It steals their youth and murders their laughter, if not robbing them of life itself. The crowd, openly smug but secretly sneaking home, wilfully refuse to acknowledge the pain and senselessness, because this would be to acknowledge their own part in creating the war.

The poem as a whole both juxtaposes and compares general society with the suffering of the soldiers. Society as a whole ignores the suffering of war, but in this very act lies its own suffering. The senseless suicide is ignored only because society is not able to handle the full extent of the horror that led to it. The young solder was filled with "empty joy." In many ways, the joy society feels when their "heroes" are hailed upon their homecoming is similarly empty. It is a joy that understands the suffering that underlies it. When the suffering overtakes the joy, a young man commits suicide....
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