"In 1915 Vera 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."--Back cover.