Patryk is more fortunate as he lives with his parents in a three-room wooden house with a main room that serves as his parent's bedroom, a kitchen and at the back, his father's workshop. Patryk's father is "a wheelwright repairing and making wooden wagon wheels." Patryk is learning this trade from his father.
One day Patryk finds a small rusty button near the castle ruins. Jurek wants the button and tries to get Patryk to give it to him. When he refuses, Jurek becomes enraged, screaming and threatening Patryk with a large stick. Patryk holds his ground and then tosses the button into the forest. He is shocked by the hatred he sees in Jurek's face.
Later in August, as Patryk is going to school he witnesses the bombing of the old wooden school house by the Germans. It burns to the ground, killing the school teacher and a nine-year-old boy named Cyril. Makary wants to know why the war has come to their tiny village. The boys tell him that although the village is in Poland it has belonged to Russia.
Raclaw reveals that his father was told by the Russian commandant Dmitrov that they are leaving the village because the Germans are advancing. Meanwhile Jurek and Patryk take Raclaw to Jurek's backyard where he too cuts a button off a Russian uniform hanging on the clothesline. Jurek claims that his button with the knight fighting the dragon is the best.
The three boys leave for home but Patryk, wanting to get a Russian button like Jurek's and realizing that with the Russians leaving this might be his only chance, sneaks back to Jurek's house. He steals a button, one that is exactly the same as Jurek's.
The next morning the seven boys watch from the village water pump as the Russians march out of the village.They discuss the withdrawal of the Russians and the coming of the Germans. Jurek brags about his button but when he sees that Patryk has the same button, he becomes enraged and then announces his dare. "Wait! Got a great idea! We'll have a contest! Whoever gets the best button wins. Winner gets to be king. Means everyone has to bow down to him. Best dare ever. Buttons." Jurek insists that they cannot ask for a button but must "get" one.
Shortly after this the German's bomb the retreating Russians. Jurek leads the boys out of the village, to where the bombing happened, and they find many dead Russian soldiers. Jurek determined to find a winning button, climbs into a bomb crater. All the boys follow him but Patryk who is disgusted. This doesn't resolve the button challenge however, and Jurek tells the other boys they must wait until the Germans arrive to get better buttons.
Back in the village the boys decide to scavenge through the ruins of the school house. Ulryk uncovers their late teacher, Mr. Szujski's wooden cane that he used to beat the students with. Jurek snatches the cane away from Ulyrk, insisting that the boy who wins the button dare - the button king - should have the cane. He promptly strikes Drugi hard on the arm. Remembering Jurek's anger in the forest, Patryk knows he cannot let Jurek win the cane or the button dare. "Knowing that if Jurek won the cane, he would use it in the worse way -- as he just had. And that told me that I absolutely couldn't let Jurek be the button king. He'd go crazy."
Patryk's worst fears are realized in ways not even he could have imagined, as the button dare escalates and pushes the boys into the most dangerous of situations.
Discussion
Avi whose real name is Edward Irving Wortiss is the author of many acclaimed children's and teen novels. Like many of the best stories, The Button War had its germ in a story Avi was told by his father years ago. On Avi's website he explains his father's story:
"The story he told was rather unusual. He was raised in a village somewhere in Eastern Europe, but with so many national boundary changes, he could not even say precisely which country. During World War One, he said, his village was invaded and taken over by now this army, now that, from different nations. When these armies took over his village, the soldiers commandeered the women to wash their uniforms. Once washed, the uniforms were hung out to dry. The boys in the village—so my father-in-law related—would sneak about, cut the buttons from the uniforms, collect them, and trade them amongst themselves. This in the midst of The Great War."
As Avi explains, the button dare, which escalates, becoming both increasingly reckless and violent, mimics the escalating conflict that was to become the Great War. The boys begin by stealing buttons from Jurek's sister's clothesline, but are soon retrieving buttons from dead soldiers. From this they quickly move to following the soldiers and eventually even becoming involved in the conflict. The consequences are terrible.Their desire to collect buttons knows no bounds and directly results in the deaths of several of the boys; Drugi is beaten to death by an Austrian soldier for attempting to steal a button and Wojtex is executed for having a Russian button because the German's believe he is a traitor. Jurek's desire to obtain the best button leads him to become involved with the Russians helping them to set up the ambush of German soldiers which results in Raclaw being seriously wounded. As the boys are either killed or drop out, the contest becomes one between Jurek and Patryk.
Through the character of Patryk, Avi demonstrates how its possible to lose sight of what is right and be drawn further into a conflict. While many of the boys are eager at first to partake in Jurek's dare, only Patryk seems to understand the consequences should Jurek win.Patryk was the biggest and the strongest of the boys. His father tells him that God made him this way "to help the weak." Mindful of this, Patryk stays in the dare to try to win because he knows that Jurek will treat the other boys in a brutal manner if he becomes the button king. However, fighting on Jurek's terms doesn't help, as Patryk discovers, because Jurek keeps changing the conditions of the dare. As long as Patryk continues to play by Jurek's rules, he loses and becomes more and more like Jurek and is drawn in deeper. Just as Jurek does, Patryk desecrates the dead by stealing buttons from them and he steals from the living. He risks his life several times, all for buttons. He just can't seem to quit and walk away.
It is actually Ulryk, the boy who wants to be a Catholic priest, who does the right thing. He goes to Father Stanislaw, confesses and then throws his buttons in the river. When Patryk tells him that if he leaves, Jurek will be king, Ulryk, responds, "Not for me." and walks away. Even after Makary is killed by Jurek, Patryk still doesn't give up. He still intends to beat Jurek but the war intervenes. It doesn't stop Jurek who will now kill anyone to win. Finally Patryk does what Ulryk did - he throws the one button he still has away in disgust and runs out of the village to find his parents.
All of this is an allegory for the madness of the Great War where countries fought for four years over small patches of mud-filled, cratered, blackened land for no reason and where men were executed for desertion or bullied into enlisting. Even when it was obvious that no one was winning and that millions of lives,both soldiers and civilians were being lost, no one country would call a truce and end the war. Like the boys in the button war, the leaders of countries involved in World War I lost sight of what they were fighting for and why they were fighting and if they should even continue to fight the war.
The Button War, reminiscent of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, is a dark, tragic novel. It is well written, with realistic characters and a well-created setting that portrays life in a village caught in the middle of a war.
Book Details:
The Button War: A Tale of the Great War by Avi
Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press 2018
229 pp.
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