The First World War Written for Children: 11 Books From 1914-1919, Free Online
Almost everything on this page was written during the war, not after it, and that is the whole reason to read it. These are not historical novels. They were published in 1915, 1917, 1918, sold to children whose brothers and fathers were in France, by writers who did not know the ending and in several cases were being encouraged by their governments to write them.
So they do something no later book about the war can do: they get it wrong in public. The tone swings between recruitment poster and genuine grief, sometimes inside one chapter. A series volume opens with two boys thrilled to be near an aerodrome and closes on a casualty list. Read them as documents and they are extraordinary; read them expecting All Quiet on the Western Front and they will seem shallow, which is the point — the flattening was deliberate and it was aimed at children.
Eleven are in the free library.
The one that is a real novel
Rilla of Ingleside (1921) is the best book about the First World War written for young readers by a distance, and one of very few contemporary novels of the war from a woman's side of it. It is the last of the Anne of Green Gables books: Anne's youngest daughter is fifteen when the war starts, and the novel covers all four years from the home front on Prince Edward Island — enlistments, the casualty lists in the paper, a war baby raised in a soup tureen, and a dog who waits at the station for four years. Montgomery kept a diary through the war and wrote the novel straight out of it, and the grief in it is not managed or resolved. It is also, unusually, a book that names the battles as civilians experienced them: as newspaper headlines you cannot do anything about.
Read it after Anne of Green Gables, or at least after Rainbow Valley, which introduces the children who do not come back.
The Australian one
Captain Jim (1919) — Mary Grant Bruce, the fourth of her Billabong books, moving her Australian station family to England and into war work. Bruce is a much better writer than the series shelf she is usually filed on, and this is the volume where the cheerfulness cracks. Worth reading next to Rilla: two dominions, the same telegram.
The American series books, written to order
The Great War arrived in American children's publishing before American troops did, and the syndicates turned it into series volumes at speed. All of these are formula, and the formula is what makes them interesting.
- The Forest of Swords: A Story of Paris and the Marne (1915) — Joseph Altsheler, and the best-written of the American books here. His "World War" series follows a young American in France from 1914, and Altsheler had been a war correspondent's kind of researcher: the retreat to the Marne is reconstructed carefully and the scale of it genuinely frightens him.
- Air Service Boys Flying for Victory — aviation was the war's glamour and this is the series that sold it. Two boys, a bombing raid, and no consequences that last past the chapter.
- The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service — the same idea with wireless instead of aeroplanes, and better on the technology than on the war.
- Boy Scouts in the North Sea — submarines, and a good example of how quickly the Scouting series were repointed at the war.
- The Rover Boys on a Hunt — the war is in the background of a Stratemeyer Syndicate volume, which is its own kind of evidence about how much of it children were assumed to be following.
- The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army — the girls' equivalent, and the interesting half of the genre: nursing, the Eastern Front, and a series that sent its heroines somewhere real. This volume was published while the Russian army still existed.
- Two Daring Young Patriots; or, Outwitting the Huns — British, set in occupied Belgium, and the title tells you the register. Read for the propaganda mechanics; the word "Huns" is doing a job.
The two about being at home
- The Flag (1918) — Homer Greene, and the quietest book here. An American boy who cannot enlist, a flag, and a small town's pressure on the people not in uniform. It is about suspicion of neighbours, which almost nothing else from 1918 written for children will touch.
- A Patriotic Schoolgirl — Angela Brazil doing the war as a boarding-school story: war work, rationing, an older brother at the front, and the school year going on around it. A genuinely useful document of what English girls were being told the war required of them.
How to read three
Rilla of Ingleside for the novel, The Flag for the uncomfortable one, and any of the series volumes — Air Service Boys will do — for what most children were actually reading. The distance between the first and the third is the real subject of this page.
All of it is free
Every book above is public domain and readable in the browser here, with nothing to install and no account needed to start.
By shelf: 5 books filed under the First World War for younger readers, 10 war stories and 11 books about soldiers. By author: L. M. Montgomery and Joseph Altsheler, who between them wrote most of the good ones.
For the war generation's earlier equivalent, our G. A. Henty guide covers the Victorian writer who taught British children what a war novel was supposed to sound like — and the gap between his confidence and these books is the whole of 1914 to 1918.