The war has stopped for no one's birthday. On the morning he turns thirty, David Littledale lies in a courtyard in the Savoy mountains, listening to the distant rumble of artillery and remembering who he was before he became a soldier. An American who joined the French Foreign Legion, David has crossed an ocean to find himself in a foreign war, and now, wounded and wondering, he faces the question every man in the trenches has asked: what am I fighting for? Owen Johnson's 1921 novel traces one soldier's attempt to locate meaning amid the chaos of the Great War. As David recovers among his comrades, he watches the strange peace of the mountains clash with the violence he's left behind, and he wrestles with alienation, love, and the particular loneliness of a man who has chosen a fight that may not be his own. The Wasted Generation is a quiet, devastating portrait of a generation asked to sacrifice everything for reasons they cannot name.
