Boy Soldiers of the Great War (22 page)

Second Lieutenant Charles Carrington, having himself enlisted under age, well understood the fears of a boy. His battalion, the 1/5th Royal Warwicks, was due to take part in an attack and he had been working feverishly to get everything ready. The companies had been assembled in less than two hours from the initial order to move and the battalion was about to get on its way. The sense of responsibility and duty concentrated Charles’s mind and he was surprised at how little fear he felt.

One little incident reassured me still more. An NCO came up and said that Private Eliot wished to speak to me. The man was a mere boy, whom I had known in England … I found him crouched against a chalk-heap almost in tears. He looked younger than ever. ‘I don’t want to go over the plonk,’ he flung at me in the shamelessness of terror, ‘I’m only seventeen, I want to go home.’ The other men standing round avoided my eye and looked sympathetic rather than disgusted.

‘Can’t help that now, my lad,’ said I in my martinet voice. I was nineteen years and three months old myself. ‘You should have thought of that when you enlisted. Didn’t you give your age as nineteen then?’

‘Yes, sir. But I’m not, I’m only – well, I’m not quite seventeen really, sir.’

‘Well, it’s too late now,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to see it through and I’ll do what I can for you when we come out.’ I slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You go with the others. You’ll be all right when you get started. This is the worst part of it, this waiting, and we’re none of us enjoying it. Come along, now, jump to it.’

And he seemed to take heart again.

In such circumstances, any decision by the officer in command to send a boy out of the line was a personal one, and he was well within his rights to refuse if they were about to go into action. The boy had lied about his age, and turning round at such a late stage
to profess his true age might be met with sympathy but little leniency. There was, after all, no way of actually verifying the age of a boy, other than to look and gauge from his face, begrimed and mud-spattered as it well could be, concealing the softer features of youth. As a unit was about to go into action, it was difficult if not impossible to do anything anyway; much better for him to go over the top and sort out the problem later, should it remain to be resolved.

In the hours before an attack, few men would be able to sleep, other than occasionally nodding off. Wide awake, they might remember loved ones back home, or think of nothing in an attempt to empty the mind. There were few whose throats did not dry and whose stomachs did not turn over at the thought of the morning. In a few hours’ time, they would have to fix bayonets and face the front wall of the trench, waiting for the signal to scale the ladders on to the parapet and advance.

Thomas Hope, the once enthusiastic sixteen-year-old, wrote:

I have one trump card – my age – but I can’t summon sufficient courage to make use of it. I am torn between my natural fears and my anxiety to play the game. The others are in a different position altogether. They must go on; illness even, feigned or otherwise, would avail them little now. They are doomed as far as seeing this attack through is concerned, and they know it. When the door behind us is locked, it is easy enough to go forward, there is nothing else to do, but I, holding the key to safety, shrink from exposing my fear to my comrades by opening it, although every nerve and fibre in my body is crying out to me to avail myself of this opportunity to preserve my life.

It was possible to cope with despair when a soldier could resign himself to his fate and prepare accordingly. Where there was indecision, a possible exit, then that hope, however tenuous,
could be torture. As the hours, then minutes, dragged interminably towards zero hour, there was plenty of time to think, to calculate the chances of survival and to wonder if everyone else was as scared. In an attack, comrades ultimately depended on each other, and there was a steely determination not to let anyone down, least of all the rest of the platoon. Successful training instilled regimental pride and this could not be squandered easily – a subliminal thought perhaps, but one that was influential nevertheless.

George White was going over the top, cavalry style. No trenches for him, but a mounted foray. His regiment, the 2nd Dragoon Guards, had been held in reserve during an infantry offensive, but had now been called forward, ready to go and exploit an expected breakthrough. As they waited, unmounted, they stood at their horses’ heads, holding the reins and talking quietly, each reassuring the other. George said his prayers and then began to think about how he could be dead quite soon.

I had no such thing as premonition and never thought I would be killed. On the other hand, I knew that it was quite possible, and got to wondering what it would be like in heaven. I could not comprehend existing forever in that ideal place. I suppose I considered I was fighting for a righteous cause and therefore if killed in action would, like a Red Indian who died fighting, go to the ‘Happy Hunting Ground’. Funnily, it never entered my mind that if fatally wounded I might go to the other place, and therefore gave no thought to possible conditions there. Nor did I give any thought to the possibility that I might be badly wounded and perhaps maimed for life.

As they waited, George became aware of a flurry of activity to his left, where the Dragoons’ C squadron was lined up. As he watched, he saw a young trooper ride forward from the lines to speak with some officers.

He seemed to be having a long discussion. Eventually, he rode back in the direction of our base and word filtered through to us that he had just informed his troop officer that he was only seventeen years of age. Apparently, he had lost his nerve and did not wish to take any further part in that day’s operation. I suppose the officer concerned had no option but to report the matter to his seniors and they were then obliged to withdraw the man from the line.

To George, who was yet to pass his sixteenth birthday, the option of pulling out from the fight was anathema. ‘I could just not understand why a young man should act as he had, with a chance to get into cavalry action in the offing.’ The waiting had been difficult and the boy had seemingly played his ‘trump card’. He was fortunate to receive a sympathetic hearing.

Honour, tradition, the threat of punishment, but above all comradeship forced men to face the unimaginable. Even so, it was a remarkable feat for any man to overcome natural instincts of self-preservation and go forward. In this regard, officers and NCOs with their burden of responsibility had an advantage over privates. The men serving under an officer were not encouraged to think independently but to react to orders and carry them out to the full. The officers who gave those orders had an enormous duty of care to the men under their command, and to break faith with them was a decision few would ever countenance. While there were certainly cases in which inadequate officers were ‘quietly’ removed to Britain, there was an acknowledgement too that they faced onerous pressures, and suffered disproportionate casualties, especially among junior, frequently teenaged, officers. Inevitably such pressures had to find an outlet. During the course of the war, of the 35,313 men court-martialled for drunkenness, one in twenty-five was an officer. To put this figure into context, fewer than one in 300 courts martial held abroad for offences such as cowardice,
desertion, self-inflicted wounds or quitting a post were lodged against officers.

Before the attack went in, a bombardment would be laid down on the enemy front, to hit the support lines and so curtail the enemy’s ability to resupply and reinforce his front line; this bombardment would be lifted once the attack had begun. As the war progressed, different artillery techniques were developed not just to wear down the enemy but also to protect those about to advance. Then, as zero hour was reached, there was a signal given by an officer, usually a sharp whistle, followed by a mad scramble up the scaling ladders and out into no-man’s-land to form up in lines. Enemy machine guns were always trained on the parapet and, mindful of that fact, some men raced up the ladders, preferring a bullet in the leg to one in the head or chest. Others chose to hang back for a second, judging the sweep of the enemy’s machine gun, advancing the moment the bullets passed overhead. Everyone had, or imagined he had, a ploy to survive, although for most the moment of going, as described by one veteran, was akin to being dropped into ice-cold water.

The first offensive in which the regular, territorial and new Kitchener Army units would all play a part was the Battle of Loos, launched in September 1915. This was part of a wider three-pronged assault undertaken by the Allies in late summer to finally break the front and drive the Germans out of northern France. The Allied offensive had been agreed after much discussion in late July and involved a coordinated attack against the northern and southern flanks of the German Army, with the French attacking on two fronts, a small thrust immediately to the south of a proposed British attack and another larger assault in the Artois region. The British would simultaneously attack in the industrial and coalmining area of Lens.

The French, who had carried the greater burden of the war so far, were keen that Britain should commit herself to further
offensives. If British troops took the initiative, the enemy’s forces could be kept on the back foot, thwarting any ideas they might have of renewing offensive actions of their own. The Allied attack would, for the first time, give some of Kitchener’s New Army divisions that had recently arrived in France a chance to cut their teeth in a major offensive.

The British commander-in-chief, Sir John French, and General Douglas Haig, commanding First Army, looked at the proposed area over which the British would attack and did not like what they saw: flat country that was covered in industrial workings, predominantly mines and their associated slag heaps. Dotted nearby were a number of heavily fortified villages protected by deep belts of barbed wire; it was country that the Germans would find easy to defend. Yet, notwithstanding the concerns of those at the front, Kitchener was keen for Britain to show France that she was willing to fight, and, after a meeting with the French C.-in-C. Joseph Joffre, ordered French to proceed with preparations, emphasizing that Britain had to do her utmost to help her ally even if that meant heavy casualties. On the ground, Haig would be directed to deliver the assault on a seven-mile front between Loos and La Bassée. Six divisions, numbering some 75,000 men, would take part in the opening attack.

A preliminary bombardment, the largest in the war to date, would begin on 21 September and would pulverize the enemy line until the morning of the attack. Firepower would, weather permitting, be backed up by the use of poison gas. This was the first time it would be used by the British and, with luck, would create havoc in the enemy trenches as British troops went over the top.

In preparation, the men were shown a model of the proposed battleground with earth, coal, bricks and chalk to represent hills, slagheaps, houses and trenches. Certain landmarks were already familiar. Heaps of coal, known as ‘
crassiers
’ in French, could be seen from the British line, as could mine workings, including in
Loos itself the huge twin pylon linked by a walkway that the men named after London’s famous Tower Bridge. Smaller idiosyncratic features also stood out, including the Lone Tree, a large cherry tree close to the German lines, which had somehow contrived to survive even with shrapnel and bullets embedded in its trunk.

Despite the initial reservations, confidence grew that the enemy defences would crumble under a sustained bombardment, with any surviving Germans overcome by the cloud of gas. It was known that the protective chemicals impregnating enemy gas masks were effective for only thirty minutes, after which they would need to be re-dipped. If the gas was released forty minutes before the infantry attacked, they should find the Germans overcome. So long as there were few casualties among the British infantry, they would quickly be ready to assault the enemy’s reserves, while massed British cavalry waited to exploit the anticipated breakthrough.

Any discharge of gas would require accurate weather forecasts and constant monitoring of the wind direction. A final decision on the precise time for release could not be taken until a few hours before the attack. Even then, when it was taken, the news that the gas would be released at 5.30 a.m. was not communicated to commanding officers in the line until, in some cases, an hour beforehand.

Great coordination was required to bring supplies of ammunition and bombs into the line, as well as 1,500 gas cylinders that would need to be carefully positioned. Long iron pipes were also brought forward, through which the gas would be discharged into no-man’s-land. Finally, to cut down the distance over which the infantry would attack, assembly trenches were dug, producing long white streaks of freshly turned chalk running laterally across the countryside. Progress was going well for all to see, Germans included; worryingly, they were observed displaying notice boards above their trench pointing out that they knew an attack was imminent and the date it would be launched.

The build-up to the attack was described by one of the underage soldiers who took part. Private Len Thomas was serving with the 13th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, on a 9.2-inch howitzer. He had enlisted at seventeen and had been serving abroad for five months. Although warned just before leaving for France that no one was to keep a diary, he – like Ernest Steele – had nevertheless written a daily account of his war in a small notebook.

21st More shelling of German lines at night. No 4 Gun dropped shells on crossroads expecting to catch reinforcements.

22nd Best day’s shooting since Festubert. Bombarded trenches and blew machine guns and trenches to blazes and also houses. Brigadier General very pleased with battery’s shooting. Congratulates officers and men …