Just before he died in 1987, my grandfather Jack Weaving sat at a typewriter and wrote a set of short stories about his childhood in the West Country of England. One of these was about his older brother, George, who was 17 when World War I broke out. By all accounts a strapping young man – six foot three with square shoulders and a decidedly handsome face – George lied about his age and signed up to fight for Britain when the call came, and was enlisted in the Grenadier Guards – almost exactly 100 years ago.
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I tell you this because I was reminded of his story at the opening night of the recent British Film Festival, where the new movie Testament of Youth was screened. It's really worth catching when it's released, and is based on the best-selling memoirs of Vera Brittain – writer and pacifist. The ethereal Alicia Vikander plays Vera Brittain, with Kit Harrington (yes, that's Jon Snow from Game of Thrones) cast as her fiancé Roland Leighton. The film opens in 1914 and follows Vera and her friends and brothers as they too are propelled to war. I don't want to give away anything important, but you can imagine the most likely outcomes and why Brittain, after the war, dedicated her life to the search for peace. At 21, with brothers, fiancé and closest friends fighting, she left a place at Oxford University to become a nurse, working firstly in a hospital in London and then at the coastal town of Etaples in Northern France, where Allied forces had established a base camp and a clearing station for the wounded. By all accounts the conditions there were atrocious (Aussie soldiers later caused a mutiny things were so bad), and Brittain nursed both German and Allied men, many suffering from mustard gas poisoning.
The film's director James Kent – thanks to the beautiful cinematography and a moving score – creates a strong sense of how this dreadful war was to touch the lives of so many people, the Brittain family included. In the book that became the voice of a generation Vera wrote: "How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die."
The film plays strongly to the powerful tradition of tragic English romanticism, and works carefully to neither glorify war nor condemn its futility. Events are laid out – albeit beautifully – for us to bear witness. And we also see glimpses of how difficult it was for Britain to argue for restraint when dealing with Germany after the war. The hatred towards Germany and Germans was palpable, and with something like 5 per cent of the British population killed or wounded, the impact is almost inconceivable, the emotional damage continuing to rust away lives for years. The film is a timely reminder of the need for compassion, and – as Brittain herself said – to untiringly order your life "by the rule of love, though others may be captured by hate".
My grandfather, Jack, never spoke about his brother, George, nor about any of the experiences he had of the Second World War that was to follow. In his short story, written with a playful and self-effacing pragmatism, he describes how George came back home on a break before heading to France. Jack, then 12 years old, was playing in a country lane when George turned up with their father and sister to say goodbye. "Strange how one remembers this after all these years" writes my grandfather. "There as we met, my brother gave me a wide cheerful grin and said 'Well, so long, Jack', and I replied with an equally cheerful 'Well, so-long George, and then on they went. A little while later, I turned and looked at their backs, and stood for a minute or two watching them, and thinking how good George looked. Then they disappeared round the bend of the road. I never saw him again."
