Boy Soldiers of the Great War (40 page)

One of those who left for France in February that year was an eighteen-year-old Red Cross nurse, Marjorie Grigsby. In 1916 she had become sick and tired of hearing her father talk about her brother Herbert and his service in Mesopotamia, so when she returned from boarding school in July she had gone to Devonshire House, the home of the Red Cross in London, and sought out an interview with anyone who could help.

I saw the Head of the Red Cross. He interviewed me over a double desk and I was always very good at reading on the other side when I was sitting there and he said, ‘How old are you?’ So I said, ‘Twenty, sir.’ I saw him write down, ‘Age twenty. Apparent age sixteen.’ I said, ‘Now you’ve written it down, sir, in black and white, you can’t alter it, but it isn’t sixteen, it’s seventeen.’ He grinned and left it as it was, and passed me. I think he thought if I’d got the cheek to tell him that, I could do anything.

After working in a London hospital for eighteen months, Marjorie, with parental permission, was sent to France. As she left, she was given command of a group of General Service VADs. Coming from an upper-middle-class family, Marjorie was charged with delivering these primarily working-class women to France.

I felt a perfect fool. All the General Service VADs had to be in the charge of a VAD because we were voluntary and the service ones were paid. To use the old-fashioned word, they were really charwomen and they had to be taken and lined up on the quay. We were going to the Hotel Christol in Boulogne, so I marched them down the quay, round the other side and down the road and into the hotel, stood them to attention and then handed them over to the office. That was the end of them as far as I was concerned. Lots of them were old enough to be my mother at any rate, if not my grandmother, and there was I. I suppose you look more mature in uniform, but I couldn’t have looked very old.

Marjorie was unaware of the increasingly bleak outlook in France. The morning after she arrived, Field Marshal Haig had held a conference with all his army commanders to discuss the arrangements for defending the front, which included agreeing the disposition and use of the reserves and the crucial role of the artillery during the German offensive. Then, after returning to London, Haig continued to press for fresh drafts, stressing the urgent nature of his demands, but, while supplies continued to pour across the Channel, reinforcements did not.

By the end of February, Nurse Marjorie Grigsby had been sent to work at No. 2 Red Cross Hospital, Rouen. When she arrived, she had opened her suitcase to find a letter from her mother offering a few friendly words of advice: she must always remember how she had been brought up and not mix with the wrong people.

Marjorie was acutely aware of her youth and was less concerned with getting in with the wrong people than with how she was going to be accepted by the other nurses. The early signs had been mixed.

When I went into the staff room the nurses were having their break and they were all smoking. They would make fun saying, ‘Oh, yes, here comes the baby, she won’t want a cigarette, she
won’t want a gasper.’ I got sick of it, so I went and bought a packet and one night I walked in and pulled out a little packet of Woodbine Willies, five in a little green packet, and lit up – God, I nearly choked. But smoking made me feel that I was the same age as the others, so that I could be on a par with them.

The nurses could afford to relax. Casualties at the front in February were the lowest since November 1915 and the third lowest monthly total of the whole war. It was the silence before the storm.

As the dark clouds gathered, a fourteen-year-old boy, Henry Stevens, made his way to France for the first time. By 1918, boys of his youth serving overseas were extremely rare although not as rare as the circumstances of his case; these were probably unique.

His story began in December 1917 when his brother George returned home on leave. George had been serving on the Western Front since July 1916; he had been wounded by shrapnel in June 1917, returning to frontline service after a spell in hospital. George was fed up. While in hospital, he had voluntarily given one and half pints of blood in order to save the life of a wounded officer, an act for which a doctor promised a month’s leave. The doctor had given George a strongly worded letter of recommendation to take back to his unit, the 7th Northamptonshire Regiment, but no leave was forthcoming. Eventually, as a matter of course, two weeks’ leave was granted in November, at the end of which George disappeared. Over the next few weeks the Metropolitan police made several visits to the family home in Barking, Essex, but were told that nothing had been seen of him since he left to rejoin his unit.

Then suddenly, on the evening of 25 February 1918, George surrendered himself to Police Sergeant Samuel Pyle at Ilford Police Station, confessing to being a deserter. His identity was established by Sergeant Pyle and next day he was conducted under
military escort to a Rest Camp at Southampton before being sent back three days later to France. The problem was that the soldier was not George but his brother Henry, seven years his junior.

Henry was sent via Le Havre and Boulogne to Hancourt to join his brother’s regiment where it was acting as Corps Reserve. Henry’s duplicity was quickly, if not immediately, unmasked, leaving him no option but to own up to his antics. It was just two weeks since Henry had arrived in France and on the day of his fifteenth birthday he found himself sitting in a guardroom being interviewed by the Assistant Provost Marshal. It appears that Henry was released back to the battalion awaiting further instruction. The order was sent from the 73rd Infantry Brigade headquarters and directed that Henry should be sent to the Base at once. However, this order arrived only on 20 March, on the eve of the German offensive, and no one was going anywhere.

The offensive was launched against two British armies, the Third Army in the north and the Fifth Army at the extreme right-hand end of the line where it met with the French. The enemy attack at this point was intended to drive a wedge between the British and French armies, and ultimately to drive the British back against the Channel ports. In launching their offensive, the Germans used new tactics of rapid infiltration. A devastating but brief bombardment of the British lines was followed by an infantry attack by the pick of the forces available. The British defences were quickly breached in most sectors, the enemy bypassing strong points in the line; these were mopped up later. This initial success was aided by the weather, a thick mist that hid the attacking troops, so that the first many of the British soldiers saw of the enemy was large numbers sweeping to their rear. In this way entire battalions could be encircled and captured. Such was the rapidity of the enemy’s advance that in just two days the British troops were flung back over the old Somme battlefield, the Fifth Army retiring twenty-five miles.

In Britain, news of the German offensive brought about the immediate release of the reserves. But by keeping them in Britain, Lloyd George had endangered the BEF’s capability to withstand the onslaught. The vast majority of the drafts rushed out to France had not experienced any form of the battle-hardening experience acquired only by serving in a war zone.

At Newmarket, seventeen-year-old Eric Hiscock was not expecting to cross the Channel so soon. He had enlisted in the army in 1915 aged fifteen, and the officers who had overseen his progress had pledged ‘faithfully’ to his parents that he would not see active service until he was at least eighteen. As he wrote:

So much for well-intentioned promises. The Kaiser decreed otherwise and when all hell broke loose on the Somme in March 1918, Private E. Hiscock, 59333, was dispatched with all haste to help stem the advance to the French ports.

Eric was not the only boy to go out under age. ‘The widely cast net for men caught up other underaged soldiers,’ he noted, including one lad called Brook, and another seventeen-year-old friend, ‘a cheerful, lazy-minded, fresh-complexioned Cockney called Ernest Jackson’. All three were given the dubious compliment of being made lance corporals (unpaid) before setting sail.

On 23 March, seventeen-year-old Reginald Kiernan was also in the process of getting ready to go, but everything was in a state of commotion.

It appears that there is a very big stunt on in France. The physical training staff have the wind up. The whole camp is being cleared, and they are afraid they will be put on draft. There is a PT sergeant who has been the terror of recruits since 1915. Men he trained in that year have been back, wounded, in 1916 and 1917, and each time he was the same. He is utterly changed now and is very quiet. We feel triumphant over these NCOs – we know we will soon be
the real soldiers, and we do not care a damn about France. We feel twice as strong as they are.

On Sunday 24 March, Fred Hodges heard that his draft was off to war. He and his friends were billeted in Norwich, and talk spread quickly among the boys who thronged the city streets that they would be sent to France without completing their training.

On Monday, 25 March, the rumours proved to be true; at the early morning roll-call, as we paraded outside the billets, we were officially told. The situation on the Western Front was so grave that all those who had reached the age of eighteen years and eight months were to be drafted to the Front immediately. My age was eighteen and eight months on 18 March, and so I was eligible.

War-readiness included the rigmarole of queuing for extra kit, gas mask, identity tags, first field dressing, steel helmet, iron rations, and, most exciting of all, ammunition. Queuing, which had always been a chore, was tinged with excitement and expectation. Back in their huts, the boys repeatedly tried on the full equipment, before laying the kit on the floor to make minor adjustments to straps and buckles. Then it was off to get bayonets dulled and boots resoled where needed, and rifles given a final check by the armourer. Last, but not least, there was a trip to get a haircut to ensure that gas masks would fit properly. They were ready to go, or almost. Reginald Kiernan, an Irish Catholic, went to confession. Skipping tea, he managed to leave the barracks for the short walk to the church and a priest.

He did not seem too pleased to be brought out into the church at six o’clock in the evening to hear a confession, though he tried to hide it … The priest never said a word to me, except the words of absolution. Perhaps he was tired.

Charles Carrington, who had himself enlisted at seventeen, was by 1918 in England overseeing the training of young conscripts, primarily Yorkshiremen. Every six months, the reserve battalion received seven or eight hundred boys, mostly eighteen years old, into the fold to be fashioned into soldiers. Untrained but nominally fit, they were given the classification A4, and it was Carrington’s job to see that they were trained and A1 by the time they were embarked for the Western Front.

The transition he saw in these boys during six months’ training was remarkable.

The skinny, sallow, shambling, frightened victims of our industrial system, suffering from the effect of wartime shortages, who were given into our hands, were unrecognizable after six months of good food, fresh air, and physical training. They looked twice the size and, as we weighed and measured them, I am able to say that they put on an average of one inch in height and one stone in weight during their time with us … Beyond statistical measurement was their change in character, to ruddy, handsome, clear-eyed young men with square shoulders who stood up straight and were afraid of no one, not even the sergeant major.

In ‘the dark days’, as Carrington called them, of 1918, these boys would not receive even six months’ training. In time, questions would be asked in the Commons about this. The new Undersecretary of State for War, James Macpherson, replied:

The minimum period of training for such lads is four months, I can assure my Hon. Friend that no lads have been sent to France unless they are sufficiently trained to take their place in the firing line.

There were allegations that some boys had received just fourteen weeks’ training, denied at the time but later conceded by
the Government. Fourteen weeks or four months, either way the time granted for training had been shortened dangerously and it was a moot point whether it was possible to teach a boy to be a competent soldier while simultaneously developing him physically.

The boys’ departure for the Western Front was ‘painful’ to witness, according to Carrington.

I knew well that under their forced cheerfulness there were mixed sentiments and I did not much like the headmaster’s – I mean the colonel’s – set speech of valediction. The boys suddenly looked much younger, loaded down with their marching order, their new steel helmets and gas masks, their pouches stocked with live ammunition, and with their iron rations tied to their packs at the last moment in white linen bags – the unmistakable sign by which you recognized a new draft in France.

There was anything but cheerfulness as far as Private Percy Williams was concerned. Percy, a lad from the heart of Wales, was feeling miserable and not in the slightest patriotic. He had prayed long and hard that this day would never come.

You may call me a bit of a coward, but I didn’t want to join the army. I could see by the casualty lists that so many had died during the Battle of the Somme, I could read between the lines and I was hoping and hoping that the war would be finished before I was called up.

Soon after his eighteenth birthday in September 1917 Percy received a telegram directing him to Whitchurch Barracks in Cardiff. He left home feeling very apprehensive, clinging to the belief that he would not be sent abroad until he was nineteen; that was what he had been told.

Not a bit of it. I was sent abroad at the end of March 1918. In the short time I was out in France, I hoped, along with others, that I’d get a blighty, a slight wound that would get me back to England.