"There are kind Germans as well as brutal ones": The Foreigner in Children's Literature of the First World War

The popularity of British children's literature about the war after 1918 shaped the memory of the war in the minds of many children. This paper explores presentations of the foreigner in Bessie Marchant's Molly Angel's Adventures and D. H. Parry's With Haig on the Somme. Both books are packed with encounters between English heroines or heroes and their French and Belgian allies as well as meetings with the feared German enemy. Read together, the texts serve as a powerful reminder of the pervasiveness of the war into areas of civilian life such as the nursery and the schoolroom.