Kids These Days and the Great War
Children born in the twenty-first century have quite a different relationship to World War I than their great-grandparents or even parents. For this young generation, the war is a purely historical event. In this article, I draw on my experience as the parent of two boys in primary school to examine some of the ways in which kids these days are exposed to the Great War.
It may be relevant to mention that we live in a country that was neutral during this war. For this reason, there are no public demonstrations of remembrance such as Armistice Day, no graveyards to act as physical reminders of the conflict, and probably only a tiny number of families with antecedents who actually fought in the war. Any memory of 1914–18 has long since been superseded by the trauma of occupation during World War II.
Nevertheless, the Great War is still present here in video games, TV & movies, toys, books, and music.
Video Games
Yes, video games. The bane of my existence as a parent and the point of many a contention in our household.
Anyway.
Valiant Hearts by Ubisoft was released in 2014 for the centenary. This game was based on wartime letters and includes historical photographs as well as a timeline to give context to the missions. Not all of them take place on the battlefield; in fact, most of them don’t involve shooting or killing others at all.
Players must solve different puzzles or tasks in order to advance. These tasks involve, for example, bypassing explosives while digging a tunnel; driving a getaway car while avoiding aerial bombs; and reviving one of the characters by pressing various combinations of buttons at irregular intervals. Missions take place at a wide variety of places, including recruitment depots, Fort Douaumont, Nivelles, and a POW camp. It’s easy to become emotionally invested in the stories and outcomes of the four main characters — Belgian nurse Anna, German farmer-cum-soldier Karl, his French father-in-law Emile, and American Freddie. True to life, however, not everyone gets a happy ending.
Battlefield I is on the opposite end of the spectrum to Valiant Hearts. It’s a first-person shooter game in which you can take part in various famous battles, including the Somme, Monte Grappa, Suez, and Gallipoli.
Because of the nature of online gaming with a team of random players who don’t know each other, the gameplay often comes across as individualistic and uncoordinated. While battlefield chaos was obviously a major aspect of the war, the lack of leadership and strategy seems particularly jarring. This deficiency can probably be improved if you play on a team with friends/known entities.
I found the stories and characters to be less emotionally engaging than in Valiant Hearts, probably in part because Battlefield I’s intended audience is much older and, as a first-person shooter game, its main focus is on death and killing. In Valiant Hearts, both the characters themselves and the missions have equal importance; Battlefield I is much more mission-oriented. Also, because your character can respawn after being killed in action, deaths in this game seem less consequential. In this sense, you get a feeling for the human cost of the war: as soon as your character dies, another soldier incarnates to be slaughtered in his turn.
The Great War also turns up on the gaming platform Roblox. I hate Roblox with a passion and if I had the power to kill it with fire, I would do so without a single hesitation. Thus I make no apologies for the following review of one of the games set at Ypres. The graphics are terrible, the storylines nonexistent, and the gameplay questionable at best. At the same time, by virtue of that nonexistent story and awful gameplay, it does a good job of capturing the boredom and anxiety of troops in the trenches. As a player you simply have to sit around doing nothing as you wait for an attack or the signal to go over the top. The nervous anticipation is actually quite palpable. In real time, one may need to wait for 20–30 minutes. Needless to say, this is not one of my son’s favourite games.
Television/YouTube
My kids don’t really watch traditional television. They prefer YouTube and Netflix.
The YouTube channel Simple History features animated, simplified versions of different historical events. These clips rarely last longer than 5 minutes and often highlight funny or less well-known episodes in history. Among other things, my kids learned about trench clubs and the attack of the dead men at Osowiec from this channel.
Horrible Histories from CBBC has recently gained much popularity in our household. We have a box set of the first 6 seasons and also watch clips on YouTube. The show often highlights the more disgusting parts of history, as can be seen in this clip about Ersatz-food in Germany. We have also watched the Horrible Histories World War I special (essentially a compilation of all the WWI clips) several times — it is always well-received.
Toys
Lego is famous for many reasons, and one of them — a source of both pride and frustration for fans — is its determined refusal to make sets that depict war. In fact, during the 1980s, Lego did not make grey bricks for castles because the company feared that children would repurpose them to build war machines.
Nowadays, one can purchase a kit for a Sopwith Camel…but on the company’s website it makes no mention of the plane’s use in the war. It is described merely as “one of the most recognizable British single-seat biplanes ever to have graced the skies.”
Polish company Cobi has tried to fill the vacuum. They specialise in war sets, ranging from World War I to Vietnam. Among their Great War sets, you can find the Renault FT-17, Sturmpanzerwagen A7V, as well as a variety of airplanes.
In our household, Cobi’s poor instructions for assembly have resulted in many tears of frustration. The finished pieces are not great for play as they fall apart easily (Lego-brand blocks stick together better). Furthermore, unlike Lego, Cobi sets contain many specialised bricks specific to that set. This means that they cannot easily be rebuilt if bricks go missing and they can’t easily be repurposed for other projects. Cobi is thus probably best suited for adults or older children who want to build display pieces.
Books (and Magazines)
Our house is overflowing with books. Admittedly, most of them aren’t about the Great War, but we do have a few that have proven surprisingly popular.
I think that having information available on the children’s level — both intellectually and literally on a low shelf where they can reach it — is important. So most of our books and magazines about the war have a lot of photographs. Some of them were written specifically for children, others are comprehensive histories for adult readers.
As long as the contents of these books is not egregiously wrong, I don’t think that the specifics really matter. The point at this age is to create engagement and interest. If a childhood fascination with the exploits and panache of Manfred von Richthofen eventually serves as a gateway to a deeper and longer-lasting interest in the war and history in general, then so much the better. In such a situation, you may want to read up a bit on the person or event in question yourself in order to offer more context for your child.
Music
In recent years, the centenary of the Great War appears to have led to the production of a number of songs about the conflict. I have already mentioned Horrible Histories. Their song about the cousins Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, and George V lays out the family wartime drama between these relatives and heads of state in an upbeat and catchy way.
If you prefer a less Vaudeville-esque style, this rap battle about the causes of the war is also very popular in our house.
Even if children do not understand all the lyrics to either song, they can still identify the principle characters by their caricatured appearances and accents. They can then associate faces, names, and countries with the conflict even if they are not quite sure how everything all fits together. As an introduction to the major players of the war, both the Horrible Histories song and the rap battle work well (though I personally prefer the rap battle).
Last year the heavy metal band Sabaton inexplicably became popular among schoolchildren here and my youngest son started listening to The Attack of the Dead Men on a loop.
Sabaton’s lyrics and melodies strike me as generally very basic, but they provide a good introduction to the events of the war. Their Great War album highlights major battles such as Verdun as well as stories and people that aren’t necessarily well-known to the general public such as Cree sniper Francis Pegahmagabow. Their songs emphasise the heroism and glory of war as well as the immortality of the fallen; the sentiment “dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori” seems to underscore almost all their songs.
My favourite Sabaton song is their a capella setting of John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” It doesn’t really register with the kids, being so far from the band’s usual style, but it serves as a wonderful bookend to the album — and to this article ;-)
