Book Description

Excerpt from Bobbie and the War Bobbie and the War By Bobbies Father Bobbie is just an ordinary American boy. He is nearly fourteen and is about ready to enter high school. In scholarship he is below rather than above the average; but he is usually interested in his lessons, and his father is not worrying about his ability to make good. He enjoys sports, games and outdoor life, and like all true boys he loves to tinker with tools. He has shown an unusual affection for animals and will make a pet of anything from an antiquated hen to a tadpole. Perhaps it was his sensitiveness to the suffering of animals which led us to avoid talking about the Great War when he was near. Perhaps it was because we felt, like most American parents, that the War was monstrous, insensate, something too horrible to bring into the consciousness of a happy whole-souled boy of fourteen. We were thankful that a regulation of the local board of education forbade the discussion of the War in school rooms. And we tried to keep away from him the more terrible of the pictures which soon filled the illustrated papers. But in the two years of warfare he has grown to take an interest in things. At times he read the daily newspapers and looked through the illustrated weeklies. He became interested in the War in spite of us and occasionally dropped a remark which showed he was forming opinions upon it. He shared his spending money with the Belgians whenever the family took up a collection from the childrens banks and the parents bank accounts for relief work. And then like every normal American child he asked questions about the War. At first we put him off with those general colorless and neutral answers which parents are so skilled in framing. But we found that he was getting false notions of the War from other sources. We reached the conclusion that if we did not furnish the truth he might never get it. And thus we set about answering carefully some of his questions. Six of these questions and answers are here given. They are arranged in a logical order rather than in the haphazard conversation of family life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.