Scars on my heart: The truth about war men could not tell

As it turned out, following a "disconcerting" time in hospital, Dick did pull through and even returned to the fight, but the incident changed them both forever. Naomi Mitchison went on to become one of the finest novelists of the 20th century and a ­committed socialist, and from that moment, whenever humanly possible, she and her husband exchanged letters every day. In the first volume of her ­autobiography she explained the reasons for that decision, claiming that it had little to do with "romantic love" but everything to do with trust and self-confidence in their relationship: "Even if the other one could be at their most ­maddening - as all husbands and wives are bound to be in a day-to-day, live situation - there was the feeling that the other was there."

The decision sparked her determination to become a writer even though she still regarded herself as "only a girl even if I was married", and she signed her early efforts as "Mother of Seven" or even "Returned ­Serviceman".

In addition to launching her ­literary career, that episode in Mitchison's early life is a reminder that in time of conflict all men and women are equal and that there can be no division of effort between the sexes. The old saw might have it that "men must work and women must weep" - the line is from Three Fishers, a Victorian-era parlour poem by Charles Kingsley - but the reality is rather different. While it is true that by tradition and usage women rarely serve on the frontline, their contribution to the painful field of battle is no less significant and it can be found in the way warfare is depicted in literature.

That being said, there is a huge ­difference between the way in which male and female writers so often view the dirty business of war. This has nothing to do with gender or ­experience but it is influenced by outlook, ­intellectual differences and, dare one say it, approaches to compassion and general humanity.

Take two examples from the First World War. In his poem Glory Of Women, Siegfried Sassoon mocked women who encouraged men to go off to war, writing in the opening lines: "You love us when we're heroes home on leave, or wounded in a ­mentionable place."

The tone is sarcastic, even misogynistic, and it pays subconscious lip-service to the notion that war is men's business and women are merely bystanders and cheer-leaders, or at worst, handers-out of white feathers to men thought to be shirkers or cowards.

Compare this to a very different poem written by a very different kind of writer. To My Brother was the work of Vera Brittain, a pacifist intellectual best known for her acclaimed ­autobiography Testament Of Youth - a film of that book is released this week, produced by David Heyman, whose credits include the Harry Potter series and Gravity.

The subject of the poem was Brittain's much-loved brother, Edward, who died in the last days of the war on the Italian front, and it contains lines which probably no man at that period could have written: "Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart."

Brittain knew what she was ­writing about: not only was Edward killed in action, but she also lost her fiancé Roland Leighton and two of her closest friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow. The book's publication was a ­seminal period in her life, for as well as chronicling the impact of the war on the British people, Testament Of Youth is also a moving catharsis for Brittain's own grief at the untimely deaths of four men who were exceptionally close to her.

Written as the first part of a planned four-volume autobiography, Testament Of Youth became an immediate best-seller when it was published in 1933, a time of disillusion and discontent with national and international politics. Based on Brittain's letters and diaries from the First World War, it had an immediacy and intensity which marked it out not just as a harrowing witness statement but also as a luminous piece of literature in its own right.

Not every critic was enraptured - the shrewd and spiky James Agate likened it to the sight of a woman weeping in public - but the general opinion was that ­Brittain had cemented her place as a major writer of the First World War.

Brittain died in 1970 aged 77, by which time she was ­acknowledged as a leading novelist and social commentator who embraced ­pacifism and wrote trenchantly against apartheid and the nuclear deterrent. She married the political scientist George Catlin who makes a brief appearance at the end of his wife's memoir, and one of their children is the Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams.

At the end of that decade, Testament Of Youth was made into a superb BBC television series starring Cheryl Campbell as Vera Brittain and it fully justified the author's hopes that her work would be read as "a vehement protest against war".

Given that pedigree, it was almost inevitable a new film version would be produced in time to coincide with the centenary ­commemorations of the First World War. Directed by James Kent (The Thirteenth Tale) and with a script by Juliette Towhidi (Calendar Girls and Love, Rosie), it stars the Swedish actor Alicia Vikander (Anna Karenina) as Vera ­Brittain with Kit Harington (Game Of Thrones) as her fiancé, Roland Leighton. Importantly, it also enjoys the backing of Shirley Williams, who last week pronounced herself well satisfied with the outcome having voiced earlier concerns that it would be difficult to better the 1979 TV version.

In a sense it would take a ­multiplication of errors or pure bad luck to mess up a filmed version of Testament Of Youth, so vivid is Brittain's message and so ­poignant the story.

The plotting is quite simple, introducing Vera as a privileged daughter of a well-to-do family, set on getting into Oxford and carving out a career as a writer. Surrounding her and acting as foils are her brother Edward and his friends Roland and Victor, who will soon be part of the lost generation of young men who went off to war with such gay abandon in the late summer of 1914.

Although the script and the photography stray dangerously into Downton Abbey territory, the action remains true to the ­original memoir, taking Vera to Oxford where she comes to the conclusion that being a well-mannered young lady is not enough.

She ­volunteers as a nurse and is soon in the thick of the action, tending brutally wounded men and trying to come to terms with the reality of modern industrialised warfare. Against that background, the deaths of the young men in her life seem almost inevitable and there is a chilling finality when the news of Roland's death comes on the cusp of their marriage.

If this sounds like the well-rehearsed and oft-told tale of men doing the fighting and women doing the tending, the film is saved by the harsh reality of the scenes in Number 4 General Hospital at Etaples, on the northern French coast, with its broken bones and spilled guts leaving no doubt that the nursing sisters occupied a ­hellish frontline of their own.

There is also a moment of epiphany when Brittain and her fellow nurses tend wounded Germans and find them not so very different from their own kind. This looks forward to the final scene of the narrative when Vera addresses a pacifist meeting and speaks movingly about the futility of warfare. It is a scene which reveals Vikander's deft interpretation of her ­character and draws out the strength of mind which was very much part of ­Brittain's approach to life.

For evidence, it is only necessary to return to the words of Testament Of Youth, which again could not have been written by a man. Surveying the scene as she holds the hand of a badly wounded Prussian lieutenant, Brittain noted: "The world was mad and we were all victims; that was the only way to look at it.

"These shattered, dying boys and I were paying alike for a situation that none of us had desired or done anything to bring about."

With good reason, Vera ­Brittain was hailed as the pre-eminent ­British female author of the First World War, but it took time and considerable patience for other women writers to be accepted, a process that was helped ­immeasurably by the labours of talented editors such as ­Catherine Reilly, whose 1981 anthology Scars Upon My Heart published the poetry of writers as diverse and thought-provoking as Margaret Postgate Cole, Eleanor Farjeon, Rose Macaulay, Charlotte Mew, May Sinclair, Edith Sitwell and Mary Webb.

One other writer from the conflict stands out, not least because she was a ­novelist and journalist who considered herself equal, if not superior, to her contemporary male colleagues and had the capacity to see events from awkward angles.

This was Rebecca West, born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, who took her pen name from the rebellious young heroine in the play Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Born in London, she spent part of her early years in Edinburgh where she was educated at George Watson's Ladies College. During the war years she was one of only two journalists permitted to visit the government's huge munitions complex near Gretna Green.

From the outset she established herself as a feisty and committed writer who took no nonsense from her peers and quickly emerged as an outspoken feminist and suffragette. Not for nothing did George Bernard Shaw say: "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely."

It comes as no surprise that her first novel, The Return Of The Soldier (1918) took a ­controversial subject - the treatment of shell-shock - and dealt with it in an uncompromising way.

Seen from the perspective of narrator Jenny, the story follows the return from the Western Front of Captain Chris Baldry, who has become unhinged by his experience of combat.

It takes time for Jenny and her cousin Kitty (Baldry's wife) to piece together the strands of the captain's earlier life and while the conclusion is unsatisfactory it was an early effort to describe what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

A prolific and financially ­successful author who had a long love affair with HG Wells, West wrote many better books during her long career, notably Black Lamb And Grey Falcon (1941), a totemic classic of travel literature, but The Return Of The Soldier deserves its place in the pantheon of war fiction. Not only was it was the only war novel ­written by a British woman during the conflict, but West also dealt with an ­unpopular and little-known subject in a sensitive and ­authoritative way.

Like Vera Brittain, who came from a similar background and who shared her steely approach to her life and work, Rebecca West did not flinch from tackling difficult subjects. Perhaps it is that ­determination that separates the men from the women and the sheep from the goats.

Testament Of Youth opens in ­cinemas on Friday.