Carol Acton

Writing and Waiting: The First World War Correspondence between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton

The unpublished letters exchanged between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton during the First World War, and Brittain’s diary of the period, show the extent to which men’s and women’s war experiences were interdependent, thus collapsing those binary oppositions of home and front, women and men, within which we write war. In these texts, the woman Brittain defines as ‘waiting at home’ cannot be divorced from the official war arena - the front. Furthermore, such interdepend-ence reveals that women’s tendency to accept much of the discourse of propaganda occurred not because of their separation from the world of combat, but because their intimate connection with it demanded the site of mourning that was offered by such discourse.

‘Stepping into history’: reading the Second World War through Irish women's diaries

This article examines two very different wartime diary accounts by Irish women, Romie Lambkin, a driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and Mary Morris, who nursed in England, France and Belgium. Both texts assert the legitimacy of the Irishwomans wartime story through consciously placing themselves in history, affirmed by the difference between their ‘real’ existence as participants in the war, and the ‘unreal’ Eire, outside history and reality, a ‘fairyland’, as Lambkin calls it, of lights and food set against a blacked out and bombed out Europe. More broadly, drawing on theoretical perspectives on life-writing and identity, the discussion focuses on these accounts as dynamic, vividly written contributions to our understanding of the war experience, showing how the subjective experience narrated in a diary has an important place in the collective historical narrative of the Second World War.

‘Can’t Face the Graves Today’

These two accounts from volunteer nurses on the Western Front in the First World War, a Briton and an American, present a similar response to the news of the Armistice: not the joy and exhilaration of victory, or even relief at the end of the slaughter, but an overwhelming burden of grief at the loss that they had witnessed and which in that witnessing had become intrinsic to their experience. Women’s writing from the ‘front’, by professional and voluntary nurses, whether in the form of diaries or letters written during the war or memoirs composed later, reveals not only how grief marked their response to the official end of war, but also how it was intrinsic to the daily experience of nursing, and shows that the recording itself was an act of mourning. Thus, for example, the diary letters of nursing sister K. Luard, written at regular intervals throughout her time in France and Belgium and published in two consecutive volumes as Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1915 (1915) and Unknown Warriors (1930), mourn overtly through the commemorative framework imposed on the published collections and indirectly in her immediate accounts of individual deaths.1 It becomes clear when reading nurses’ writing from the First World War that narrating their war experience, whether during the war in the form of letters or diaries or post-war as memoir or autobiography, is a form of elegy.

Grieving the ‘Good’ War

The memoirs, diaries and letter exchanges discussed in Chapter 1 reveal the fallacy of defining war through the traditional boundaries and binaries of home and front, civilian and combatant, beginning and ending. At the same time, such boundaries still persist in delimiting spatial parameters and in creating a legitimacy surrounding voices that are given permission to speak and voices that are silenced. As both Damousi and Winter show, and as we have seen in the private writings of women such as Vera Brittain and Phyllis Kelly, the emotional history of war involves a particularly poignant collapsing of conventional boundaries of time and space, illustrating how the war experience extends long past its official ending not just in terms of public memory in the form of memorials, for example, but also in private struggles to deal with loss both emotionally and economically. The popular success of Sherriff’s play Journey’s End in 1929 and Brittain’s Testament of Youth in 1933 further testify to the need for a shared public expression of private anguish long after the official end of the war. To consider grief and loss in the First World War and Second World War as distinct would, therefore, be to ignore those voices of mourning from the First World War that extend to and then merge with grief as it is anticipated and experienced in the second.

Mourning and Combat

The gendered division of wartime behaviour excludes women‘s voices from speaking war when it is defined as combat, and at the same time privileges grief and mourning as the province of women on the home front. This gendered division of labour similarly works to exclude male combatant grief from the war story: fighting and weeping cannot exist in the same space. The impossibility of expressing grief in combat represented by David Jones in In Parenthesis and the pain that remains years after the deaths of friends in the Second World War in the words of two American combatants interviewed in the 1990s point to the problematic nature of combatant grief and mourning that results from the immediate conditions of death and these gendered constructions of mourner and mourned.

For Women Must Weep

On Saturday, 28 October 1916, Phyllis Kelly received this telegram: ‘Eric reported by wire this morning dangerously wounded Oct 27 is in casualty clearing station they cannot grant permission to visit.’ Her response is to write a letter to Eric that she knows he may never see.

Epilogue: ‘Mother to Mother’

Lynda Van Devanter’s politicising the private grief of the mother as a protest against war is employed again in a Vietnam nurse veteran’s response to the First Gulf War. In her poem ‘The Muslim Mother’, Bobbie Trotter takes the images of war beyond American mourning on the home front to include the mourning of ‘the other’. Trotter brings together the iconic Christian image of mother (the Pieta) with ‘the other’ Muslim mother as a way of uniting two opposing cultures in the single image of a mother’s plea against war: ‘The Muslim / mother went / to the grotto / clutching her son’s / picture to her aching breast’. The poem strips away the public and, by implication masculine, rhetoric that divides nations and sends them to war: ‘it wasn’t her faith in Allah / it wasn’t her faith in Jesus / that led her there’. This specific Muslim mother thus becomes the universal image of maternal grief, ‘before the statue / of the Virgin / Mary she fell / prostrate’, through whom Trotter can reject constructions of meaning that sustain the binaries essential to the perpetuation of war. For a mother war can be understood only in terms of personal loss and grief: ‘and begged / mother to / mother / please / end / this / war’ (Van Devanter and Furey (eds)., 1991, p. 180).