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I was pleased to hear Dame Shirley Williams on this programme the other day endorsing the film Testament of Youth, to be released next week. She’d been afraid that the autobiography of the same title by her mother, Vera Brittain, might have been shrunk into a Hollywood-style romance, dodging some of the hard questions. There was scope for that, for sure: a brilliant, defiant young woman seeing her world altered beyond recognition by the Great War, nursing in France, losing her fiancé, brother and close friends, and going on to become a campaigning pacifist. The romanticising hasn’t happened, she says, and I share the relief. Testament of Youth sat on our bookshelves at home for more than thirty years. I’d thought of it as a worthy volume which I really should get around to reading at some time, but at 661 pages, and with the type seeming to get smaller as the years passed, the time never came. Until last summer, that is, when a holiday and the anniversary of the outbreak of war seemed to leave me with little excuse. From the very first pages, I realised I’d been missing something important for understanding the world of my parents’ generation, and reflecting on my own. Vera Brittain’s account mingled anger with love, grief and disillusion with hope and courage as she attempted, in her words, ‘to challenge that too easy, too comfortable relapse into forgetfulness which is responsible for history’s most grievous repetitions.’ She herself was ready to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to pursue a course she considered right, willingly accepting the low status and blood-soaked chores of nurses of that time. Shirley Williams says her mother, ‘did all those things because she felt she wanted to be close to the young men she loved, and the only way to do it was by being in the same kind of hellish situation that they were in.’ The Christian faith speaks of God taking that step in Jesus Christ, becoming part of a troubled and dangerous world out of love for every human being on the planet. It’s a choice made by medical workers of all faiths and none who’ve joined the fight against ebola. They don’t know the individuals they’ll be caring for, but taking the risk of exposure to disease is itself an expression of love, however they might choose to describe it. People do it when they step between those who wish each other harm; when they put their own security at risk to stand alongside groups which have become demonised; when they work at nights in towns and cities across the country as street pastors, cleaning up and helping home the revellers whose night out has quite literally ended in a gutter. Deliberately walking into a hellish situation can sometimes be the only course which will bring love alive.