verbava все записи автора from The Children’s Crusade : Medieval History, Modern Mythistory by Gary Dickson

The most popular twentieth-century American work of fiction to nourish itself from the Children’s Crusade is Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969), which was both a best-seller and a critical success. If the horror of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden overshadows Slaughterhouse-Five, the book’s alternative title demands to be taken just as seriously.
Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling hero Billy Pilgrim, a young, naive GI in wartorn Europe is a true American innocent abroad. Given the childlike diminutive of his fi rst name and the medieval peregrinus of his last, he makes an excellent symbolic child-crusader. His comrades in arms, and indeed some of the German troops, are likewise represented as youngsters. Their forty-three-year-old U.S. colonel admits he forgot that wars were fought by babies. Looking at their freshly shaved faces, he gets a shock. “My God, my God,” he exclaims, “it’s the Children’s Crusade.” As much the innocent victims of war as the German civilians, these young American GIs fighting World War II in Europe are the new child-crusaders.
Slaughterhouse-Five fuses the absurd inhumanity of mass destruction—which the attack on Dresden exemplifies—with the theme of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Calling it “the Children’s Crusade” allows Vonnegut to give an anti-heroic twist to the notion that World War II had been a Crusade in Europe. That was the title Dwight David Eisenhower chose for his military memoirs (1948), and in retrospect, his choice of title seems inevitable. Four years earlier, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower delivered a solemn address to the Allied Expeditionary Forces which began: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade....” During the war the minumum age of conscription for American servicemen fell from twenty-one to eighteen, as it was for the British. These were boy-soldiers. Boy-crusaders, some might say.
Was it, as one critic suggests, Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East (1932) which supplied Vonnegut, an admirer of Hesse, with his motif of the Children’s Crusade? Hesse called his eastern journey a pilgrimage and a Children’s Crusade. But another critic points out that Vonnegut had to look no further for boy soldiers than the great anti-war classic of World War I, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Its German troops were “little more than boys.” An example closer to home for Vonnegut would be Stephen Crane’s novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), with its youthful protagonist and his young friend. These Union soldiers were the “brave boys in blue.” There was also the World War II refrain—“Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come home.” Fighting men were now “the boys.” Vonnegut’s boy-soldiers did not lack military antecedents.
To find out about the actual Children’s Crusade, Vonnegut and his friends in Slaughterhouse-Five, turn to Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Mackay, a Scottish journalist and man of letters (1814–1889), wrote in the spirit of Voltaire that “vile monks” preaching to “deluded children” set it in motion. Vonnegut may have used Mackay to relocate the pueri in his World War II American Children’s Crusade, but he jettisoned Mackay’s cynical perspective. His child-crusaders were naive, not “deluded.” Consciously or not, Vonnegut was exploiting the mythic theme of childhood innocence which nineteenth-century America shared with medieval Europe.
Widespread and intense opposition to the war in Vietnam was commonplace across the campuses of America when Slaughterhouse-Five appeared in 1969. So Vonnegut’s idea of a Children’s Crusade spoke to the politicized, activist, anti-war students of America’s colleges, who, by then, were already veterans of their own abortive Children’s Crusade on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy. The climactic moment of the anti-war campus rebellion, the shooting of students at Kent State (1970), came only a year after Slaughterhouse-Five was published.