Testament of Youth

Virago Press, 2014. Good secondhand copy.

'Few young women could have been less forewarned and forearmed than I was against the war in general, and the Army Hospital Service in particular.' In 1915 Brittain abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed services. Before the war was over she had served in London, Malta, and close to the Western Front in France - and she had lost all the men she loved. Out of that experience came this cauterizing book, at once a memoir and an elegy for the bright, passionate generation who came of age on the eve of the war, and vanished in its trenches. Moving, sweeping, and one of the greatest accounts of war ever written, Testament of Youth captures the politics, hopes and despair of Brittain and her peers...