Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

. . . at all costs I must preserve my self-respect – preserve the self which he loved and I have lost . . . I only wish I could see a little light in all the depths and blackness – only wish I knew what my obvious duty was. Perhaps it is not impossible to regain one's self respect.

"Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?"

Had a really been a time, I wondered, when I believed that it was?

"... and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country's Glory or another's Lust of Power."

"The shortage of doctors," I commented, "must be a tremendous problem–yet when the women doctors they are crying out for now began their training, every possible obstacle was put in their way."

I did not then know that when the group of medical women . . . had offered their services to the War Office in 1914, they have been told that all that was required of women was to go home and keep quiet.

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.

"It…makes me so, so angry and impatient with most of the soulless non-entities one finds around one here. I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful. Modern warfare is merely a trade…as far as I can see. Sometimes by dint of an opportunity a single man may rise from the sordidness to a deed of beauty; that is all."

-From a letter from Roland to Vera

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..."