Boy Soldiers of the Great War (13 page)

How is father’s job progressing? I hope he’s getting on alright with it.

God bless you

Cyril

Ernest Steele, the quiet and studious boy from Leytonstone, had also arrived in France in mid-1915. He wrote home too but, against regulations, kept a diary for his own consumption as well. His tone was far less ebullient than Cyril’s.

Tuesday, December 14th, 1915.

Worked on canal bank in morning. In evening went up to firing line. Had to belly-flop in mud and water four times in half a mile owing to M.Gs. and rapid fire. Got over near Hooge when mine went up and then over came umpteen shells and rapid fire. I got into ditch, up past my knees in mud. Was helped out and we rushed across field over to support trenches with wire. I fell over a dead man. On way back we had to belly-flop again, owing to rapid fire and, going through Ypres, shells burst 10 yards away. I got hit slightly. Five men in another party wounded. Ugh!

Wednesday, December 15th, 1915.

Another day fatigue up near Hooge. No work done as no tools. Beaucoup tea, thanks to K. Shrops. L. I. who supplied us with everything. We got back safely but another party got hit.
Fourteen
men were wounded. Poor old ‘C’ Company.

I am feeling rocky, wrist hurting slightly and nerves going. Iodine for wrist and rum for nerves in evening.

Rum was useful in anaesthetizing the nerves, as well as helping to fortify them if men were about to go over the top. More usually,
it was dished out on a day-to-day basis to reinvigorate those holding the line. With approval, it could also be given to men who had undergone a particularly onerous ordeal, such as a trench raid, or a fighting patrol in no-man’s-land, but not ordinarily for men returning from a working party near the firing line such as described by Ernest Steele.

The rum was extremely strong and came in large earthenware jars, chunks of which litter the battlefields today, testament to its ubiquity. It was served out by a sergeant, who measured the dark viscous liquid into a tin mug, on to a spoon or simply tipped it into a soldier’s mess tin. This was done in the presence of an officer, at least in theory, ensuring that each man took his tot and did not pass it on. Its medicinal effects were instantaneous, warming a soldier up from frozen toes to numb ears. To the young who had never taken rum, and to a few who had never even tasted alcohol, the effect was overpowering, as seventeen-year-old Ben Clouting found out.

During the first cold snap we received our first rum issue which we were to drink straight down. The old soldiers showed no hesitation tipping their heads straight back, so following suit I downed my share. My goodness, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets! I’d never tasted rum before in my life and this was neat navy rum; I thought my throat was on fire.

The over-consumption of alcohol was as much an issue for public concern in the Victorian and Edwardian periods as it is today. Alcohol was the cause of a great deal of social vice and family violence, and Christian organizations struggled to persuade all classes, with an emphasis on the poor, that the devil was in the drink and that abstinence was always best. Temperance was not just a principle, it was a movement, and thousands of boys who went to war had promised their parents that they would try to avoid the German bullet and the sins of the bottle in almost equal measure.

There was no sin in the way Smiler Marshall chose to use his rum. Trench foot was a debilitating condition brought on by living in alternately freezing and wet conditions. To combat the problem, whale oil was issued as a protection against the weather. It was not a popular remedy; rum, according to Smiler Marshall, was much better. Smiler was living proof that not all rum was dished out as stipulated in military manuals.

I didn’t smoke much but you got plenty of cigarettes issued and someone would say, ‘Who’ll give me one or two smokes for the rum ration?’ I used to give them my cigarettes for the ration so my water bottle was always three parts full.

Now, when we got in the front line the orderly officer and orderly sergeant came round twice during the night, once just before twelve and again between five and six in the morning. When they’d gone by I’d know they’d got a good distance of the front line to go, so as quick as lightning I unwound my puttees and took my boot off and my sock and poured some rum into my hand, took a little lick myself, and then rubbed my toes for ten minutes then put my boot and puttees back. You were not allowed to take clothes of any description off in the front line, not for three days. When they went by next time I did the same to the other foot and therefore I kept good feet. If you didn’t attend to your feet, well, if the frost penetrates them and your boots are wet through, then your feet can go black if you aren’t very careful.

Standing in a trench at night, peering across no-man’s-land, was hard enough for anyone who was cold and craving sleep. Young boys, many of whom had not added the bulk or fat that came with maturing years, found frost, biting winds, and snow almost impossible to cope with. Sentry duty in particular was a job that would eat away at a man’s very spirit, the cold seeping up the legs and into the body, making him ache from head to toe. It was also mind-numbingly boring and endlessly repetitive.

Nevertheless, every man on duty knew that to be found asleep was a serious matter and potentially a court martial awaited anyone who was caught as Royce Mckenzie well knew.

We’d been three or four days with nothing to eat and no drink, nothing, and we were buggered, absolutely buggered. We’d lost a lot of men, so we were stretched out, about twenty or thirty yards between each sentry, looking over no-man’s-land and I was struggling to keep my eyes open and I must have fell asleep, anyway I felt this tap on my shoulder and it was Sub Lieutenant Newall and he says to me, ‘Mckenzie, it might not be me next time, try and keep awake.’ He was one of the finest gentlemen I ever came across, if it had been anybody else I’d have been court-martialled and shot.

Bristolian George Blanning was not so lucky. George was born in June 1898 and was sent out on a draft in 1916. According to Bill Pain, a private in the same battalion, he was still not quite eighteen.

He was in the front line and when the visiting officer came round they found him asleep and he got tried by court martial and Major Hawks – a proper old army man – was in charge and Blanning got sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. We were all on parade and heard it read out as a lesson to other troops of course. That night, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Martin Archer-Shee, MP, came back from England and interviewed the chap and said, ‘Now tell me your correct age’ because he didn’t believe that the boy was nineteen. George was stubborn and wouldn’t give his age away at first, but eventually Archer-Shee got it out of him that he was going to be eighteen in two weeks’ time, and he got him off. They put him in the cookhouse until he was nineteen, and that’s where he finished up, doing the cooking behind the lines.

Court martial records indicate that George Blanning’s sentence of three years’ penal servitude was later suspended.

Sleeping on duty endangered everyone in the front line, but total exhaustion was total exhaustion and it took a hard-nosed officer to make an example of any man whose head had perhaps fleetingly slumped forward on to the parapet. Working at night, under the cover it gave, expending physical energy was in many respects preferable to standing motionless, watching shadows. Work generated body heat that kept a man awake and, if he was not warm, then at least he was less cold.

At night on sentry duty a soldier was expected to keep his head and shoulders above the level of the parapet to maintain a good field of view. In the darkness, he was protected from all but a random shot. During the day a trench periscope was used, revealing little other than barbed wire, earth and discarded rubbish. The enemy remained hidden, and it could be weeks, even months, before Tommy saw Fritz and then, perhaps, only a fleeting glimpse. Vic Cole had been in France throughout the summer of 1915 and had, as yet, seen no one.

I was making my way along a much battered and little used trench, endeavouring to trace a broken telephone wire, when, taking a look over the top to see where I was, I saw a German about three hundred yards away digging at the back of a trench parados. I watched him for a moment and thought, ‘Well, I’m entitled to have a shot at him.’ I aimed, pulled the trigger and saw a piece of cloth or leather fly off the side of his coat – he disappeared – did I wound him? I shall never know, but it was my first shot at the enemy.

It was sniping, though not in the pure sense of the word. Other men, picked deliberately for their marksmanship, were the real snipers; the rest were happy to take potshots as the fancy took them.

Sniping was a perennial threat. A battalion’s routine spell in forward trenches, especially in a busy sector, was punctuated by casualties from this deadly game of cat and mouse. The victims included a disproportionate number of those new to the line, oblivious to the dangers of a quick peek over the top, as well as the careless, tall or downright unlucky.

Seventeen-year-old Londoner Archie Gardiner belonged to the category of the exceptionally unlucky. During his battalion’s three-day tour in the line close to Ypres he was the sole fatality, shot by a sniper as he inadvertently raised his head above the parapet.

Archie had enlisted in the Queen’s Royal West Surreys with his best friend Edgar Lee. Both were aged sixteen and lived just a few doors apart in Greenvale Road, Eltham. They had grown up together, serving side by side in the 1st Royal Eltham Scouts. Archie was a little older than his friend and had gained a reputation for being mischievous, and it is possible his parents thought the army might do him some good, for neither objected when he went to join up.

Archie had been serving an engineering apprenticeship at Woolwich Polytechnic. He had never been the most conscientious student and his first year’s training had been marked as only ‘fair’. It was during his second year, coinciding with the outbreak of war, that Archie’s work slipped badly. His attendance dropped and his tutors were not happy with his conduct, marking his report ‘Unsatisfactory. Slack and inattentive’. It was to no one’s surprise when, in early March 1915, Edgar and Archie enlisted. They were given the consecutive regimental numbers 5026 and 5027 and, being staunch friends, they sought to stick together, embarking for France on the last day of August 1915 with the 8th (Service) Battalion.

They had not been overseas very long when, one wet November night, the battalion arrived in the line near the shattered village of Dickebusch to find the trenches waterlogged
and in desperate need of draining. In places, the sodden parapet had simply collapsed and it was while undertaking repairs that Archie was hit and killed.

Edgar Lee wrote a short note to Archie’s parents.

I am writing this in the trenches. I have just come back from seeing poor old Archie. He was killed by a sniper this morning about 10.30 a.m. He was shot just above the right eye with an explosive bullet and death was instantaneous. I am sorry there is no mistake about it because I went and saw him myself.

The depth of Edgar’s loss was terrible. ‘I miss him more than you at the time, being with him every day,’ he wrote. The battalion war diary briefly noted: ‘Quiet days, our snipers gained the upper hand easily.’ Unusually, Archie’s death was not recorded. His local newspaper, the
Eltham and District Times
, later published a farewell to its local lad, mourning the passing of ‘a true British boy’. It said, ‘He always played the game and he played it to the end.’ Archie was buried in Spoilbank Cemetery, four kilometres southeast of Ypres. Two days after he was killed, his battalion left the line.

The sniper who killed Archie may have hidden himself in the ground between the German first and second lines. Alternatively, he may have been shooting from within the trench, carefully concealed behind an iron shield built in the parapet. These shields gave considerable protection to the snipers, who used just a small aperture in the half-inch-thick plate through which to shoot, knowing they were safe from all but the most accurate of retaliatory shots.

It took a steady hand and a keen eye to be effective and snipers were frequently young, although Second Lieutenant Stuart Cloete’s ‘best sniper’ was perhaps something of a record. The boy turned out to be only fourteen years old.

He was the finest shot and the best little soldier I had. A very nice boy, always happy. I got him a Military Medal and when he went back to Blighty and I suppose school, he had a credit of six Germans hit.

Sniping helped counteract the unremitting boredom of daytime life, but it was not risk-free, for the hunted rarely stood their victimization for long. They retaliated by using their spare time in a meticulous hunt for their tormentor, trying to work out exactly where he was hiding. Once he was discovered, the men would wait. The next time the sniper fired, an instant fusillade would be directed at him by men positioned at different points along the opposing trench.

Cyril José had his ‘closest shave’ when he slid aside the metal plate that covered the aperture in the sniper’s shield. Unbeknown to Cyril, a German had already pinpointed the position.

I was just taking a squint through the hole, intending to have a shot when, as I had it open – thud – plonk! A bullet hit the sandbag in front of the hole and ricocheted, hitting the iron plate. Another half inch probably and I should have had a little hole through my head. But thank God it didn’t come off and I’m still alive and kicking.

Although the sounds of war terrified many, there were those, like Smiler Marshall, who found some enjoyment in the situation. He was always keen on a bit of fun and the noise of war, in particular, delighted him.