Boy Soldiers of the Great War (39 page)

The boys were formed into separate companies, depending where they came from. There was a Scottish Company fashioned from boys sent from every Scottish regiment; there was a Northern Company, with lads from Durham and Newcastle, as well as a Southern, Midland, and a mixed company made up of boys from Wales, Ireland and South Africa.

Within a short space of time, Major Harford had over a thousand boys under his command, including a number of lads aged over nineteen designated ‘immatures’ owing to the inadequacy of their physique. These boys were to be given good food and plenty of exercise, their chest measurements and weight being taken every three weeks in preparation for a move back up to the front line.

All the boys undertook a strict regime of training, with bayonet fighting and trench construction at the Bull Ring. On other days, they were taken out on route marches, to be followed by sports, including football and cricket. Harford recalled:

Sgt Summers started boxing competitions, and some really good material was soon discovered. Summers carefully arranged the
weights and watched to see that no boy was out-classed. The National Boxing Association were most kind in sending me every month two medals, one silver and one bronze, to be boxed for, and these were much prized by those who won them.

With so many boys at the camp, there was plenty of raw material from which to find good boxers or talented footballers. Others had a more theatrical bent, and for them a concert party was formed, ‘The B’Hoys’, under the sergeant and former musichall artist. Costumes were made in Britain and shipped out to France, and concerts were put on, not just for in-house entertainment but also for the enjoyment of other depots and hospitals.

As well as many such activities, the boys were set to work. So many casualties were arriving at the base that help was always needed. Eighteen-year-old George Fortune was waiting for his nineteenth birthday when he would be sent back up the line. He was among a group of boys who had been put to work burying men who had succumbed to their wounds. ‘It was a sad business – the coffins were roughly made and sometimes blood would come through the bottom.’ Shortly before Christmas 1917, a rumour came through that the authorities were to form a young soldiers’ company, ‘when they got enough of us’, recalled George. In the meantime he was kept on burial fatigue.

That year, the war had not been going particularly well for anyone, but it was at least going more badly for the enemy. Economically, Germany was in deep trouble. An Allied naval blockade of German ports had cut off essential imports, yet the country’s own economic mismanagement was as much to blame for growing war-weariness and unrest. Domestic problems were compounded by the knowledge that the Americans had joined the war and were on their way to France and, once the men of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) took to the field in numbers, these fresh, if inexperienced, troops would seal the fate of the central powers. Germany would
be beaten and with it the Kaiser’s principal allies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria and Turkey.

The Americans took the decision to join the Allies in April 1917 and began to gear up for the conflict. A small regular force under its commander, General John Joseph Pershing, was dispatched to Europe, while at home conscription would potentially draw on an available pool of 24.5 million American men. Daunting though this figure was, it would be a while before the AEF could take to the field and make any meaningful impression on the war. In the meantime, the Germans would have the chance to strike first.

In preparing for their offensive, the Germans had to fully utilize their one huge, if short-term, advantage. After the October Revolution of 1917, the new Russian Government had immediately signalled its desire to cease hostilities and end the war. Negotiations began in December 1917 and, well before the peace treaty was signed in early March 1918, the Germans had begun to transfer artillery and infantry divisions from East to West. In all, well over a million men, mostly battle-hardened, would be ready to attack when given the order.

After the offensives at Ypres in the summer and Cambrai in the autumn, British troops were in need of rest and training. As always, the C.-in-C., Douglas Haig, was concerned about the number of troops at his disposal on the Western Front that winter. The British line in France was 123 miles, if all the twists and turns were included, the longest held by the BEF in the war to date, and a third longer than in 1916. Furthermore, five divisions, effectively Haig’s reserve, had been siphoned off to fight in Italy. Little wonder he felt that the number of men available to him ensured that there could be no Allied spring offensive, and that the initiative would inevitably pass to the Germans. They, he believed, would undertake offensive operations of their own against the weakened British divisions in France and Belgium.

Haig’s problems were exacerbated by the deep mistrust between himself and Lloyd George, who had replaced Asquith as Prime
Minister the previous year. After the perceived failure of recent offensives, Lloyd George had taken it upon himself to rein in the commander-in-chief, starving him of reinforcements; he was fearful that he would not be able to overrule any proposal made by Haig to launch a new offensive. Only by deliberately holding reserves in Britain could he ensure the predominance of his will over Haig’s.

By the middle of December, it was quite clear that the Germans were beginning to shift the first of their infantry divisions from East to West. Haig expected thirty or thirty-two to be moved, over the course of three or four months. At first he doubted that the Germans would risk an all-out attack but, if they did, it would signify, as he wrote in his diary, ‘a gambler’s throw’. The outcome of the struggle for power in Germany between military and civil authorities would, in Haig’s eyes, decide the next move. ‘If the military party won, they would certainly attack and try and deliver a knock-out blow against the Western Front. We must be prepared for this.’

Meanwhile at Étaples, the rumours of a change proved true and with the new year the young soldiers were moved down the coast to the No. 5 Convalescent Camp at Cayeux; the camp’s war diary notes: ‘Jan 1st 1918. Boys under 19 and immatures requiring further training are in future to be sent to this Depot. The first batch arrived on this date.’ Two days later they were joined once again by Major Cardinal Harford who, almost straightaway, took the boys down to the beach for a swim. For many of the lads who had been born into industrial poverty, this turned out to be their first dip in the sea and, for a few, the first time that they had been swimming at all. Harford recalled:

In due course, the numbers reached between 1,000 and 1,200, and a nice packet of trouble seemed collected together – but not a bit of it. We were a really happy lot and there was never any trouble.

A monthly parade was held, a necessary but uncomfortable duty, to say farewell to the boys who had reached the age for frontline service, and immatures whose physical stature was such as to warrant a return to the trenches. These boys were on their way to their respective depots in France, the first stop en route to their battalions at the front.

In March, the Germans launched a massive offensive that put pressure on Allied medical officers to send back as many boys as possible, and, while many were willing to go, not all who had seen action were prepared or happy to go back. Private Alexander McConnell of the 16th Highland Light Infantry cut his own throat with a razor in the early hours of one Monday morning. He had been to the front and had been one of those designated ‘immature’ when he had been sent down to the base for building up. An investigation was launched but the results are unknown; a return to the line and all its attendant terrors would undoubtedly have been difficult, too difficult for some to stomach.

Major Cardinal Harford, who had grown to know these boys, found it hard to see them leave.

It was a parade which I hated, they were such lads, and one found oneself much drawn to them; and one hated to think, after the happy days we had spent together, that they were once more on the way to the Front Line with all its horrors. It was indeed strange, and almost unbelievable, looking at their youthful faces, to realize that all had served in the trenches and that Fate had decreed that they should again be due to return to them.

It was perhaps as well that the major could not have foreseen the heavy bombardments that, in the last year of the war, were to take the lives of many of ‘his’ boys.

12
1918: The Year of Decision

BRAVELY HE ANSWERED
HIS COUNTRY’S CALL
HIS BRIGHT YOUNG LIFE
HE GAVE FOR ALL

13095 Private Albert Povey
6th Royal Berkshire Regiment

Killed in Action 23 September 1915, aged 17

The nature of warfare had changed radically by the last year of the war. In particular, there were more efficient and accurate techniques for hitting targets, including photo-reconnaissance and improved methods of judging location and distance by the use of flash-spotting and sound-ranging. Fuses were made more reliable to cut the number of dud shells, while the shrapnel shell was complemented, and to an extent superseded, by all manner of high-explosive shells, which could devastate trenches, penetrate strong-points and cut barbed wire. With the advent of smoke shells to hide advancing infantry, and the use of gas shells to subdue the enemy in their trenches, artillery by 1918 was no longer a rather blunt tool of predictable destruction but an incisive battlefield weapon.

Artillery was the big killer during the Great War, responsible for well over half of all battlefield casualties. Commanders were well aware of this and had spent much time asking for more and
heavier guns and greater quantities of shells. Although the number of British field guns and light howitzers had not risen substantially on the Western Front between July 1916 and March 1918, up by around 12 per cent, the number of heavy-calibre guns and howitzers had grown exponentially. In July 1916, 576 were in use on the Western Front; by March 1918 this had risen to 2,093.

A war based increasingly on mechanization and heavy industry had never looked so splendid or so utterly fearsome. In March, April and May 1918, the overwhelming power of these guns would be unleashed and into the resulting maelstrom would be hurled tens of thousands of eighteen-year-old boys, many with barely four months’ training and some with as little as fourteen weeks. The Government, under military advice, had considered the question of sending eighteen-year-olds to the front on many occasions in 1917, but had declined to do so. Now, in March 1918, owing to the pressures of the German offensive, ministers felt compelled to reduce the limit to eighteen years and seven months and subsequently to eighteen years and six months.

Eighteen-year-old Private Percy Williams of the Northumberland Fusiliers was one of those boys sent to France in March 1918. He never forgot the impact of the bombardment and recalled it in detail many years later.

I was in a dugout in the third-line trenches when an officer came round and said that there might be action tonight. I’d not been under bad shellfire before and I was shaking and was almost sick with fright.

When the shelling started we were told to leave the dugout and we scrambled up into a trench that had been practically destroyed. Gas shells had been falling all night and saturated everything, covering our masks with a sulphur film. You couldn’t see. I had stomach ache. I felt faint and sick and had to spew up, forcing me to take the gas mask off and vomit as best I could, trying not to breathe in.

Casualties were being suffered and between the din we could hear them shouting for stretcher-bearers, stretcher-bearers. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die!’ We did not know what was happening, not fifty yards on either side of us.

It had been true for much of the war that those holding a trench tended to have an advantage over those seeking to take it. In 1918 this balance altered radically. Artillery, when integrated with new infantry assault tactics, would break the deadlock of the Western Front. If the modern battlefield tactic of ‘shock and awe’ ever had an origin, then it was surely in the fighting of 1918. And if these bombardments could rattle window frames in London, as they did, what effect might they have on the boys drafted out to France in the last spring of the war?

The fighting would test the boys’ resolve to the limit and, in time, their gallantry would humble the highest in the land. When the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, addressed the House of Commons as the tide of war finally began to turn against Germany, his words bordered on a eulogy.

I remember coming at nine o’clock one dark night to Boulogne, after I had been to see the generals, and I met these boys coming up by torch-light from the boat, and they went straight to the front. No sooner were these boys in France than they had to face veteran and victorious troops. No veterans ever fought with greater courage and with greater steadfastness than those lads. They hurled back these legions who had vowed to destroy the British Army. We must all be proud of the boys who have so upheld the honour of their native land, and helped so valiantly to save the cause of the Allies from disaster.

These boys had indeed helped save the Allies but their victory was based upon a lengthy period of preparation. Haig might not have had the troops he wanted in France but with the knowledge
that the German offensive was coming he had set about accumulating and hoarding huge quantities of ammunition, including 16.5 million shells sent to France in the ‘quiet’ months of January and February 1918. Medical supplies were also stockpiled, and with the supplies came young VADs, nurses of the Voluntary Aid Detachments created to augment the medical services. At the outbreak of war, there were over 47,000 VADs, belonging to either the Red Cross or St John Ambulance. This number nearly doubled during the war. Initially, the lower age limit for going to France was twenty-three, but in time this was largely ignored. Even so, only around 5 per cent actually served overseas, forty-two VADs died, thirteen through enemy action.