ABSTRACT
Eager to be sent to fight in France in early 1915, nineteen-year-old Roland Leighton writes to Vera Brittain of his frustration at remaining in England: “When men I once despised as effeminate are being sent back wounded from the front … can I think of this with anything but rage and shame?” 1 In April, soon after Leighton is sent to France, Brittain arranges to exchange her student status for the more culturally acceptable role for a young woman in wartime, a VAD nurse, suggesting to him “if you must get wounded, try & postpone it until August, by which time I might be efficient enough to help to look after you.” 2 In October, nursing in London, she romanticizes to him the possibility of “Roland wounded & here! But it’s too good to think of. It is the kind of thing that only happens in sensational novels.” 3 This epistolary exchange reveals the extent to which the physical wound can become an abstract idea in the cultural consciousness: as capital in a country at war, the man can receive the wound, signifying masculinity tested at the front, while at the same time it creates his culturally acceptable counterpart in the woman who cannot be wounded but can participate in his wounding, and thus the cultural capital, by nursing him.
