Testament of Youth is an unflinching account of the early life of an Englishwoman whom circumstances and conscience made an eloquent witness to a war that in this century of horrors remains the most savage, futile, and incomprehensible of any. (p. 4)

Though a product of the '30s, Vera Brittain's "testament" is written in the rather fussy, periphrastic language of the world before the Great War that divided history, she believed, as decisively as B.C. and A.D., but it is no less affectingly honest and heartrending. It's now impossible to imagine the innocence with which her generation answered that they solemnly described as the call of God, King, and Country; but not impossible to envy them their generous, fatal idealism. (p. 13)

Eve Auchincloss, "The Great War and the End of Innocence," in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1981, The Washington Post), January 25, 1981, pp. 4, 13.