In this book are contained two short books by the best selling author Vera Brittain - Seeds of Chaos and Humiliation with Honour. For this edition, there is an introduction by Aleksandra Bennett of McMaster 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. Shortly after the War she published her classic book Testament of Youth and moved gradually towards a position of Christian pacifism. It was during the Second World War that she published two short books (Seeds of Chaos and Humiliation with Honour) in which she argued the pacifist cause and as the horrors of the end of the Second World War became manifest (Dresden, Hiroshima) her books became increasingly well known and influential. It was in 1943 that Vera Brittain began work on these books, which she termed a 'final appeal' against saturation bombing. Hamburg 'surpassed them all in horror': On the night of 27-28 July 1943, several square miles of the residential and commercial heart of the city were engulfed in a firestorm which burned for several hours at a temperature of 1,000 degrees centigrade. This is the background out of which these powerful texts were inspired.