Independent Reading Blog Prompt 8

I feel that the theme of this book is that WWI especially effected the younger men and made the 'lost'. This whole idea of a lost generation never made sense to me when we learned about it in school. I know that there were the lost writes such as Earnest Hemingway, but I didn't get what 'lost' meant particularly. Erich Remarque describes how men who were older could go back home and return to their lives. They had something familiar and stable to grasp onto while in the War and didn't let the fighting get to them. These young men didn't. They just received basic schooling and living experience as children, and then right away were forced into witnessing the worst things in perhaps all of history. How were they supposed to go home and think of life as anything but just explosions and survival. They had no foundation, except fierce fighting and constant misery. There is no normal to return to after the war. Many soldiers were traumatized by the fighting and will never assimilate into normal society. Paul realizes this and wonders at what cost are men willing to fight for reasons they aren't even aware. The wars are made in rooms full of rich men who, but they're fought by poor boys who are deeply scarred for life.