One Voice

This book reprints for the first time two short works by the best selling author Vera Brittain - Seed of Chaos and Humiliation with Honour. For this new edition there is an introduction by Aleksandra Bennett of Carleton University in Canada and a preface by Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain's daughter. Vera Brittain worked as a nurse in the First World War - a war in which her brother, his best friend and her own fiance were killed. In 1933 she published her classic book Testament of Youth and moved gradually towards a position of Christian pacifism. In 1942, during the Second World War, Brittain published Humiliation with Honour, a statement of her pacifist beliefs, in the form of letters to her son John. Two years later she followed this with a denunciation of the Allies' policy of the saturation bombing of German cities, Seed of Chaos, in which she argued forcefully that there was no evidence that the mass bombing of great centres of population would either shorten the war or break civilian morale.
In Britain, Seed of Chaos was attacked by George Orwell, while in the United States, where it was published as Massacre by Bombing, Vera Brittain's protest stirred up a storm of controversy which reached as far as the White House when President Roosevelt issued a statement attacking the book.