What I found most signficant about Brittain's writing so far is not only her representation of the loss of individualism, but her awareness of it while the war is still in its early stages.  Beginning with her first experience witnessing a death, she seems immediately aware of the growing distance of human specificity: "reasonable as I try to be I cannot make myself feel that the individual, whatever it may have been, has really vanished into nothing and is not.  I merely feel as if it had gone away into another place, and the worn-out shell that the men carried away was not Smith at all" (177).  Both Vera and Roland echo this sentiment throughout the memoir.  Hitherto I had assumed that the so-called "loss of individualism" had been an afterthought of society, a label applied to describe retrospective conclusions concerning the social effects of the war.  However, while Brittain's memoir was written after the war, the above quote is taken from the diary she was keeping DURING the actual events.  The very same day of this soldier's death, Brittain was able to observe her indifference and his alienation from self.  This amazes me, because it means that the experiences inspiring the sentiment must have been tenfold what I imagined them to be, somehow.  

Also, I find it strange that Brittain expresses this notion while simultaneously divulging so many specificities about her relationship with Roland and her inability to ever forget him.  Was not this Smith also loved by a family and friends?  Is Brittain unable to realize this possibility?  Or was it the mere circumstance of his death, "like this in the midst of strangers, with Sister beside him of all people, and no one really to care very much" (176) which removes him from an identity in her eyes?  

It seems a strange disconnect that the emerging technologies which forced a much more impersonal war should cause, probably, much more personal attentions in recuperating from it, and yet did not.  With wounds more deadly and horrific than ever before, one would think that soldiers would spend much more time in the hospital with the personal attention of doctors.  However, as later stated in the book, the shortage of nurses and doctors often meant that men who could have survived would die because of lack of timely attention.