Having battled her way to Somerville College in the face of parental opposition, Vera abandoned her studies at the outbreak of the First World War to serve as a volunteer nurse witnessing the horrors of trench warfare. In 1918, with many of those closest to her dead, she returned to Oxford and later devoted her energies to the causes of pacifism and feminism, writing and lecturing world-wide. In 1933 she publised her haunting masterpiece which conveyed to an entire generation the essence of their common experience of war. It was a bestseller in both Britain and America.