War has shown its ugly side many times throughout the ages. As people have seen through battles, the casualties can be devastating. People lose families, lose their livelihoods, lose their dignity, and lose their homes when they are amidst war. The stories and the personal experiences of non-combatants are often shown to shed light on the brutality and violence that exists in war. Soldiers rape women and kill men. They set fires to entire villages and thousands of children are either left dead, raped, or orphaned. This essay is meant to shed light on the effects of war on non-combatants.
John Keegan, in his book, explains the views of war and the way people may have a particular perspective on combat and the various classifications of people during a war. The friend is the ally who helps or comes to aid. The enemy is the person that needs to die so one can win. The casualties are the people that are often a mixture of non-combatants and prisoners. It is important to see what Keegan says because perspective is a key theme in this essay.
If the student-officer can pigeon-hole at will the highly polarized view of combat which his military training gives him, in which people are either 'enemy', 'friend', 'casualties', 'prisoners', 'non-combatants', or 'dead', if he can set aside this stark, two-dimensional picture of battle and prepare to look at it in the same light as a liberal-arts student might, or a professional historian…[footnoteRef:1] [1: John Keegan, the Face of Battle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 16.]
Interest in the experiences of non-combatants especially during the First World War grew substantially over the last three decades. During this war, children experienced a brutal and painful existence through disruption of home life, schooling, and dead or absent parents, and deaths of other family members and close friends. While many of these experiences were frequent on the Home Front, children commonly struggled to grasp the motives behind these events, and the impression upon them was persistent in diverse, and often more emotive, ways.
The poem written (1914-1918) by an 11-year-old girl named Anny Politzer, 'Der heimkehrende Krieger' ['The Returning Soldier'],[footnoteRef:2] suggests that more or less several children engaged and involved themselves in a position in relation to the war. Her words screamed of the pain and the numbness of existing within a time of turmoil and upheaval. Children are malleable. They are moldable, easily influenced. When children see the horrors of war, it changes them. It removes their innocence. Included in this essay is an image of the actual poem in Appendix section. Transitions from child to adult can happen rapidly during these hostile times. [2: Anny Politzer, 'Der heimkehrende Krieger' ['The Returning Soldier']]
These primary sources help explore questions of how considerations of the character of the child are tangled up in the ever-changing stations of adulthood within war, and as how depictions of the child remained complicit in reformation of attitudes towards the war. The material seized and gathered in various collections proves that children did not preserve diaries in a similar manner as adults. Alternatively, that this kind of proof has not endured -- where one possess the ability to trace the impact of war on the children that experienced it, however, is mainly seen in assignment and in drawings with a rare poem here and there.
In an assortment of school essays, printed in 1915, "The World War and Personal Expressions by Children: 150 German School Essays," shows how students discuss how they felt about the war through the various events they witnessed and experienced. For instance, a child mentions saying farewell to his father, or a child receiving terrible news of killed or missing family members. These are important revelations of the thoughts and feelings of this kind of non-combatant, the child. Some of the more positive revelations like celebrations after a victory were rare.
Instead, they wrote more about the constant noise made by falling bombs. What is also apparent from this is the strong influence propaganda had on children. As written in some of the essays, the children anticipated a victory through the educational and cultural recollection of previous German victories. Here lies evidence of the way in which children were both producers and products of propaganda at the same time. Essays like 'How I made a nightly attack on London with my Zeppelin', written by an Austrian child, imagines successfully attacking the city of London. New technology at the time as if Zeppelins were a source of fear and danger for adults, but children,...
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