Testament of Youth Author:Vera Brittain Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittains elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By w... more »ars end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.« less