Left behind.(THE STRAGGLER)(spinsters, widows)

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Whenever war is spoken of I find The war that was called Great invades the mind--Vernon Scannell, "The Great War"

SOME years ago my colleague Florence King declared her ambition to rehabilitate the word "spinster." Her efforts seem to have borne little fruit. Neither my local newspaper nor my local TV station ever refers to anyone as a spinster. Nor have I heard anyone so designated in private conversation, not since my childhood.

"Spinster" is certainly a fine old word. It has been used in its current sense since at least the early 17th century, when the lexicographer John Minsheu, a contemporary of Shakespeare, described the word as "onely added in Obligations, Euidences, and Writings, vnto maids vnmarried." It is all a bit unfair. "Bachelor," whose current meaning goes much further back, at least to Chaucer's time, is still heard, but "spinster," never. Yet perhaps, with the 20th century behind us, and with all proper respect to Florence King, this is a case where we should let sleeping words lie.

These reflections arose from reading reviews in the British magazines of Virginia Nicholson's book Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War. The book seems not yet to have been published on this side of the pond, but I shall certainly read it when it does appear. No person born in Britain in the 20th century can ever tire of reading about "the war that was called Great."

As awful as that war was for British men (not to mention the men of this and other nations, who are beyond my scope here), it may have been worse for women. One of the most heartbreaking books ever written is Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. Twenty years old in 1914, Vera Brittain lost to the war, one by one, all the men she cared about, beginning with the love of her life, the poet Roland Leighton. He was expected home from the Western Front for Christmas of 1915. Brittain sat up late on Christmas Day waiting for him, to be greeted next morning with the news he had been killed on December 23. The others followed him, ending with her adored only brother in the last months of the war.

So it was for untold numbers of women. Virginia Nicholson quotes the headmistress of a tony girls'school breaking the news to her senior pupils in 1917: "I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever marry.... Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can." This was actually a bit hyperbolic. As Niall Ferguson notes in The Pity of War: "Fewer British men were killed during the war than had emigrated in the decade before it." Seven hundred thousand is still a lot of young men to die in four years, with some corresponding number hopelessly maimed; and the losses were disproportionately from the middle and upper classes, which supplied most of the British army's junior officers.