During the Great War, numerous bridges existed across national frontiers that linked children's experiences of the conflict. The significant revival of the historiography of childhood in wartime relies, without question, on an archival renewal. In every nation at war children became, in fact, the target of a war discourse that had been elaborated especially for them. Intended to explain and justify the war in the eyes of the younger generation, this initiative of both cultural and economic mobilisation appears as a transnational constant, a visible sign of the process of totalisation that affected all belligerent nations. Unavoidably caught up in the mobilisation of the civilian populations on the domestic front, children were nevertheless not systematic targets of the war's violence. Yet all children shared one form of essential experience: that of the impregnation of daily life by cultural mobilisation, especially at school, and by the violence of war.