. Many, though, decided to hold on to traditional genres of music and decided that atonality was one class in their education they preferred to flunk. Beyond this, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the growth of the automobile and airline industries, and the universal fascination with cinema signaled a new age of flight beyond the traditional bounds into a realm of genuine existence: existentialism. For many, the past age was a confusing as well as tragic one. Hadn’t European progress ensured a better future? Hadn’t industrialized technology relieved us of many of the burdens of the past? Hadn’t sophistication in literature and the arts cre­ated the potential for splendidly civilized world cultures? For many after WWI, the answer was no, or at least that something was deeply amiss. Indeed, those colonized by Western empires confessed that if this was what it was to be civilized— if this was what “ civilization” meant— they wanted no part of it. In the coming decades, this disillusionment with the prewar order would transform world cultures in the 20th century.