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“Our knowledge of life is limited to death.�� (p. 225)

Honest and sad. This WWI novel depicts the trauma of war and its impacts on the youngest generation of soldiers—those who “had been standing on the very threshold of life itself�� (p. 21). The teenage and early-twenties soldiers fighting on the front lines were old enough to fight but too young to have developed identities or to have established families or careers that would await their return home. They were thus cast into the world of violence, untethered from the foundations of social support available to older soldiers.

“It is the common fate of our generation �� The war has ruined us for everything �� We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves �� We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it.�� (pp. 78-79)

The young soldiers in this novel wrestle with the questions of why WWI is happening, of why they are there, of why they are fighting people who have never personally done them any wrong, and of what it all means. They consider and interact with POWs, as the latter die of dysentery. When the soldiers get leave to return temporarily to their families, they suffer the pain of coming home, of interacting with people who cannot understand their war experiences and of finding a life left by the wayside that can never be picked back up again.

“Please let the wind of desire that rose from the multi-coloured spines of those books catch me up again, let it melt the heavy, lifeless lead weight that is there somewhere inside me, and awaken in me once again the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect—let it carry me back into the ready-for anything lost world of my youth.�� (p. 149)

The young men fighting on the front lines in this novel struggle with fear all the time, especially when injured or when stranded alone on the battle field (e.g., in shell hole). They struggle with their dual existence, alternating between intense periods of violence and superficial idleness while waiting for battle. They struggle with the horrors they see day after day.

“We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away—they stumble on their splintering stumps to the next shell hole.�� (pp. 118-119).

These war-worn youth have to endure listening to injured friends lost on the battle field, paralyzed and lying face down in the mud, crying out for help. They have to struggle with the guilt and regret that inevitably follow from killing enemy soldiers, particularly when it happens up close, in hand-to-hand combat.

“It is only now that I can see that you are a human being like me. I just thought about your hand-grenades, your bayonet and your weapons—now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common �� Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we’re all just as scared of death, and that we die the same way and feel the same pain.�� (pp. 191-192).

The novel also documents the horrors of war-related surgery and medical treatment. For example, hospitals have dying rooms and are run by “hero-making�� doctors who want to send every wounded soldier back to the front line, regardless of how badly they are injured.

“Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.�� (p. 225)