In an age haunted by the specter of a nuclear holocaust, World War II sometimes seems as long ago and far away as Agincourt, as distant as Blenheim, at one with Trafalgar and Waterloo. Yet it was only slightly more than four decades ago that millions of men and women were engaged in a struggle, the dimensions of which had never been seen before or since. One was a young West Virginia woman who went to Britain to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force of the RAF in 1942, and who received a medical discharge from the Service in 1943. Her name was and is Mary Lee Settle, and her account of life in the RAF is eloquently recounted in her memoir All The Brave Promises. Now, in her VQR essay, the young woman destined to become one of America's foremost novelists, takes up where her memoir left off and describes what happened to her during the remain der of the war.

"I distrust nostalgia," writes Ms. Settle. "It is like fog. It obscures and distorts. It celebrates wars never fought and times never loved. And words never said. It ties us to a false past. For freedom from the illusion of memory, I wrote All The Brave Promises. For the same reason, I find myself writing fragments, of which "London 1944" is a part."