Book excerpt: This fierce anti-war novel by Irene Rathbone (1892-1980) is told from the perspective of a cultured former suffragist and several of her friends--young women who work at rest camps just behind the lines in France and as nurses of the severely wounded in hospitals in London. When Joan loses both her brother and lover to the war, in anger at the enemy she volunteers for work in a munitions plant, but by the end, she is a confirmed pacifist.