The Child Soldier in Literature

The transformation of the child soldier, from hero to killer or victim, is equally vivid in literature. The classic nineteenth-century representation of the child at war is the character of the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

Les Miserables was written some 32 years after these events. A key moment in Hugo's novel is the Paris student uprising of June 1832, where many of those who die are students involved in a short but violent antimonarchist revolt. As with Delacroix, the main action is on the barricades and focuses on a child, the orphan Gavroche, a street urchin who joins with the student rebels, pistol in hand. During the battle, he crosses over the barricades into the line of fire in order to gather unspent cartridges from among the dead. He is killed while singing.

In Hugo's novel, Gavroche's heroic actions are marvels. If, as Margaret Mead once opined, adults viewed children as “pygmies among giants,”²⁰ Hugo turns this vision on its head, describing the diminutive Gavroche as a giant concealed in a pygmy body and comparing him to Antaeus, the great mythical Libyan giant defeated by Hercules.

The rebels watched with breathless anxiety. The barricade trembled, and he sang. He was neither child nor man but puckish sprite, a dwarf, it seemed, invulnerable in battle. The bullets pursued him but he was more agile than they. The urchin played his game of hide and seek with death, and... tweaked its nose.²¹

Gavroche does not survive, but when he is finally brought down by a bullet, Hugo tells us that “his gallant soul had fled.”²² For Hugo and for others, the child fighter very much represented “the people” in their struggle for democracy; in this sense, the child served as a collective representation of all that was good, striking to break out of an encrusted social order.

Hugo's story of the death of Gavroche must be placed in the context of his understanding of the violence of war. Les Miserables combines both nar­rative and social commentary and is marked by Hugo's observations on revolution, which he understood as inevitably flowing from the conditions of inequality in society. Hugo likened revolt to the releasing of a spring or, even more powerfully, to a whirlwind whose destructive force smashes those whom it carries away as well as those whom it seeks to destroy. It pulls in all those who cherish in their souls a secret grudge against some action of the state, life, or destiny, to the revolt; and when it manifests itself, they shiver and feel themselves uplifted by the tempest.²³

Hugo carefully distinguished his judgments about the morality of col­lective violence from the particular makeup of the participants. The latter, he recognized, could be a rather motley crew of combatants. Hugo was well aware that violence could also take a negative turn. But, citing Lafayette, Hugo argued that true insurrection, as a form of expression of collective and universal sovereignty guided by truth, was a sacred duty.²⁴

For Hugo, Gavroche's participation in the insurrection is part of the rights and duties of all citizens, men, women, and children, to resist oppression.

Hugo sees a moral order in revolutionary violence. Indeed, because insurrection is a noble striving, revolutionaries must not act like criminals.²⁵ This view is made clear in an incident involving the murder of an elderly man, a doorkeeper who refuses a group of fighters entrance to a home. What seems clear is that Hugo is tracking the customary laws of war, which criminalize the intentional killing of noncombatants. Revolutions must follow the moral and normative codes of organized violence. But it is also clear that Hugo does not imagine that these would bar children from join­ing in class struggle.

The same revolutionary spirit that informs Hugo's novel is found in Johnny Tremain, one of the best-selling American novels for youngsters in U.S. history. Written in 1943, in the middle of World War II, it focuses on the saga of its eponymous hero as he grows and develops from a self-centered and arrogant child into a young soldier who takes up arms on behalf of the American Revolution. Johnny is 14 when the novel opens in 1773 and just 16 when it ends in the aftermath of the battles at Lexington and Concord, two of the most iconic events of the revolutionary era.

What is profoundly interesting is that the arc of Johnny's development and growing maturity tracks the arc of his emergence as a revolutionary activist. At the outset of the novel, Johnny is an apprentice to a silversmith in Boston and his main concerns focus on developing his abilities in a skilled trade. The novel adeptly recognizes that the American Revolution was very much a civil war that pitted loyalists to Britain (Tories) against the rebels (Whigs or patriots).

Johnny's transformation takes place after a prank by another apprentice results in the severe burning of his hand, which makes it impossible for him to continue on as a silversmith. Unable to find other skilled work, he is befriended by the 16-year-old Rab, whose family publishes and distributes a Whig newspaper. They hire Johnny to distribute the newspaper to its subscribers by horse throughout Boston and the surrounding areas. This brings Johnny into contact with various rebel leaders and groups, and this, together with his self-education in the library, turns him into a Patriot. As the rebel movement grows and the British military occupation deepens, Johnny is drawn into the violence of the growing rebellion. Several key events mark the transition to open revolt. These include a powerful patriotic speech by Otis, one of the Patriots; a cruel injury to Rab by a British officer who catches him trying to examine the locket of a musket; the execution of Pumpkin, a young British deserter who has given Rab his musket; and, finally, the death of the heroic Rab, who is fatally wounded at Lexington and who gives Johnny his musket just before he dies. Most importantly, it is discovered that Johnny's own burned hand can be made usable by a sim­ple surgery and that, while he may never be a silversmith, he will be able to fire a musket in battle. In the last lines of the novel, Johnny also recalls Otis's speech and says, “Hundreds would die but not the thing they died for.”²⁶

The relationship between war, revolution, and the novel's construction of Johnny's development shows how political and revolutionary activity, including revolutionary violence, contributed to Johnny's development as a mature and responsible person. There is very little depiction of those things that are deleterious about war.

The links between revolutionary violence, political maturity, social justice, and the transition to citizenship are no longer themes in contemporary novels of child soldiers although, to some degree, the heroic child soldier lives on in novels, usually set in a distant historical era, directed at adolescents. Contemporary contribution to this genre include Carol Campbell’s The Powder Monkey and Arthur Trout’s Drumbeat, all set in the American Civil War, but even some of these, such as Soldier’s Heart by Gary Paulson, focus far more on the trauma of war than on its heroics.²⁷ But the heroic child soldier of the earlier era has been rendered invisible in contemporary adult fiction. Exemplifying this trend are three modern works of literature that reflect on the plight of child soldiers in Africa. All are published for the Western market. They are among the few works in fiction that give center stage to the actions of children under arms.²⁸ The works are Beasts of No Nations by Uzodinma Iweala, Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, and Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanel Dongala.²⁹ In all of these works, the role of the child soldier is at best a terrible tragedy and at worst a threat to any sense of morality and social justice. Indeed the contemporary child soldier appears to subvert not just the social order but the natural order as well.

Beasts of No Nation is written as a comic nightmare allegory. As the title implies, it functions as the antithesis of a war novel. It is not about the human soldiers of a particular nation state but rather of “beasts” who have no national identification.

The book is set in a kind of dream time although, in this instance, the dream is a nightmare. From the very beginning, it makes use of the conven­tions of comic books. The Commandant is the nefarious nameless leader of the nameless force that murders Agu’s father and kidnaps him from his village. The Commandant has all the attributes of a comic super-villain. Like the Joker in the Batman comics, he has no ideology. He is not inter­ested in power, money, or land. He kills for the sake of killing as well as for his own lust and amusement. Like other super-villains, he has his servile minions, such as Luftenant and Rambo as well as his army of soldiers who laugh when he laughs and seek to imitate his every walk and gesture.

The terrible action scenes of the text are garnished with the classic devices of the comic-book narrative. In conventional comics, uppercase words such as ZAP, WHAM, BANG, and especially KAPOW mark the scenes of vio­lence. In this book, Iweala converts and expands the classic KAPOW into a new faux-African action-comic vocabulary of evil: “KPAWA” marks the beating of Agu as he is dragged before the Commandant³⁰; “KPWISHA,” as the Commandant dashes cold water over him; “KPWUDA,” as the machete wielding Agu chops a captured enemy soldier into pieces; “KPWUD,” as he stomps a young girl to death; “KPWAMA” as soldiers kick down a door; “KEHI KEHI” marks the raucous laughter of soldiers as innocents are mutilated and murdered; and “AYEEEIII!” the murdered scream as they die. All this is very effective dramatically and none of it is funny in any way. But it has the immediate effect of stripping the story of any social and cultural context. The story unfolds both nowhere and every­where. There is no history and no meaning to anything that is going on. Strongly paralleling the humanitarian understanding of war, it portrays peo­ple simply dying for nothing. Unlike the classic comic, there is no superhero to save the day.

Placing the action of the novel outside of any temporal, historical, or soci­etal context gives the horror it describes an elusive transcendence. The action, which stands outside of history, stands for “Every War,” or at least every African war, and in this respect at least, there is little difference between this novel's understanding of Africa and that found in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad took Africans out of history and suspended them between the human and the animal. Here, the narrator Marlow describes his journey up the Congo River:

The pre-historic man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings.... We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.. No, they were not inhuman.......

They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.³¹

And here is Agu, more than one hundred years later, on his way to the killing fields:

We are walking down into the valley and down into the bush so I am feeling like an animal going back to his home...................................................... I am hearing water and I am

thirsty and wanting to drink................... Everybody is looking like one kind of animal, no more human.... Everything is just looking like one kind of animal.... I am liking how the gun is shooting and the knife is chopping. I am liking to see people running from me and people screaming for me when I am killing them and taking their blood. I am liking to kill.³²

In his influential critique of Conrad, Chinua Achebe decried Conrad's stripping of Africans of their humanity as well as his description of Africa as a “metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity.”³³ Like Conrad's, Iweala's characters hover between the human and the inhuman, but the battlefield is no longer merely metaphysical. Still, the metaphysical struggle continues. Indeed, Iweala may well have a larger purpose in stripping his characters of their humanity, because in doing so he also immunizes them from their culpability in murder, a central theme in the humanitarian efforts to “protect” children under arms. But Conrad also had a larger pur­pose, namely, to offer a critique of colonialism. Yet, as Achebe tells us, “You cannot diminish a people's humanity and defend them” at one and the same time.³⁴

Moses, Citizen and Me was written by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, who was born and resides in England but is of Sierra Leonean descent. The setting of the novel is the civil war in Sierra Leone. The novel's protagonist, Julia, living in London, is summoned back to Sierra Leone after a 20-year absence. She returns to the home of her beloved Uncle Moses and Auntie Adele in Freetown, where she encounters their grandchild, Citizen, an ex-child soldier who, during the civil war, murdered his own grandmother, Adele. Citizen, aged eight, is living with Uncle Moses after having being released from Doria, a rehabilitation camp for former child soldiers. Uncle Moses is torn between his grief for his murdered wife and his duty toward his grandson. The questions of the story are basic. Is Citizen ruined? Is he redeemable? Who can redeem him and how?

At first wanting to understand who Citizen is and later wanting to build a connection to him, Julia visits Camp Doria, where she has her first encoun­ter with an ex-child soldier. The soldier, a boy nicknamed Corporal Kalashnikov, has just been rehabilitated from his regular habit of drinking tea laced with gunpowder and marijuana. Julia perceives him as caricature of a soldier who could otherwise be leading a carnival parade. Nonetheless, the encounter with Corporal Kalashnikov serves as a personal rite of passage, which enables her to begin to understand the plight of child soldiers.³⁵

All of Julia’s future contacts with child soldiers take place not in reality but in a magical dream-like state while her hair is being plaited by Anita, Uncle Moses's next-door neighbor. As Anita plaits her hair, Julia begins a magical journey into the forest where she encounters a unit of child soldiers that includes 12-year-old Abu, his older brother Masa, Citizen himself, and their vicious commander, the 20-year-old Lieutenant Ibrahim. Ibrahim is the leader of the “number-one-burn-house-unit.”³⁶ The scene is one of stark brutality and violence. Ibrahim carries a knife that he has stolen from a corpse, one of many in the trail of corpses he has created in his campaign of extermination. The unit is about to attack a village of the “enemy,” although it is clear that it is merely a rural village. The child soldiers, under the influ­ence of drugs, join in the spree of chaos and murder, where the dying and fleeing inhabitants are seen by them as just so many insects. Despite their participation in murder, the children in the novel are presented as being completely under the murderous control of Ibrahim, whose calculated terror­ism and violence propel them into combat. Ibrahim cruelly beats Abu for crying for his mother, lashes Citizen fifty times for his “failure” to beat a fel­low child soldier to death, murders the helpless Musa who has come down with malaria, and forces the children to dance to stop them from comforting one another over Musas murder. Despite this and despite how broken the children are, they retain their “innocence” and their humanity in this war.

For the rest of the novel, Julia magically tracks back and forth between Freetown and “the bush” where this unit of child soldiers, now deep in the Gola forest on the borderlands between Sierra Leone and Liberia, finds its redemption. The war is now over and the children are cared for by Bemba G, an elderly shaman-like character with magical powers. Bemba G's plan is to redeem and rehabilitate the child soldiers through the staging of Shakespeare’s drama Julius Caesar, in which all the children will play a part. Citizen is to play Lucius, the boy servant of Brutus, who in the play is implicitly with Brutus when he dies on the plains of Phillipi and whom the novel casts as a boy soldier of ancient times. Lucius is sleeping in Brutus’s tent when he encounters the ghost of Caesar, who foretells his death. In Shakespeare’s play, Lucius cries out in his sleep, clearly disturbed by the presence of Caesar’s ghost, but does not see him. In the novel, Citizen/ Lucius, while acting out his part, has an unscripted dream where the ghost is not that of Caesar but of his murdered Aunt Adele. The encounter is transformative. Lucius sees the ghost and “the glory of her voice, those assessing eyes, naked brown arms with flesh gently drooping. He thinks of tenderness and love—and joining hands. The Ghost turns, revealing a back torn with wounds from a cruel death.”³⁷ But in contrast to Brutus’s encoun­ter, Citizen’s encounter with the ghost foreshadows not his doom but rather his reconciliation both with his family and with society.

To its credit, Jarrett-Macauley’s novel does not seek to redeem child soldiers by members of the so-called helping professions—social workers and psychologists—but rather by reconnecting these child soldiers, who have been artificially isolated and brutalized by war, back into the global culture they have always inhabited. However, though the novel clearly demonstrates the intellectual richness of Sierra Leone society, its portraits of children at arms remain remarkably thin; Jarrett-Macauley reduces them to the stereotypes of human rights reporting. Indeed, as the author admits, she has never met a child soldier and has relied almost entirely upon her own interviews with personnel from agencies that deal with child soldiers. This is not to argue that a novelist must be constrained by reality but rather that the novelist’s imagination, even in this otherwise wonderfully imagined story, has been constrained by the rhetoric of advocacy. This is a rather surprising result since Brutus’s kindness and gentility toward Lucius on the very eve of his death suggest that Lucius and Citizen, despite their both being called child soldiers, actually have very little in common. Brutus may have betrayed Caesar but he is no Lieutenant Ibrahim. In the novel we never get a child soldier who departs from the stereotype. We never get the child soldiers who believed, even if wrongly, that they were fighting for a cause or those who fought to protect their homes and villages from rebel deprivations.³⁸

Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanel Dongala is the story of a civil war in an unnamed country in Africa. It is partly based on the personal experiences of Dongala, who was a director of academic affairs at the University of Brazzaville. He fled the Congo at the onset of the civil war in 1997. Johnny Mad Dog is the story of two 16-year-old teenagers, Laokolo, a young girl on the run from the conflict who wheels her crippled mother around in a wheel barrow, and Johnny Mad Dog, a leader of a unit of a militia group called the Mata Mata, or Death Dealers. Johnny lives in a world of false­hood and deception. “Looting” he says, “was the main reason we were fighting. To line our pockets. To become adults. To have all the women we wanted. To wield the power of a gun. To be rulers of the world........................................................................................................................ But

our leaders and our president ordered us.... [to say] that we were fighting for freedom and democracy.”³⁹

Johnny Mad Dog’s world is also one of total self-deception. He imagines that he brings sexual pleasure to a woman he is raping, regards himself as an intellectual even though he has only finished the second grade, and provides himself endless justifications for wanton murder. If this was a novel about a single individual, Johnny would clearly be a criminal sociopath. He is dangerous, glib, and grandiose; has absolutely no conception of the rights of others; and shows no guilt, shame, or remorse. But the essence of a sociopathic personality disorder is a disregard for cultural and social norms or rules. This novel portrays the world that Johnny lives in as itself devoid of meaningful social and political categories. The novel’s use of patently absurd and inauthentic social and political categories conveys the meaningless cruelty of war. There are no authentic rules to break, which renders both Johnny and warfare ultimately unintelligible.

The novel uses a variety of rhetorical devices to do this. For example, the two ethnic groups at war are the Dogo-Mayi and the Mayi-Dogo, patently fictional ethnic categories that have blossomed out of squabbles between postcolonial political leaders with little prewar intergroup salience. The war­ring political parties formed around these ethnic categories are the equally contrived MFTLP (Movement for the Total Liberation of the People) and the MFDLP (Movement for the Democratic Liberation of the People). The categories of the opposition’s allies are all a jumble, as Johnny and his mili­tiamen imagine they are also hunting down fantasy “Chechens” and “Israelis,” all of whom turn out to be innocent African civilians, who are casually murdered by Johnny and his unit. Some of this is balanced by the story of Laokolo, a courageous young woman of uncommon intelligence who tries to survive in an insane world. In the end, in an almost Orwellian way, both Johnny and Laokolo are manipulated by forces out of their control, and adults serve as stand-ins for Big Brother.

In the literature, folklore, and song about war, the very common name “Johnny” has frequently been used to mean every anonymous soldier. Over the last two or three centuries, there have been many Johnnys. Johnny Reb was the slang term for the common soldier of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. In the same war, soldiers of both the North and the South sang and marched to Patrick Gilmour’s “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, Hurrah, Hurrah.”⁴⁰ In World War I, Americans sang to “Over There,” by George M. Cohan whose first verse began with “Johnny Get Your Gun, Get Your Gun, Get Your Gun,” and in the World War II, U.S. audiences listened to the patriotic sounds of the Andrews Sisters singing Don Raye and Gene De Paul’s “Johnny Get Your Gun, Again” in the 1942 film Private BuckarooP In all of these wars, especially the American Civil War, there were large numbers of children under arms, and “Johnny” easily stands for any soldier, whether adult or child. Certainly, Johnny Tremain, the eighteenth-century Johnny who was clearly a child soldier, fits easily into the genre of a patriotic soldier fighting for a just cause.

Of course, literature does not only provide us with patriotic Johnnies. Indeed one of the most powerful portraits of a “Johnny” in modern litera­ture is the antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. The novel tells the tale of Joe Bonham, a young American soldier of the World War I who, after being hit by an artillery shell, lost his eyes and his limbs. Lying in hospital, Bonham is unable to communicate except by using his head to bang out Morse code.⁴² At first blush, Johnny Got His Gun seems to speak of the unjustness of any war and to reject all attempts to justify war or to distinguish between just and unjust wars. The sheer horror of Bonham’s situation implies that war is meaningless. Bonham has little use for any of the myths of war and rejects all of the so-called reasons for fighting—liberty, freedom, decency, democracy, or independence. Indeed, his thoughts on the American Revolution subvert every sentiment found in Johnny Tremain:

America fought a war for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn't fight at all?... Can you look at a guy and say he's an American who fought for his liberty and anybody can see he's a very different guy from a Canadian who didn't? No by god you can't and that's that. So maybe a lot of guys with wives and kids died in 1776 when they didn't need to die at all.⁴³

By the end of the novel we are less certain that Joe's position involves a complete rejection of war because the novel's critique of war is tied to a broader critique of class-based societies that locates the meaninglessness of war in an economic system that exploits the vulnerable. Although Bonham's acute suffering leads him to an antiwar position, it is by no means clear that Trumbo meant the novel to lead to a complete abandonment of the possibil­ity of a just war. Indeed, Trumbo delayed the 1939 release of his book because he apparently feared it might unfavorably distort the efforts to defeat fascism in Europe. Thus, even the most powerful of antiwar novels demon­strates that all pro- and antiwar sentiments are coated in political residue.⁴⁴

In stark contrast, recent novels of war and, especially, novels of children at war in contemporary conflicts completely remove war from the world of politics. None of these new texts of war offer a rationale for violence. Instead, war appears virtually out of nowhere, usually as a result of adult perfidy, to engulf children and to turn them into victims and killers. It is almost as if war was a malevolent natural phenomenon akin to a tornado, which lands on a country and destroys it. The novels attribute a kind of random and feral meaninglessness to war that unmistakably echo Conradian representations of the near-riotous inhumanity of Africans. It is not as if past wars and uprisings in the West, especially civil wars and revolutions, did not have dramatic displays of violence. Chateaubriand, in his memoirs, for example, describes terrible scenes of murder and mayhem during the French Revolution that are hardly supportive of Hugo's view of the morality of revolutionary violence. Chateaubriand described crowds of people bear­ing severed heads on spikes:

A troop of ragamuffins appeared at one end of the street... As they came nearer, we made out two disheveled and disfigured heads... each at the end

of a pike.... The murderers stopped in front of me and stretched their pikes up towards me, singing, dancing and jumping up in order to bring the pale effigies closer to my face. One eye in one of these heads had started out of its socket and was hanging down on the dead man's face; the pike was projecting through the open mouth, the teeth of which were biting on the iron.⁴⁵

Similarly, Chateaubriand's memoirs of the July Revolution, 1830, the same one in which Delacroix's painting figures so prominently, are unequivocal in their near-racialized disparagement of children and his horror at how they threw themselves into the bloody work of war:

The children, fearless because they knew no better, played a sad role during those three days. Hiding behind their weakness, they fired at point-blank range at the officers who opposed them. Modern weapons put death in the hands of the feeblest. These ugly and sickly monkeys, cruel and perverse, immoral even without the capacity to perform immorally, these three-day heroes devoted themselves to murder with all the abandon of true innocents.⁴⁶

Chateaubriand was a royalist and foe of revolutionary violence. His scorn for children under arms did not prevail in either French or Western thought, where the democratic gains brought about through revolution trumped virtually all other considerations. Thus, despite the cruel bloodletting of the past and the prominent role played by young people in revolutionary vio­lence, revolutionary activity was understood as meaningful and positive. Yet, if Chateaubriand were alive today, he could easily be writing much of the contemporary humanitarian discourse on child soldiers.

The irony of why we were so willing to read a political and social context into the violent acts of children in the past but strip away this context in the present still remains. Why is it that we read mindless barbarism into contemporary warfare? Some might argue that the new wars in Africa and elsewhere are, in fact, much more horrible than the warfare of the past. The fact that war is increasingly directed toward civilians obviously adds to our sense of fear and outrage. To be sure, the portraits of African children at war that form the set-piece humanitarian and literary descriptions of child soldiers have been harnessed to serve modern notions of the greater good— ending children's involvement in war. But despite attempts to lend the situation of child soldiers a universal “everyman” quality, humanitarian and literary portraits of child soldiers do so by drawing upon an earlier discourse about Africa that served to dehumanize Africans. In the end, we are still writing Africa's script, and with it the larger story of child soldiers, in much the same way that Conrad did so many years ago.

Notes

1. Phillip Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York, 1962, p. 411.

2. Frank Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order. London, 1964.

3. Aries, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 202—206.

4. Ibid., pp. 266—268.

5. Peter Gripton, The Arborfield Apprentice. Reading, 2003.

6. Herman Melville, “The March into Virginia Ending in Manassas,” in Lorrie Goldensohn, ed., American War Poetry: An Anthology. New York, 2006, pp. 65—66.

7. Richard Reid, War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa. London, 2007, pp. 2—21.

8. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingame, War and Children. New York, 1943.

9. Most “child soldiers” are adolescents, who are legally defined as children.

10. “Child Soldiers Ratification Campaign,” in Human Rights Watch: Childrens Rights. http://www.humanrightswatch.org/campaigns/crp/action/index.htm. Accessed 23 November 2007.

11. Sally Merry, “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way),” Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 26, 1, 1999, pp. 55-77.

12. For example, Francis Deng, The Dinka of the Sudan. Prospect Heights, IL, 1972, pp. 68-73; E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes. New York, 1978, p. 77.

13. A. W Cockerill, Sons of the Brave. London, 1984.

14. John C. Dann, The Revolution Remembered. Chicago, 1980.

15. David B. Parker and Alan Freeman, “David Bailey Freeman,” Cartersville Magazine. Spring, 2001. http://www.wintektx.com/freeman/whois.htm. Accessed 28 October 2007.

16. Margaret Downie Banks, “Avery Brown (1852-1904), Musician: America’s Youngest Civil War Soldier,” America’s Shrine to Music Newsletter. February 2001. http://www.usd.edu:80/smm/AveryBrown.html. Accessed 28 October 2007.

17. Susan Hull, Boy Soldiers of the Confederacy. Austin, TX, 1998 (1905).

18. Delacroix’s painting is available on: Wikipedia. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix. Accessed 28 October 2007.

19. Jean-Jacques Yvorel, “De Delacroix a Poulbot, l’image du gamin de Paris,” RHEI: Revue d’his to ire de l’enfance irreguliere. 4, 2002. http://rhei.revues.org/ document52.html. Accessed 23 May 2007.

20. Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago, 1955, p. 7.

21. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. New York, 1976 (1862), p. 1028.

22. Ibid., p. 1028.

23. Ibid., p. 883.

24. Ibid., p. 887.

25. Ibid., p. 939.

26. Edna Forbes, Johnny Tremain. New York, 1980, p. 256.

27. Carol Campbell, The Powder Monkey. Shippensburg, PA, 1999; Gary Paulsen, Soldier’s Heart. New York, 1998; Arthur Trout, Drumbeat. Shippensburg, PA, 2007.

28. Other works of fiction contain episodes in which child soldiers appear, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Half of a Yellow Sun. New York, 2006; Helon Habila, Measuring Time. New York, 2007; Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged. New York, 2006.

29. Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation. New York, 2007; Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Moses, Citizen and Me. London, 2005; Emmanuel Dongala, Johnny Mad Dog. New York, 2006.

30. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, pp. 2, 8, 21, 47, 51.

31. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness. Clayton, DE, 2004, p. 37.

32. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, p. 45.

33. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial Discourse: An Anthology. London, 2001, pp. 209-220.

34. Caryl Phillips, “Out of Africa,” The Guardian. 22 February 2003. http://books. guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,900102,00.html#article_continue. Accessed 21 November 2007.

35. Jarrett-Macauley, Moses, Citizen and Me, pp. 36-37.

36. Ibid., pp. 58-61.

37. Ibid., p. 208.

38. David Rosen, Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. New Brunswick, NJ, 2005; Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest. Portsmouth, NH, 1996.

39. Dongala, Johnny Mad Dog, p. 64.

40. Patrick S. Gilmore, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again Hurrah, Hurrah” (1863), in Patriotic Melodies. United States Library of Congress. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200000024/default.html. Accessed 6 December 2007.

41. George M. Cohan, “Over There” (1917), in Patriotic Music. United States Library of Congress. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200000015/ default.html. Accessed 6 December 2007; Edward F. Cline, dir., Private Buckaroo, 1942; Internet Movie Data Base http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035218/ soundtrack. Accessed 6 December 2007.

42. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (New York, 2007).

43. Ibid., p. 145.

44. Ibid., p. 2

45. Robert Baldick, The Memoires of Chateaubriand (New York, 1961), p. 105.

46. Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoires d’outre-tomb. Paris, 1951 (1841), p. 430, cited in Yvorel, “De Delacroix a Poulbot, l’image du gamin de Paris.” I thank my friend and colleague Richard Rabinowitz, of the American History Workshop, for his translation of Chateaubriand.