Erich Maria Remarque, "The Lost Generation"

• All of the WWI soldiers who have been injured rest in a hospital, classified by the places they've been wounded almost like broken toy soldiers or action figures shelved because they don't work properly anymore
• The whole building is filled with human waste and broken body parts - it's extremely gruesome.
• The soliders are essentially dehumanized
• There are hundereds of thousands of hospitals all over Germany, France, and Russia just like this one.
• The narrator is part of a lost generation because he is only twenty yet he knows "nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and the fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow" all because of the war - and his whole generation is experiencing the same thing.
• The narrator ponders what society could possibly want from them once the war is over because through they years the only thing they've known to do is kill - "our knowledge of life is limited to death." What will they do?