Read Boy Soldiers of the Great War Online
Authors: Richard van Emden
Fred Hodges was the antithesis of Percy Williams. Fred, a grammar school boy of the most patriotic type, had enlisted aged seventeen in March 1917 with two friends from school. The prospect of a commission had been suggested but rejected, as it appeared to forestall their chances of getting abroad. They could not wait. They were fit, strapping lads, and made a nice contrast to the blighted youth that all too frequently shuffled into the recruitment office. When Fred and his friends had walked in on that March day, he had been proud to overhear the medical officer say, ‘Ah, these three look more likely. I’m pleased to see three young chaps raring to go.’
In the last days before leaving for France, Fred’s draft was moved to Norwich. All embarkation leave was stopped but Fred managed to contact his parents and they came to the city to stay for a few days. On the day before embarkation, the boys were taken to a local park to be inspected by a senior officer.
We marched past the general, column after column. It was a cold frosty morning; our breath was ascending from our mouths as we marched, and then the general got up on his dais and spoke to us. ‘You men,’ he began, and then paused as he surveyed our eager young faces, ‘of course I know you’re not men, you’re only boys, but the Germans have broken through our fortifications and you’re needed at the front at once. You’ve now got to play the part of men.’
The general then descended and walked along the lines of boys inspecting each one, stopping, Fred recalled, to talk to a few who appeared particularly young or small or both. It was a young
draft. Fred estimated that it was three-quarters boys, and only one-quarter men.
The next day the draft left the camp and marched to the railway station. The crowds grew ever deeper as they approached the train, but Fred spotted his parents and for a moment they were able to say goodbye.
The pavements were full, mostly of women; we were their boys. Some waved and said, ‘Good luck’, some were crying. We could hear comments: ‘Poor little buggers,’ I heard one woman say. ‘Fancy sending them out to France to die for us.’
My parents were there on the station platform and I remember my mother putting her arms round me and saying something about ‘If you don’t come back …’ I don’t know what she was going to say but I interrupted her and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I shall come back.’
Reginald Kiernan had left his camp and was already on a train to Dover. As the train went down to the coast, a crackle of rifle fire was heard as some of the lads, excited at owning new weapons, took pot shots at grazing sheep and cows. By evening the joviality had calmed and men slept against each other, or sprawled out in the passageways of the carriage.
It was night when we passed through London and children and women came on to the verandas of the slum tenements and cheered us. Their cheers sounded shrill and faint over the noise of the train. Many were in nightclothes, and we could see them dimly, and their little rooms, by the light of their tiny gas jets.
After arriving at Dover, the men were temporarily discharged to several houses overlooking the port, and awaited the order to move. When it came, they traipsed down the hill to the ship and
joined the queue to board. As they waited, Kiernan became aware of a lady dressed all in black approaching the line. The words she spoke were unforgettable – born, as they clearly were, out of her own personal grief.
‘Finish it off this time, boys,’ was all she said.
A MOTHER’S HOPE, A FATHER’S JOY GOD HAS CALLED OUR ONLY BOY
79210 Private Harold Carter 9th London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers)
Killed in Action (Epéhy) 18 September 1918, aged 18
The men and boys who poured into France at the end of March were given one undertaking: to halt, by whatever means, the unremitting enemy advance. It was a huge obligation to place upon the shoulders of those who had never seen combat before; nevertheless, lads such as Fred Hodges were not about to shirk the responsibility. The draft sent out with Fred would join the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers, but first they needed ammunition. As the boys queued at the base camp for their extra rounds, Fred heard the voice of a Private Ablethorpe, a usually mild-mannered and refined lad, but no longer. ‘Well, now they’ve given us all 120 rounds of ammo, I intend to use it, and shoot as many of the buggers as possible before I’m killed.’ Fred was more thrilled than taken aback. ‘I realized that we boys were going to face death or wounds for our country. I said to Ablethorpe, “We’ve GOT to STOP THEM whatever OUR fate.”’
The situation at the front dictated a short stay at the base, often less than a day, before the drafts were entrained on cattle trucks and sent to join their new battalions. The trains were
slow, cumbersome and jolting, and it was perfectly possible to jump out of a carriage and run down the track to catch up. On Fred Hodges’s train, a few boys fired their rifles at barns, while others climbed out on to the roof of the train, returning, after it had passed through a tunnel, with blackened faces. There was an atmosphere akin to going on a picnic, but the tranquillity of the countryside belied the danger ahead and one old campaigner knew it. In the truck was a man named Brandon, an old soldier who wore the medal ribbon of the 1914 Mons Star.
He was watching our boyish tricks with some interest when, grinning, he said, ‘When Jerry sees your lovely pink faces he’ll say “Mein Gott!” rat, tat, tat, new troops, rat, tat, tat, tat.’
Often drafts were roughly hewn apart, 200 being sent to one battalion, 300 to another, frequently separating friends in the process. Fred was fortunate in being sent to the battalion he joined in 1917. Now he had the chance to listen to ‘old’ soldiers and pick up tips about life in the line, but there were not many left to tell the tale.
These survivors of the Old Tenth had only just come from the forward area of the line, their numbers reduced to less than a hundred very tired, dirty, unshaven men, whose faces showed the strain of the past fortnight.
The boys looked on in awe at these men, whose clothing was muddy and torn and yet their rifles were spotless, and in return they were greeted by these battle-worn soldiers with a mixture of pity and amusement.
Not all new boys were made welcome. Harold Lawton, an eighteen-year-old lad from Rhyl in Wales, was one of those who were numbered off and directed to join a battalion with which he had no prior association, the 1/4th East Yorkshire Regiment. This
unit had been practically annihilated in March, being reduced from a nominally thousand-strong battalion to three officers and thirty-six other ranks. On 5 April, Harold was one of 500 reinforcements sent to make up the numbers. Harold remembered:
The regiment was resting after a very nasty time. We were the new boys and the old soldiers took no notice of us whatsoever; they were utterly exhausted and had to look after themselves, but it meant they told us absolutely nothing.
The following day the battalion was sent forward.
We were to hold a line of trenches which were little more than a scrape in the ground and we had to get digging straight away. We hadn’t been there long when one chap, a lad who’d come out with us, John Peacock, looked over our new parapet and he was immediately shot through the head and killed. I was shocked. No one knew what was going on! We were cold, wet and hungry.
Fred Hodges, in contrast, had moved up to the Somme in stages, and had more time to acclimatize. These boys were naive, and, as Fred remembered, prone ‘to behave like a crowd of tourists’. A group had stood near a battery trying to spot the flight of the shells and had already been told to clear off by a gunnery officer.
Fred’s march to the front line had been full of interest and incident. The battalion had been broken up into platoons to minimize the risk of casualties from shelling. As it happened, the threat materialized from the air, a plane swooping low to drop a couple of bombs, scattering the boys, most running for an empty trench. The corporal was annoyed and turned on the platoon. ‘I thought I’d brought some men up the line, not a lot of bloody scared kids.’
These kids may have felt like soldiers but, to the experienced eye, kids were all they were and moving up to the front with the
weight of fear, expectation and a full pack was utterly exhausting. An unknown Australian who saw these lads wrote home:
For two days companies of infantry have been passing us on the roads – companies of children, English children; pink-faced, round-cheeked children, flushed under the weight of their unaccustomed packs, with their steel helmets on the back of their heads and the straps hanging loosely on their rounded baby chins.
It was a sight that could not but evoke pity.
Reginald Kiernan, one of a 400-strong draft sent to join a battalion in the line, wrote:
We were in full marching kit, and we marched on with no band, just slog, slog, slog on, not even keeping step after about five kilometres. I have never had such an agonizing bodily strain as the last kilometre. We had not one halt. Some of the men were screaming at the end, though I don’t know about what, unless it was the fear that one’s head would burst. It seemed as though we would march for ever. A great many men fell out and lay by the roadside … I tried to keep upright when we were marching, instead of leaning forward, slipping the fingers through the shoulder straps of the equipment to relieve the weight.
Eric Hiscock wrote of his experience:
It is difficult, at this distance from the dread reality of those frontline nights, to communicate what it was like for a youngster still well under the age of enlistment to be included in such hazardous fatigues. Most journeys were made in single file, on treacherous duckboard tracks perched precariously across the sinister, stinking, death-filled mud flats … I don’t know what happened mentally, but physically I occasionally broke down under the sheer weight of equipment that had to be carried, lack of sleep, and the
intolerable discipline that was necessary to keep tired and bored soldiers up to something like scratch, and away from mutiny … I wanted home with all my being.
Later that summer, Eric was tempted to get out of the line by means of a self-inflicted wound. It was while his company was resting for ten minutes by the side of the road that an opportunity presented itself. Heavy howitzer guns on caterpillar wheels were passing.
Suddenly I saw one such vehicle approaching that I might use as a means of getting myself shipped home and out, finally, from this world I had never made.
No one, I decided, could accuse a flaked-out schoolboy, seemingly asleep during a ten-minute rest, of a self-inflicted wound if one of his feet was run over and crushed by a heavy vehicle in the dark. All I had to do was stretch out a short distance in my pretended sleep just as the caterpillars approached and I would be incapacitated for ever from that painful moment.
The instrument of release rolled nearer and nearer. I stirred in my simulated sleep and my right leg stretched out. In a matter of moments the foot of it would be crushed and mangled into an inoperable mess and I would be headed for home, minus a foot but for ever free from nightmare marches, fatigues, machine-gun bullets …
At the last moment he withdrew his dominant right leg and substituted his left, but the caterpillar had passed. ‘A sense of relief flooded my stupid mind and my tired body,’ he recorded.
Why would any soldier, let alone a seventeen-year-old boy, willingly mutilate himself to get out of France? The reality of war is one of intense extremes and the same moment of madness that could propel a man to win a medal was, in the climate of war, a primary reaction that might also cause him to run headlong in the
opposite direction or to put a foot under the track of an oncoming heavy vehicle.
The number of self-inflicted wounds (SIWs) had officially grown from just thirty-four cases in the year to the end of September 1915 to 2,239 cases in the last year of the war. Better medical detection of such ‘crimes’ was no doubt partly responsible for the remarkable increase, but then, as such recognition improved, so did the ability of soldiers to disguise their efforts at self-mutilation. Many cared little for the risk of detection: like Eric Hiscock in his moment of temptation, they had reached the end of their tether and were going to get out one way or another.
It would have been easy, believed Reginald Kiernan, to shoot oneself to get away from the line. If a man was careful and shot through a water bottle into the leg, there would be no tell-tale ‘burn’, the giveaway mark of a rifle discharged from just a few inches. ‘But I could not do it. The thought of it had always filled me with disgust. Someone has to do the fighting.’
A particularly fierce bombardment, indeed, faced Fred Hodges’s platoon soon after it arrived in the front line.
Captain Drummond came along and said, ‘Now do what I’m doing,’ and he sat on the fire step and pulled his feet up so his heels were touching his backside and he put his arms around his head and shoulders and said, ‘Now you’ve covered your vital parts, so there’s nothing more you can do. If you do stop some shrapnel, what better place to die than in the front line in defence of your king and country?’
Such lessons had been learnt in the past when there was time to acclimatize, and generally not while shells peppered the parapet; new battalions were sent to ‘quieter’ sectors to learn the ropes. In April 1918, many were so utterly depleted, so completely replenished by drafts, that there were few men left with any experience to impart. The younger soldiers would have to turn, where
possible, to those in the draft itself who had served at the front before.
One boy fortunate to be going the other way was the imposter Henry Stevens. Quite what part Henry played in the retirement is not clear. The fighting in the previous three weeks had been brutal: eleven officers and 275 other ranks of the 7th Northants were killed, wounded, or missing. Henry had managed to remain with his unit, probably with the transport. He was a civilian in an army uniform and was, as likely as not, kept out of harm’s way as far as that was possible in a fighting retreat. By 8 April the exhausted battalion was relieved and out on rest, at which time Henry could be disposed of, being sent under escort to custody at the Military Police barracks in Boulogne where he was interviewed once again. He repeated the story as told to him by George of how his brother had given blood and why he had decided to stay on in Britain and desert after his official leave had ended.