World War I remains the disaster the world has never completely digested because, like the Wicked Witch of the East, it was followed by something even worse. Based on the book of the same name by feminist author Vera Brittain, it tells the story of World War I from the viewpoint of a young, upper-middle-class British woman, who had friends, family and a fiance fighting on the front lines. Though it had been her ambition to study at Oxford, Brittain left school within months of enrolling to take a job nursing the wounded. When we meet her, Vera is already angry - that her father won't pay for her education (but will for her brother's), and everything that follows only confirms in her the sense that men are running the world into the ground. Timing is everything in the book world, and the memoir arrived just as intelligent people were beginning to dread and fear a second world war.