Boy Soldiers of the Great War (29 page)

Despite the instructions from the War Office that were issued before he signed up, Cecil was adamant that no one asked to see a National Registration Card, and therefore the only details taken down were those he falsely supplied.

I kept my name Harrison all the way through training but when I’d finished and thought I was going over to France, I decided, ‘Right, before I go over there I want to make sure that my people know I’m all right and in the army,’ so I sent a letter to my father and got a chap who was going on leave to post it in London, a bit of artfulness on my part to make it look like I was in town. In the
letter I said that father should place an advert in
The Times
saying he would not apply for my discharge if I gave him my address. I couldn’t stand the idea of being discharged; it would have been so humiliating.

I bought
The Times
several days later and read the advertisement in the personal column, ‘Right that’s me, that’s good enough,’ and there and then, I went into the Wesleyan Chapel, sat down at a table, and wrote to father on some blotting paper, giving my address, and sent it home.

The failure of the Derby Scheme had served a useful purpose. It had made conscription more palatable to the public by demonstrating that all avenues for the maintenance of voluntary enlistment had been exhausted. Public antagonism towards ‘shirkers’, periodically whipped up by the newspapers, also helped conscription pass on to the statute books with less opposition than many politicians had once feared.

MPs were also widely reported as berating those who would not serve. One, Colonel Charles Yate, told the House:

I say that men who are not slackers have all attested, or will attest, under this bill. In this bill I want to bring in the men who have not attested, who will not attest, and who are slackers. Every one of them is a shirker.

It was a widely held view. The Military Service Act of January 1916 was passed by the Commons without rancour, leading campaigners against conscription being, in the end, placated.

As far as the issue of young soldiers was concerned, the conscription debate centred on whether it was right to enlist boys at the age of eighteen, and whether guarantees were in place that they would not be sent abroad until the age of nineteen.

Under the Derby Scheme, boys could not be called up until eighteen years and nine months; with conscription, boys would
be brought into the fold a full nine months younger and a core of worried MPs believed this age was simply too young. There was an awkward contradiction in their argument. They resisted all attempts to lower the age of conscription. Yet if boys could be sent abroad after the age of nineteen, would it not be better to accept them earlier into the army so that they would have a full year’s training, equipping them better to withstand the rigours of trench warfare?

Few if any of the dissenters had any military experience, and they were arguing against the weight of opinion influenced by MPs with military careers behind them, whose anecdotes gave credence to their views of trench warfare and how it affected soldiers of all ages.

The burden of war had proved remarkably egalitarian. A large proportion of MPs had sons at the front, including at least one serving under age, while Members themselves had shown an admirable willingness to serve. A number had gone to France in the first year of the war, and during its course several were killed. Perhaps the best known was John Redmond, the Irish Nationalist MP who was killed in 1916, while among other notable victims was Conservative Member for South Oxfordshire Major Valentine Fleming DSO, father of the author Ian Fleming, who was killed in May 1917.

For a long time, the Government had argued that when it came to serving in the trenches age mattered less than the physical strength of the soldier. This argument had many advocates among those MPs who had served abroad and found that healthy lads had proved adept at soldiering in difficult conditions. If age was the issue, they argued, it concerned those who were older rather than those who were younger.

A forty-four-year-old MP and army officer, Major John Newman, could substantiate such a belief. During the conscription debate in January, he supported the view that boys of eighteen were more than capable of serving in the trenches.

I have served for the last few months at the front, and as a simple captain of a company, I walked with my men, and I can tell the Hon. Member that in all our long marches both in this country and in Flanders I never saw any young men in my company fall out, nor have I ever seen any of them helped along, though that occurred in the case of men of about forty.

‘Are they eighteen?’ asked a backbench MP.

Major Newman replied:

Yes, and some one or two in my company were not actually eighteen. I had a letter from the mother of a lad in my company who stated that he was only sixteen years old, that he was too young to serve in the trenches, and that he should be sent home. I sent for the lad, a very well-grown young fellow, though he is certainly not nineteen, and I told him, ‘Your mother says you must go home. Here is your birth certificate showing that you joined under sixteen.’ The lad said he did not want to go home and that he wanted to serve …

In Flanders, of which I have had experience, it is not the young who suffer but the middle-aged, men of thirty-five or forty years, who undoubtedly do get rheumatism in the trenches. Young men, I find, go through their duties splendidly … To my mind, the class of men you want in Flanders are young fellows of eighteen years of age.

Major Newman’s argument was hard to refute, although his repeated claim to authority based on his trench experiences was, fortunately for him, not contested in the House. Before becoming an MP, Major Newman had served as an officer in the 5th Royal Munster Fusiliers and on the outbreak of war he had patriotically re-enlisted, joining the Middlesex Regiment. However, his subsequent service overseas had been a little more truncated than he suggested in his speech. His ‘few months’ were in fact no more
than a ‘few weeks’. Indeed, his eloquent words to the House were made less than two months after he had first gone to France.

A medical report on Major Newman noted that: ‘He found that life in a dugout increased his pain and stiffness and on sudden alarms he found he could not get out of his dugout without help.’ It was clear he could not continue to serve and on 4 January 1916 he was on his way back to England, reinforced in his belief that young men were more capable of sticking life in the line than someone more than twice their age.

Newman’s service record had another limitation. His short sojourn in France had been with the 17th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, known as the 1st (Football) Sportsmen’s Battalion. It was full of young men unscarred by industrial sickness and injury – indeed, many were athletes, including the first black officer in the British Army, Walter Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur. The battalion was therefore hardly representative of the rank and file of British soldiering.

Stephen Gwynn, the fifty-one-year-old Nationalist MP for Galway, had also been to the trenches, serving for two months in the ranks in January 1915 before receiving a commission in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Gwynn, whose standing as an MP rested on the highest standards of probity, had blatantly lied in order to enlist and by all rights he deserved censure similar to that directed at underage soldiers by the Undersecretary of State for War.

Gwynn’s application for a temporary commission hardly attempted to conceal his dishonesty. He stated his occupation as a ‘Journalist’ and although he was born in 1864 he claimed to be just thirty-seven years old. He then went on to state particulars, including his marriage to Mary on 17 December 1889 and the dates of birth and names of his six children, beginning with Edward, born in November 1890. By his own admission he must have been eleven when he married and twelve when he fathered his first child. Despite the evident fraud, Gwynn was commissioned in March 1915.

Unlike Major Newman, Stephen Gwynn had fought valiantly for several months in the harsh environment of trench warfare. In October 1916, a fellow officer, Roland Fielding, serving with the 6th Connaught Rangers, recalled the MP’s arrival in the line.

Stephen Gwynn arrived today. He has just been in to lunch … He is old for a Company Commander – fifty-two. All the more sporting therefore to have come out in that capacity, especially since he seems to have had a tussle with the War Office Authorities before they would consent to send him.

What is particularly interesting about Gwynn’s case is the remark that there had been a tussle over his enlistment and who had apparently resolved it. In a note written on 9 June 1916, Gwynn thanked the Undersecretary of State for War for his help: ‘… you yourself gave me preferential treatment because I was a Member of Parliament in allowing me to join the army at an advanced age …’ It was six months since Tennant had stood up in Parliament and stated that it was ‘the policy of the War Office only to take those who are of proper age’.

Tennant’s action tarnishes the record of his words when, displaying moral indignation at the behaviour of those who would fraudulently enlist under age, he berated Sir Arthur Markham for his struggle on their behalf: ‘He [Markham] ought to remember that these boys, about whom he has been complaining for a year or more, were, on their own showing, liars.’

Conscription finally came into force in January 1916, and with it, underage enlistment and the need to lie about age largely disappeared. The problem of boys who were already serving remained. In March, Harold Tennant reiterated the Government’s policy as it stood, but, in answer to a specific question, stated that whether or not a boy embarked for service overseas was

one for the medical authorities to decide on the medical facts of each case … There is no minimum age at which youths are sent abroad; they are sent when their physical qualifications are such as to make it suitable that they should be sent.

This was surprising. While the return of an underage boy serving abroad was ‘left entirely to the discretion of the commanders-in-chief’, the rule, according to the last War Office instruction, was specific: for any boy serving at home and under seventeen years of age, ‘Discharge will be carried out by his CO under King’s Regulations.’

A few weeks later, on 9 May, Colonel John Gretton, during a further debate on the extension of conscription, quoted the explicit War Office orders:

No man, whatever his physical development may be, has to go out until he is nineteen years of age. Those orders are carried out in this way: Every man taken out for a draft has to pass a physical and a medical examination. The medical officer who conducts that examination is ordered to put on one side the young man who has any doubt about his age …

It was not that the instruction was unintelligible; the problem was that no one seemed fully in tune with the details. So it came as something of a relief to everyone when the regulations were simplified. On 13 June 1916, a War Office Instruction (No. 1186) was published that appeared to clarify once and for all the Government’s view on the protracted issue of underage soldiering. Everyone knew that there frequently had been a gulf between the age stipulated by a boy on enlistment and his actual age. Now there was broad agreement that birth certificates would be accepted as
the
key piece of evidence when deciding whether to remove a boy from the front or not.

No one, least of all Sir Arthur Markham, was under any illusion that the issue would be immediately and painlessly rectified.
The new instruction was, nevertheless, a vindication of the campaign he and his colleagues had waged. It indicated a change of Government heart, and, unofficially, the Undersecretary of State for War was gracious enough to write a letter to the MP for Mansfield outlining the details, a copy of which Sir Arthur released to the press. Nine days later, the
Daily Mail
was one of several national newspapers to publish the story.

BOY SOLDIERS OF 17
MR TENNANT SAYS THEY ARE TO BE DISCHARGED.

Sir Arthur Markham has received a letter from Mr Tennant stating that the long agitation on behalf of lads in the army has at last been successful.

The War Office has issued new instructions that boys under 17 are to be discharged and boys over 17 and under 19 are to be placed in the reserve.

The previous War Office instruction of September 1915 would now be superseded. All ambiguity regarding the rights of underage soldiers to be discharged or temporarily removed from the fighting appeared to have been resolved. The simplicity of the new rules mentioned in the
Daily Mail
report appeared to promise unequivocal action for families who could prove that their sons were too young to be serving at the front.

The newspaper had printed only a précis and, although the contents of its brief report were in essence accurate, a couple of clarifications had been missed. While a boy already serving abroad under the age of eighteen would be sent home, the instruction added a crucial rider: it would occur only ‘if he be willing’. If the boy were not ‘willing’, then the issue became unclear. ‘If not sent home, he will be dealt with as in section (b) of this paragraph,’ read the instruction. In short, he would be transferred to what was known as Class W. Reserve where he would be kept out of harm’s way, probably at a base camp, although this was not
made explicit. These boys would be joined by those aged between eighteen and nineteen who, under the instruction, could not be returned home but were sent for further training until old enough to go back into the line.

There was one other rider to the announcement. ‘Boys’ was taken to mean not
all
who were under the age of nineteen, but only NCOs and other ranks, not officers. The long-standing rule that allowed officers to serve abroad over the age of eighteen would remain for the time being. It is curious that in parliamentary debates this issue was not raised nor was the difference ever made overt. The continued lack of clarity led some parents to believe, after reading newspaper reports, that their young officer sons would not see action until at least their nineteenth birthdays. When these boys were later sent overseas, and hundreds died in the Battle of the Somme alone, anger was directed at the War Office in no uncertain terms.