Vera Brittain served as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse during the First World War, serving in Malta, France, and London. Having seen the horrors of the “Great War” first hand — and after having her fiance, her brother, and her two best male friends die in the war — she became a committed pacifist. In 1937, while the threat of another European war kept growing, she said this in a pamphlet published by the Peace Pledge Union:
“I hold war to be a crime against humanity, whoever fights it, and against whomever it is fought.”
[Quoted in “Vera Mary Brittain,” Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vera-mary-brittain accessed 29 April 2024.]