Transcriber’s note: Table of Contents added by Transcriber.
CONTENTS
THE WASTED GENERATION
By Owen Johnson
Lawrenceville Stories
The Prodigious Hickey
The Varmint
The Tennessee Shad
Stover at Yale
The Spirit of France
The Woman Gives
Virtuous Wives
The Wasted Generation
Making Money
The Sixty-first Second
THE
WASTED GENERATION
BY
OWEN JOHNSON
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1921
Copyright, 1921,
By Owen Johnson.
All rights reserved
Published September, 1921
TO
HUGH WALPOLE
IN FRIENDSHIP AND IN ADMIRATION
THE WASTED GENERATION
PART I
I
August, 1916
I am thirty this day, the twenty-ninth of August, 1916.The guns are roaring along the Somme front. Anothergreat attack is on. The gray waves are passing over thetop for the thousandth time and, for the thousandth time,hope is in the air once more. I feel it in the suddenoptimism of the daily bulletin, in the groups in the market-place,in the little knot of evacués, here in a Savoyardcourtyard, basking in the sun and studying the windingline of pins on the yellowed map of the front.
“Brigadier David Littledale, Légion Etrangère, Croixde Guerre, wounded at Verdun, March 5th, shellwound in the shoulder and the leg, shell-shock andgangrene. Entered Val de Grace, March 21st, evacuatedon Chambèry, July 10th, 1916.”
The record used to hang at the foot of my bed besidethe fever chart and the record of operations. FromChambèry, here into a rest area, to put on flesh again,to quiet my jumping nerves and to fatten up for thereturn to the front. To-day I have no desire to hastenthat return. I write it down frankly,—as I intend tokeep ho