By Michael F. Duggan
T223. Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd. Lord Kitchener sends his sympathy.
Colonel of Territorial Forces, Records, Warwick.
One hundred six years ago today (December 26, 1915), Lt. Roland Leighton, age 20, of the 7th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was buried at the British military cemetery in Louvencourt, France. He had been shot while leaving a trench to inspect barbed wire in need of repair in front of the British positions on the moonlit night of December 22. Hit in the lower abdomen, Leighton died late the following day. He had been scheduled to go home for Christmas leave on December 24.
His fiance, Vera Brittain, would live until 1970 and would write Testament of Youth (along with 28 other books), one of the most important memoirs of the First World War. She would also lose her only sibling, Edward, and friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow—essentially all of her male circle of friends (Edward, Roland, and Victor were her “Three Musketeers”)—in the war. Edward, Roland, and Vera had all been accepted at Oxford, but she would go alone (she left Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse in France and Malta, but would return after the war).
In 2014 Testament of Youth was made into a feature film with Alicia Vikander (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones). Even with historical inaccuracies and omissions, it is a hard-hitting movie about human promise squandered in war. Brittain’s wartime diaries were published as Chronicle of Youth in 1981. Her correspondences were issued in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.
Roland also had literary ambitions. On April 25, 1915, he wrote the poem Violets, which he showed to Vera while on leave that August. On the day he wrote the poem, he had enclosed violets in a letter to her. Nascent, but showing real potential, it rings of the Georgian Poets like Rupert Brooke, but gently anticipates Graves, Owen, and Sassoon.
Violets from Plug Street wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head: It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood, Think what they have meant to me— Life and hope and love and you. (And you did not see them grow, where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land, These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand