Right, you got it. A World War was started under the pretext of a the assassination of a minor royal, but really to sell and test modern weaponry of the industrial age - on a ferocious scale. Not so much for us, but for the Europeans, it was devastating.
Hemingway didn't refer to it as the "Lost Generation" because of some kind of intellectual disillusionment - it was in reference to how many people were killed. Because in WWI units were still often raised, trained and fought among other men from the same city and town. So in some places, literally, whole generations of young men died.
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