Ch. 5 (entry #1)

By being the longest chapter, I thought chapter five was going to be chalked full of literary terms.  However; no matter how long I searched for one, I could not seem to find one literary term.  So I just decided to keep looking, and it turns out a literary term was staring me right in the face, as I read on of Edgar Derby's lines, "'We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly-shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, My God,' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade" (Vonnegut 106).  I believe that this quote is an example of allusion in Vonnegut's writing. By making this allusion Vonnegut compares The Children's Crusade to WWII, which in hindsight makes perfect sense. The children in The Children's Crusade were only 8-12, and by no means should they be sent out to fight a war.  Now the idea of sending kids to embark on a crusade to the holy land would sound preposterous to anybody nowadays, but yet we still send our own children fight in wars today. In WWII the US sent in 18-25 year old boys off the fight the Axis forces.  To most people in the World those boys were still children.  They had barely just left home and graduated from college, and were already getting shipped off to battle. Yet the government still sends young men into battle, who are still children in the eyes of their elders.