Before I wrote my novel Sheltering Angel of Belleau Wood, A Novel of One Woman’s Life After Titanic, I had not heard of Vera Brittain. Nor had I read her memoir Testament of Youth published in 1933. I realize now what I was missing.

            Last night when I watched the film based on her memoir, I was struck by similarities to my latest novel. Brittain was a bright young Englishwoman whose greatest desire was to become a writer. Her brother Edward was bound for college, but Vera’s father considered college a waste of money for a daughter. Undaunted, in 1914 Vera tested and was admitted to Oxford to read English literature. Then England declared war on Germany for its invasion of Belgium and France.

            When Vera’s brother, two of his dearest friends, and her fiancé Roland Leighton joined the war effort, Vera left college to serve as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in field hospitals, tending the wounded, both English and German. The chaos and trauma of nursing work was physically exhausting and horrifying in the blood and gore of wounds she tended. When she learned of the deaths of the four men she most loved, grief enveloped her.

            In researching the Great War for writing my novel, which includes letters and journals of two brothers fighting in France in 1918, I found similar horrors for U.S. Army and Marine soldiers. Trench warfare was more brutal than battles of the Civil War because in 1917 and 1918 when the U.S. joined the effort, the weapons were machine guns, mortar shells with exploding shrapnel, and mustard gas. Men were burned and blinded by the gas, had limbs blown off by shrapnel, or took a barrage of bullets to every part of the body.

Vera Brittain, WWI VAD nurse

When an armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, nearly ten million military soldiers were dead and another thirty million wounded. An estimated ten million civilians died in the shooting or by Spanish flu, starvation, or other causes. It is no wonder that when she returned to Oxford and studied history, Vera Brittain became a pacifist, writing and speaking about the imperative of peace.

History teaches us lessons we ought not to repeat. Although the novel harkens back to WWI, Sheltering Angel of Belleau Wood is set during WWII when Germany invaded France again, this time taking control of Paris. And once again, it was the American armed forces who liberated not only Paris but the German camps holding, tormenting, and killing a million and a half innocents.

It strikes me as no wonder in her later life Vera Brittain became a voice for peace. In my opinion, so should we all.