Status Updates From Testament of Youth

Italy, with its new scenes and experiences, had made all the difference; in spite of Asiago, in spite of Louvencourt, those weeks abroad had somehow healed the acutest soreness of the War's deep hurt. After them, apart from occasional dreams, I had no more hallucinations nor night terrors nor insomnia, and by the . . . end of the year . . . I was nearly a normal person.

How mean they are, these little strivings, these petty ambitions of us who are left, now that all of you are gone! How can the future achieve, through us, the sombre majesty of the past? Oh, Edward, you're so lonely up here; why can't I stay for ever and keep your grave company, far from the world and it's vain endeavors to rebuild civilisation, on this Plateau where alone there is dignity and peace?

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide.

Too miserable to light the fire or even to get into bed, I lay on the cold floor and wept with childish abandonment. Why couldn't I have died in the War with the others? . . . Why couldn't a torpedo have finished me, or an aerial bomb, or one of those annoying illnesses? I'm nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage, living on ingloriously in a world that doesn't want me!

in which love would seem threatened perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might, perhaps, have it again, but never again should I hold it. [3/3]

Only gradually did I realise that the War had condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of apprehension; [1/2]

The immediate result of peace – the cessation of direct threats to one's personal safety – was at first almost imperceptible, just as a prolonged physical pain which has turned from acuteness into an habitual dull ache can cease altogether without the victim noticing that it has gone. [2/3]

How would the War ultimately have affected me? I wondered, looking with dull eyes into a singularly empty future, which seemed capable of being filled only by individual efforts that I did not feel in the least inclined to make. [1/3]

And now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the war; nothing remained except to endure it. [4/4]

Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon . . . it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, "a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing." [3/4]

Once an ecstatic idealist who had tripped down the steep Buxton hill in a golden glow of self dedication to my elementary duties at the Devonshire hospital, I had now passed – like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far – into a permanent state of numb disillusion. [2/?]

. . . I couldn't see that it mattered to myself or anyone else if I caught and even died from one of my patient's dire diseases, when so many beautiful bodies of young men were rotting in the mud of France and the pine forests of Italy. Having become, at last, the complete automaton, moving like a sleep-walker through the calm atmosphere of Millbank, I was no longer capable of either enthusiasm or fear. [1/?]

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. [2/2]

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. . .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 died at an earlier stage of the interminable War, leaving him alone to mourn their loss. [1/2]

Two orderlies, hastily summoned from adjacent wards by one of my few convalescent patients, finally rescued my 5-foot-3 from its predicament, and as they strapped the insane giant into bed I sat by my table with a beating heart, listening to his fury exploding in a torrent of such expressive language as had not yet assailed my innocent ears even in 2.5 years of Army life. [2/2]

I had not underrated the strenuousness of my ward; indeed, it contained possibilities hitherto unrealized–as I knew one night after I have been chased up and down the hut by a stark naked 6-foot-4 New Zealander in the fighting stage of delirium. [1/2]

The world was mad and we were all victims; that was the only way to look at it. These shattered, dying boys and I were paying alike for a situation that none of us had desired or done anything to bring about.