Boy Soldiers of the Great War (38 page)

One of the lads sent home to Canada was Maurice Goulet. At the start of the war, the fourteen-year-old was working for a local butcher in his home city of Ottawa. Inspired by newspaper reports of the gallantry shown by the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions, he enlisted, adding two years to his age. His mother was having none of his antics and promptly had Maurice discharged but he
tried again, enlisting without her knowledge in Hull, a town across the Ottawa River. His unit embarked overseas, Maurice reaching France the following month. At first his mother tolerated his service but in August she changed her mind and applied to have him withdrawn. She sent a letter with a copy of her son’s birth certificate to the Department of Militia and Defence, but this was rejected as evidence and Mrs Goulet had to pay for a formal legal declaration to be drawn up confirming her son’s age, whereupon he was withdrawn. For her, as for others, the lists of casualties in the newspapers had proved too much. Ironically, Maurice’s unit had been designated non-combatant and her son had been well out of harm’s way chopping down wood for the army. It took approximately ten weeks from the time Mrs Goulet first wrote until the completion of formalities, a time quicker than that seemingly taken to remove underage boys from the British Army.

While thousands of lads eventually made their way back to Britain, thousands more remained abroad. The base camps to which they were sent were sited close to the major ports such as Calais and Le Havre. As the war developed, the size and duties of base camps expanded to meet the ever-growing demands placed upon them by the British Expeditionary Force, which had more than doubled its size by mid-1916 to 1.7 million men. These bases hospitalized the wounded, and were the point of embarkation for both the sick and those going home on leave. They acted as sorting offices for the mail, and as supply depots for vast quantities of war material destined for the front, as well as ‘holding pens’ for boys back from the line.

If there was a coordinated programme to deal with the flood of underage soldiers who were removed from the front line, then history has not left the evidence. The instruction of 13 June had dictated that boys under the age of nineteen would be sent out of danger. However, when these boys arrived at a base camp there is
little to suggest that specific resources had been allocated to their welfare and upkeep. It was a recipe for chaos.

In the summer of 1916, the Reverend John Hannay, a fifty-one-year-old chaplain, was working at an unspecified camp where, he estimated, there were nearly a thousand boys, all of whom had enlisted during the early days of recruitment and who had either been sent down from the trenches as being unfit to serve or picked out as unsuitable as they arrived in France. Their number had steadily increased throughout the summer, and they were becoming a problem to handle.

Their existence in camp was a standing menace to discipline. Officially they were meant to be trained, fed, lodged and if necessary punished according to the scheme designed for and, in the main, suitable to men. In reality they were boys, growing boys, some of them not sixteen years of age, and a few – it seems almost incredible – not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a fighting man remains a mystery. But they did.

Hannay’s judgement of these lads was very much of its time. The boys, he reasoned, were of a particularly difficult kind.

It is not your ‘good’ boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells a lie about his age, it is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and endure the hardships of a soldier’s life for the sake of seeing fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the makings of men in them if treated properly.

The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane CO wants to condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most COs, even most sergeants, know that punishment of
that kind, however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally unsuitable for a boy. At the same time, if any sort of discipline is to be preserved, a boy, who must officially be regarded as a man, cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey orders. That was the military difficulty.

To Hannay, the boys faced a precipice of social and moral decline. They were kicking their heels around the base camps and no one was taking charge of their welfare. This could only encourage mischief. The NCOs under whose immediate control the boys had been put found their charges nothing but a nuisance, for there was little to offer the lads in terms of education and no proper plan of physical exercise. As a result, the NCOs were aggressive and bullying – in short, according to Hannay, the boys ‘were in a straight way to be ruined instead of made’.

It was an Irish surgeon working at the camp who sought to do something about the problem. Hannay referred to him simply as ‘J’. J’s decision to help met with total support, but that did not make the job any easier. On the contrary.

It was not that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no active opposition. Everyone wanted to help. The authorities realized that something ought to be done. What J was up against was the system.

The system was identified as the army machine, an intransigent monolithic structure which, once set in motion, was capable of putting two million servicemen in the field, but was ill-equipped to adapt to smaller irregular problems that required specific remedies. The wheels of the machine, as J and Hannay discovered, would only go round one way.

Trying to get anything done in the army is like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud surrounded by dense entanglements of
barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually give the permission you require, lies just beyond …

It was the YMCA, not the army, that came to the rescue. A Young Soldiers’ Club was formed and was offered one of the best huts in the camp, one originally designated as an officers’ club. The YMCA then procured and supplied the hut with, among other things, a magic lantern, books, games, boxing gloves, a piano, and writing paper.

Everything was set up for an inaugural meeting at which a colonel at the base camp had been invited down to give an opening address. In preparation, the boys were marched from their camps down to the hut by their NCOs, most being deposited in the hall an hour before the meeting was due to begin. The sergeants considered their responsibilities terminated once the boys had walked through the club doors, leaving hundreds of youngsters to sit around and await the colonel; it was bound to lead to trouble. Hannay wrote:

They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything breakable was smashed into little bits. A YMCA worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and recommended as experienced with boys’ clubs in London, fled to a small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats.

It was a considerable time before peace and order were restored. No one had been hurt – although there was widespread damage, the boys were simply venting their frustration at their predicament. There had been no animosity against any staff who happened to be in the vicinity; on the contrary, when the colonel made his belated entrance to give his speech, he was met with rousing cheers, not
just by the boys in the main hall itself but by boys finishing off their handiwork in other rooms, boys who had clambered up on to the balcony, and boys who stood perched in windows now missing their frames.

The colonel gave his speech, though, not surprisingly, it was not the one he intended, but one fashioned from the scene of utter carnage in front of him. Remarkably, it proved a roaring success, though he did not mince his words: ‘He told the naked truth about themselves, what they were, what they had been.’ Crucially, he told them what they might be, too, and they listened intently. ‘I found out later on that those boys would listen to straight talk on almost any subject, even themselves,’ wrote Hannay.

The boys began to settle down once a routine had been established. There were lectures in the afternoons on every subject imaginable, as talks were dependent on who was available. There were lectures on the Navy, on men who had won the Victoria Cross, a lecture on Napoleon’s campaigns (given by a visiting history professor from Cambridge), and a magic lantern slide show on the wonders of Egypt. This proved a difficult talk as the slides had been sent as a present from England, and some effort had to be made to find anyone who could provide a verbal accompaniment.

Not all subjects were necessarily so gripping. A lecture on how the army was fed, given by an Army Service Corps officer, would depend very heavily on the skill of the speaker, while another on the art of saluting was always likely to struggle. Occasionally, the talk missed the mark altogether. One visiting speaker launched into a speech beginning with the observation that every boy before him must have lied to enlist. The ‘talk’ then turned into a tirade as he developed the idea that all lies were ‘disgraceful’ and that therefore the boys should be ‘thoroughly ashamed of themselves’. It was an object lesson in how to lose an audience and if there was any point to the exercise it was undermined completely when, a week or two later, another speaker, starting with the same premise, roundly praised the boys for having lied, declaring that
each and every one of them should be proud of their patriotic actions.

The most remarkable and interesting lecture, according to Hannay, was one given by an underage soldier himself, when, owing to an emergency – there being no speaker – someone had to step in.

He volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have been there. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor physique. If the proper use of the letter ‘h’ in conversation is any test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are not to be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half an hour told us what he had seen, endured and felt, with a straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art. He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen him since.

The boys clearly required dedicated help. A proper routine of work was established with an emphasis on physical training under the charge and guidance of undefined ‘special sergeants’. The club too was refitted, although the boys were still prone to antics, including wild boxing bouts held in pitch darkness after the club’s candles had been trampled. On one occasion, Hannay found a boy lying flat on his back, using the heels of his boots to hammer the keys of the recently acquired and brand-new piano.

Further improvements were made, including the installation of electric light, and, in what was probably an astute move, the imposition of a Miss ‘N’. She was placed in charge of the hut and was quickly able to modify some of the boys’ worst behaviour. ‘Miss N was born to deal with wild boys,’ noted Hannay. ‘The fiercer they are, the more she loves them, and the wickeder they are, the more she loves them.’ Miss N ran the canteen at the club,
boiling eggs, serving tea, cocoa, malted milk, bread-and-butter, and biscuits. Tea parties were held every day and were always full. ‘She listened with sympathy which was quite unaffected, to long tales of wrongs suffered, of woes and of joys.’

In April 1917, a decision was made to collect the underage soldiers together and place their education and training on a more professional footing, under the direct control of an officer whose sole duty would be their collective welfare.

Captain Cardinal Harford had been working as an adjutant at the 33rd Infantry Base Depot at Étaples, when he was instructed to take command of all the young soldiers who were then being held at the 26th Infantry Base Depot. His sudden promotion to the rank of major was welcome, but he now faced dealing with hundreds of boys, and the prospect left him feeling somewhat apprehensive.

The young soldiers began to arrive in half-dozens from all parts of the line: English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, and also some South African boys … lance corporals, corporals, some with Military Medal ribbons, tall boys, short boys, nondescript boys, many most indignant at being taken from their units. One extraordinary boy was Sgt Conner, a pukka Sergeant, a serving soldier from, I think, the 2nd Lincolnshire Regt., aged 17½; and a most useful NCO he proved to be.

Ostensibly, Cardinal Harford had many of the credentials to train such young boys. He was a tough-looking forty-year-old officer who had served in the Imperial Yeomanry during the Boer War, and been badly wounded by a bullet in the stomach. He had an impressive group of medal ribbons on his uniform and, to go with his evident stature, he had considerable recent frontline experience, having served in the trenches with the 9th East Surreys and then with the 13th Essex Regiment.

Major Harford was given a free hand to select his training staff and, being aware of how much boys looked up to role models, he set about choosing wisely. A large number of boys under his command were from Scottish regiments, so among his staff was a fine NCO, Regimental Sergeant Major Fraser of the Highland Light Infantry. Indeed, all the NCOs who were selected were men who had seen action but, through injury, were unfit for further frontline duty. One of the more notable was Johnny Summers, a former featherweight and welterweight champion of England, who instructed the boys in boxing and was immensely popular, while another sergeant, a former musichall artist, was taken on to keep the boys entertained. Much later, Harford was even able to procure the help of Captain Hugh Colvin of the Cheshire Regiment, who had won a Victoria Cross at Ypres. He was sent to the camp as one of the physical-training instructors.