Guido is a twelve-year-old beggar in war-torn Naples. In his last few years he has come to know intimately hunger, loneliness, and death— man's enemies always, but more senseless and frightening than ever when man himself is their cause. With an inner strength that was his mother's sole bequest, Guido struggles to remain aloof from the dirt and filth, the hopelessness and degradation, that is a beggar's life... "Then I remembered what my mother had said to me when I finally had guessed that she was dying. 'Guido, you must be strong. You are all alone. Be strong like iron... But be kind, too; or you will wear yourself and others out. Don't be so strong that you will become lonesome'... As I walked across the square to find a place to hide, a place to sleep, I said her first words aloud to myself; 'Guido, you must be strong. You are all alone'."

Always his senses and his mind vie with each other, one part of him searching only for food, another for some meaning to all the suffering. To satisfy his physical needs Guido must steal bread, must study with a beggar's cunning the faces of his victims in order to choose the most lucrative means of approaching them, and must lie to his beloved Father Pietro, the friend of the poor.

But this is enough to fashion only the vilest kind of life, and it is not enough for Guido. He stands apart, analyzes, and in time gains some measure of human understanding and compassion. As he tells his friend Anna, "One must not waste oneself with hate." It is his kind that will survive the war, in spirit as well as in body.

In the sensitive, poetic style that characterizes all of Mr. Haugaard's works, he tells a highly personal and impassioned tale of war and its effects on the children who must live through it and learn to love mankind in spite of it.

From the dust jacket