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Testament Of Youth

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In Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, she writes about her experiences during the first World War. The story gives an in-depth perception of the hardships that she encountered and how they led to her strong ambition as well as views on war. Many of these hardships, especially the losses of her loved ones drove her ambition and contributed greatly to her success. Another important aspect of Testament of Youth is how strongly against war Brittain became due to the tremendous injustice and high mortality rates that stemmed from the war. The effects of the war itself was a direct cause of the ambition and pacifist view that Brittain had which she then used to move forward and find success in her days to come.
From the beginning, it is clear that Brittain had a clear objective for …show more content…

It affected the men who were drafted to fight, the families that they left behind, and most commonly forgotten, the nurses who volunteered in the war effort. Brittain was a nurse, but there was a myriad of other women who were in her exact position. Many women felt that they were obligated to assist in the war effort so although they were unable to fight, many of them volunteered as nurses. Helen Dore Boylston was one of those nurses. She was an American who worked on the front line caring for British soldiers. She kept a diary which was later published called Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse. She recounts some of the horrendous scenes that she encountered. She says “In a war, the ones who are going to die don’t matter. It’s the ones who might live that count” (Boylston 1927, 43). This statement shows how she became desensitized to death because she had seen it so often. This was not uncommon, in fact, another nurse named Louie Johnson, in an interview talked about the many patients she had seen. She said that they had to have still been in their teens and during her service, she saw some of the most horrific wounds of war (Johnson,

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