As The 100^th Anniversary Commemoration Of The Slaughter Of World War I Continues-Vera Brittain’s Testament Of Youth-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Frank Jackman

Testament Of Youth, starring Alicia Vikander, based on the memoirs of Vera Brittain, 2015  

We are now, as I write this review about the film Testament Of Youth based on the memoirs of the well-known 20^th century British pacifist Vera Brittain, deep into the third year of the commemoration of the unmitigated slaughter of World War I. There are many ways that people have become anti-war, anti-imperialist, if not pacifists, and this film is a striking example of one young woman’s way to that path. It is perhaps easier to get on that anti-war path if you have been reared among the various historic religious objectors to war like the Quakers and Mennonites. Moreover it is unquestionably understandable, since this reflects my own case, if you have been in military service and have come first hand up against the inexorable demand of the killing machine that war has always been. That type conversion although not typical of the experience of the average soldier who, if he or she survives, goes home and goes back to whatever they were doing is well-documented (although the now more openly expressed experiences of post-World War II veterans from Vietnam and the various American Middle East invasions and occupations, including high rates of suicide and other social pathologies may make that “going back to what they were doing” statement suspect). The trail to pacifism that Ms. Brittain charted, going from her bewildered unformed pleading with her father to let her brother Edward join the army as the almost universal hysteria around entry into World War I fanned its flames, to drawing some ant-war lessons from her experiences makes this a very interesting long-term conversion experience.    

One of the great, and I do not believe not arbitrary, dividing lines in modern history was the sharp difference in sensibilities before World War I and afterward. Before the war was entirely possible for anybody who would a combatant, or a non-combatant like most young women, to believe war a necessary evil to fight evil yet to be naïve about what impersonal and indifferent to intentions industrial-sized war was all about. After that war when the flower of European male youth laid down their heads for a few strips of land or some ruling class’ demented designs that was no longer possible although many still continued to believe that the case. Ms. Brittain and her generation fell sway to that former belief. She and her brother Edward as well as his fellows at school were all under that sway as the war clouds gathered. These were all middle-class kids with expectations that they would help, if left alone, help push the British Empire forward. But the war cut off that possibility.

Here is the way Vera’s conversion played out on film (a look at her biography shows that her conversions and the events which gave her those insights were rather of longer duration). The precocious Vera, played in a very strong performance by Alicia Vikander, a very intelligent upper middle-class young woman from out in the hinterlands, wanted to sit for the examination for entry into Oxford. Her seemingly old-fashioned father balked until Vera’s loving brother Edward stepped in to persuade him to let her sit. She was accepted. And they were off. Except the damn war got in the way in all kinds of ways as the question of doing one’s duty for one’s country ate at Edward and his friends. One of those friends, Roland, along the way becoming very smitten by Vera. And eventually she him. The long and short of it was all the young men in her life were off to the military, none forced to go but committed to do the “right thing.”

The bulk of the rest of the film deals with the intertwined fates of the young men and Vera’s own personally patriotic attempts to do her duty-for her young male compatriots. Rather than completing her studies at Oxford she volunteered for the nursing corps-for the duration including a stint at the front in France. From there it is a case of all the young men she was involved with laying down their heads on various fronts. Roland, at home on furlough, who had previously been extremely attentive to Vera had come back a changed man. Before he returned to the front under her nurturing they decide to get married the next time he was home on leave. There would be no next time. Her brother’s friends share a similar fate and eventually her sweet Edward after being saved by her at her nursing station near the front goes back on duty. Only to be one more causality in the daily newspaper and one more black-etched telegraph message from the War Office to the family.

As the film ends (as it had begun) Vera is troubled by the euphoria of the crowds on Armistice Day 1918. Having seen the flower of her country’s (and Germany’s) youth fall under the barb-wired on the fronts and having lost her companions she happened on a meeting discussing what should become of the Germans who “started” the war. She makes an impassioned and person speech before that essentially hostile crowd. And the rest is history. Yes, a testament to youth- and the folly of war. If we could ever learn that lesson without all the hell she had to go through. See this one, please.