(Makeup for the third blog post)

So many key moments in Testament of Youth have stood out to me that it is difficult to put them all together; however, I would say that what stood out the most was the overwhelming sense of wasted and stolen youth.  I found it was best summed up in the statement "Although they would no doubt have welcomed the idea of a League of Nations, Roland and Edward certainly had not died in order that Clemenceau should outwit Lloyd George, and both of them bamboozle President Wilson, and all three combine to make the beaten, blockaded enemy pay the cost of the War." (470) (Taken from the aptly titled chapter "Survivors Not Wanted")  Not only had an entire generation been either wiped out or deeply scarred, but the end result had not been the accomplishment of any particular goal, but the cleaning up of the mess made by the war itself.  Nothing of actual value had been accomplished, and no one was even quite sure why the war had been fought.  By the end of the war, the object was no longer even that of the original players—nations fought simply to make sure that the resources sunk in the war were compensated for, with a net result of loss on every side.

I honestly wish this book could become required reading in schools across the world, because I cannot express how monumental it has been in revealing exactly what war in the modern day is like, and what we are getting into when we vote for violence.  Not so much because we should never go to war, but because I've realized just how clueless many of us are about what war means to a nation.  The wars we have gotten involved in over the past few decades do not seem to be much better, albeit on a smaller scale—we never actually manage to get to the point where we feel comfortable withdrawing troops, for fear of situations reverting and letting our work go to waste; yet as long as we continue policing in such a manner, that work cannot be completed.  Tangent aside, Testament of Youth really drives home the importance of taking war seriously, both in its payoff and its consequences.