Read Boy Soldiers of the Great War Online
Authors: Richard van Emden
The carriage rose up and sank down again, listing dangerously over a steep bank. The cries and screams and the hiss of steam escaping from the engine was deafening! One by one, we climbed out through the window of our compartment and on to the line. What a sight met our eyes! The wreckage was piled thirty feet high and terror-stricken men were staggering about. Worse still, men were trapped in the twisted metal of the wreckage.
The collision with the stationary train was bad enough, but less than a minute later the fast-moving express arrived and ploughed
into the derailed carriages, the wreckage of which had spread across the tracks. A fire, which started in the wreckage of the leading carriages, was accelerated as the train splintered and pressurized gas cylinders that fed the carriage lamps ruptured, adding fuel to the flames. It hardly mattered now that the train doors were locked, as all that remained was a tangled wreck, with many men killed, and others wounded and trapped.
Private Thomson recalled:
I was detailed for stretcher-bearer duties. What a job for a lad not yet eighteen! I wept. I saw many a battlefield after that, but I never saw anything like the things I saw on that terrible day.
It was afternoon before we’d rescued everyone. A lot of the men lay down in the field, they were so exhausted, and some of them thought about the folks at home and how worried they’d be when the news got out and they walked to Gretna Post Office to send telegrams.
After a roll call taken later that day, it was found that in all just fifty-seven men were left to answer to their names. All told, the train crash cost the lives of 216 men of the Royal Scots, and wounded a further 227. The disaster at Quintinshill was, and remains, the worst rail crash in British history.
The casualties included three officers, twenty-nine NCOs and 184 other ranks killed. Of 116 identified ages, 29 of the dead were under age, comprising 17 aged eighteen, and 11 aged seventeen. One sixteen-year-old also died. His name was Private John Malone, a lad from Edinburgh. A drummer boy, he had joined the band with all their instruments in the foremost part of the train. In the aftermath of the crash, Private Malone had been trapped in the wreckage where, despite determined efforts, it proved impossible to release him other than by amputating both his legs. He died that night in hospital.
The stunned few who had helped to rescue their friends were
eventually taken away late that afternoon. Private Thomson remembered:
About five o’clock they put us on a goods train and took us to Carlisle and then up to the castle for a wash and a meal. A while later they took us back to the station, and there was a special train waiting to take us on to Liverpool.
Early next morning, we were put to work sorting out bloodstained equipment salvaged from the wrecked train. It was a gruesome task and I’m quite sure that there was flesh stuck to some of it. Then we mustered and were allocated our mess decks for the voyage.
It would have been hard to send these men straight to the front and, after some lastminute discussions with the War Office in London, the survivors were sent back north where they received fourteen days’ leave.
We were lined up on the quayside and marched off through the streets to Lime Street Station. Believe it or not, some children playing in the street threw stones at us. We looked so bedraggled and disreputable that they took us for German prisoners!
It would be the best part of a month before Private Thomson was able to rejoin the remnants of his battalion serving at the front.
WORTHY OF EVERLASTING LOVE
25793 Private James Walters
9th Sherwood Foresters
Killed in Action 9 August 1916, aged 16
It was a momentous occasion for any soldier to cross the English Channel, but for boys it was particularly significant. Embarking, then sailing over twenty-two miles of water, and stepping ashore in France: this was not just a prerequisite of going to war, it conferred on a boy the attributes of a man. Now he was ‘on active service’, a label of which to be proud, and one that every lad who volunteered prayed would some day apply to him.
During their training, boys wanted to appear like soldiers who had already served abroad, craving the outward signs of such status. They habitually removed the stiffening wire from round their rigid peak caps, following the practice of soldiers at the front who did this to soften the outline and make it harder for snipers to see them. Or trainees would seek out a 1908-pattern web belt rather than the cheaper leather version made for the volunteers of 1914; sporting the older webbing made a boy look like an ‘old sweat’, a regular soldier who might be home on leave. But such ploys were only playing at war; now this was war itself, and for boys like sixteen-year-old Thomas Hope, who had just set foot in France, the adventure was only just beginning.
Behind me lies the life of ordered things, comfort, security, peace and the hundred and one things that constitute the life I know … Ahead is the unknown – danger, hardship, wounds, perhaps death, but these possibilities leave me unmoved. I can only think of heroics, of battles won, of returning heroes, glorious deeds already enacted perhaps on this very ground, the newspaper war I have read so much about. What if I had missed this, if I had been born too late? But why worry? I am here, proud and glad to be here, and that is all that really matters. This is my great adventure.
Thomas Hope was watching from the rear of a transport lorry as it slowly wended its way forward towards the line. He could hardly contain his excitement at the unfolding cavalcade of war.
I am as happy as a new schoolboy at his first picnic, revelling in this new life of guns, limbers, ammunition columns, parties of infantry all going the same way up to the front.
This was a war that demanded a huge collective effort. Private Hope was just a small cog in a gigantic military machine but this was significant neither to him nor to the other young boys keen to adopt the manifestations of manhood that came with being a soldier overseas.
And how long did it take to shatter those illusions? In Thomas’s case, it took four days.
Zero day has come and gone and I have lived a hundred years. Four short days ago, I was a youngster with all the ideals of youth, but now I have changed. Everything seems different. I doubt if life can ever be the same. The onetime omnibus sways and jolts over the uneven ground as it carries away from the line what is left of the platoon. Where we are going or what is to happen to us next, I know not and care less. It is sufficient that we are leaving that hell behind.
Drafts from the base camp joined their units wherever they happened to be, and Thomas had been unfortunate enough to find his battalion of the King’s Liverpools as it prepared for an attack. He had experienced his baptism of fire: he had been over the top, an unusually quick submersion into total war and about as severe as it could get.
This was not, on the whole, typical, particularly for new battalions out at the front. Emergencies excepted, they might hope to be slowly inducted into trench life, instructed behind the line before being sent to a relatively quiet sector to learn the ropes. This was the experience of the 17th Royal Fusiliers, a battalion that embarked for France in November 1915. They were still in billets when they were given guidance on life at the front by a sergeant of the Highland Light Infantry. His friendly spiel was recorded by one young private in a letter home.
The day before we went into the trenches for the first time, a sergeant from a Scotch regiment came round to our billet to give us a few hints on trench warfare, a lecture in fact. He was a very sensible chap.
‘Now see here, you fellows, the war’s all right if you take it in the right way and you can have a regular picnic in the trenches if you chum together in threes or fours … This war is a war of craft so you’ve got to be crafty, it’s your craft against their craft and the craftiest man wins … the more you go into the trenches, the craftier you get.’ And so on and so on. I don’t know whether I’ve become any craftier yet but you’d better look out when I come home. Of course I shan’t put my head over the parapet again, I always look underneath now! That’s craft.
The march up to the front line was always a testing time for both fresh and seasoned troops. Old soldiers knew what to expect, but lads new to France were frightened and curious in equal measure. Stomachs churned at the sound of distant gunfire and nerves
frayed at the spectacle of a damaged landscape that became ever more tattered as the front was approached. Finally, there was the eerie illumination of the trenches as Very lights shot up into the night sky, burst, then lingered and slowly faded. The occasional rat-tat-tat of a machine gun might be heard.
Fear was not the only test of their resilience. For any tour in the trenches every man was laden down with equipment not just for his personal use but for the general maintenance of the platoon or company over the following days. Norman Gladden, a young soldier in the Northumberland Fusiliers, noted that his burden had been further increased with personal issues of Mills bombs, Very lights and other portable ammunition.
As a result, my load, in addition to the normal equipment, ammunition, rifle, overcoat, waterproof, two gas helmets and a steel helmet, included a shovel, two Mills bombs, two Very lights, a ground flare, a smoke bomb, a day’s rations, leather jerkin, cap comforter, pair of leather trench gloves joined by a long tape, two sandbags and one hundred extra rounds of ammunition. All these were necessaries in that war but looking back it is incredible that we were able to transport so much under the conditions that prevailed.
If troops were not shelled as they came into the line, then their baptism might begin with the ‘morning hate’. This dose of concentrated fire started at dawn and was delivered by both sides, as if to reassure each other of their continued presence and participation in the war. After this brief bombardment, the day was frequently quiet as men slept, wrote letters or undertook menial tasks, before the ‘evening hate’ at dusk. Only at night-time did the front become alive, as men used the cover of darkness to undertake a multitude of tasks such as bringing up rations, repairing and improving trenches, and patrolling no-man’s-land.
Sixteen-year-old Herbert Gutteridge was among a group of twenty men selected to carry water to the troops in the line. He had only recently arrived in France and this was his second night in reserve a couple of miles behind the front, and he had yet to go into the trenches.
We set out after dark in single file, each man carrying a full petrol can of drinking water. All went well at first, apart from a few stray shells which fell well away from our party, but when we were about 300 yards from our front line, all hell suddenly broke loose. A deluge of shells and trench mortar rifle and machine-gun fire saturated the area. Every man plunged into a shell hole as I grovelled in the bottom of mine, petrified with fear. I expected to be blown into eternity every second, while showers of earth and stone fell upon me from nearby shell bursts and streams of machine-gun bullets tore into the back of my shell hole just above my head. After about ten minutes, the deluge suddenly stopped and our leader ordered us to dash to the front line. This we did, delivered our precious water and got out of this hellish place with all speed. What casualties we had I never knew, as I was very confused and bewildered. I now knew what to expect.
One of the worst tasks was handling the dead, particularly in warm weather when bodies quickly putrefied. The stench could make life intolerable and wherever possible bodies were removed for burial. This was almost the first job on active service that George White had been given and, short of owning up to his real age of fifteen, he simply had to get on with it.
On the second night, we came across a number of bodies of British soldiers near where we were working. The thing that struck us was that their faces and hands were black as if they had been coloured troops. We soon found that they were not, when we took the identity discs from their necks and went through their pockets
for the paybooks. Each soldier carried two identity discs of different shapes and colours on a cord round the neck: the round one had to be taken from the body and the other one left on. The fact that each one had two discs told us that they had not yet been reported dead but probably missing. We were conscious of the fact that by handing in the discs and paybook of each man, his next-of-kin, who had probably been informed that he was missing and hoped he had been taken prisoner, would now receive the dreaded telegram informing them that he had been killed in action. As we looked through their paybooks, most contained photographs of themselves and their families. We found the whole business very sad and felt sorry that it had fallen on us to disclose it.
Once settled in, a new battalion could expect to be attached to another for tuition and training in trench warfare. In a quiet sector, companies would be sent forward one by one to have the important details pointed out. Men sent out on draft joined their units wherever they happened to be, and for them the procedure was slightly different. It was sensible, if possible, to tag on to someone who had some expertise so as to learn as much as possible. For younger soldiers, this initiation frequently turned to a respect bordering on hero-worship.
Among groups of men with particular unit responsibilities, such as the machine-gunners or stretcher-bearers, teams had to bond quickly. These men implicitly relied on each other and teaching newcomers the ropes was important not just for individual survival but for the life of the group as a whole. George Coppard had no doubt that the example of one man, Lance Corporal William ‘Snowy’ Hankin, had a great influence on him: