“Politics is the
executive expression of human immaturity”.
Vera Brittan
Detroit, Michigan. 1 November. I
am sitting in the Sky Club lounge at Detroit Airport bored out of my brain
awaiting my delayed connection to Austin, Texas. So, I decided to write a blog.
It may surprise regular readers of this modest blog that one of my favourite
books is Testament of Youth, Vera
Brittan’s war memoir to end all war memoirs. It is a story of indescribable
loss. Loss of family, friends and love on the charnel fields of the First World
War. It is also a story of immeasurable hope as women begin their long journey
to rightful and righteous equality. At times the book touches me personally.
Brittan’s description of her entry into Oxford University and her fight to be
treated with the respect her mind deserved chimes sharply with my own
experience amidst the ivory towers and dreaming spires some sixty years later.
Indeed, I was the first, or at least one of the first, to gain entry to Oxford
from an ordinary state, comprehensive school utterly ill-prepared for my entry
into a society of whom I had had little experience. It was more than intimidating. It was
terrifying. I simply did not belong.
Brittan’s elegiac eloquence
speaks for a slaughtered generation. Indeed, the book marks the end of innocence
at so many levels, a Cri de Coeur of a young woman trying to make sense of staggering
loss. In so doing Brittan pleads across a century to understand the place, the
role and the rights of the individual in the face of dark, distant, and unimaginably
dangerous power. Having worked as a nurse at the front Brittan became a
pacifist, blaming war itself for her loss. However, war was only the agent of
death for it was a failure of vision, politics and strategy at the top that
doomed those she loved. Above all, it
was a failure at the top of power to understand how an apparently enduring peace
could so quickly become industrial, total war.
A century on as I cast my mind
across today’s Europe there is none of the nationalistic “it will all be over
by Christmas” hubris from which all the soon-to-be warring nations suffered in
1914. Rather, the opposite is happening. As illiberal predators emerge from the
dark recesses of intolerance and gather at Europe’s periphery they see Europe
not as strong and steadfast. No, they see Europe as prey full of the weak, the
hapless and the irresponsibly well-meaning. Indeed, it is as though Europe has
become one vast ivory tower, a vast ‘Oxford’ in which a hallowed elite see very
real risk, threat and danger as some abstract concept to be debated but not
acted upon.
If ever there was a case of lions
being led by donkeys it is Europe today.
With society-breaking migration destroying free movement by moving all
too freely; with a resurgent Russia ‘righting’ imaginary ‘wrongs’ on its reeling
region; and with a woeful world growing more dangerous by the day European
leaders are clueless. Instead, they have resorted to a form of pacifism to mask
the extent of their impotence and the implications of their incompetence from
Europe’s people. It is a pacifism that is so pacific that it wallows in a mire
of liberal contradictions, self-denying and self-paralysing in equal measure.
When I cast my eye across this world what I see is coming war - big war as frictions and
falsehoods are magnified by self-willed liberal retreat and self-obsessed
illiberal challenge. It is a world in which unscrupulous and intolerant power
seeks dominion over the innocent and/or irresolute through warped history,
faith, and warped world a view.
Oxford taught me that one must
have the ambition to think and to think big for it is ideas that change worlds
and I see such thinking in all three works of the Testament trilogy. Indeed, what I love about Testament of Youth is its bigness, its grandeur. Its bigness of
spirit, its bigness of humanity, and its bigness of idea. Brittan’s bigness is
that she manages to turn her yawning loss into a quest for peace. Her testimony
to the four lost loves in her life is not some carved headstone but an idea;
that war must never again happen. However, in celebrating innocence Testament of Youth is also a stark
warning to all free citizens not to be reduced to impotent innocence by
self-interested ‘leave it all to us’ politicians, to blindly trust power like
children trust parents.
Testament of Youth is a book I have read many times because each
time I read it I discover something new about myself, the society I help shape,
and the liberal values which I cherish but which I believe need defending.
Where Brittan and I part company is how best to prevent war. For her war was an
intrinsic evil which she hints via her feminist creed is endemic to all men. Like
many of her traumatised generation she also believed that if one removes the ability
to wage war then war will be ended. There are strains of both schools of
thought in today’s debate over the nature and method of European security and
defence. However, for me war is a
function of a structure broken by the eternal struggle between different views
of power. One can never prevent war by the free rendering themselves powerless
in the hope that tyranny will see their reason.
Julian Lindley-French
