Playing Fields, Flanders Fields

Paul Delany

• War Diary 1913-1917: Chronicle of Youth by Vera Brittain, edited by Alan Bishop
  Gollancz, 382 pp, £8.50, September 1981, ISBN 0 575 02888 2
• The English Poets of the First World War by John Lehmann
  Thames and Hudson, 144 pp, £6.95, August 1981, ISBN 0 500 01256 3
• Voices from the Great War by Peter Vansittart
  Cape, 303 pp, £7.95, November 1981, ISBN 0 224 01915 5
• The Little Field-Marshal: Sir John French by Richard Holmes
  Cape, 427 pp, £12.50, November 1981, ISBN 0 224 01575 3

When Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was published in 1933 it struck a deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been men of special grace, the irreplaceable flower of the nation’s youth; and they blamed the post-war decline of Britain on their absence. The survivors – guilty, perhaps, simply of having survived – were left to bear the burden of a disappointing and mediocre peace.