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 Vera Brittain abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, after her fiancé Roland went to the front. She served in London, Malta, and in France on the western front and saw the horrors of modern warfare first-hand; by war's end she had lost Roland, her brother Edward, and two of her best friends. Her 1933 memoir is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation.