Paul Bäumer, the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, recurrently states how he and his brothers-at-arms are barely twenty, yet they are not young, with no youth. In the passage at the bottom of page eighty-seven to eighty-eight, "We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” So far in the novel, this is the most blatant statement of why they were no longer youthful.
In truth, it is a sorrowful statement. The idea that these young men have been ripped from their youth long before they were ready is something behold. They are stuck, fleeing yet unable to progress, with the knowledge that they themselves had destroyed their love of life and now they have nothing to look forward to, no future. Repeatedly, it is said that he and others like him are the "Iron Youth" yet so far these twenty-year-old "stone-age veterans" seem hard only on the outside. In their thoughts, they are still young and reminisce about before the war when they could act like the young men they had been. So it is a truly upsetting realization about war drafting, and about the detrimental experience for young men in war.
I agree with all your point in this statement and I really your last four sentences. You explain the meaning of Iron Youth while also giving an example of why they are "soft" on the inside (the example being of their feelings of nostalgia.) This is a really good blog post but what do you mean by behold in this sentence; "The idea that these young men have been ripped from their youth long before they were ready is something behold."
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