World War I left deep wounds in the survivors, including the families of those who had died, and memories of the war and their loved ones filled everyday life. Like the English writer Vera Brittain, many relatives roamed the battlefields of Europe, in hopes of cementing their memories and understanding what had happened to their loved ones—and to Western civilization as a whole. During the war, Brittain had served as a nurse while suffering the loss of her brother, fiancé, and friends. Whereas organized tours of battlefields had begun almost immediately after the war, in 1921 Brittain went on her own to find her brother’s grave high up in the remote mountains of Italy. She recounted this visit in a memoir of her early life.

“How strange, how strange it is,” I reflected, as I looked, with an indefinable pain stabbing my chest, for Edward’s name among those neat rows of oblong stones, “that all my past years—the childhood of which I have no one, now, to share the remembrance, the bright fields at Uppingham, the restless months in Buxton, the hopes and ambitions of Oxford, the losses and long-drawn agonies of the War—should be buried in this grave on the top of a mountain, in the lofty silence, the singing unearthly stillness, of these remote forests! At every turn of every future road I shall want to ask him questions, to recall to him memories, and he will not be there. Who could have dreamed that the little boy born in such uneventful security to an ordinary provincial family would end his brief days in a battle among the high pine-woods of an unknown Italian plateau?”

Close to the wall, in the midst of a group of privates from the Sherwood Foresters who had all died on June 15th, I found his name: “Captain E. H. Brittain, M.C., 11th Notts. And Derby Regt. Killed in action June 15th, 1918. Aged 22.” In Venice I had bought some rosebuds and a small asparagus fern in a pot; the shopkeeper had told me that it would last a long time, and I planted it in the rough grass beside the grave.

“How trivial my life has been since the War!” I thought, as I smoothed the earth over the fern. “How mean they are, these little strivings, these petty ambitions of us who are left, now that all of you are gone! How can the future achieve, through us, the sombre majesty of the past? Oh, Edward, you’re so lonely up here; why can’t I stay for ever and keep your grave company, far from the world and its vain endeavours to rebuild civilisation, on this Plateau where alone there is dignity and peace?”

Source: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933; repr. London: Virago, 1978), 525–27.

Question to Consider

In what ways are memory and historical facts important in this account of the postwar world? How do memory and facts shape Brittain’s analysis of the future?