In the dim glow of the oil lamp, all that can be seen of the boys’ faces are their eyes. Moses's are anxious, darting, clouding with fatigue as he struggles to recount his story. Janvier’s gaze is clear, confident, even hard, every detail at his recall. It was February when the rebel soldiers came for him; March when he completed his weapons training; May when his commander ordered him to execute four other children caught trying to escape the rebel camp. “Kambale was my neighbour’s son,” Janvier recalls. “He was 15.” Janvier did not recognise his schoolfriend immediately; the victims were already blindfolded before they were lined up in front of him. They wept and cried out as Janvier levelled his rifle and shot them.

Janvier has ancient eyes, older by far than his 17 years, older than the chubby moon face they sit in. The rebel soldiers took him as he ate lunch on a break from school. At the other end of the village, they snatched Moses, 16, and his 14-year-old brother as they mended the thatch on their family home. The brothers, too afraid to shout for help, disappeared into the rebel ranks unseen.

The rolling green hills and red earth of the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo are studded with gold, diamonds, cobalt and copper – resources (or curses) that have fuelled conflict since the first mines were dug. Add the ethnic hatreds still reverberating from the Rwandan genocide, and you have a recipe for bitter conflict. Human life is cheap, children’s lives the cheapest.

Nobody knows exactly how many children have died in the Congo conflict. Over the years, tens of thousands have been lured, abducted or otherwise forced into the service of the various armed groups fighting for land, money and tribal supremacy in the past decade. Since a United Nations-brokered truce in 2003, more than 40,000 children have been demobilised or run away of their own accord. But thousands more still remain. Those who emerge bring with them horror stories of the abuse they suffered – and inflicted – during their time as child soldiers. So having survived the war, what happens when these brutalised survivors come out of the jungle, hungry for home?

It was just four days ago that Janvier and Moses were fighting on the front line. When they fled here to Goma, walking for four nights and hiding by day, they came to the offices of Save the Children, the lead agency in the rehabilitation of child soldiers. Whenever a child flees, or is formally demobilised from an armed group, the organisation swings into action to take on their case. First, the child is placed in a famille d’accueil, or reception family, while workers try to trace their blood relatives. This can be difficult because the conflict has dispersed families. In any case, a period of more than a month is required for counselling to prepare for a reunion between a shocked, excited or frightened family, and a child emerging from the darkest place humanity has to offer.

When Save the Children’s officers turned up at Kavira Luyondono’s house to tell her they were sheltering her son Pierot, she fainted. Kavira had not seen her son for six years after he disappeared, at the age of 11, with the nationalist rebels who came through their village. It took her a month to discover where he had gone. After six years, she was sure he was dead.

Joy was quickly tempered with fear – was he the sweet-tempered child she remembered? “I was afraid if I took Pierot back, the neighbours would come and say, ‘You can’t have a bandit, a soldier in the house.’ We asked the mediator if he had committed any crimes or anything that could affect our family.” The mediator warned them not to expect the same son that had left six years before. “He was a very calm little boy, very shy. I never understood how he could fight,” Kavira says. “But they explained to us that he had been with people who were brutal, who had killed.”

Pierot had too. As soon as he arrived at the rebel camp, he was taken straight to the front. This would be his initiation and his training, too. “It was to see if we were afraid,” he explains. “I wasn’t afraid because the others had given me ganga to smoke,” he says. “It gives you courage and makes you want to fight.”

Other techniques were used to press the recruits into battle. Every child would be put through so-called magic rituals, such as being thrown into charmed water to render them impervious to bullets. Scars were carved into their wrists and backs to mark them as a member of the group and ensure bullets bounced off them. Some groups have forced recruits to kill family and friends as their initiation, saying it would bring protection. Monique, the child “wife” of a soldier, remembers boys cooking and eating the genitals and livers of the vanquished to endow them with their victims’ strength.

Pierot believed in the magic rites for a while, as children tend to do. “It was later, when there were many deaths and my friends were killed, that I started to realise it wasn’t true, it wasn’t normal,” he says. He does not remember the first man he killed, or even the first child. In the chaos of battle, the tiny soldier would just lift his gun above his head, shut his eyes, and fire. His great fear was to kill someone face to face. The first time he was ordered to do so, it was a grown man who had tried to desert. Pierot led him away and shot in the air; the man, astonished, obeyed his exhortations to flee. Once, when he was 12, he was ordered to shoot a prisoner, a Ugandan. This time he could not get out of it. Afterwards, he cried and his commander whipped him with an electrical cord. “Is this your brother that you are crying for?” the commander demanded. “This is our enemy.” A year later, that same enemy captured Pierot and took him as a prisoner of war.

Once out of prison, the captives were enrolled in the enemy army, and sent to fight against their former comrades. It took three more years for him to summon the nerve to escape. He walked for three days and three nights, covering 20 miles before reaching a UN peacekeepers’ post and turning himself in.

Pierot should have been released long before he ran away, under the truce agreement that locked militias into a child demobilisation programme. But not all groups have been willing to give up their young recruits. Jean de Dieu Muhindo is head of Save the Children’s programme for former child combatants in eastern Congo. His job is to go into the jungle and meet rebel leaders to convince them to let the children go. “At first, the commanders would say, ‘Come in, come in,’ and there would be children all around them. It was nothing to them; they didn’t know it was wrong.” Lately, however, the commanders have hardened. “They hide the children now. They don’t want to release them because they are useful.”

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