Boy Soldiers of the Great War (37 page)

The Silver War badge was awarded to men who had been discharged owing to wounds or because they were otherwise medically unfit. This saved them from harassment or the need to explain themselves to overzealous civilians. Underage soldiers were not entitled to the badge irrespective of whether they served abroad or not. Private Sydney Phillips of the 16th Welsh Regiment had enlisted in 1914 and served in France for three months during the winter of 1915/16 when aged fourteen. Now he had been demobbed he was being hassled in the street. ‘You will fully understand, I know,’ he wrote, ‘how galling it is to me [that] I am continually asked “when are you going to be called up”, and after just 16 months’ service … The regimental badge does not cover ex-soldiers as any individual wears one.’

His application was refused as was that made by Charles Barter who had served with the 6th East Kent Regiment. He had been wounded, shot in the right shoulder during the Battle of Loos. His true age was discovered after recovery at the 1st Birmingham War Hospital and he was discharged, unusually not for wounds
but because he was under age. Even on enlistment Barter, like Phillips, was big for his age at five foot six inches tall and with a chest measurement of thirty-seven inches. This labourer from London had claimed to be nineteen on enlistment but was only fifteen. Back in civilian life he would be vulnerable to the same questions that bedevilled Phillips, yet there would be no Silver War Badge for either lad.

The rules governing underage service at home and abroad had changed radically in 1916 to the boys’ benefit, and Frank Lindley, for one, would never return to the Western Front. The battles of 1915 and 1916 had taken a terrible toll among underage soldiers. Now, thankfully, Government intervention had ensured, albeit belatedly, that never again would lads be sent abroad in such numbers.

Times had truly changed. In early July 1916, for example, Sergeant Albert Perriman of the 11th South Wales Borderers recorded an attack in which his platoon, perhaps numbering between forty and forty-five men, was ordered to assault and capture three machine-gun posts. He paid tribute to his men and the wonderful mutual support they had given and referred to the fact ‘that on this day, there were six who had not yet reached the age of eighteen years’. A year later, such a concentration of underage soldiers in a platoon was well nigh impossible. Statistics (see
chapter 16
) drawn from an analysis of 251 soldiers selected from surviving pension records at the National Archives back up this fact. All those whose details were examined had enlisted during wartime and served while under age in a theatre of war. Of just seven who went abroad in 1917 five had enlisted before conscription in 1916 and the consequent tightening of the enlistment procedure.

By 1917, it is clear how very few underage soldiers were able to go abroad for the first time. Those who succeeded normally had to use considerable guile and ingenuity, as did the lad who
joined the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers in June 1917. The story was touched upon by Captain James Dunn during compilation of the battalion’s war hstory,
The War the Infantry Knew
. He recalled how ‘the draft of one, a boy of seventeen’, had turned up at the battalion having deserted from the regimental depot in Liverpool: ‘Having made it overseas, he got to the 1st Battalion by jumping trains and lorries; but he wanted to serve with us, so he walked along the Hindenburg front to reach us. His declared intention is to tell the Drum Major at Litherland [the depot] that he has been “over the top”. The D.M. hasn’t been overseas.’

The effects of the Government’s new rules were being felt. The following year, 1917, losses among soldiers under the age of eighteen were cut by 80 per cent, and those who died were drawn predominantly from among boys whose ‘real’ ages were ignored or remained undetected. They included lads such as Private John Banning, Private James Gray, Lance Corporal Herbert Diprose, Private Douglas Williams and Private James Stedman, all of whom had enlisted at thirteen or fourteen years old in 1914, and had served overseas for at least a year or eighteen months. All five were killed in 1917, aged sixteen or seventeen.

Amongst those who died in 1917 was one of the ‘little heroes’ that Acting Captain Douglas Cuddeford had so appreciated and tried to look after. On the first day of the Allied offensive at Arras in April, he came across a lad shot by a German sniper.

He was only a boy, obviously not more than about seventeen years of age, but he had always refused to be sent back to the Base Depot along with the other ‘under ages’. The bullet struck him in the belly, and as usual in the case of these abdominal wounds he rolled about clawing the ground, screaming and making a terrible fuss. Certainly, to have one’s guts stirred up by a red-hot bullet must be a dreadful thing, and that a bullet is really hot after its flight through the air is well known to anyone who had tried to pick up a newly spent one. However, they got the boy back into the trench,
opened his clothes and put a bandage around his middle over the wound, but of course we could see from the first it was hopeless. A little later, as I was squeezing my way along the crowded trench passing the word to A Company to be ready to go over on the signal, I noticed the lad laid out on a blown-in part of the trench. By then he was lying very still, and I thought he was dead, but as I passed he half opened his eyes and said something to me. I had to stoop down to catch what he said; it was ‘Good luck to you, sir!’

In 1917, fewer than twenty boys are officially identified as having died on all fronts aged sixteen (approximately the same number are listed as having died on the first day of the Somme offensive) and only one, Rifleman Edwin Elks, was as young as fifteen. These numbers underlined the effectiveness of the new safeguards and, to a lesser extent, reflected the decline in the once rampant enthusiasm among boys to serve. The major British offensives of 1917, such as Arras, Third Ypres and Cambrai, were fought by men deemed eligible to serve and drawn from right across the adult male population. The majority of boys, if they remained in France at all, were now down at the base camps. For most who were aged seventeen and eighteen, the time would still come when they would have to return to the trenches but, meanwhile, they would be safe.

11
Held to Serve

MOTHER’S BABY SON
SORELY MISSED

22243 Private Bernard Whittingham
98th Battalion, Machine Gun Corps

Killed in Action 23 July 1916, aged 17

In the summer and autumn of 1916, thousands of boys were shipped back to camps in Britain, many of which were located around Channel ports such as Dover and Folkestone. The boys were a mixed crowd, some relieved to be home, others resigned to their lot. Archibald Dall had considered his removal from France as almost fair game, after hiding his age – sixteen – for as long as possible. He was returned to Dover from Boulogne to join a growing number of lads who had been sent back from the fighting that summer. In Archibald’s case, he should have then been transferred to the Army Reserve, but, for reasons that appear to contradict the War Office instruction, he was held to serve. The army authorities may have regretted their action. ‘Within a month or two there were over four hundred of us inflicting our boyish pranks (or nuisances) upon the already overworked training and organizing staff,’ he recalled.

Released from the tighter military law that prevailed on active service, the boys became prone to antics that did not endear them to their NCOs, who were used to being in control. Cyril José was
sent to a camp at Devonport in January 1917, after recovering from his wounds. The discipline he came up against was almost intolerable, the boys being hauled up for any misdemeanour. Cyril and his friends speculated that it was deliberately unpleasant in the hope that some of the older boys would be provoked into volunteering once again for foreign service. With food shortages across Britain becoming severe – owing to German submarine attacks on Allied shipping – the boys at Devonport found their rations cut from half a loaf per boy at dinner, to half a loaf per sixteen boys.

Half the camp is doing jankers. The grub here is scandalous! We’ve done nothing but make complaints about it. Not enough to feed a cat. We nearly had a mutiny here on Thursday night in the guard room. There were 33 of us on guard and an officer in charge and we started shouting about the grub – asked the officer if he was investing our ration money in the War Loan. He didn’t half rave then. [He] picked four of us out and had us in the office one by one. Unfortunately for him he picked four Expeditionary men – we told him that we had better grub in France.

Cyril had teamed up with two other boys who had recovered from wounds and were passing time at Devonport until they were old enough to return to France. All three were still only seventeen years old but, as Cyril wrote to his family, they had a status among the other soldiers.

We’re down as the ‘Dauntless three’ probably because we give more cheek to NCOs and to anybody, in fact, than any of the others. We seem to be the leaders here, with one or two other fellows, as half the guard are recruits and we are older than the rest of the Expeditionary men.

Many of the NCOs, although somewhat older than the rest, had scarcely any more service than the boys under their command.
One evening when gunshots were heard, a corporal of just four months’ service dashed into Cyril’s hut.

‘Stand-to, my lads, stand-to!’ We wouldn’t get up. He danced about with a big electric torch banging the bed boards. ‘There’s two shots been fired, p’raps three! Catch hold of a rifle!’ He went nearly daft and we started pulling his leg … the two corporals in charge were both windy as anything and told us we didn’t know how serious it was … So we started singing ‘Goodbye forever’ and ‘Farewell, farewell’ and told them we had shot better chaps before breakfast. We did have some fun.

Shortly afterwards the corporal came round and posted Cyril on guard duty.

‘If anyone comes, ring the bell and we’ll soon be with you.’

‘If anyone comes,’ I said, ‘I’ll shoot first and challenge after.’

‘Don’t, don’t. You mustn’t get wind-up.’

‘Got wind-up before you were called up. Anybody would think you were going over the top or something instead of having a cushy time in Blighty.’

It was hard for boys such as Cyril not to feel superior to men who held rank but scant authority. Cyril and his friends did not have just a confidence born of overseas service, they also had insignia on the uniform that told anyone who cared to look that they had been in action: brass stripes on the left sleeve signifying a wound, blue chevrons on the right, each signifying a year’s service abroad. With such swagger, it was difficult not to become the focus of other boys’ attention.

We’re always getting into rows with chaps who have about 12 months’ service, telling us they did this and that ‘before we came up’. We then show them our sleeves with stripes and service badges
and tell them to ‘wipe their noses on that’. Especially on sentry [duty] in the road. A lot of chaps of other regiments might pass on their way in town, and seeing the sentry try to take a rise out of him. ‘Go to it, kid – we’ll be doing that in France in a few weeks.’ Sentry: ‘Here, kid, wipe your nose on that. I was doing this in France before you were called up.’ Disappearance of soldiers.

The instruction of October 1916 applied not just to British soldiers, but to soldiers of the Empire as well. Lads under seventeen from Canada and Australia would also be shipped home after a short administrative stay in England. In late 1916, Canadian William Kerr was posted to Bramshott Camp, near Liphook, on the main London–Portsmouth Road. He had been recuperating from wounds received in France while serving with the 1st Canadian Division, and was still at the camp, when he was ordered to see Captain Dunn straight away in the company commander’s office.

‘I have a special job for you, Corporal Kerr,’ he said, while I stood to attention in front of him. ‘There are thirty-eight young soldiers in this camp just turned sixteen, who have falsely given their ages as eighteen and only now been found out. They are being sent back to Canada, and I am putting you in charge of them until arrangements have been made for their departure.’

Kerr was given charge of a forty-bed hut, with a separate room at the end for himself, as the corporal. All he had to do was to take the roll call morning and night and ensure that the boys’ beds were kept tidy. Then, during the day, the boys were to be taken out on route march, with the distance left up to the discretion of Kerr.

As the captain handed Kerr the hut key, he added one further point. He must ensure that every night, after lights out, the hut was firmly locked. It all seemed relatively easy, although Kerr
wondered if he discerned a wry smile on the captain’s face as he strolled away down the path, leaving him with the job in hand.

Captain Dunn was certainly not smiling when, two mornings later, he paid another visit to the boys’ hut and confronted me. ‘How are your young men behaving?’ he asked, but his slight turning away as if giving me a moment to think about the reply was enough to tell me there was more to his visit than that. ‘All right, sir, no trouble at all,’ I replied and went on to report how I had done everything he had ordered me to do. ‘You did not know that two of them, and possibly a third, were in Liphook at midnight last night?’

Kerr was taken aback. It was clear that the boys had simply resorted to clambering out of the windows before sauntering off into town.

Boys would be boys and it was obvious that, as this group was to return to Canada, it was better to strike a deal to maintain discipline than to risk humiliation through confrontation. With Dunn’s permission, Kerr compromised with the boys.

I called the roll, morning and night, marched them, rested them, let them break off near any sweet or lemonade shop they took a fancy to, made a deal with them of three or four verbal permissions to be out at night on condition that they were back at midnight – or by God I would route march them till they were ready to drop. It worked.