Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

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]