Boy Soldiers of the Great War (23 page)

23rd Bombardment continuing. Trenches heavily shelled. At night called out on ammunition fatigue at 1 a.m. Shelled crossroads.

24th Still on trenches. German lines on the ground [flattened]. Cavalry expected to charge. Infantry have orders read out to them about the charge. Gas to be used.

Private George Adams was understandably nervous. He had enlisted in March and, after fourteen weeks’ training, had been sent abroad as part of a draft to a regular battalion, the 1st Middlesex. He had been in France for two months and had been rapidly acclimatizing to trench life. With the news that he was going to go over the top for the first time, nerves took hold. The battalion was to attack the Prussian Guard, they were informed, and the men were to ‘give them the bayonet’. At sixteen, he was well aware of his lack of height and strength and was not particularly encouraged by the idea of ‘running up against a bloke armed with the
same tool as myself and standing about six feet four inches in height and weighing about eighteen stone’.

The night before the attack, torrential rain poured down on the troops moving into position. With so much transport on the roads, progress was slow and it took battalions many hours to arrive. One boy struggling forward was sixteen-year-old Dick Trafford, a private in the 1/9th King’s Liverpools, a Territorial battalion. When Dick enlisted with his mining friends, he thought little about what war meant, and although he was kept back when the battalion sailed for France in March, he soon joined them when, in August, he was included on a draft. He was not the youngest boy on the ship. George Woolfall was also sixteen, a couple of months younger than Dick, while other lads, such as Glenny Hale and Robert Carr, were only a matter of months older. This would be the first time over the top for all of them, news of which would later be a great worry to their parents back home. George Woolfall was the exception. His mother was already dead and his father, serving with the 1st King’s Liverpools, was already in France.

George had enlisted in January 1915 but, ever since the battalion left without him, he had been more in than out of trouble, with a series of charges laid against him. He had been absent without leave, had broken out of billets and on more than one occasion refused to obey orders. He had also been charged with being insolent, and had absented himself from parades. This bundle of trouble was finally sent abroad and since then his behaviour had changed for the better and he had committed no further offences. His wish to serve abroad having been granted, he would go over the top with the battalion. Whether he was aware of the fact or not, he would be fighting less than three miles from his father, Richard Woolfall, who was himself preparing to go over the top close to the La Bassée Canal with his battalion, part of the 2nd Division.

Dick Trafford was full of apprehension at the thought of going over the top but he was excited, too. The day, however, did not start well.

We were going up in the early hours of the morning. It was dark and we passed through a battery of guns just as it opened up to start the final bombardment for the attack. I was near one of the guns and as it fired the noise burst my eardrum, blood squirting out of it, and I was deaf straight away. The sergeant took one of the little dressings we always carried in case we were wounded and packed my ear with cotton wool to plug it, and of course we were expecting to go over the top in an hour or two, so I would have to go over the top with my ear already wounded. I wasn’t allowed to turn back. There was only one way – forward.

The final frantic British artillery barrage was designed as much to cut the enemy wire as further to destroy their trenches. The weather, which had been foul all night, began to abate at first light and with it the breeze that would be needed to push the gas towards the German lines. Frantic messages were sent back to headquarters asking for further instructions, but the decision to proceed had already been taken and the order came back that the cylinders must be opened on time. It was clear to the gas officers positioned in the front line that in places the poisonous cloud would drift back on to the troops. The prognosis proved correct. When the gas was released at the northern end of the attack, the cloud lingered in no-man’s-land, then, to the horror of the frontline troops, it began to drift back towards the British lines.

The troops attacked at 6.30 a.m., and at the southern end met with considerable success. The breeze here was strong enough to take the gas over to the German front line and the attacking divisions stormed the German trenches with such success that within two hours they had entered Loos and were fighting in the town, overwhelming all before them. Surviving Germans were seen to run away, followed by jubilant Scotsmen of the 15th Division. All appeared to be going well, and such tangible evidence of success helped build a sense of euphoria.

Len Thomas’s battery had opened fire at 3 a.m. The infantry had gone over, and in his diary he noted the good news filtering back from the front.

Infantry charge and didn’t meet much resistance. Germans demoralized with heavy shelling. First line easily taken. Prisoners captured easily. Rough looking lot of villains. Plenty of our wounded back laughing and joking. Mostly London Terriers. Everyone in the best of spirits. Chaps wounded in three places joking with German helmets on their heads. By 8 [a.m.] infantry take Loos and press on. Refugees come over from Loos and tell terrible tales about the Germans. English ‘tres bonne’. Field artillery move up. Cavalry reported on the go.

The success near Loos was in contrast to utter devastation five miles away to the north. George Adams had been lucky to survive, and he knew it. Days later, he wrote to tell his parents of his experiences.

On Saturday morning we went over the top and out of 700 who went over, 180 came back. I was one of the 180. It was not a real attack, it was a sacrifice to let the French get through on our right … We sent our gas over at ten past six, and at twenty past we went over and I am sorry to say that nearly all the fellows I knew have gone – and, Dad, Jack Badrick, the bricky who used to work for Harry Rooney, has gone as well. I turned round to speak to him and I saw him lying dead, shot through the head. The attack was a mess up from start to finish. We got over the top and walked across behind our gas, and then the Germans sent their liquid fire into the gas and set fire to it and when it cleared they were standing on the parapet in their shirtsleeves waiting for us.

The Germans, anticipating the use of gas, had prepared their defences. No one, George included, got further than 100 yards
from their frontline trench, cut down by withering machine-gun fire.

Supporting the Middlesex Regiment was the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, which included the poet Robert Graves. According to Graves, the bombardment, for all the gunners’ endeavours, surprised everyone by its relative slackness compared to the firing that had preceded it. Then, half a mile from the firing line, Graves reports hearing

a distant cheer, confused crackle of rifle fire, yells, heavy shelling on our front line, more shouts and yells, and a continuous rattle of machine guns. After a few minutes, lightly wounded men of the Middlesex came stumbling down Maison Rouge Alley [a communication trench] to the dressing station. I stood at the junction of the siding and the Alley.

‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Bloody balls-up,’ was the most detailed answer I could get.

A little to the south, the 2nd Gordon Highlanders had gone over the top at 6.30 a.m. in the direction of the heavily fortified German village of Hulluch. Their gas helmets had proved of limited use against the gas that enveloped them as they attacked, and they found it hard to breathe. Matters were not helped by the sheer weight of equipment that they had to carry. Each man had been issued with two days’ rations, 220 rounds of small-arms ammunition, a pick or a shovel and two sandbags, and they had laboured in crossing 550 yards of open ground to reach the enemy line. It had been tough going, and they were thankful to have met only light resistance, finding the German front line almost empty. After a break, they had been ordered on to the German support line where they had had to fight before digging in to await further orders.

Among those who waited was the fatherly figure of Corporal Charlie Parke. He had been out in France for nearly a year, and
was now involved in his umpteenth action. He had joined the army aged sixteen and now considered himself an ‘old sweat’ at twenty-two, a view endorsed after he saw the latest crop of reinforcements to join the battalion. It was plain from their faces that they were young and Charlie had sympathy for them all.

One young-faced newcomer, no more than sixteen years of age, started chatting nervously to me; dark-haired and of average height and slender build, it transpired he hailed from the Birmingham area. He was clearly on edge. I dwelt on the thought how many young kids were seen now in the front line, all having lied about their ages … These kids were pitched straight into this catastrophic carnage and the stark fear in their eyes reflected my own terror at the First Battle of Ypres.

Like Charlie Parke, Ernest Fitchett of the 1st South Wales Borderers was an experienced campaigner – he had been over the top at least twice before, and had already been wounded – but he was only seventeen years old. He had enlisted soon after the outbreak of war and had been sent to France in October 1914, when he had been bayoneted during hand-to-hand fighting. He was back in France early the following year, and on 9 May had taken part in a disastrous attack at Aubers Ridge, when his battalion had been annihilated. At Loos his battalion was placed in support, moving into old French trenches in the early hours of the morning in front of the village of Vermelles. There they awaited the outcome of the initial attack by the 1st and 2nd Brigades before being called forward, as Ernest remembered.

We sent over great clouds of gas and when we thought it had taken effect, we mounted the parapet but only to be met by a perfect hail of bullets + shrapnel under which we had to advance over 1,000 yards of open ground, and when we got about half way across, we were obliged to stop, for the machine gun, rifle, and
shrapnel fire was so heavy that it was impossible to advance any further just then. As we laid there we could see other regiments advancing on our right and left, and saw them take the first line but we could not advance until both flanks had advanced and cut them off.

The 1/9th King’s Liverpools had been awaiting instructions from early morning. They had been held in support with the London Scottish on their left, the first Territorial unit that had seen action in France in October 1914. They formed part of a two-battalion reserve behind the attacking battalions of the 1st Division. At 9.10 the order was sent to attack but it was nearly two hours before it arrived and a further hour before they were ready to move forward. The Germans, suspecting an assault, called down artillery on the trenches opposite and had already caused casualties. Dick Trafford recalled:

It was just one noise, one big noise, the guns of both sides banging away at each other. Well, you could always see the shells bursting ’cos you could feel them, you could feel the shrapnel falling. There were no steel helmets in those days, and the shells burst close to the trenches and these bits of shrapnel were dropping around you and bullets flying past. You could feel the whistle of the bullets.

It was obvious that the trenches directly in front of their line of attack were still full of Germans, and the commanding officer of the London Scottish repeatedly asked for a further bombardment of enemy trenches.

Private Alec Stringer of the London Scottish was on tenterhooks. Barely a year earlier he had been enjoying the sun on Australia’s Bondi Beach, but when war broke out he had cut short his tour and patriotically returned home to enlist. He had stretched a point with the recruitment sergeant in March 1915
when he had claimed to be nineteen years and eleven months when he was only fifteen years and eleven months, but that did not seem to worry anyone. He had turned sixteen in April and embarked for France five weeks before Dick Trafford in July. Two months later and here they both were, neighbours on a battlefield, both of them soaked through, cold and covered in mud. They watched the gas attack in the early hours and witnessed the terrible effects when the wind veered round, sending the gas back on to the men in the front trenches, choking some who came streaming back, their faces yellow, and the brass tunic buttons turned green. Now they were due to move forward; the London Scottish were about to attack with the King’s Liverpools filling the gap between the 1st and 2nd Brigades. The London Scottish’s right would rest on the Lone Tree, the Liverpools’ left on the same famous landmark. Alec was always to remember that as they advanced past the 1st Battalion Black Watch, they were cheered on their way, while Dick remembered:

We went over in sections, and as soon as the German machine guns started, we dropped down. You feel like in a race, you’re waiting to start, waiting for the signal, then the sergeant would shout, ‘Right, lads,’ and you’re over the top. It wasn’t always nice getting out of a trench because you didn’t have footholds or any steps, you got over the best way you could and then you ran like hell to get to the German trenches as quick as you can. I remember thinking that if my time came I hoped it was a bullet and let it be sudden; I never wanted to be a cripple or to be robbed of my senses.

In a sense you relied on the Germans to give you orders, it was a case of hide and seek, you drop in what we call the prone position, you’re on your face, then when the German machine guns stop firing for a moment you’re up and as fast as you can go towards the German wire. If a man dropped, he dropped, that was it, whether they were killed or not you were not allowed to stop. You could
hear men calling, ‘I’m wounded, I’m wounded, will you come over here?’ It was the stretcher-bearers’ job to come along in due course and pick them up, but there were some horrible sights all the same, men with their arms hanging half off, some with their legs badly wounded; nasty casualties.