There Come a Soldier Book

During the last years of World War II a young paratrooper—lost and scared in the Belgian forest—has little to rely on buy his memories . . . memories of his boyhood growing up poor in the cotton fields of Georgia, surrounded by the warmth and love of family and friends. Working hard, playing hard, watching out for five brothers and sisters and a girl named Ruthie, it is clear that the boy who becomes a soldier has learned to listen to his heart.

Told in a flowing Southern vernacular and in strong and beautiful paintings that contrast the harshness of war with the beauty of the rural South, Peggy Mercer and Ron Mazellan have created a tale that is heart-piercing and haunting in turns—but unfailingly reminds us that we share a basic humanity.

Publishers Weekly

Based on the author's father's reminiscences of his Army service during WWII, including the Battle of the Bulge, this somewhat theatrical tribute also sends a message that all men are brothers. In a dual framework, Mazellan's (The Longest Season) representational, dramatic paintings and Mercer's (Ten Cows to Texas) admiring text alternate between showing "Papa" as a soldier on the front (no actual battle scenes are depicted) and as a boy on his sharecropper family's Georgia farm. Each wartime scenario triggers a flashback to the soldier's boyhood, underscoring the foundations for his physical stamina, courage and loyalty. In the childhood sequences, each introduced with the words, "For he was a boy once...," he leaps from a barn hayloft and eggs on his siblings and friend Ruthie to follow suit, "although it took a right smart of coaxing" (this memory precedes a description of Papa's parachuting into occupied France), rises "'fore the rooster crowed" to pick cotton and listens to his mother's counsel, "Always be a brother." Papa heeds this "gift" in an imagery-laden encounter: taking refuge one night in a cold barn, he finds himself shoulder-to-shoulder with exhausted soldiers from the enemy army. A "ray of light" filtering down through the barn's rafters forms a "wide and perfect ring" around the boots of the sleeping soldiers, who huddle together "against this winter, against this war." Discharged from the army with a Purple Heart, he returns to the theme of the circle at the end: "The circle holds. And when enemies [come,] let 'em in." Ages 5-up. (Oct.)