The Enemy

By: Davide Cali and Serge Bloch
Genre: War and peace
Location PIC CAL

a book about peace.

I have had the distress of visiting war graves in France. It is sickening, 18 year old boys, raised by hopeful parents, investing in sons who will contribute to their home country, who will be kind, smart, inventive, play sport, marry and produce grandchildren. Instead at 18 they lie in foreign soil, potential dormant, grandchild's face unknown, wasted. At that moment walking down the lines and lines of white still crosses, while a church nearby echoed with the voices of children singing hymns to the silent- I became a pacifist.
This book, is about peace, but it comes from the trenches, the real ones and the ones in the mind, it comes from futility, it comes from propaganda exposed as truth and at the end it comes as a realisation that all men are men,  who love and are loved,  who are thrust into a deceitful violence against their will and are made to murder each other only because they are told to. The two soldiers in this story figure it out- they are used, manipulated and coerced, they figure out that peace surpasses war.
This book has already gone to our Year 12 History class, may they never become the subject of a picture book like this- their mothers will want to see the faces of their children.

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