One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [1]
Now, we readers of this book can meet children like Jimmie and his next door pals—young ones not playing war games for fun (or at the behest of remembering parents, alive and doing well in the peaceable kingdom of the United States of America), but, alas, swept into ongoing warfare, and become, willy-nilly, actual combatants or victims of others wielding guns, knives, and bombs.
Ahead are those children, and ahead for us who meet them through a book’s knowing, resolute insistence, is plenty to ponder: knowledge offered becomes ours to have, to hold up to our minds’ eyes for sustained consideration. We are offered, too, in this volume’s extraordinarily affecting presentation, the valuable words of Anna Freud; and as I met them, I kept on remembering her thoughts about children, caught in the turmoil of the war being waged near their homes, their families, and their friends. I was privileged to know her, hear her recall the past, and reflect upon what she had learned (so often) by watching boys and girls attentively, and keeping in mind what they had said to her.
“So often, children learn violence from others,” she once remarked to me, and then this follow up: “That is obvious [what she had said], but not so obvious, at least to some of us who worked with children in London, during the time of the [Nazi] blitz was the lure, you could call it, of violence, of war, of aggression visited, and then returned in kind. My father in his writings knew to emphasize aggression as an aspect of all of our psychological lives, but when that ‘drive,’ he called it, becomes the norm, so to speak—and the young are summoned to what might be termed ‘a call to arms’—then, in a sense, aggression is given the sanction of the adult world, and enacted by it. Here we have, under such circumstances, an extraordinary kind of childhood being allowed (encouraged even) by parents, teachers, and civic authorities: boys and girls prodded (taught even) by adults to be fighters, to join with adults in their attitudes, feelings, and, yes, their actions. I saw in London some children fighting as if they were ‘the Germans’ or ‘on our side’—and I knew that in Europe, during the war, some children fought alongside adults, as ones who did errands, surely, but also as ones not only spying, running here and there, but taking orders—the young become fighters alongside their elders.”
A moment of silence, then this: “So it goes, children become fighters, warriors”—and today, thanks to this compelling book, the rest of us can know, as Anna Freud put it, how “it goes,” in our twenty-first century for children across the globe, caught in the throes of war, become witnesses to it, become soldiers in it—struggling for victory over others, and all the while, struggling to grow up in an all too callous, even murderous, world.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
During the spring of my junior year of college, when I was twenty-one years old, I began this project, collaborating with Refugees International as a Research Associate. Over the next five years, I traveled to eight countries, spending up to a month at a time interviewing children and their caretakers, visiting their homes and schools, playing soccer, and doing drawings. The world changed a great deal in that time and the children’s attitudes towards me, an American, shifted somewhat as well (which is why I did not visit Iraq or Afghanistan). The following timeline gives a sense of the major events in this book.
June 28, 1389: The Battle of Kosovo brings the kingdom of Serbia under Ottoman control.
March 1962: General Ne Win leads a military coup in Burma.
September 1983: The Sudanese government triggers the Second Sudanese Civil