Quote by Vera Brittain: “The War was a calamity for civilization beyond all imagining.”

Some events are so large in their destruction that no prior framework of imagination can prepare you for them. Brittain, who lost her fiancé, her brother, and her closest friends in the First World War, is saying that the catastrophe exceeded every category available for understanding it. Only those who lived through it could begin to measure the scale.

Testament of Youth was published in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Brittain was writing partly as a warning: the world had not yet sufficiently reckoned with the catastrophe of the First World War, and she feared the same forces were gathering again. Her memoir was a sustained argument for memory as the foundation of peace.

English writer, pacifist, and feminist whose memoir Testament of Youth, published in 1933, became one of the defining documents of the First World War generation. She abandoned her studies at Oxford to serve as a nurse during the war, losing her fiancé, brother, and two close friends. She remained a committed pacifist and feminist activist for the rest of her life.