Boy Soldiers of the Great War (16 page)

AS A SACRIFICE
GLAD TO BE OFFERED
A BOY
HE DIED FOR ENGLAND

Second Lieutenant Harold Cottrell
2nd South Lancashire Regiment

Killed in Action 30 September 1916, aged 18

The opening months of the war had been catastrophic for the officer corps of the small British Regular Army. Between August 1914 and the following March, some 6,000 of its officers had been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or were missing. This loss had to be made good, and replacements were found among the young temporary officers who had enlisted for the duration of the war.

Initially, there had been confusion about the appointment of temporary officers, with the War Office offering precious little guidance. Good luck or, better still, good contacts could win a commission, with a large number of appointments being made by commanding officers, adjutants and civil dignitaries before the system was tightened up.

Many of the new officers who were sent to France in early 1915 had come forward as the result of a Government advertisement in
The Times
the previous August. The appeal for temporary officers aged seventeen to thirty had elicited a good response, but there
was no expectation that these men, especially the youngest, would see overseas action until they were aged at least eighteen. There was an assumption that, unlike most working-class boys of their age who needed to be nineteen to go abroad, these youngsters would be sufficiently well built to cope with overseas service and had innate officer qualities.

The war changed this expectation. While senior army officers and politicians knew that the war would last a long time, few predicted the number of casualties. In particular, losses from among junior officers proportionately outstripped those of any other rank.

Junior officers led from the front, but in 1914 and 1915 their distinctive dress had been a contributory factor in their undoing: the cut of the jacket, the breeches as well as the ‘Sam Browne Belt’ with a revolver holster made them stand out in daylight and silhouetted them in deepening gloom. Sword drill was still an important part of officer training and in 1914 officers took these outdated weapons to France. Although in the main they were dispensed with, right up to and including the Battle of Loos in September 1915 there were officers who made themselves conspicuous to the enemy by advancing sword in hand. Even then, when swords finally disappeared, officers were still to be witnessed attacking with a walking stick or cane in hand.

For all their bravery, these junior officers were marked men and German riflemen wreaked havoc among their ranks. To counteract the threat, officers began to wear other ranks’ uniform with markings of seniority that could be seen only close up and, in time, this helped to cut the high proportion of casualties.

At the same time as the pre-war regular officer was becoming an endangered species, the BEF in France was rapidly expanding in numbers. The army grew almost four-fold in 1915, to just short of one million men by the end of the year. Territorial officers would help fill the void and, in time, Kitchener’s new breed of junior officer would also arrive, but in the meantime a pool of
officers was needed from which to draw in order to alleviate the current difficulties.

The boys who enlisted as regular officers, as Stuart Cloete did in September 1914, were, in the most part, thoroughly keen to serve. Their motivation was not identical to nor wholly dissimilar from those who enlisted as privates. The boys destined to be other ranks were mostly already at work, bored, and sometimes hungry. The boys of officer stock were frequently still at school and just as bored, and hungry too – but only for change. As Cloete wrote:

The psychological force behind the idea seems to be of a dual nature. First, something was going on that was too big to be missed – adventure on a heroic scale; secondly, the eagerness of a young man to test himself, to try out, as it were, his own guts.

Cecil Lewis was a typical excited schoolboy. In the spring of 1915, he was on the stone terrace at his school at Oundle, with his great friend Maynard Greville. They were avidly discussing the war and their possible participation. Maynard was keen to leave at the end of term and enlist, despite the fact that both were still sixteen years of age. Cecil said:

‘They won’t let us.’

‘Why not? We’re almost seventeen.’

‘But old King says you can’t get a commission in anything until you’re eighteen.’

‘Rot! What about the Flying Corps? They’ll take you at seventeen. They want young chaps … I vote we write to the War Office and see what happens.’

‘All right! Oh, Maynard, wouldn’t it be ripping!’

It took them a long time to get those letters right. ‘We mustn’t let it look too much like kids; but it wants to sound keen and all that.’

The decision to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps appeared to have been taken on a whim but, according to Lewis:

It was the last link in a subconscious chain of wish fulfilment. For, now I come to think of it, I hardly remember a time when I was not air-minded. At prep school I was already making gliders out of half-sheets of paper, curving the plane surfaces, improvising rudders and ailerons, and spending hours launching them across the room from chairs and tables.

But, in spite of this passion for ‘aeronautics’ – as they were then called – it never occurred to me that I might be actively concerned in them. That I myself might fly a real full-sized aeroplane was beyond the bounds of the wildest possibility. Then came the war and the importance of the air began to be realized. An immense impetus was given to aircraft design and manufacture. The opportunity opened, and the onlooker became participant.

The allure of flying was extraordinary. Only a decade had passed since the science fiction of flying had become science fact, and the thrill of taking to the air was out of all proportion to the potential dangers, which were very real and frequently fatal. With the war, aircraft design rapidly improved, offering would-be pilots new, faster, more aerobatic planes, but, while reliability was gradually enhanced, the stresses placed upon aircraft, pushed to the limits of stress and performance, made accidents prevalent.

One incident concerned the son of none other than the Undersecretary of State for War, Harold Tennant. Second Lieutenant Henry Tennant had just passed his eighteenth birthday when he enlisted into the cavalry early in November 1915 before transferring to the RFC, training with the 17th Reserve Squadron. In May the following year, he was badly injured when his plane unexpectedly stalled and nosedived seventy feet to the ground. Tennant suffered broken bones, a fractured wrist and ankle, a severely lacerated right cheek, impairment of vision,
and numerous cuts and bruises. Not surprisingly, he also suffered ‘severe shock’ and required medical treatment for well over six months. He did not survive the war, though; he was killed in May 1917 at the age of nineteen.

The vast majority of young men who applied for temporary commissions in 1914 and 1915 did so with the full knowledge and cooperation of their parents. Almost all had previous experience in school, college or university Officer Training Corps and were therefore assumed to have certain leadership skills. In many cases, they were the sons of serving or recently retired army officers. Such fathers could be prevailed upon to find their boys a place in their regiments or, failing this, to use the network of friends from other units to gain a commission, even if it meant the commanding officer turning a blind eye to the age of the applicant.

George Llewelyn Davies was studying at Cambridge University in 1914. He was also a member of the university’s OTC and so received a letter from the adjutant pointing out the duty of all undergraduates to offer their services to the country right away. His younger brother Peter, who was seventeen, noted in his diary the impact of the letter on both boys: ‘This slightly disconcerting document – for great wars were a novelty then – was taken to apply to me also, as I had left Eton and was due to go to Trinity next term.’

In a matter of days, both Peter and George were on their way to Winchester to apply for a commission, their sense of duty overriding any hesitation on their part about going to war.

I think George as well as I had odd sensations in the pit of the stomach as we emerged from Winchester Station and climbed the hill to the Depot. At any rate George had one of those queer turns, something between a fainting fit and a sick headache … and had to sit for a few minutes on a seat outside the barracks. I would willingly have turned tail and gone back to London humiliated but free. George, however, the moment he recovered, marched me
in with him through those dark portals, and somehow or other we found ourselves inside the office of Lt. Col. The Hon J. R. Brownlow, DSO, commanding the 6th (Special Reserve) Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifles. [He] was busy writing, and looked up to ask rather gruffly what we wanted.

‘Well – er – sir, we were advised by Major Thornton to come here to ask about getting a commission – sir,’ said George.

‘Oh, Bulger Thornton at Cambridge, eh? What’s your name?’

‘Davies, sir.’

‘Where were you at school?’

‘Eton, sir.’

‘In the Corps?’

‘Yes, sir, sergeant.’

‘Play any games? Cricket?’

‘Well, sir, actually, I managed to get my eleven.’

‘Oh, you did, did you?’

The colonel, who had played for Eton himself in his day, now became noticeably more genial, and by the time he had ascertained that George was the Davies who had knocked up a valuable 59 at Lord’s (which knock he had himself witnessed with due appreciation) it was evident that little more need be said.

‘And what about you, young man?’ he asked, turning to me.

‘Please, sir, I’m his brother,’ was the best I could offer in the way of a reference.

‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then. Just take these forms and fill them in and get them signed by your father and post them back to me. Then all you have to do is to get your uniforms … and wait until you see your names in the
London Gazette
. I’m pretty busy just now, so goodbye.’ And the colonel waved dismissal to two slightly bewildered second lieutenants designate, and went on with his writing.

Stuart Cloete, who enlisted as a temporary officer aged seventeen years and two months, is an interesting case. Stuart was
sent by his father to an establishment called ‘Jimmy’s’ in Lexham Gardens. ‘He was supposed to be the best army crammer in England, having succeeded in getting boys through the Sandhurst exam who were all but mentally defective.’ Cloete was sure nevertheless that he would fail, even though he would study under Jimmy’s tried and tested method of cramming defined by, and based upon, the age-old school method of question-spotting from past exam papers.

Convinced he would still be unsuccessful, Stuart tried instead for a temporary commission.

These were now being offered to public school boys if suitably recommended by two officers. Here Captain Harvey, a retired naval officer, a great friend of my mother’s, helped me. He took me to the barracks at Hounslow – a scene of indescribable confusion – and the colonel of the regiment who was a friend of his, signed my papers almost without looking at me … In addition to the colonel’s recommendation, Allan Haig Brown, who commanded the Lancing OTC and whose ferrets I had looked after, gave me a letter saying I had served under him, as was required.

Hedging his bets, Cloete attended the Sandhurst exam and was surprised to find he could actually answer some of the questions but then, before the maths paper, he received an envelope marked OHMS (On His Majesty’s Service). It contained his commission as a temporary officer. Cloete, having achieved his ambition, failed to turn up for his last Sandhurst exam. ‘I later realized I had made a great mistake in not going through with it – because no one failed, so great was the need for officers in the new army now being formed.’ He had missed out on two years’ seniority, for no temporary officer could be made up to regular commission until he was nineteen, unless he had been to Sandhurst. In time, Stuart would serve as an acting captain on the Somme aged eighteen, then on his nineteenth birthday he was made a regular second
lieutenant and a temporary captain. ‘Had I gone to Sandhurst, so great were the casualties, I might have been a regular major. I might also have been dead.’

Influence and nepotism were rife, and boys who were just seventeen, and even those who were younger, were helped to get into the army quickly and with minimum fuss. A well-known case involved the son of the poet Rudyard Kipling. John Kipling, who had only just turned seventeen, had been rejected for military service owing to his extremely poor eyesight. When his father prevailed upon friends in the Irish Guards, a commission was offered. John was to be killed in action when he was eighteen. Ernest Lancaster, born in Southsea in May 1899, is one of many less-well-known cases. He enlisted as a private in the Hampshire Regiment and was recommended for a commission in 1915 by a family friend who was a retired colonel. Ernest later served with the 7th Dorsets, and then the Machine Gun Corps in France in 1916 and was killed aged seventeen.

There is also much evidence that a father could secure a commission for his son in his own regiment. Ernest Stream was headmaster of Grimsby Municipal College but had also been a major in the Lincolnshire Regiment. His son John Stream joined the same regiment shortly after his sixteenth birthday in November 1915. In fewer than ten months, John was serving as a second lieutenant on the Somme with the 7th Lincolnshires, still two weeks short of his seventeenth birthday; he was killed in 1918 aged eighteen. Similarly, Stanley Bates, the son of Lieutenant Colonel John Bates, was given a commission into the 1/5th King’s Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment), the same battalion as his father; and Louis Broome, a lad from Brighton and the son of a colonel in the Indian Army, was granted a commission in his uncle’s regiment, the 2nd Battalion Royal Scots. Both Stanley and Louis died, aged seventeen, during the early summer of 1915.