Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

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/?]