Edward Brittain

He had been admitted to New College, Oxford, but after the outbreak of hostilities he joined the British Army and was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant into the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment) on 19 November 1914.

[1] He remained in England for the first year and a half of the war; he was held back from several transfers to the front by his colonel who was not impressed by Edward's supercilious attitude.

Thurlow was killed in action at Monchy-le-Preux in April 1917; Richardson was blinded at Arras the same month, and died from a cerebral abscess in London in June 1917.

These losses transformed Brittain, in his sister's words, into "an unfamiliar, frightening Edward, who never smiled or spoke except about trivial things ... Silent, uncommunicative, thrust in upon himself.

"[4] Brittain returned to the Western Front almost exactly a year after he had left it and was immediately sent into battle, without knowing either the terrain or the men he was commanding, but emerged unscathed.

On 15 June 1918 on the Asiago Plateau, Captain Brittain was shot in the head and killed during an early morning counter-attack against an Austrian offensive, part of the Battle of the Piave River.

She was initially reluctant to believe that her brother had deliberately exposed himself to danger but eventually came around to his colonel's interpretation of events and fictionalised them in her novel Honourable Estate.

[12] In the 2018 BBC Radio 4 programme Edward Brittain and the Forgotten Front, Baroness Williams followed the footsteps of her mother to the grave of her uncle.

[13] On 7 July 2023, Buxton Festival staged the first of a run of performances of The Land of Might-Have-Been, a musical show drawing on existing songs by Ivor Novello, presenting a fictionalised version of Vera Brittain's life in 1914 and 1915, and exploring her relationships with her fiancé Roland, Edward, and Edward's (fictional) gay lover Bobbie Jones, and the impact the war had on them.