Children's crusades (1212) (1945)

In our first class discussion of Slaugherhouse-Five we explicated the novel’s three titles and their relationship to Vonnegut’s writing style and political opinions. Vonnegut exemplifies the idea that all art is necessarily political, so every aspect of his text serves to push against nationalistic and hegemonic norms. Mary O’Hare, the wife of Vonnegut’s war buddy, suggests the secondary title The Children’s Crusade in order to focus his work around the real and terrible experiences of the young boys who suffered under the guise of American ideals. During discussion, someone (Mr. Mitchell?) mentioned that Vonnegut’s conscious inclusion of a woman’s perspective on war exposes another side to the great WW2 narrative we expect. The kinds of John Wayne war movies that Vonnegut despises are centered around men, masculinity, and dramatized violence. Mary’s reminder that wars are fought by children refutes all the glorified portrayals of war perpetuated by blockbuster movies and patriotic novels.

Vonnegut reads from Charles Mackay’s famous Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds to introduce the Children’s Crusades in 1212, though Mackay’s account doesn’t quite agree with modern historical discourse. Mackay’s book, written in 1841, claims that hordes of young children were drafted by two monks in France and Germany. He explains that the monks collaborated with Pope Innocent III himself in duping the children, sending them on a treacherous voyage, and finally selling them as slaves in North Africa. However, current scholarship indicates that two waves of child crusaders were led by two young shepherd boys, Nicolas of Cologne and Steven of Cloyes. The two charismatic young leaders (some scholars think they could be as young as 12) inspired over 30,000 children to join them on a mission to convert Palestinian Muslims to Christianity. Interestingly, sources emphasize that their aim was peaceful conversion, despite the fact that all other Crusades from 1096 to 1271 brought violence and destruction to much of Europe and the Middle East.

The child crusaders that Vonnegut references were duped by an oppressive religious regime in order to accomplish their political goals, but the child crusaders have been commonly understood as masses of young, poor children led by their peers to sacrifice their lives for Christian ideals (including grossly islamophobic and antisemetic rhetoric). I would argue that both historical motives stem from the same locus of power – young people were convinced by powerful systems both directly and indirectly, from Papal order and from children just like themselves. This dual compulsion applies to WW2 as well. Not only were young men forcibly drafted, but they fell prey to a nationalist regime that encouraged patriotic violence. We learned in Mr. Leff’s class that the US government launched massive propaganda campaigns to encourage civilian cooperation, though the government itself didn’t work nearly as hard to preserve destructive American ideals as the American people themselves.

Vonnegut’s soldiers certainly do their part to further toxic war rhetoric, though these characters are systematically discredited through critical irony. Lazarro exemplifies senseless violence, Weary demonstrates over-glorified narrative projection, and Edgar Derby (poor guy, he got shot for stealing for a teapot) articulates ideological reasons for American superiority. To be perfectly clear, I see Derby’s assertion as wholly noble and I agree that Nazism is really, really, really bad. But he still caricaturizes the American tendency to blanket complex historical events in patriotic rhetoric that assumes America represents peak democracy, despite the nation’s internal failings. These soldiers show us that harmful ideology comes from authority but is preserved through the general population, resulting in events as catastrophic as the Children’s Crusade in 1212 or the bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Here’s one last connection between the two events: the child crusaders and child soldiers were overwhelmingly poor, making it much easier for religious or governmental authorities to use their bodies as political pawns. Some scholars have even posited that the crusaders may have been a mass of peasant farmers and shepherds with nowhere to go, rather than exclusively young people. Similarly, American soldiers have historically been from lower-income groups because richer folks could easily evade the draft. This is especially true today, though we don’t have a draft, because young people often join the military in order to afford higher education. So the Children’s Crusade allusion works perfectly for Vonnegut’s WW2 narrative on multiple levels – both events are tied up in questions of authority, ideology, and class inequality.