Losing a Fiancé
  Vera Brittain's account of the visit she paid to the
grave of her fiance Roland Leighton accompanied by her friend and fellow author Winifred
Holtby: from Testament of Youth (1933):
Today, tours of the battlefields in
France are arranged by numerous agencies; graves are visited in parties, and a regular
trade has been established in wreaths and photographs and cemeteries. But that level of
civilisation had not been reached in 1921 so Winifred and I hired a car in Amiens,
and plunged through a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of
skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim
protest against man's ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man. Along the road, at
intervals, white placards were erected in front of tumbledown groups of roofless,
windowless houses ; were these really the places that we had mentioned with gasping breath
at Etaples three and a half years ago ? I asked myself incredulously, as with chill
excitement I read their names:
BAPAUME-CLERY-VILLERS-BRETONNEUX-PERONNE-GRIVESNE- HEDAUVILLE
At Albert a circumspect row of Army huts, occupied by reconstruction workers, stood
side by side with the humped ruin which had once been the ornate Basilica, crowned by its
golden Virgin holding her Child aloft from the steeple. Was this, I wondered, apart from
the huts, the place as Edward [her brother, killed in the Italian campaign]
had known it?
But the day's real purpose was my visit to
Louvencourt— as the words of the dead American poet, Alan Seeger, restlessly
hammering in my head against the grinding of the car's sorely tried gears, had reminded me
at intervals all afternoon:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill
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Roland Leighton (centre) with
Edward Brittain (left) and Victor Richardson
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As the car drove through the village to the cemetery,
I realised with a shock, from its resemblance to a photograph in my possession, that the
grey château half hidden by tall, drooping trees had once been the Casualty Clearing
Station where Roland had drifted forlornly and unconsciously into death. We found the
cemetery, as Edward had described it, on the top of a hill where two roads joined; the
afternoon was bright and sunny, and just beyond the encircling wall a thin row of
elms made a delicate pattern against the tranquil sky. The graves, each with its little
garden in front, resembled a number of flower-beds planted at intervals in the smooth,
wide lawn, which lay so placidly beneath the long shadow of the slender memorial cross. As
I walked up the paved path where Edward had stood in April 1916, and looked at the trim,
ordered burial-ground and the open, urbane country, I thought how different it all was
from the grey twilight of the Asiago Plateau [where her brother was buried], with
its deep, sinister silence. The strange irony which had determined the fates of Roland and
Edward seemed to persist even after death: the impetuous warrior slept calmly in this
peaceful, complacent earth with its suave covering of velvet lawn; the serene musician lay
on the dark summit of a grim, far-off mountain.
 I left Louvencourt, as I thought, unperturbed ; I had
read the inscription on Roland's grave and gathered a bronze marigold to keep in my diary
without any conscious feeling of emotion. Whatever, I decided, might be true of 1918, I
was beginning to forget the early years of the War and to recover from the anguish of its
second Christmas.
But late that night, back in the Paris hotel, I picked
a quarrel with Winifred [pictured left] over some futile trifle, and went to bed in a fury of tears.
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