Boy Soldiers of the Great War (43 page)

Interestingly, in the medal rolls held at The National Archives, she is listed as ‘VAD/Unofficial Overseas’. Whether she was official or not made not a scrap of difference to Helen herself, treating the wounded and holding the hands of those who were about to die.

It’s funny how quite strong men that you looked up to would want to hold your hand during these moments. It was a very real expression of what I believed in very, very firmly, the physical contact with other life. It generally came from them, they wanted to hold your hand and you wanted to hold theirs. It was a horrible feeling to know that somebody is going right into eternity that moment, and you have to hold their hand, maybe patting it to give them courage. So often, so often these young men would look at you and say, ‘You remind me of my mother’, who would be three times my age. It was something that happened and always the same words, ‘You remind me of my mother.’

Marjorie Grigsby tried to remain detached.

Some of them were quite youngsters. Remember, lots of them were only boys of seventeen and eighteen, they’d joined up – they thought it was a joke I think, you know what children are. They entered into the spirit of the thing and found it wasn’t fun when they got there but they had to carry on – there were lots, lots. We knew how old they were and of course we felt sorry for them but they were just patients. You didn’t know them. It wasn’t a friend or a relative. You had no particular sentiments. But if you were the same age as they were you couldn’t help thinking, ‘Oh Lord, I wonder if he’s got any brothers,’ or wondering if he was an only child. It’s an absolute mêlée really of blood and thunder.

Helen never forgot the bloody reality of the whole experience.

You heard the shelling and sometimes it seemed very close and noisy, but I never remember fear, naked fear. I was conscious of the shells, but I thought, well, a shell could kill anyone and if it is me, then so be it. But there was so much to do, there wasn’t time to stand back and think. Ambulances were always arriving, generally in convoys, and you would go out and help those who could walk or limp along, and the rest would be carried in for treatment.

The wounds were smelly. I think very often the smell was the worst. Every wound was treated with a swab doused in Lysol, a red solution. The Lysol was in a dish and you held the swab with forceps, dipped it in and applied it to the wound quite brutally to clean this nasty place up. These wounds were so dirty, sometimes full of maggots, and on one occasion I saw lice in the wound, too.

Bad wounds were quite horrific, shocking beyond belief. You didn’t want to believe what you were seeing, the horror of what people, responsible people, were doing to each other. I remember the first amputation I saw. They said, ‘Go on, Nurse, you can help, this is quite a simple one,’ and they shoved me into the room with the others and it suddenly struck me how simple and ordinary it was to deliberately cut off a hand.

Throughout the spring months of 1918, tens of thousands of wounded men were evacuated, from advanced dressing stations to casualty clearing stations, and as quickly as possible down to the base hospitals. There was always a brief time-lag between casualties at the front and the sudden rush at the base camp, as trains pulled into the sidings and released their cargo of maimed men for treatment. The underage soldiers living in huts nearby could not help but be aware of the seriousness of the situation, and it would have come as no surprise to them that moves were under way to sift out from among their number anyone who might go up the line. On 25 March, an entry in the war diary of No. 5
Convalescent Camp at Cayeux noted that all ‘strenuous efforts are being made to evacuate all men for general duty’, followed four days later by a note confirming that an order had been issued that ‘all boys aged 18½ who were “Fit” and immatures of category “A” were to be discharged to their Bases’. That day, 151 boys left Cayeux, ready to go back to the line. When the Germans renewed their attacks on the Lys in early April, an effort was made to reduce the numbers in the depot still further.

The decision to cut the age at which a boy could be sent abroad had not been taken easily, but the dire military position necessitated the change. On the very day that the Germans launched the second phase of their offensive, the Prime Minister addressed the Commons and spelt out to MPs the extent of the crisis.

There was an understanding as to boys under nineteen years of age, that they would only be used in case of emergency. We felt that the emergency had arisen. In so far as those who were over eighteen and a half were concerned – those who had already received four months’ training – we felt it necessary that they should be sent across to France.

Two days later, on 11 April, the commander-in-chief felt compelled to release a ‘Special Order’ addressed ‘To All Ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders’. Underlining his admiration for the men under his command, Haig told them:

There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, we must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.

Nowhere was the fighting more intense than around Armentières, and the fifth division was sent forward to try to stabilize the front.
It was the morning of 11 April, and Vic Cole was reluctantly on his way back into action.

As we advanced, line after line, in extended order across the green fields and into the sprawling forest of Nieppe, there was no sign of war, the sun shone, birds sang in the trees and startled deer ran leaping off into the brush. We eventually came out on the other side of the forest, still no sign of the enemy.

For a brief moment the fighting appeared to have subsided. A halt was ordered and the men dug in. It was then that Vic saw a farmhouse and absented himself from the shallow trenches to investigate. He found a cellar full of wine and, liberating six bottles in a sandbag, he returned to the trench to find his friend Ralph Newman. They were already quite merry when the rum ration came round; they would have been in serious trouble if anyone had suspected how drunk they were.

With the sun shining, the birds singing, and the mellowing effect of the wine and rum, we were feeling at peace with all mankind – even with Fritz himself! Then, all of a sudden, with a shattering crash, the fun commenced – with a mighty roar the German barrage opened up and in a moment the air was full of bursting shells, flying shrapnel and the smoke and noise of battle.

Pulling myself together, I noticed that most of the stuff was going over our heads and dropping in C Company lines. All the world seemed full of the whine and crash of shell splinters. To our front across a ploughed field, the ground rose a little so that we had hardly any real field of fire, then suddenly, quite close, I saw the Germans – at least I saw the tops of their helmets bobbing up and down as they ducked and dodged in our fire. Aiming at these moving blobs, I fired again and again until there was no longer anything to shoot at and the ‘cease fire’ whistle brought respite.

With much gusto, a battery of our field guns now joined in the game. Concealed in the forest behind us, they fired over our heads at the again advancing enemy. As poor Fritz came on, our guns shortened their range until their shells were falling just in front of our own position. One fell right among our men, then another, and several men were wounded.

It was demoralizing enough to be shelled by the enemy, but to be fired upon by one’s own side was heart-breaking. In any successful attack, a small proportion of such losses could be expected: shells sometimes fell short, or infantry advanced too quickly into their supporting barrage. Firing on your own entrenched infantry was pure loss. Vic, being a signaller, tried to telephone back but the line was cut, so he was ordered by an officer almost incandescent with anger to go and get a message through ordering the guns to lift. Vic shook hands with Ralph and set off, but by good fortune he found another signaller who could relay the message, and within minutes the gunfire relented.

As I turned to leave, something hit the tree behind which we were crouching, there was a blinding flash, a whirling sound of splinters, parts of the tree flew all about and there I was lying flat on my back looking up at the startled signaller. I had been hit in the back and was already feeling numb from the waist down. In a few minutes, stretcher-bearers arrived on the scene. A couple of them dragged me over to a hole for temporary cover and turned me on my face. One of them let rip a stream of swear words as he cut away my leather jacket and saw the wound.

Vic was taken first to a dressing station, labelled, and then evacuated to a farmhouse with a Red Cross flag above the door.

My stretcher was laid on the floor and the bearers went away. The place was crowded with wounded men swathed in bandages. At
one end of the big room, a couple of RAMC doctors were bending over a stretcher raised on boxes and it looked to me as though they were trying to amputate a leg. It was dusk, and the room was lit by an oil lamp. A soldier sitting opposite, his head in bandages, suddenly fell forward and crashed to the floor.

Despite the pain, I managed to doze and awoke to find myself crying like a baby. Nerves, I suppose. The doctors made their rounds, put fresh dressings on us and marked most of us up for a CCS. Then came the ambulance driver – a woman! This was the closest I had ever seen a woman to the firing line, and although big shells were still whistling overhead the girl took no notice of them – she just carried on with her job. ‘I can take four,’ she said. So four of us were carried out and lifted into the little Ford ambulance. The girl gave us cigarettes and to me she said, ‘Don’t worry, chum, I’ll take it easy over the shell holes.’

It was the end of Vic’s war. The metal could not be taken out of his back, and remained there until he died in November 1995, a few weeks short of his ninety-ninth birthday.

The girl who gave him a lift was exceptional, although not unique, in being so far forward within the battle zone. Normally, the CCS was the farthest a nurse would be permitted to go, but these were exceptional times, to the point that even CCSs were under direct threat of being overrun. Marjorie Grigsby was still serving at the CCS when the order came to evacuate. The German forces were getting perilously close, and the decision was taken to remove all the casualties and head towards the coast.

So we all put together what we could in the way of anything we could carry, and went to the ambulances. We worked until about midnight. It was a pouring wet night and ours was the last ambulance to leave. On board we had six stretcher cases, a girl driver by the name of Griffin who, for some reason, was practically stone deaf, and myself. We set off and I suppose we’d gone about four or five miles – bang – ‘Oh, my
God’ a tyre had gone. The Germans were quite close and no one to help us. Now, I knew about nursing but I didn’t know a thing about changing a tyre, so I just tried to do what Griffin told me. She said do so and so and ‘Put that spanner on’. ‘What’s a spanner?’ I felt so hopeless, the water was dripping off me, and I was cold and frightened. I don’t know how we did it but we got that tyre off and put another one on and set off again with German artillery firing quite near.

The Germans attempted to press their advantage and drove the British further back, but the line was beginning to stabilize and, by the night of 14 April, the great advances of the previous few days came to a grinding halt.

Cyril José had been rushed forward to join his new battalion, the 2/4th Ox and Bucks, which was resting just behind the line in a village that Cyril recognized as the one in which he had spent Christmas 1915. Within hours of his arrival, the battalion was ordered forward, extending in an open field to await the Germans. As they dug in, they came under attack both from shellfire and from snipers lodged in some farmhouses, and several men were killed or wounded. Promptly, Cyril and five others were sent off to dislodge the Germans but, by the time they arrived, the snipers had pulled back fifty yards. Both parties traded shots for half an hour before the Germans pulled out on horseback.

The next day, the Ox and Bucks were ordered forward. Cyril later wrote:

We went over the top on Sunday afternoon [15 April] and again on Monday evening when we took our objectives but were wiped out. In the end there were about fifteen of us left, no officers or NCOs … I took charge, as they were mostly young kiddies from the training reserve battalions.

In what Cyril was humorously to call a ‘thin red line of khaki’, the survivors waited for reinforcements, but with no support on either
flank the position was hopeless. It was only a matter of time before the enemy regrouped and came again.

Jerry surrounded us on three sides and advanced in front, in three waves, so we showed him how fast we could run. We fired a few rounds into them now and again when we got out of breath, then on again. We didn’t stand a chance of holding him. I suppose Jerry got those who were wounded and couldn’t run. Didn’t stay to argue the point myself.

As he fell back, Cyril turned to run again and was shot in the left arm. By pure chance, the bullet passed through the wound stripe on his sleeve. Now injured, he could legitimately drop his rifle and equipment and escape. He was fortunate. By Sunday 21 April, he was back home, in hospital once more. He had lasted less than three weeks in France and no more than three days back in the firing line.

The German offensive continued until 29 April, when it was finally called off. Once again the Germans failed to capture their objectives, and although they had taken the town of Armentières and seized one of the three strategic heights, Kemmel Hill, they had not succeeded in taking the critically important railhead of Hazebrouck. The success of the first few days of fighting could not be sustained and, although a deep salient appeared in enemy territory, salients were, as the British had found at Ypres, costly to hold.