The relationship between the Lost Generation and WWI is complex and defining.. The Great War was the watershed between the old and the new world, and the Lost Generation was cast right in the middle.

The generation born between 1883 and 1910 received an education that prepared them to live in a Victorian world. But they only glimpsed that world and were soon thrown into the Great War’s battlefields, with its horrors, destruction, and advanced technology.
When the war was over, they thought they would go back to ‘normal’ life. Everyone said they would go back to ‘normal’ life.

But there was no going back.
The world where they landed was not the world they knew. What they had known was now the ‘old world’. They were living in an unknown ‘new world’. Besides, they were not the people who left that old, familiar world behind.
They had seen terrible things that no one ever imagined. They had witnessed and felt, on their skin, the dehumanisation of the industrial war. They had wondered why this should happen to them and maybe thought they would find an answer when they got back home.

But they didn’t.

The world they found didn’t make sense after the carnage, after the death, after the destruction, after the hate.

There were no answers.

Demobilisation: the watershed

Strange as it may sound, demobilisation was a moment of disconnect for all the people back from the front.
For almost five years, they had lived under attack. They had become accustomed to the emergency of the trenches. They had created a new family with their comrades, who took the place of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, even wives. In the trenches, how men related to each other was totally different from how they would act at home. Vicinity created a special intimacy. Every one of them depended on the other in a factual but also emotional and even psychological way.
In the environment of war, these men and women had found a new world where they were useful to each other.

Demobilisation destoyed this. Even when soldiers and nurses returned to their homeland together, what had bonded them was gone. The human relationships created by the deadly war environment were impossible to maintain in a peaceful world because it had its own rules and acceptable norms.

It felt surreal and unlikely – unreal, even.

Here, the disconnect happened.

Unwilling to accept this world that wanted to be like it was before, as if their sacrifice had been for nothing, as if they had fought and died on the battlefields and it didn’t matter because everyone pretended nothing had changed, this generation looked for new meaning and new purposes – and found none.

They were told they were back, but in fact, they knew the world had changed while they fought on the battlefields, and it would never be the same again. The world they had been prepared to live in had disappeared before they had a chance to experience it, and they knew nothing of the new world they lived in.

Everything was moving, everything was changing, and nobody knew what it would be like once things settled.

Maybe they would never settle.

The Lost Generation decided they didn’t care.

So these young people who wanted an answer and could not get it, who looked for a sense and meaning and did not find it, who wanted a future but didn’t have a solid ground on which to build it, decided they didn’t care. They didn’t care to carry on. They didn’t care to rebuild the world that war had destroyed. They didn’t care to make the effort and build a future. They decided to live in the present because they knew they had that. To get as much fun as they could while they could. They totally disconnected.

RESOURCES

International Encyclopedia of the First World War – Post-war Societies
Mail Online – A very bitter victory: Returning WWI soldiers’ hatred for the leaders who sent them to die