The main thing that stands out to me from Vera Brittain’s The Testament of Youth is that most of the war’s true victims were extremely young. Those fighting or helping with the fighting, such as Vera working as a nurse, were my age, and many were even years younger. These people, many just children really, witnessed and were involved in some of the most heinous acts there are to see. These events were so horrendous that they numbed the soldiers and nurses by making them grow old much too quickly. This meant that the young people of this time were not given the slow and steady growth that other modern generations were given. These people lost out on forming their own identities, and those who had an identity lost theirs. The only identities for the soldiers and nurses of this time were related to their duties; soldiers were simply soldiers and nurses simply nurses. As they were shaped by war, war became all they knew; the concept of war was almost their identity itself, and thus they could not imagine a world without it. The youth the 1910s were simply identified by their duties, and after years of war, they were set-up to be lost in a different world when the fighting was over.