One of the more interesting aspects of Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's shifting attitude towards the war, from enthusiatic patriot to world-weary cynic. While working for the hospitals in Devonshire and Camberwell, Vera Brittain displays both a patriotic zeal for the war effort, and a disillusioned bitterness towards war's horrific effects. She writes of "the baffling contrast" between these two conflicting experiences, and the difficulty of trying to  reconcile her perceptions and ideals about the war with her actual experience. 
    Outwardly at least, Brittain is proud of her work supporting the war effort, telling her parents that "'I should never respect myself again if I allowed a few slight physical hardships to make me give up what is the finest work any girl can do now'" (213). Yet she confesses in her diary that "after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again . . . Some of the things in our ward are so horrible that it seems as if no merciful disposition. of the universe could allow them and one's consciousness to exist at the same time." (215) These sort of soul-degrading experiences pervades Brittain's entire memoir, causing her to characterize moments of idealism or patriotic sentiments as little more than childish naivete in retrospect. While it's easy to retroactively dismiss Brittain's optomism as mere inexperience, I think that Brittain's contrasting wartime perceptions and experiences might be a good indicator of the worldwide cognative dissonance which fueled the war from the civilian perspective.