One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [0]
Voices of Children in War
Charles London
To all the parents, mine and theirs,
alive or dead, who try, against
the odds, to protect us.
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or where one could weep because another wept.
—from W. H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles
We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
—from William Shakespeare’s King Lear
When Elephants fight, it is the Grass that suffers.
—East African Proverb
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Foreword
Author’s Note
Maps
1. “Innocent in the Ways of the World”: Childhood and War
2. “Then He Lined Us Up”: Children Fleeing
3. “We Can’t Stay Here”: Migrants and Refugees in Hiding
4. “I Am Getting Used to Living Here”: Children in Camps, Shelters, and on the Streets
Photographic Inserts
5. “The Things I’ve Done”: Children as Soldiers
6. “Surviving the Peace”: Coming of Age in Post-War Kosovo and Bosnia
7. “God Has Something in Store”: What Becomes of War’s Children
Reference List
Further Resources and What You Can Do to Help
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
ROBERT COLES, M.D.
During the late 1950s I worked as a resident in pediatrics and child psychiatry on the wards of the Children’s Hospital Boston; and so doing, I met many children who were not only sick but hurting with unremitting pain, debilitating to both mind and heart—to the point that some boys and girls dared say to their parents (and to us doctors), that they wished for death, whose arrival, they averred, would end the agony they no longer felt able to bear, even with a modicum of equanimity. One day, as I talked with a ten-year-old lad who had contracted polio, and who was paralyzed from the waist down (no vaccine was available then, to spare children from such a dreadful, disabling disease), I heard this from Jimmie: “My dad fought in the war [the Second World War], and he said he saw a lot of kids my age get killed—and he even saw some fighting hard, ‘like good soldiers, so their country [France] could be free,’ from that dictator, Hitler, and his army.” A moment of silence, and then, as if my perplexity had become quite apparent, this soliloquy of sorts: “You have to be brave, and keep on fighting. If kids could fight for their country in Europe, I sure can try to fight for myself, right here and now. ‘Be a good soldier,’ my mother and dad tell me, and then I say, ‘You bet I will.’ So, when they come to visit me, they ask how the soldier is doing, and I say, ‘The soldier is fighting hard, and I hope he wins the war.’”
There are, of course, soldiers and soldiers; indeed, young Jimmie, before his hospitalization, had often played soldier games in the backyard of his suburban Boston home. He and his friends had taken sides, shouted and screamed at one another, aimed sticks as if they were guns and made noises—bang, bang, bang!—to affirm deadly intent. “My dad was a soldier, and me and my pals fight like soldiers, and our dads coach us,” Jimmie once told me. Yes, indeed, here were American children and their parents (one-time warriors in Europe and Asia), engaged in vigorous military activity, so it seemed to all who watched: “My mom,” Jimmie told me, “said I could go to join the army, and they’d not have to teach me much, because of what my dad and the other dads [of his neighborhood friends] have taught me—and remember, in a real war, kids sometimes fight too, or they sure see the fighting right before their eyes.”
That long-ago critical moment in my occupational life came back to my mind as I read the pages that follow—their collective words an unforgettable lesson for all of us readers: children become witnesses of war fought, and further, children become warriors themselves, ready and willing to take up arms, even as they observe others doing likewise—a violent world registering its implacable philosophy on others, who are violated in the name of this or that slogan, creed,