Highlighted words in blue with labeled tone:
Words: silent, poorer, unchanged, fragile
Tone: Melancholic
Benjamin's claim about war is that it leads to a profound loss of communicable experience, rendering returning soldiers not richer but poorer in a silence that contrasts sharply with the contradictions imposed by strategic, tactical, economic, mechanical, and moral aspects of war.
Underlined evidence in red:
"...men returned from the battlefield grown silent-not richer, but poorer in communicable experience..."
With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that.
For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.