Innocence Stripped Away Dragoljub Jeličić, 12-year-old Serbian soldier, posing for the photograph taken in his report, 1914. Although older and less known than 8-year-old Serbian soldier Momčilo Gavrić, Dragoljub Jeličić was one of the youngest soldiers of World War I. Dragoljub was born in 1902 in present-day Croatia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but his family emigrated to Šabac in Serbia due to Austro-Hunarian mistreatment. They have two different stories regarding Dragoljub Jeličić, and this is what they both say: The first tells us that her father died in March 1912. His mother soon remarried and, apparently, Dragoljub decided to run away from his house to Belgrade, about 80 km from Šabac, so it is not known how he would have gotten there. In Belgrade, he sold newspapers and worked on a Ferris wheel. He tried to enlist in the army when the First Balkan War broke out, but was denied because of his age. Apparently in 1913 he was accepted into the army at age 11, and...