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,...
Essays did indeed become a great way to look briefly into the minds of children experiencing war. "The editor, an author of school books and previously a school teacher, hopes in his foreword that the essays will help teachers identify interesting themes to teach because 'school lessons are all about war"[footnoteRef:3] Appendix A will also have the images of the bombing and the essay. [3: The British Library, 'School Essays Compositions', last modified 2015, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/school-essays-compositions#sthash.uneeg8rc.dpuf." ]
There are images during World War I that depict mothers and children wearing gas masks. These haunting images not only affect the viewer but also show the numbness and reality of the situation. These people, these non-combatants felt the effects of the war even though they were not actually a part of it. It is often a sad thing to realize in these situations, that war has a far-reaching effect, across nations, across continents.
The loss of life and the loss of innocence is something that permeates time and history.[footnoteRef:4] It saturates the very fibers of human existence because it connects the world and everything in it to the fate of life, death. What bring life can also bring death. What brings joy can also bring hate. What brings peace can also bring war. With war comes innumerable suffering, especially at the hands of the innocent. The ones that cannot defend themselves. The non-combatants. [4: Footnote: JEFF McMAHAN, 'The Just Distribution Of Harm Between Combatants And Noncombatants', Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 4 (2010): 342-379.]
The status of noncombatants is fundamental to ethical discussions concerning war as well as the use of force. Regularly, worry for noncombatant's centers around the comportment of war -- on controlling "collateral damage" as well as needless loss of life. More recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. army used tactics to attempt to avoid bombing populace centers and depended heavily upon fastidiousness strikes to limit the destruction exacted on the civilian substructure. These kinds of tactics by the U.S. army won over political support from Iraqi civilians. This is because they respected the concept of noncombatant immunity and the rule of not hurting those who are not directly involved in the war.
In fact, the U.S. army even granted some of the immunity to Iraqi soldiers. This is because they realized many of these soldiers were not trained soldiers but in reality, were noncombatants either coerced or tempted into becoming soldiers for some sort of protection or privilege. However, not every war scenario grants such immunity to noncombatants. The reality for some wars was quite the opposite. "Consider that the suffering of noncombatants in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the former Yugoslavia spurred decisions to launch U.S. air strikes and to conduct NATO's sustained humanitarian intervention"[footnoteRef:5] [5: John Carlson, 'War On Behalf Of Noncombatants', Isme.Tamu.Edu, last modified 2015, accessed April 8, 2015, http://isme.tamu.edu/JSCOPE04/Carlson04.html#_edn1.]
Genocides or ethnic cleansing were and are a horrific consequence of wars. Non-combatants in these instances are killed, tortured, raped, and brutalized because they are seen as targets to be destroyed. A clear example of that were the Nazis and World War II. The mass killing of Jewish people in German concentration camps led to some of the most powerful personal accounts and stories in recent history.
Eric Lamet presents a primary source of the true story of a boy going into an internment camp. "For the fourth time in little more than three years, I was being forced to go where I did not want to go. Although this time I did not cry, not sure whether I had matured or just become hardened by experience, I'm unsure, the move raised similar emotions."[footnoteRef:6] This young boy admitted he had to, in a sense, mature faster than he was meant to. He had to grow up and stop crying. He moved to where he needed to go. He lived how he was told to live. [6: Eric Lamet, A Child Al Confino (Avon, Mass.: Adams Media, 2011), p. 105.]
The atrocities committed under the flag of war, it created a lot of chaos. Some of the men that witnessed the chaos, participated, or simply felt the need to confess, often revealed in their words, the need for spirituality and salvation. In a primary source from Saint Augustine, he explains men and confessions. "What then have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions-…
