Vera Brittain

...the circumstances of Roland's death....

Gradually the circumstances of Roland's death, which at first I was totally unable to grasp, began to acquire coherence in my mind. Through letters from his colonel, his fellow officers, the Catholic padre who had buried him, and his servant whose sympathy was extremely loquacious and illegibly expressed in pencil, we were able to piece together the details of his end-so painful, so unnecessary, so grimly devoid of that heroic limelight which Roland had always regarded as ample compensation for those who were slain, like Kingsley's Heroes, " in the flower of youth on the chance of winning a noble name." The facts, as finally gathered, were more or less these:

 On the night, December 22nd, that Roland was mortally wounded, the 7th Worcesters had just taken over some new trenches. Like the company whose lethargic captain appears in the opening scene of Journey's End, the previous occupants of these trenches had left them dirty and dilapidated, while the wire in front was so neglected that Roland's platoon was ordered to spend the night in repairing it. Before taking the wiring party over, he went to inspect the place himself, using a concealed path which led to No Man's Land through a gap in a hedge, because the communication trench was flooded. As it happened, this trench had been flooded for a long time, and the use of the alternative path was known to the Germans. Not unnaturally, they had trained a machine gun on the gap, and were accustomed to fire a few volleys whenever the troops facing them showed signs of activity. This enemy habit was known to the Worcesters' predecessors, but they did not, apparently, think it worth mentioning to the relieving battalion.

 At the time that the Worcesters took over, the moon was nearly full, and the path through the hedge must have been quite visible by night to the vigilant eyes which were only, at that point, a hundred yards away. As soon as Roland reached the gap, the usual volley was fired. Almost the first shot struck him in the stomach, penetrating his body, and he fell on his face, gesticulating wildly, in full view of the company. At the risk of their lives, his company commander and a sergeant rushed out and carried him back to the trench. Twenty minutes afterwards the doctor at the dressing-station put an end to his agony with a large dose of morphia, and from that moment Roland ceased-and ceased for ever-to be Roland.

 The next morning a complicated abdominal operation was performed on him by the senior surgeon of the Casualty Clearing Station at Louvencourt, ten miles away, but the wound had caused so much internal mutilation that the doctors knew he was not likely to last longer than a few hours. The machine-gun bullet had injured, amongst other things, the base of the spine, so that if by some combined miracle of surgical skill and a first-rate constitution he had been saved from death, he would have been paralysed from the waist downwards for the rest of his life. As it was, he only came round from the operation sufficiently to receive, " in a state of mazy contentment," Extreme Unction from the Jesuit padre who, unknown to us all, had received him into the Catholic Church early that summer. " Lying on this hillside for six days makes me very stiff," he told the padre cheer-fully. They were his last coherent words. At eleven o'clock that night-the very hour in which I had been so happily filling the men's paper-bags with crackers-Uppingham's record prize-winner, whose whole nature fitted him for the spectacular drama of a great battle, died forlornly in a hospital bed. On the Sunday morning that we, in the Keymer cottage, were vainly trying to realise his end, his burial service was read in the village church beside the military cemetery at Louvencourt. As they brought his body from the church, the colonel told us, " the sun came out and shone brilliantly."

; That was all. There was no more to learn. Not even a military purpose seemed to have been served by his death; the one poor consolation was that his routine assumption of responsibility had saved the wiring party. 

Later, night after night at Camberwell, watching the clouds drift slowly across the stars, I dwelt upon these facts until it seemed as though my mind would never contain the anguish that they brought me. Had it been heroism or folly, I asked myself for the thousandth time, which had urged him forth to inspect the wire beneath so bright a moon ? In those days it seemed a matter of life or death to know. " 

All heroism," I argued desperately in my diary, " is to a certain extent unnecessary from a purely utilitarian point of view.... But heroism means something infinitely greater and finer, even if less practical, than just avoiding blame, and doing one's exact, stereotyped duty and no more."

 All the same, gazing fixedly out of the ward window at a tall church spire blackly silhouetted against banks of cloud pierced by a shaft of brilliant moonshine, I would whisper like a maniac to the sombre, indifferent night: " Oh, my love !-so proud, so confident, so contemptuous of humiliation, you who were meant to lead a forlorn hope, to fall in a great fight-just to be shot like a rat in the dark ! Why did you go so boldly, so heedlessly, into No Man's Land when you knew that your leave was so near ? Dearest, why did you, why did you ? " (pp.241-43)

From:  Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago Press, 1984).  First published 1933.