Boy Soldiers of the Great War (46 page)

I looked again at the German graves as I passed, and I thought of the relations of those men in Germany. I thought too of the many who also would never return home to their families.

I was trying to realize that it was all over, that I was alive and that I had a life to live. It was almost unbelievable. For seven months I had lived a day at a time, but now I could look forward as well as back.

More than a year earlier, in mid-1917, Private Thomas Hope was undergoing battle training with his battalion, well behind the
lines. It was beautiful summer weather and, after a hard day’s training, Thomas and his friends meandered back to the billet for rest, a peaceful evening and a chance to chat. They were housed in an old barn and, as there was a full moon that night, a soft light was diffused throughout the building. ‘The hooting of an owl outside, the rustling of leaves and the sound of restless cattle,’ as Thomas recalled, were things to be appreciated while the men puffed contentedly on their pipes and cigarettes and talked well into the night.

When will the war end? What will happen to us? Questions we can never agree on.

The first we can find no definite answer to; it is something only to be dreamed about, something that, deep down in our hearts, we doubt if we’ll ever live to see. Nevertheless, that does not prevent us from speculating and surmising on just what will happen to us when the miracle takes place.

The older sages of the group had firm ideas that post-war life would be no bed of roses. Hope’s friend Webster was frighteningly cynical.

I’ll tell you what will happen to you duration soldiers. You’ll have the time of your lives, you’ll be hugged and kissed, treated and petted, they’ll have banners strung across the streets: ‘Welcome Home, Our Heroic Tommies’, you’ll be received with open arms, they’ll let you mess on their doorstep and thank you for doing it, you’ll be the heaven and earth and all that therein is for just one month, then some morning they’ll wake up and realize the war is over, and that’s when you fellows will have to start using your own toilet paper. You’ll get the cold shoulder, as they’ll have no more use for a penniless, out-of-work, fighting man who stinks of trench manners and speech … Ah, you can laugh, boys; you’re little tin gods just now, but when it’s all over you’ll find you’ve
not only had to fight the war but you’ll have to fight the peace as well, and a damned sight harder too, if you’re going to win through, so get it out of your thick heads that you’re in for a cushy time.

Webster’s opinions caused consternation in the barn, not just among Hope and his close-knit friends, but also among those who could not help but listen to this doom-laden prognosis. ‘Smother him, somebody, he’s too cheerful,’ came one response, amid calls to ram a sock in his mouth, or kick him.

At sixteen years old, Thomas was inclined to listen intently to the older men, who had taught him not only how to survive but how to live. Taffy, another old stalwart who was keen to continue the conversation, decided to put forward his views.

All I know is that there will be a couple of million men suddenly thrust back into civil life … men accustomed to look on life cheaply, all of them coarsened in different degrees by the exacting life they have been forced to live. As in war, so it will be in peace, and anything might happen.

Taffy pointed out that although the post-war struggle would affect hundreds of thousands, not every struggle was applicable to every man. For younger soldiers there would be specific difficulties. Thomas listened carefully, aware that his friend had given the subject on which he was talking some detailed thought. He watched Taffy, ‘with his head to one side and his pointing index finger wagging away in tune with his ideas’.

‘Some of you, of course, have jobs to return to. For you, the war will merely have been an episode, but there are others like Mac, Duggan, Barham and a few more, who had just started an apprenticeship. To them the war will have been more than an interruption; the most valuable years of their lives have been wasted here;
they’ll have to start all over again, handicapped by age. Then there are the babes like Jock [Thomas] there.’

‘Hold on, Taffy,’ I interrupted.

‘It’s quite true, Jock, there are dozens like you out here, straight from school into this, men before you were youths, the only trade you know – that of killing. Yes, unless the old country can dig up a Solomon, peace is going to bring one glorious mess, an unequal fight against a public who will soon forget our sacrifices, and new generations who will know nothing of the war and what it meant to those who served.’

The convivial party broke up shortly after but, while the majority of men were soon fast asleep, snuggled under blankets and greatcoats, Thomas’s mind was active.

I toss restlessly, thinking of the different opinions … Webster’s, well, like all old soldiers he dearly loves a grouse. Taffy now, he has evidently given the subject serious thought and his words keep returning to my mind.

Their speculation proved with hindsight to have been remarkably accurate. Books abound detailing the post-war world, the prime minister’s ‘Homes fit for heroes’ promises that in the end left thousands of former soldiers out in the cold. There are harrowing stories of post-war hardship, of beggar-soldiers hawking matches on London’s Embankment, of former officers offering in newspaper advertisements their manual and mental labour to anyone who might see their way to employ a former lieutenant or captain, now living through hard times. Then there were perhaps the saddest cases of all: soldiers driven to suicide, whose death was not believed to have been in any way attributable to war service, leaving a widow and children to fight their own battles to survive.

And there are stories, too, of the medical boards that sought excuses to cut a man’s war pension to a pittance, despite his continued suffering from wounds.

George Parker, holder of a medal for gallantry, won when aged seventeen, was still recuperating in hospital in February 1919. He was just one of many who were misled after the war, persuaded to sign away his rights.

We wounded were waiting in the usual way for the disability pension people to sort us out with our grades of disablement. I was graded C. It might take months but, and here lay the cunning, if we signed a paper called Form Z22 in which we would agree to accept whatever pension they awarded, we could be discharged at once. I was still young, not twenty-one for another seven months, so like others I signed it. A great number of us have been sorry since.

Many wounded boy soldiers had spent so much time in hospital that the war was over by the time they left. Cyril José was still recovering from wounds he received in April 1918; George Coppard, who had been wounded in the leg, was demobilized as medically unfit. He always regretted that he had not been in France at the end of the fighting. ‘To have celebrated survival with those left of my old company would have been a privilege indeed,’ he acknowledged.

George was left, early in February 1919, to face the world with a £28 gratuity and a 25s-a-week pension for war injuries, which dropped after six months, then ceased altogether after a further year. He, like many others, found that his old clothes would no longer fit and spent almost all his gratuity in clothing himself so he could resemble a civilian.

The youth had become a man but with only the capabilities of a youth to meet adult realities in civvy street. Although an expert machine-gunner, I was a numbskull so far as any trade or craft was concerned … No practical steps were taken to rehabilitate the broad mass of demobbed men, and I joined the queues for jobs as messengers, window cleaners and scullions.

For the boys who had thrown up their apprenticeships, there was indeed a price to pay. Even if their old jobs had been saved, they were frequently expected to begin again, to work their way back up a ladder they had already climbed partway. Norman Collins, who as a teenager had walked away from his apprenticeship in the drawing office of shipbuilders William Gray and Company in Hartlepool, found that he could not bear to go back at the age of twenty-one and start afresh, even though, as he admitted, he had forgotten most of what he had once been taught. Many were now men with a man’s pride; they wanted to earn money, enough to marry and support a family, yet while that was possible for those who had learnt a trade and could apply for, or return to, work fully qualified, for those in their early twenties it was not an option.

George Head, who had joined the Royal Engineers, was in this position, having resigned his employment as a junior draughtsman to enlist under age. At seventeen, he had been earning 12s 6d per week in the drawing office and when he left he had been patted on the back and given extra pay, a reward for his patriotism.

I was now twenty-two; what would I earn, taking into consideration that I had lost five years’ professional training and was no further advanced mentally as far as being an engineering draughtsman was concerned?

In the end, George warily returned to his job in the drawing office and was paid £3 10s a week. It sounded like an improvement, but owing to inflation his pay was not enough to marry and live on in 1919. He also discovered that other draughtsmen of his age who had not served or who had completed their apprenticeship before enlisting were being paid £5 a week. He was, in effect, being penalized for his patriotism.

Cecil Lewis, the Royal Flying Corps pilot who had flown on the Western Front since the age of seventeen, was aware of what he,
and others like him, had lost in the intervening years. Comparing himself to men who had pursued careers uninterrupted, he began his autobiography,
Sagittarius Rising
, with an acknowledgement of what war had cost.

To me, and thousands like me, the easy developing pattern [of his life] was completely thrown out of symmetry by the First World War. It took me from school at sixteen, it destroyed all hope of university training or apprenticeship to a trade, it deprived me of the only carefree years, and washed me up, ill-equipped for any serious career, with a Military Cross, a Royal handshake, a six-hundred-pound gratuity, and – I almost forgot to say – my life.

There were men older than I whose education was complete. To them, the War was a setback, disastrous but not irredeemable. There were others, older still, who had positions to which they could return. But we very young men had no place, actual or prospective, in a peaceful world. We walked off the playing-fields into the lines.

Near the village of Flesquières, close to the town of Cambrai, there is a small Commonwealth War Graves cemetery with about 300 gravestones. One in particular cannot fail to move the visitor. At the foot of the grave is the inscription, paid for by the family: ‘School, War, Death’. The soldier who lies there, Private Arnold Statham, was not under age, at least not when he was killed, but the words tell the reader something of the truncated nature of his short life and the few life-experiences he sampled. Yet this was also true of those who survived but who had enlisted so young as to know little else. They had come through the war but were ill-equipped for any peacetime occupation; so intense was the experience that the rest of life paled into insignificance.

Former Seaforth Highlander Norman Collins acknowledged the feeling.

The years of war seemed to last longer than all of the rest of my life put together … I really felt much older than my parents, and I think that feeling continued for the rest of my life.

For Norman, as for so many of that generation, their epitaph might read ‘School, War, Life’, but what were they going to do with their lives? How were they going to live with the memories, or justify their existence when their friends had died so young?

In response, Norman and other men used the maturity the war had given them as a springboard to accomplish things faster than might otherwise have been the case, and discovered that those lost years, in terms of career development, could be recovered. Norman became a director of Perkins Engines; Cecil Lewis one of the four founder members of the BBC in 1922; Ben Clouting the owner of a successful industrial window-cleaning company.

For others, what was taken from the war is, to outside eyes, more oblique. A veteran who had served under age, one of four centenarians who attended a service at the Cenotaph to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the outbreak of war, was one of the thousands who remained entirely silent upon the subject of his service for the whole of his life. He died in October 2004 aged 104, taking whatever he saw, whatever he did, to the grave.

Former soldiers like George Coppard, George Parker and Cyril José were still the lucky ones. For all the empty promises the Government had made, for all the disappointment that peace might bring these men, they were alive, they could still have families, children who, in their turn, would produce the next generation.

Dick Trafford also survived the war, despite being wounded and gassed. In 1919, he returned home.

We got on a train to Liverpool and then from Liverpool to Ormskirk, and the first person I saw going to work was my dad on his way to the shipyards. Of course he downed tools and told his
mates, ‘Tell them I’m not coming in today, tell them why.’ And I went home. Of course my mother was there; she couldn’t believe her own eyes when she saw me, I think she thought she’d lost me for good. Oh, she broke her heart, threw her arms around me, her long lost son. They never thought about my feelings about being home ’cos they’d got feelings of their own, they’d got me home and that was all they bothered about.

At home we did away with our uniforms that were full of lice. I’ll always remember my mother’s face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you lousy devil, all your clothes, dump ’em,’ she says, ‘dump ’em and get one of your old suits.’ Of course my old suits didn’t fit. I’d put weight on, you see, and I’d grown; I had been a boy when I went to war. I had nothing to put on so my father had to lend me a suit while he went to Liverpool to buy me one ready-made.