Boy Soldiers of the Great War (15 page)

First, remember your age. You may be tall, and you may feel old and strong, but you are only 15; therefore you are too young to stand the strain of anything approaching this. Then, I have no doubt you want to do your duty. Well, do you think it would be your duty to join the army, and spend England’s money in training you now, and then when you got out here, you would crumple up immediately? It would merely be wasted on you. Why, I am over three years older than you and even I am beginning to think I am not much use out here, although I think I shall be all right.

No matter how strong you feel, it takes more than a grown man’s strength to survive this strain for long. You know how strong Ernest Cox was! Well, when I saw him, he told me his nerves were entirely gone and he starts immediately he hears a shell, even if it’s merely one of our own guns. Don’t tell anyone else that as he does not want Mrs Cox to know …

We
all
have to sacrifice something to do our duty. Your part is to carry on with business as usual
in spite of
all the recruiting sergeants in creation. Just grin and bear the things they say, and remember that by doing it you are doing your duty and that if you don’t you are showing how weak you are. I have seen several kiddies out here; they have a pretty rotten time and don’t survive it long, although they have cost as much as anybody else to train. So, if you are spoken to again by anybody, just tell them your age, and don’t let me hear any more about your wanting to join. It makes me feel pretty rotten and I know it will make Mater feel worse.

Don’t mind me saying this, and think I am trying to father you, it is for your own good, and also for the Country’s good that you should not join, and having seen some of the results of youngsters joining, I think I am entitled to say this. You can see from this letter how your suggestion has made me feel, worse than I have felt since I have been out here.

Love to all

From your elder Brother who knows

Ernest

The letters home, and lengthening casualty lists, woke families up to the fact that the decision to let their sons enlist was not necessarily one that might iron out a few adolescent problems or make a man of a lad, but one that might rather be his end. Death was an everpresent backdrop to life, and lads like Smiler Marshall had plenty of time to ponder on that fact.

All the time, well, you were just wondering whether you were going to be the next one. All the time. Would you be the next one to be killed? The Padre used to reassure us. He used to say a little prayer and then say, ‘However near you are to death, there’s somebody nearer.’

One of those who witnessed the draining effect of life in the line was the Nationalist Member of Parliament for Galway City, Stephen Gwynn, who had temporarily set aside his life in politics for one on the Western Front. This erudite officer noted how soldiers knew that courage was a wasting asset. ‘In the first weeks or months curiosity, the sense of adventure, and a mere lack of realization prevented the mind from dwelling on the thought of death’. Nevertheless in the end, the thought of death settled down upon the spirit of everyone, and, interestingly, ‘perhaps all the more upon the very young,’ he observed.

Corporal William Andrews, an older soldier serving with the Black Watch, witnessed how one boy’s powers of resistance gave way after a particularly difficult time in the line. The boy, who is known only as Private X, had spent much of his time close to the battalion tailor, a South African veteran who knew what being under fire meant. But this older man was now deemed not fit for line and had been sent back to the quartermaster’s stores and the boy was bereft.

The youngster, Private X, was a pathetic sight, his face swollen with crying. He had black hair, black eyebrows, and a round face, which normally would be cheerful, and perhaps comic. It was now childish and frightened.

‘Don’t take me back again to they shells, corporal,’ he said, again and again. ‘For God’s sake get me out of this. I can’t face they shells. I don’t mind the bullets, but I can’t face they shells.’ NCOs had told him he must cheer up, or he would be shot for cowardice, but this did not steel his shattered nerves, nor did my reasoning with him, and my attempt to cheer him with chocolate.

It seemed to me the best thing was to take him to the medical officer and get a sedative. We had many youngsters in the battalion, though I believe, none as young as X, and I was afraid his hysteria might spread to others. So I reported the case to Captain Boase, and he, failing likewise to make any impression on the
boy’s terror, gave me permission to take him to the medical officer. This was Major JSY Rogers … He seemed to have the priceless War gift of being able to do without sleep, and when casualties were heavy brought to his work a spirit of healing that made many forget their pain. He put a friendly hand on my shoulder when I went into his aid post. ‘We’re not going to have you breaking down, are we?’ he said. I smiled back. ‘No; it’s this boy I’m troubled about. He gave a false age on joining, says he is only fifteen, and he simply can’t stand the shelling. What am I to do with him, sir?’

At this X began crying again. Major Rogers offered him a cigarette, and lighted it for him.

‘Now look here, my boy,’ he said, in a kindly voice. ‘I know you want your people at home to be proud of you, don’t you? You wouldn’t like your mother to think you were funking it?’

X admitted he wouldn’t, but he said: ‘I can’t stand they shells. I don’t mind they bullets, but I can’t stand they big shells.’

The poor lad had no spirit left. He must have been knocked down or shaken by a big shell exploding near him. I had to leave him at the first-aid post, and I did not see him again. He may have been sent to hospital, or perhaps he was given some quiet job behind the lines, such as being servant to a chaplain. He passes out of this story.

In the end no cajoling or soothing words would help those lads who had had enough and simply walked away. Their youth would probably save them from the ultimate sanction for desertion, court martial and execution, but there was no absolute guarantee.

In 1916, Reverend Philip Clayton, better known to history as Tubby Clayton, went to see an old friend, Philip Gosse, a medical officer. Clayton, the co-founder of a rest home for soldiers in the town of Poperinge known as Talbot House, had a problem and sought out his old friend to see what he could do. Tubby had seen many boy soldiers on overseas service: he recalled seeing
one young hero aged sixteen sporting a Military Medal awarded for bravery, being frog-marched under escort back from the line for immediate dispatch to England. This time the circumstances were rather different.

A deserter had come to see Tubby. So scared was the lad in front of him that Tubby failed to recognize him but on hearing his name recalled that he had been an orphan brought up by two ladies in the New Forest, close to Tubby’s home. This boy had enlisted aged fifteen or sixteen. Gosse listened to the case:

He had been with his battalion nearly a year, during which time he had been blown up and buried by shells, and seen his friends killed and wounded, until at last, broken in spirit and sick in body, he had bolted.

It was clear that if something was not done about it the wretched lad would be court-martialled for desertion and stand a very good chance of being shot. Instead the two conspirators arranged a plot.

I admitted the deserter into our dressing station as a case of marked debility and shell shock, and put him to bed, where he slept for twelve solid hours.

The difficulty was what to do next. After much discussion, a medical report was made out stating that we had found Private H wandering about, that he was not responsible for his actions, and that he had been admitted forthwith to the ambulance, to await dispatch to a hospital at the base. The plot was successful, and the lad at last got back to England, whence he ought never to have been sent.

Not every boy was treated with such compassion, though to be fair not every boy owned up to his youth to save his skin. If a boy was put on trial for a serious misdemeanour, it must have been tempting to reveal his age in mitigation, but how was the boy to know that owning up to yet another offence was not going to exacerbate the situation? Private John Tiernan of the Royal
Irish Fusiliers, a fifteen-year-old lad from Droghedd, Ireland, was caught sleeping at his post in July 1916. He was arrested and tried by Field General Court Martial (FGCM) being sentenced to serve five years’ penal servitude, suspended for the war. It was almost two months later that his age was discovered and he was ordered home. Private Thomas Bomford, serving with the Essex Regiment, was another who chose not to state his true age at his FGCM. Bomford, who had served on Gallipoli, had been found, like Tiernan, asleep at his post and was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment with hard labour. Aged just fourteen, he was taken to prison and released only after his father heard of the punishment and forwarded the boy’s birth certificate.

Were these boys asleep because they were simply negligent, unaware of the seriousness of the offence or was their youth such that the burden of serving overseas was simply too much for their growing bodies? In Bomford’s case, possibly not the latter. This lad was well-built, even at fourteen, and at five foot ten inches tall and a good chest size, he would have towered above boys his age and was easily on a par with his peers in the army. He had added five years to his age on enlistment, and questions were asked as to how he was accepted; all replies pointing to his unusual strength. He had easily passed for a nineteen-year-old.

But Bomford was an exception, and many of the lads who fell short of military expectations, to a greater or lesser degree, simply could not handle the strain of service especially during the winter. One can only guess why Rifleman William Buchanan, of the Royal Irish Rifles, shot himself in the arm in January 1916 but circumstantial evidence points to his inability to cope. He had enlisted in mid-October 1915 and was sent to France at the end of the following month aged sixteen and after barely six weeks’ training, enduring freezing weather in the line. In January he was awarded a FGCM at a special hospital in Boulogne, reserved for those suspected of self-inflicted wounds, found guilty and sentenced to thirty days’ Field Punishment No. 1 for his troubles. He rejoined
his battalion in the line at the end of March 1916 and was only subsequently sent down to the base as under age.

By mid-1915 voluntary enlistment had dropped to a level where recruitment officers had to get out from behind their desks to challenge anyone they could find in the street who looked a likely candidate for the forces. Boys keen to join up found the standards for enlisting a recruit had, unofficially, fallen significantly. Enlistment in the summer months almost guaranteed service overseas by the end of the year when conditions on the Western Front were appalling. Private Donald Cheers was one example. He enlisted in mid-August 1915 and was sent to France with his battalion in mid-November, despite a formal protest by his mother, Isabella Cheers, to Donald’s commanding officer. Donald had joined up on or about his fifteenth birthday.

These lads were volunteers, but not in the 1914 sense of the Kitchener volunteers, lads all part of the same battalion, destined for a year’s training. These were lads who were frequently pushed into units that were short of men; units that had taken a battering, and required large drafts to bring them back up to strength. Three months’ training, and sometimes much less, could see a boy in the trenches; a boy who had not built up the stamina and the fat to withstand the bitter cold, a boy ill-equipped mentally to cope with the rigors of active service in the army. ‘It is a crying shame that a boy of his tender years, not fully formed yet, should be exposed to the rigors of winter in the trenches,’ wrote Isabella Cheers by way of complaint to the Infantry Records Office in Hounslow.

Private Harry Allwood, 2nd Sherwood Foresters, is another good example. In March 1915 he had joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers but was discharged in mid-June, adjudged ‘unlikely to become an efficient soldier’. He suffered, so a medical report made clear, from ‘severe palpitations with frequent fainting attacks. [He] continually falls out on parades and [was] once brought to hospital in [a state of] severe collapse.’ Yet this soldier had no
problem re-enlisting the following month and, despite his frailties, was sent to France in December 1915. He lasted three months before being sent home. Another, Private Stephen Isaac, attested in mid-May 1915 and was sent to France that October just after his seventeenth birthday. He lasted less than a month for a report stated he ‘found himself quite unable to do heavy marching in France and had to file out at once on account of pain’. Likewise, Private William Bain, 9th Devonshire Regiment, enlisted late June 1915 and was sent to France under age in October 1915. He lasted two months. He was ‘Unfit to stand the strain of the campaign’ and was sent straight from disembarkation in England to the 2nd Birmingham War Hospital to recover.

Thousands of men, not just underage boys, succumbed to the effects of trench foot and other debilitating illnesses owing to the weather. Yet many boys, especially those with only short periods of training behind them, were the least equipped to adapt to their environment and many wrote home that winter desperate for release. One such was Private Barrass who had enlisted aged fifteen and went to France just after his sixteenth birthday. In asking for his discharge, his father recalled how his boy ‘had been so keen and sure about it,’ but now, after seven weeks overseas, ‘he writes to me that he feels the work beyond his powers …’ adding poignantly, ‘He is a good boy and meant to serve his King and Country.’

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Junior Officers