Historians of the First World War have developed a rich and theoretically-sophisticated scholarship on the social and cultural effects of this conflict (in ways that are now beginning to emerge for the Second World War as well). Rosie Kennedy's The Children's War makes a fine addition to this literature by examining the intertwined histories of childhood, war and society, and nationalism.

It is often forgotten that children experienced the war alongside adults, and Kennedy successfully demonstrates that British children were part of the war effort. No doubt, children were directly influenced by air raids or family separation during the First World War. But Kennedy is also able to show that children were not only passive victims of the war but also active and enthusiastic volunteers, keen students of a wartime education, and eager consumers of books, toys, and games that found a central place for war. Influenced by the work of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, she is interested in what they term a “war culture”—that is, representations of the conflict turned into a system of thought that gave the war its deep significance. The book shows how the study of childhood can provide an excellent way of analyzing Britain's war culture from 1914 to 1918. Not only was war not concealed from children, it actually became an integral part of their daily lives, play, and education. The school curriculum was saturated with subjects linked to the war, thereby making aggression and violence almost trivial and “domesticated” (to use George Mosse's language), a natural part of modern industrial society. The question of children's involvement in the war effort is a complex one, but Kennedy makes a clear case for their large-scale practical and ideological participation.

Chapter 2, “Families at War,” makes creative use of wartime letters sent between children and men serving on the battlefront. It adds to the existing literature by Michael Roper, Martha Hanna, and others that shows how important letters were in maintaining and strengthening the bonds with home. Such letters challenge the notion that soldiers were fully isolated from loved ones and point to continuities between the battlefront and home front. It was through such letters that children came to understand the war and were able to remain close to their absent fathers and brothers. Indeed, Kennedy reminds us that that by 1917 the Army on the Western Front alone was sending home 8,150,000 letters a week. Furthermore, rather than feeling alienated because people at home lacked any real sense of what war was like, it seems that soldiers were keen to share their experiences with their families and were able to go around the Army's censorship methods—which were, at best, patchy—to do so. Many of the letters represented intimate portraits of family life. They allowed fathers to parent from a distance.

The third chapter in the book uses toys, games, fiction, and magazines consumed by children to understand how the war “was imagined” (3). Already before the war there was a dramatic increase in war-themed toys, aimed primarily at young boys. While toys for boys emphasized masculinity closely associated with soldiering, wartime toys for girls maintained a focus on traditional, domestic, female roles. Toys were augmented by games and books that had a distinctly anti-German theme. Chapter 4 deals with children's involvement in organized, uniformed youth groups and shows the crucial role of children in the war effort. The young members of the Boy Scouts, for example, relished the opportunity to “do their bit.” For Girl Guides, the war had a transforming effect showing—not without some public resistance—that girls, too, could contribute to the defense of the nation. British youth groups enthusiastically threw themselves into the war effort. For example, they guarded and patrolled bridge and telegraph lines, collected information on supplies and transport, and established first-aid stations. Scouts offered their services free of charge to government departments and regional bodies, establishing that children were of great national value. It is estimated that 100,000 children were officially employed by the state. They played an important part in the organized work of the Home Front. Predictably, gender influenced the participation of girls in the war effort much as it shaped their play. Whereas boys were watching bridges, girls were advised to knit warm clothes or to volunteer in hospitals. Despite the wartime drive to recruit women and girls to work in factories and other auxiliary capacities, there was a competing effort to make sure girls would become “citizen mothers” and that they would work primarily in domestic tasks.

Chapter 5 deals with war in the classroom. This chapter again shows that adult society believed children could contribute materially and psychologically to winning the war and that many children themselves were eager to participate in the war culture. During the war, it must be noted, many children worked outside the classroom. For example, by October 1916, approximately 205,000 boys and girls were employed in the manufacture of munitions. But despite this, the Board of Education was able to incorporate the war into the curriculum with the aim of teaching children to understand that Britain's participation in the war was not only right but also part of the history of a great nation of which the children were an integral part. Schools also served as air-raid shelters, and the origins of the Blitz spirit of “business as usual” can be traced to this earlier experience of total war.

As all these fascinating facts suggest, the book as a whole fruitfully advances the argument that war in the twentieth century was a national endeavor, requiring the participation of all: men, women, boys, and girls.