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nobly died doing his duty. Buried at Ecourt St Mein, France.
    Deeply loved & so sadly missed.
    Dying nobly while doing one’s duty was what was supposed to happen.
    The reality offered less in the way of consolation to those, like Vera
    Brittain, able to face it. His stomach riddled with bullets, Roland Leighton’s Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
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    shattering pain was only mitigated by a large dose of morphia. Nothing
    ever compensated Vera for the fact that, under its effects, her lover’s final hours were passed in a state of oblivious stupefaction. No finer purpose appeared to have been served by his death, and he had forgotten her. As a
    nurse her daily life entailed tending the acute surgical cases on her ward; she was no stranger to the ‘white eyes writhing . . .’, the blood ‘gargling from . . .
    froth-corrupted lungs’ described so angrily in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce
    et Decorum Est’. In spite of this it was hard for her to make allowances for ‘the compelling self-absorption of extreme suffering’. The hardest thing to bear was ‘the grief of having no word to cherish through the empty years’.
    The men died like animals. Another nurse, Shirley Millard, recollected
    the undignified suffering of the soldiers in her care:
    They cannot breathe lying down or sitting up. They just struggle for breath. But nothing can be done. Their lungs are gone. Some with their eyes and faces entirely eaten away by the gas and bodies covered with burns . . . One boy, today, screaming to die. The entire top layer of his skin burned from his face and body . . .
    How was one to go on living with the knowledge of such violent, degraded
    deaths? How cruelly they corroded the human instinct for happiness. On a
    bright Wednesday morning only a few months after Roland’s death Vera
    accidentally found herself rejoicing in the beauty of a watery-blue spring
    sky flecked with scuttling clouds. ‘Suddenly I remember – Roland is dead
    and I am not keeping faith with him; it is mean and cruel, even for a
    second, to feel glad to be alive.’
    The hypocrisy of the warmongers made it worse. Emily Chitticks
    accepted that dying for one’s country was worthwhile, but not all the young
    women were so submissive. After the death of her fiance´ the novelist Irene
    Rathbone rounded on the bien-pensant patriots in anguish: ‘What was the
    use of winning the war . . . if none of the men who won it were to live?
    The papers were for ever quoting ‘‘Who dies if England lives?’’ But after
    all what was England?’
    The dead infected the living with their absence, introducing a sense of
    annihilating guilt and insecurity. ‘One recovers from the shock,’ wrote
    Vera in her diary a year after Roland was killed, ‘but one never gets over
    the loss, for one is never the same after it. I have got used to facing the
    long empty years ahead of me if I survive the War, but I have always before
    me the realisation of how empty they are and will be, since he will never
    be there again.’ These men had not died as the old were supposed to die,
    in the fullness of time, murmuring deathbed pieties to their assembled
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    Singled Out
    grandchildren before being seraphically removed to a better place. Their
    violently truncated lives seemed against nature, unreasonable, unacceptable.
    For decades after the war the fiction writers found their theme in its
    residue of loss and grief. Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide (), Margery Perham’s Josie Vine (), Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young () and Ruth Holland’s The Lost Generation () all traced their heroines’
    journey through suffering. Ruth Holland dedicated her novel ‘To the
    memory of A.I.E. Killed in action in France, ’. Clearly autobiographical, a sample of Holland’s thinly fictionalised experience must have expressed what many of her readers knew on their own account:
    Something had snapped. Instead of