Children and War

Abstract

247 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 3 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children and War James, Marten (2002). New York: New York University Press; 313 pages. $22. ISBN 0814756662. Children and War is an admirable collection of scholarly essays edited by James Marten, Professor of History atMarquette University. Robert Coles, in his forward to the collection, pays tribute to Anna Freud’s observations of British children during the London blitz and to her deep respect for their agility and resourcefulness in times of terrible danger. In many respects, this book serves as an extended commentary on Freud’s profound understanding of the capabilities of children. The book consists of 21 essays that address children’s engagement with war as soldiers, victims, observers, supporters, spies, and as symbols of national angst, identity and valor in a wide variety of conflicts. About a quarter of the essays address World War II and its aftermath, while others concern the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, World War I, colonial wars against the Maori, the Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, the Sandino and Mexican Revolutions, the Civil War in Liberia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other conflicts. The portraits that emerge are complex, inspiring, and troubling. These essays show how the historical and cross-cultural diversity of children and varied understandings of childhood challenge current international efforts to create a universal definition of “the child” through the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In these essays, it is striking how engaged and animated children are by war, both in the imagination and in reality. In addition, the book shows the ways children are subjected to relentless attempts by society to control and mediate their responses to war, even to the extent, as James Martin puts it, of trying to shape their memories of war. 248 I will not catalogue all the essays in the book, but reviewing a few of them will give a sense of the range of issues the book addresses. Marten’s introduction sets the tone of the book. He discusses the narrative of Iron Hawk, a Sioux warrior who at age 14 fought at the Little Big Horn River in 1876 and participated in wiping out General Custer and his troops. Iron Hawk recounts shooting an arrow into a soldier, knocking him off his horse, and beating him to death with his bow. Told when he was an old man living on a bleak reservation of the defeated Sioux, Iron Hawk’s narrative makes clear that at age 14 he thought of himself as a man, and that even many years later his victory at war continued to give meaning to his life. Elizabeth William’s essay, “Childhood, Memory and the American Revolution,” continues this line of analysis with her reviews of men’s and women’s accounts of their childhoods during the American Revolution. Many boys, some as young as age 12, joined the revolutionary army, often enlisting with their fathers and uncles. Williams tells us of women’s accounts of the moral threats that accompanied wartime violence. Both men and women wrote proudly of how, as children, they bore their share of the burden during the Revolution. In “Rescue and Trauma,” Eric Sterling explores a darker side of children’s resilience as he introduces us to a hidden tragedy of war. He writes of Helga, a Jewish woman desperate to save her daughter Eva’s life in Nazi Germany. She sent her to England in the famous Kinder transports, which saved some 10,000 children from the fate that befell 1.5 million other Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. Miraculously, Helga survived Auschwitz, only to find at the war’s end that Eva had transformed herself into an English child, changed her name to Evelyn, and wanted nothing to do with her mother ever again. At the same time, war has inspired adults to mediate and shape children’s behavior and values. In “Flower of Evil,” Aaron Cohen describes the alarm bells raised among Russian pedagogues and teachers as they fearfully observed children’s growing fascination with war at the onset of World War I. Many of these teachers came to see...