No longer youth...?

In this book, there has been the recurring theme of how they have seen much more than they should've at their age and how they are no longer 'Youth'. The quote, “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," helps explain this. Throughout the war, the second company has experienced many situations where they feel as though they have no hope in most of these situations. This has happened often throughout the book as they constantly repeat that they don't have much of a future and have lost their 'golden years' in this war when going through what they have went through. This idea illuminates the idea of seeing beyond your years and going through much of what you shouldn't normally see. This idea is something that identifies the horrors of the war and what most of the soldiers went through.