Boy Soldiers of the Great War (4 page)

A good proportion came from orphanages, joining for the comradeship and the sense of belonging more than anything else. One man in my barracks at Seaforth had come from a Dr Barnardo’s home; he had no relatives and to him, as to all these men, the army was their new family, most, not surprisingly, never receiving any mail from the outside world at all.

Social misfits, criminals, tramps, tearaways and orphans: it was a hotch-potch army and hardly a profession that recommended itself to families with even modest ambitions for their sons.

Although the army offered a bolt-hole for a few, peacetime soldiering was no easy option. Men initially signed on for twelve years, undertaking a minimum of three years’ full-time service followed by nine on the reserve. The training was hard and it was thorough, forging those who enlisted into some of the best fighting soldiers in the world. For those who found they could not take to army life, there was the possibility of being bought out by a kind relation or friend, but this was prohibitively expensive for most working-class people.

The desperation that had brought many to the sanctuary of the army sometimes drove the same unhappy men to desert when they had had enough, with a midnight flit over the camp wall the usual tried and tested method.

This form of ‘personal demobilization’ was a major problem for the pre-war army, which found that nearly 5 per cent of its annual recruitment did a bunk with little fear of being caught. Once a soldier was reported missing, a twenty-one-day ‘search’ would be made, after which his uniform and kit would be sold off and the man officially designated a deserter. For those who left the army in this way, there was always the possibility of a return. Re-enlisting under a fictitious name was easy in a world in which there were no computers to cross-reference names, no National Insurance numbers to check identities, and no requirement to show a birth certificate on enlistment. A name, any old name, was taken on trust.

The army had to weigh up conflicting interests, capturing those who abused the enlistment process while not putting off genuine recruits. Pre-war recruitment was already insufficient to meet requirements and for this reason practical proposals to curb the problem of fraudulent enlistment had been rejected. Checking birth certificates was abandoned on the basis that too many ‘good’ men did not possess one and would be unable to recall where their birth had been recorded. While registering births had been compulsory since 1837, in practice it became widespread only in 1874 when a
£2 fine was imposed on any parent caught failing to register a baby. However, many never bothered to purchase a copy of the certificate for future reference, and therefore their sons would be incapable of presenting one on enlistment. Using fingerprints was another option, as was the idea of introducing compulsory smallpox vaccination on the forearm. Both were rejected, as the former appeared to criminalize the innocent, while the latter would have left a scar – proof of previous service but also an act tantamount to branding. In the end the only tentative reform introduced to curb fraudulent enlistment was the character reference.

In October 1910, one case was forwarded to the military authorities as a prime and particularly bad example of fraudulent enlistment. On reading the file, one senior officer wrote:

I hardly know what to advise, and perhaps you will prefer to leave the matter alone; but everyone who reads the adventures of Private Stacey will realize the extent to which we are victimized by men of his type.

Private Stacey’s case was exceptional but not unique. He had first enlisted in 1902, aged fifteen, after the death of his parents. He was left, as he acknowledged, with only two options: either to present himself at one of Dr Barnardo’s homes or to join the army. He chose the latter. His story of the next eight years, in and out of the forces, underlined how difficult it was for the military authorities to keep track of a young man utterly bent on enlisting, deserting, and re-enlisting. Finally, in 1910, Stacey revealed and revelled in his military exploits in a brazen statement entitled ‘One of the King’s Bad Bargains by Himself’.

Stacey enlisted in the Essex Regiment and for a while enjoyed army life, until his first leave.

At Christmas time I was given a ten-day furlough. On returning to barracks, however, I found that not one particle of my kit
was left and no doubt it had been sold by someone who wanted a drink. I was put down for practically a new kit and given 1/- a week as pay. That I could not stomach, and one night I sold everything I had and deserted. I had three or four days’ holiday on the strength of the sold kit, and then walked to Reading. I stopped in the town one night, and the following morning presented myself at the Barracks as a promising young recruit.

Stacey gave himself the new name of Charles Cousins.

I liked the Berkshires very much, and no doubt would have got on well, but after being at Reading two or three weeks, one day I was surprised to see two men come up to enlist who were in my company in the Essex Regt at Warley. I told them how to go about enlisting but one of them was very slack and apparently gave himself away, and of course the other fellow was caught too. Not only did they give themselves away but me also. However, I got wind that they were going to cross-question me in the morning about the Essex Regt, so the night previous I sold up and ‘bunked over the wall’.

From Reading, Stacey went to Aldershot where he enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps under the name Fred Bailey; after five months he deserted and joined the Royal West Kent Regiment at Gravesend using the name Cotton. When Stacey presented himself yet again, this time at Woolwich, he was asked by the recruiting sergeant if he could supply a ‘character’, references having just been introduced. Stacey’s answer was typically brash.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I have only just left a five years’ job so I suppose he will give me a Character’ … I then gave him my real name as my employer, and the following morning called at the house which I told him to write to, and filled in the Character form as
having worked 5 years as a painter, honest, sober, and everything puffed up to make a spotless Character.

Over the next six years, he deserted and re-enlisted a further seven times, serving for a short time in India – ‘too hot for a white man’ – before feigning illness to get home.

How much longer Stacey could have cocked a snook at the military authorities will never be known, for when he heard of a special army order pardoning deserters and those who had fraudulently enlisted, he decided to come clean.

I made a full confession of having fraudulently enlisted into twelve corps … I have finished with the army now. Not that I disrespect it for I would fight for old England tomorrow if there was a war. But the army does at present not require my services. Let us hope they never may.

Part of the problem with fraudulent enlistment, as identified by the army, lay with the rewards paid to recruiting sergeants for each new man attested. ‘The present system of rewards does not tend to make the recruiter too particular or careful as the more men, good or bad, he recruits, the greater his reward,’ acknowledged the Army Council. It was a quandary that would remain largely unresolved, for the desire to halt the abuse of the system ran counter to the requirement for more peacetime volunteers. The difficulties met in cases such as Stacey’s were exasperating but ultimately manageable in peacetime. Yet if it was hard to clamp down on fraudulent enlistment in the pre-war Regular Army, how much more difficult would it be if the army expanded fivefold in the first few months of an international war? The same none-too-particular sergeants would still be signing men up, only this time, instead of arriving in ones and twos, they would be queuing round the block, beating a path to recruiting desks to enlist. Many would be boys, as keen as anyone else to serve.

Some of these eager recruits would have served their time in the Territorials. This force had been formed in 1908, as an attempt to build a national force of the disparate arms of part-time service, namely the Yeomanry and the Volunteers, but it already had a mixed history. Bringing these units into one unified force did not meet with universal approval, and many older soldiers resented what they saw as an unnecessary change to a hitherto unbroken system.

Nevertheless, for boys who did not want to make the army a career, the Territorials offered an attractive and alternative way of serving. They had been established for home defence only and for this reason seventeen had been designated as the minimum age to enlist. Thousands of boys had enthusiastically responded and continued to do so. By 1914 as many as 40,000 were aged eighteen or less and almost as many again were under twenty. In all roughly a third of the entire force was made up of teenagers.

One such was Alfred Anderson, who, at sixteen, joined the Territorials of the 5th Black Watch regiment in 1912. These were the so-called ‘Saturday afternoon soldiers’, who worked during the week on farms or landed estates, and in the small towns of Perth and Newtyle. In truth, part-timers were looked down upon by regular soldiers, but that did not worry lads like Alfred. He worked in the family business, a joinery that his father had set up in 1902, and he worked hard. His father was strict: holidays were taken by other people and, as was frequently the case among family members at work, pay was indifferent. Joining the Territorials gave Alfred an escape. He could link up with good friends such as Jock Mackenzie, Jim Ballantyne and Lyon Jeffrey, and look forward to fun at weekends. Just as important to Alfred – and one of the allures of the Territorial Force – was that he was entitled to fifteen days off to attend annual summer camp, a release from work that his father could not veto.

The summer camp of 1914, his third, began in the last full week of July, in glorious weather. One day, Alfred, just turned
eighteen, was on a route march with his regiment when the order came to fall out by the side of the road. It being a warm day, the men were in shirtsleeves. They had just passed through the town of Crieff where they picked up a few local boys who ran alongside them and now sat among them as they halted for a statutory ten minutes’ rest. As the lads from the Black Watch sat soaking up the summer sun, a photographer strolled up. This was an opportunity for him to make some money, taking pictures of the soldiers and selling copies to them later that week in the town.

‘We didn’t have any idea the war was about to break out, not the slightest. It was a beautiful day, that was all, and we were having a rest,’ recalled Alfred, who died in November 2005 aged 109. Alfred was the last of the 268,777 pre-war Territorials.

The coming of war brought a change in their role. For several years, soldiers had been given the opportunity to sign a legal document, the Imperial Service Obligation, to signify their willingness to ‘accept liability for service outside the United Kingdom in time of national Emergency’. There were, however, vast discrepancies among battalions in the numbers of men signifying their agreement. In 1912 the 6th Notts and Derby Regiment (raised predominantly in Chesterfield) had the agreement of twenty-six officers and 730 other ranks; the 7th Notts and Derby Regiment (Nottingham), the agreement of two officers and eighteen other ranks. The 7th and 8th Middlesex had almost their entire complement signed up, the 7th having secured the signatures of twenty officers and 841 other ranks, the 8th twenty-three officers and 837 other ranks. However, the 4th Royal West Kent Regiment had the signatures of two officers and twelve other ranks, and the 5th Battalion no officers at all and just two other ranks. The 5th Black Watch, with whom Alfred Anderson was serving, had no officer and only one other rank in agreement. There had been one simple reason for this, according to Alfred Anderson: ‘no one ever asked us until the war broke out’.

Whatever the reason, the fact remained that by the start of August 1914, only 18,683 currently serving soldiers had agreed to serve overseas and, with time-served men leaving the service, that was almost 2,000 fewer than two years before. In other words, only about one in fourteen of the men currently serving with the Territorials could legally be sent to fight. With the continuation of voluntary enlistment, the country could hardly force abroad men who had signed to serve on home shores only. Nevertheless, it was soon to become clear that these men were needed in France once the Regular Army found itself confronted by an enemy vastly superior in numbers.

Germany’s huge armies advanced into Luxembourg on 2 August and into Belgium the following day, part of the opening gambit of the meticulously honed blueprint for an attack on France. This plan would use pre-emptive speed and devastating force. Belgium was a convenient backdoor by which to invade from the north, and in due course to seize Paris and knock France out of the war before German attention would turn to Russia.

In the event, Germany failed to respond to a British ultimatum to withdraw, and when that expired at 11 p.m. on 4 August, Britain entered the war. Immediately, general mobilization of the nation’s professional army was ordered and within hours it had swung into action. The following day, thousands of reservists began to stream into their regimental depots across the United Kingdom, bringing the first battalions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) up to strength – in the end, reservists made up 60 per cent of the BEF. Soon they were sailing to the Continent, to take up a position on the left flank of the French, to help counter the German thrust from the north. They were the advance guard of six divisions, a total of 80,000 troops.

The plans for sending an Expeditionary Force to the Continent had been carefully drawn up and its departure met with few hitches. It came as a welcome relief to Members of Parliament, many of
whom had doubted that Britain was capable of dispatching any such force. In March 1914, there had been angry debates in the House of Commons about the size of the army and the average age of volunteers. The Army (Annual) Report had been grim reading for MPs. Recruits were overwhelmingly young, around half being under nineteen. The fear was expressed that in a European conflagration, 14 per cent of the Regular Army, according to its own estimates, would be legally ineligible to serve abroad, while many of the rest would be physically disadvantaged in a fight with other nations who generally took their soldiers at the age of twenty-one.