Boy Soldiers of the Great War (12 page)

He was very fair with hair almost white, and his cold grey eyes did more than anything else to help me control my fears. When I was with Snowy I always felt confident. He set for me a standard of cool behaviour that I tried to imitate and profit by. He was an
expert in his understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the Vickers [machine gun] and in his marksmanship. Wielding an axe in his forester’s job had developed a powerful pair of hands and forearms.

Stretcher-bearer Bill Easton was in a four-man team, one of several in a field ambulance unit. Seventeen-year-old Bill’s mentor was Tom, a gruff six-foot northerner, while Bill had been bred in the gentle surroundings of King’s Lynn.

Tom wasn’t my type at all, I don’t mind telling you. He would swear and kick up a hell of a fuss at times, but he thought about his companions more than he did about himself … he really knew what he was doing, a wonderful fellow.

The first time up the line, of course I was a bit nervous and he said, ‘Now when we go in, just hang close behind me. You’ll probably be a bit frightened, Bill,’ he said, ‘but don’t show it because some, they like to see you young fellows cut down a bit, so stick your head up and get along,’ and he’d talk on the way down about things, anything, I don’t know what he was talking about half the time.

Physical power, impressive to young lads on any occasion, was even more important in wartime and could be inspirational. Tom proved capable of repeatedly carrying men out of action when other teams gave up after one or two attempts. He also had a policy of never abandoning anyone once they were collected. Even if the injured man was clearly beyond help, the team would press on.

We never stopped, Tom would have been furious if you had. He kept walking and always took the heavier head end of the stretcher. He’d be as cheerful as anything, talking to the wounded man, and when the other men began to groan or moan he would say, ‘Look at young Bill there, he hasn’t said a word.’

Absolute faith in these men helped disorientated boys to cope with their surroundings. They set an example, frequently volunteering for dangerous jobs or taking on more than would have seemed to be their fair share of heavy work. In doing so, they made themselves vulnerable and any absence, however temporary, could easily undermine group resolve. When George Coppard’s team served for three particularly arduous days, the strain finally told on Lance Corporal Hankin.

What sleep we got had to be taken in odd snatches in an old German artillery dugout to the rear of the trench. I well remember Snowy fainting in that dugout and it was some while before he recovered. Exhaustion had no doubt caused it but at the time it shook me. I feared that he might lose some of the superb control he always showed, no matter how hard the conditions.

Some lads were lucky enough to have a relatively gentle introduction to war. Sixteen-year-old Cyril José had arrived in France just as the Second Battle of Ypres had drawn to a close in May 1915. A couple of months had passed and just once, well behind the lines, an enemy plane bombed the platoon as it drilled, scattering men into an orchard, but no casualties had been suffered. Since then, Cyril had been in and out of the trenches with desultory shelling and the activities of snipers the principal concern. In August, he volunteered to go out into no-man’s-land and by all accounts he enjoyed himself, as he told his sister.

11/8/15

My dearest Ivy

Have been quite adventurous for the past two nights having been out in front with a corporal and another private as covering party while some others fixed up some barbed wire. The first night was quite exciting as the Germans must have spotted something once or twice as they sent over a rapid fire especially when we were
coming in. They continually sent up star-shells so that we had to keep our nappers [heads] down low … To add to the fun our equipment got entangled in the barbed wire. Naturally this did not lessen the excitement of the moment. Curiously enough we did not see the funny point until we had extricated ourselves and jumped into a shallow trench just in front of our own parapet …

This trench had been full of wire entanglements and, in the process of disentangling himself, Cyril had jammed his foot through an old biscuit tin, compounding his problems.

We weren’t out of the fire yet so we began to chuck lumps of earth into the trench to attract our fellows’ attention. Having done this we asked them to get their bayonets out of the way so that we might get in. The corporal then hoisted me up out of the trench, handed up the rifles which I put on the parapet then leaning over I gave him my hand and the deed was done as it were and we could smile freely again. I then rejoined my section and on sentry I didn’t half send some ammunition over to our old friend ‘Fritzy’.

Last night was all right but not quite so exciting.

Cyril

‘Fritzy’, a term of endearment, was an example of the strange love/hate relationship with the enemy that existed in the trenches. Abstract sympathy for ‘Fritz’ or ‘Jerry’ was typically evident when the enemy lines were being pounded by artillery, for each side knew what the other was going through at the hands of a third party. There was nothing the infantry could do but sit and suffer, when the shells were obliterating whole sections of the line. On such occasions veterans recalled feeling that they had more in common with infantry on the other side of no-man’s-land than with a separate branch of the army such as the artillery or Army Service Corps, whose men, while frequently exposed to mortal
danger, never saw the inside of a trench and never went over the top in an attack.

Where no-man’s-land narrowed, it was even possible to speak to the enemy, a more frequent occurrence than people might suppose. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is the best-known example of fraternization, but there were innumerable occasions when troops shouted to one another, wishing each other good day, or some such cheery comment. ‘Morning, Fritz!’ answered with ‘Bollicks’ was par for the course according to one veteran, while another remembered hearing, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles,’ answered with a cheerful reply of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Arseholes.’

Conversations were not always so pithy. Bill Taylor, the young Canadian orphan, managed to converse sporadically with one German. To Bill’s surprise, he turned out to be a Canadian of German extraction who had returned to the country of his forefathers to enlist, although he himself had never been there before. As they traded shouts, Bill discovered that not only was this lad born and raised in Toronto, close to where Bill had grown up, but he had a brother serving with the Canadian forces while he, simultaneously, fought for the enemy.

Occasionally the two sides were so close that they could exchange not just comments but gifts. Eighteen-year-old Smiler Marshall was barely twenty yards from some Germans who were manning a position forward of their front line. In between was an old communication trench that had been filled with barbed wire. Empty jam tins had been attached to the wire to act as an early-warning system should either side be tempted to encroach on the other.

One day, the Germans sent a stick grenade flying over, to which they had tied a couple of cigarettes. After a bit I went to the bomb, and my mates were saying, ‘For God’s sake don’t touch it.’ They thought the bomb would go off and blow me up. But I went and
smoked a cigarette and it was all right, so we sent back the same stick bomb with a whole packet attached. I hope they enjoyed them.

In such an extreme environment, fraternal feelings could turn to hatred should either side play a dirty trick. With abstract notions of sport and war so closely aligned in the eyes of many, bad form on the battlefield was akin to cheating on the field of play. Once good faith had been broken, it was almost impossible to restore.

This same sense of fair play and comradeship was an integral part of maintaining morale in the line. Men would take great risks in order to protect or rescue one another, often displaying the highest levels of courage and self-sacrifice – feats that might be recognized by the award of military honours.

Jack Auguste Pouchot had served in and out of the trenches through the harsh winter of 1914/15. By 8 January 1915, the battalion diary records that part of the line had become uninhabitable: ‘Parapet falling in – River Lys rising rapidly necessitating evacuation of trenches,’ wrote the adjutant. Seventeen-year-old Leslie Walkinton described the events of the morning.

It was just getting light, and there was rifle shooting and excited shouting to our left. We could see two men lying apparently dead about twenty or twenty-five yards behind the barricade. One was a stretcher-bearer, Rifleman Philip Tibbs, who had gallantly crawled out to help Corporal Roche who had been shot by a sniper when running behind the line with some water for his machine gun. As we watched, another soldier crawled out to see what he could do, but when he reached the two men he was fired at and had to turn round and crawl back to safety.

This other soldier was fifteen-year-old Jack Pouchot, and he won the regiment’s first Distinguished Conduct Medal for his effort. Both the men he tried to help were killed. Jack remained in France
until April 1915 when exhaustion and illness combined to force his evacuation from France. He had just celebrated his sixteenth birthday.

Jack Pouchot was not the only medal-winner who was too young to be serving in the trenches. During the course of the war, several underage soldiers won the highest accolade, the Victoria Cross. They included John Meikle who enlisted at sixteen, won the Military Medal at eighteen and the VC at nineteen – this last award was granted posthumously; eighteen-year-old George Peachment, like Jack Pouchot, won a medal, in his case the VC, while going to the aid of his wounded captain, stranded in no-man’s-land. Like John Meikle, George was killed during his act of bravery.

Contact between soldiers and their families back home was also essential to the maintenance of morale in the frontline trenches. It varied greatly from man to man; in many cases it was initially frequent, war and duty permitting. Descriptions were diverse and often enthusiastic but, as time wore on, a degree of resignation set in. As soldiers felt trapped in an apparently endless war, letters could grow more sporadic, more weary and markedly shorter, the writer less inclined to describe life at the front.

In contrast, Cyril José’s letters are full of adventure, like the account of no-man’s-land he sent to his sister, and, remarkably, he never turned to the bitterness so evident in the correspondence of others. It is striking to a modern reader that, as new impressions continued to wash over him, he appeared happy to divulge to his family the repeated danger he was in.

Young boys such as Cyril were liable to believe more strongly in their own immortality than men just a few years older, and there is undoubtedly in his letters a tactlessness born of youth. Even so, this naivety does not entirely explain descriptions of battle that were bound to worry any mother, even one who had consented to her son going abroad in the first place.

The answer probably lies in the level of dislocation Cyril felt from his previous civilian life. Faced with death on a daily basis, when casualties were an accepted and normal state of affairs, he had not lost his sense of reality. On the contrary, this was his reality, his everyday, a world incomprehensible to his family. Given the limitations of his environment, it would have been difficult for him to compose anything of note were he not to describe the events taking place around him. Only in time did his words take on an occasional air of healthy cynicism, although he never lost his optimism. Once he had chosen to write about his life, he had adopted, consciously or not, a tone and style that made light of his experiences to avoid unnecessarily worrying his parents. Yet he was not sufficiently mature to know when to rein in his anecdotes. The writing remained jocular and untroubled. Cyril had willingly joined up and he was not about to complain.

When his letter of 11 August reached his sister Ivy, it was his mother who wrote back, clearly concerned at the exploits of her son. His next two replies, while initially reassuring, typically reverted to descriptions of fighting that could only have been alarming.

20/8/15

My dearest Mother

Needn’t trouble about the barbed wire biz or any of those little expeditions. I only went out for a bit of excitement, by way of a change. Really it’s great fun going out over the top – good for the nerves – espesh when you are back safely and give vent to your exhausted feelings by opening rapid fire on the Germans.

I had a rotten experience though the night before last in the trenches when I went out into a listening post about 75 yards out. There were 4 of us privates and 1 corporal. Some of Kitchener’s blessed mob opened fire when the order had been passed down to cease fire as there was a party out on the listening post. The Germans replied and must have had a rifle fixed so as to hit the listening post. One chap ‘bobbed up’ when it was a bit quiet and
got it through the napper. The two other chaps took him in but he died soon after. Guess I didn’t ‘bob up’ so much after that.

Cyril

31/8/15

My dearest Mother

In the trenches this time we have had rather a rough time. We’ve been working in building the parapet thicker besides doing sentry [duty] so that we can get a little sleep between the reliefs. I hope you’ve not been worrying.

If I have 3 hours sleep in 24 hours I consider I have done well!! I have only had 1 hour sometimes. Added to work etc we are only 40 or 50 yards away from the Germans – the Prussian Germans too! Hence we’ve had an exciting time but we go out tomorrow night and we shall all be glad too!

The most exciting day I’ve ever had was last Saturday. We were just getting our tea ready when a shell came over just behind the trench. ‘Hullo, what’s up with Johnnie?’ I said. Then I saw what I thought was a big piece of shell falling in the next traverse to mine. I ran into my traverse to dodge it, not thinking much about it. Next second, bang went an explosion. Immediately I saw another drop and before I knew where I was I felt myself glide about a foot through the air against the parapet. Didn’t know what the joke was for a minute then I saw all the others lying flat against the parapet and sides of dugouts. I knew what it was then – trench mortars … Soon someone spotted one and shouted ‘Trench mortar right!’ so we all scampered to the left and got behind dugouts or anything. No sooner had it exploded than we spotted another and so we scampered away again. We soon tumbled to the enemy’s wheeze which was to send over a big shell and then follow it up by 2 trench mortar shells. The big shells we can hear shrieking through the air and we looked out for the trench mortars. We had quite an exciting 3/4 of an hour dodging
them which isn’t exactly as easy as it seems. We had a few casualties naturally but yours truly got through as per usual.