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During the Spanish civil war there were hundreds of adolescents among the thousands of foreign volunteers. These very young, mostly French, volunteers who had lied about their age, and were not then considered as young soldiers but as children, "kids." The adults paid particular attention to them and made a difference between them and the other volunteers. After managing, with difficulty, to get to Spain, they had either to hide or to come out directly with their determination to participate in the fighting. Thus, their legal status, both forced and preserved, gave them an identity that was multiple and changing, differentiating them from other foreign volunteers. Their motivations, paths and the legal problems that they raised or came up against provide a trove of lessons on the Spanish civil war, volunteer enrolment and the mid-1930s youth.