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You are not there.
    Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
    To see the passing of the dying year,
    And listen to the Christmas songs again,
    Although You cannot hear.
    But, though kind Time may many joys renew,
    There is one greatest joy I shall not know
    Again, because my heart for loss of You
    Was broken, long ago.
    Vera Brittain spoke for the thousands like her. She spoke for May
    Wedderburn Cannan (also a poet), whose fiance´ died of pneumonia in
    Germany just after the end of the war early in  (‘Now there was no
    hope. It was the end of the world’). She spoke for Emily Chitticks, whose
    boyfriend Lieutenant Will Martin was killed by a sniper’s bullet in 
    (‘My heart and love are buried in his grave in France . . .’). She spoke too for Marian Allen (‘How should you leave me, having loved me so? . . . It seemed impossible that you should die . . .’), for Olive Lindsay (‘Half of me died at Bapaume . . .’), for Barbara Wootton (‘Her blank, shut-in face . . .
    told me what such a loss meant to her . . .’), for May Jones and for Gertrude Caton-Thompson.
    Week after week, women across Britain waited for news from the Front.
    The casualty lists posted at town halls nationwide produced either temporary deliverance from the suspense of waiting, or the obliteration of all hope.
    Sometimes the family received the dreaded telegram ‘Missing, feared killed’, which only prolonged the agony. The statistics were devastating. Of the young men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine in , no less than  per
    cent died. Because army policy was to place all men from the same locality in a single regiment, entire communities of young men were obliterated when that particular regiment suffered attack. A man from New Cross in Kent lost
    all five of his sons between  and , while a mother from Watford saw
    four out of her five killed; she lost the will to live and died soon afterwards.
    When young ‘Pozzie’ Gibson was killed, his sergeant visited his mother in
    the poorest part of Hunslet to break the news to her. ‘I’ve lost my only
    boy,’ was all she had power to say, and spoke no more, mute with grief.
    
    Singled Out
    In England, a mere twenty-eight ‘thankful villages’ eventually saw all the
    men who had set out to the First World War return safely. With these
    exceptions, not a community in the country was left unscathed by the
    raging slaughter of those four dreadful years. Very little helped. On
     November  Maria Gyte of Sheldon in Derbyshire recorded the
    deaths of ‘five dear lads’ from her village who had ‘found graves in a foreign land’. They included her son: Jack Brocklehurst died of wounds on Nov. th 
    Thomas Anthony Brocklehurst killed Oct. th 
    George Bridden died Oct. st  of wounds
    Tony Gyte died of wounds Nov. nd 
    Alfred Wildgoose died of malaria Nov. th 
    That Christmas the Gyte family were unable to celebrate:
    Dec. th . . . My dear lad Tony was missing from the family circle first time for 
    years. Oh Dear! What a dreadful war and what awfully sad homes there are this Xmas.
    The worst I have ever known. No joy. No singing Xmas hymns. No decorations.
    Lieutenant Will Martin was killed in the same year. On the back of a New
    Testament tract a few piteous notes by his fianceé Emily Chitticks betray
    her attempts to make sense of his death:
    In loving Remembrance of my Dearly loved and loving fiance´, ‘Will’ . . .
    Who made the supreme Sacrafice [sic] on March th 
    ‘Greater Love hath no man than this; in that he lay down his life for his
    friend.’ Until we meet again before God’s throne, Dearest, its [sic] only
    ‘Goodnight’.
    Emily.
    Met Will August th 
    Engaged to Will Oct th  . . .
    Killed in action March th 
    He