Generals Die in Bed

So (I'm starting to notice that I start every post with this word) I just finished reading the book that was assigned to my English class called Generals Die in Bed. I was only supposed to read to chapter four but I completely fell in love with the book and the characters (which I found out was a bad thing to get attached to) that I flipped through page after page after page until I found myself in the middle of chapter eleven. The book is a memoir of a man named Charles Yale Harrison and his experiences during World War One (wow this is starting to sound like a literary response! Ah!). Anyways, you can imagine how life was in the trenches with all the rats and lice and mud and such...oh did I forget gunfire? Yes there was quite a bit of gunfire too. I think it's one of the saddest books I'd ever read.
There has never been a book that has made me cry like that before. Usually when I see something sad, I have to let it sink in before I start crying...it usually takes me hours to ponder the sad event that I have just witnessed before the emotion sets in. For instance, when something scares me, I hardly ever scream, or when I see a sad movie, I rarely cry during the movie, but rather in bed that same night when all is quiet.
So this book is horribly sad without much of the emotion being showed by the characters. I hope that was said well, I wrote it and I don't even quite get it! Anyway, I guess that's all part of war. To create men who kill for money and vengeance and are thought not to dwell on fallen comrade, never mind the enemy(or commonly referred to in the book as Hienies). But for me, death is devastating (as it should be...right?) So got so attached to these characters and watching them die (well, "reading" them die) was compley and utter agony! Yet, he moved on so quickly that I found myself getting over it too. Because emotion doesn't sink in right away for me, I was sitting there reading like it was nothing. "Oh! look at that. His best army friend just got his legs blown off and is now crying out to him for help. What a shame. Lets just keep on running..."
Now I'm this guy wasn't a monster and he really does seem like he gives a crap about his poor legless friend. And that makes it even sadder. By the end of this book I was crying like you wouldn't believe it, and it's all because of this terrible thing that makes me sad all the time and yet I'm so fascinated by it that I could read about it all day and never get bored. I cried because i couldn't believe I was enjoying this novel about this terrible thing. This ragging, firing, shrieking ball of misery that turns men into killing machines and women into widows, countries poor and villages torn to pieces. This thing practically wiped out a generation. The lost generation. The generation lost to a monster that makes up our society, our world, or economy. Practically suicide and yet we can't live without it. WAR.