Letters from a Lost Generation (edited by Mark Bostridge and Alan Bishop) is a selection of letters, or extracts from letters, written by Vera Brittain to her brother, Edward, and three of his friends. One of these friends, Roland Leighton, became Vera’s fiancé, and the first section of the book concentrates on the letters between these two. Letters from and to the other friends, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson, don’t appear until later.
The letters are very much a product of their time. In an age of emails and texts, how many of us bother to put pen to paper and write long letters like these. Telegrams haven’t been used in the UK for years, certainly not to inform a serviceman’s relatives that a family member has been killed. The language used is also from another age and sometimes, to me at least, seems affected. The writers drop French phrases into the letters for no obvious reason, other than that is what middle-class English people did in those days. Geoffrey Thurlow has a habit of putting ‘Well!’ into his letters, which gives me visions of an out-of-breath schoolboy dashing up to tell me something. Attitudes of the time are obvious in the letters. The boys joined up because it was the right thing to do. Vera became a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse, rather than go to university, because she wanted to be of use. It is also clear that none of them had any idea of what to expect from modern warfare.
The letters also revealed to me how little I know about the First World War. I’d always thought that men enlisted and were sent out after a some training. That may have been true for ‘Other Ranks’, but it certainly wasn’t true for men who joined up to be officers. All three of the boys joined Territorial (reserve) units and were frustrated by how long it took to be sent to fight. Another misconception was that military units were sent to the trenches and stayed there. Each unit spent a limited time in the trenches and then was relieved for a period before going back.
During the war Vera Brittain served as a V.A.D nurse in Britain, Malta and France. Her letters give a good idea of what conditions were like and how they differed between those places.
This book shows the First World War from the point of view of four young people, too naive to anticipate the effect the war would have on them. It’s an interesting book, easy to dip into, but it only tells of things from an officer’s perspective. Anybody interested in this period should balance this book with one from the perspective of the ‘other ranks’, and with a more general history of the First World War.
