War Game and War Boy by Michael Foreman
If anyone was destined to create a book helping children to know the futility of war, and to do so without judging those who fight in them, it was Michael Foreman. Of his four uncles three died in the First World War and one, called Christmas, died of wounds on the first Christmas Day after the armistice. His own father, too young to join up, lied about his age to join his brothers in their great adventure and died, just a month before Michael was born, of the long-term consequences of being gassed.
His preparation didn’t end there. His first memory is of an incendiary bomb coming through the window of his bedroom, bouncing over the bed and landing in the fireplace where it burst into flames. His widowed mother ran the village shop, much frequented by soldiers billeted in the area before being sent overseas. They made a friendly fuss of toddler Michael, who from an early age loved to draw. And so a destiny is shaped.
War Game is his telling of the famous Christmas truce of 1914, when soldiers from either side of the conflict emerged from their trenches to play football in no-mans-land. With minimal sentiment, letting us feel the story as we witness it page by page, through a succinct telling and beautifully restrained, but expressive, illustrations he delivers a masterpiece.
For any child wondering what is was like to be a child in an English village during the Second World War, I know of no better account. Tank training runs alongside games of cowboys and Indians, his mother’s shop full of friendly soldiers, a teacher with periwinkle blue drawers called out of retirement, a mine carted to the police station in a wheelbarrow, and all mixed in with bombing raids that killed and then bomb sites covered so soon with wild flowers, until at last the celebration bonfires and war is over.
Through a combination of vivid personal memories and telling pieces of history and those vivid memories not just told, but drawn and painted for us, Michael Foreman communicates straight across all generations in between to you here now.
