Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

I feel as if someone had uprooted my heart to see how it was growing.

The War has little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank balance.

And so, farewell. All our sweet songs are sung,
Our red rose–garlands withered;
The sun-bright day--
Silver and blue and gold--
Wearied to sleep.

The shimmering evening, like a grey, soft bird,
Barred with the blood of sunset,
Has flown to rest
Under the scented wings
Of the dark-blue Night.

Would he ever write any more such poems, I wondered...

"Really," I wrote to Roland, "if feminism gains a hearing after this War is over, the leaders of the movement will have to be picked and chosen, I think the kind that shout and order about and find fault will have to be eliminated."

On my first day at the hospital, a Scottish sergeant produced a comment of which the stark truth came finally home to me three summers afterwards.

"We shall beat them," he said, "but they'll break our hearts first!"

"I['m]...thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of [soldiers] gave me, and for my early release from the sex inhibitions that...thanks to the Victorian tradition...dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforks her into an incompletely visualized and highly disconcerting intimacy-beset many of my female contemporaries..."