After doing a little bit of research it seems that one popular topic of discussion when considering writings from and surrounding the “Great War” concerns the comparison of men and women’s experiences during the war. As men were the ones actually on the front and in the trenches facing imminent death while the women served as nurses in more relative “safety” or stayed at home, criticism of the literature and writings that come from this period of history seems to have privileged the experience and point of view of the male soldiers than that of the women who also documented their experiences through poetry, literature, and autobiography. In light of this discourse, Brittain’s Testament of Youth seems a vital example of how important and poignant a woman’s experience can be, however, viewed only in this light leads to a danger of oversimplification, for her writings, her influence, and her perspectives offer her readers so much more.                        

            Vera Brittain, an incredibly intelligent, perceptive and deep-feeling person, carefully documents her own experiences of and leading up to the war and, as Dayne points out, adeptly uses her own diaries, letters, and historical facts to supplement her narrative. Her keenness to help the war effort is not by nature superficial, as she describes some of the efforts of society ladies to be earlier in her narrative, but built on the same drive that “made masochists of us all” for both the soldiers and the nurses (154). In one passage, describing Vera and Roland’s first fight, Roland writes to Vera with a bitterness for her “world of long wards and silent-footed nurses and bitter, clean smells and the appalling whiteness of everything” (216). While I think that most people would align with the belief that “one cannot be angry with people at the front” Vera is brave and honest enough to call Roland out and remind him of himself, his humanity, and the things that, outside of the war, are in fact valued by both of them. While Vera spends a considerable time thinking about the front and the soldiers that are stationed there (whether in treating wounded soldiers, reflecting on the war as a whole, or thinking of Roland, Edward, and particular soldiers he knows), here she boldly claims the validity of her own experience and prompts Roland to consider it as well. She doesn’t claim that her experience is “worse” nor does she diminish the experience of her fiancé, obviously a constant concern throughout her narrative so far, but enables (in this passage and throughout her autobiography) the reader to see the bigger picture, to hold valid multiple war perspectives, (through her own accounts and her inclusion of the accounts/letters of Roland and Edward), and to reflect on them equally as her experiences and ponderings unfold.