Boy Soldiers of the Great War (10 page)

Every evening while I was at Longmoor, I paid a visit to the Soldiers’ Home where for fourpence, the price of twenty cigarettes, I could obtain a huge basin of porridge floating in milk. The old soldiers would have scorned such food, but for a teenager with a never-satisfied appetite, this was just what was most needed after a hard day’s work.

As George Coppard could confirm, growing boys spent much of their meagre wages on extra food from the canteen to keep them going until the next meal.

The word calories as we know it today never existed at Aldershot. The quartermaster-general never considered the needs of a growing body engaged on hard training, trench digging or route marching. The army clerk at his desk received the same amount of rations.

Eating was George’s ‘biggest worry’ after he had become involved in illicit card games. His luck proved ruinous, and he lost all the money he needed to top up his diet.

Occasionally word would drift round that there was soup in the cookhouse. Only those with no cash took advantage of the offer, and I was generally among the poor and needy.

‘We all feel weaker with the little food and the continuous work,’ wrote Reginald Kiernan, ‘and yet we seem able to stand more of it every day.’ The speed at which wheezy, timid and thin boys could metamorphose into tough soldiers surprised no one in camp except the lads themselves. Even so, later in the war, some consideration was given to the requirements of growing boys, with the newest recruits being given double rations at Catterick Camp, in recognition of their youth and their rapid development.

Young lads could broaden out physically, but there was one place that remained a tell-tale problem: the gap between top lip and nose. If there was anything that indicated the age of a boy, it was the ‘bum-fluff’ as it was known. At times it hardly merited removing, until an NCO noticed the darkening smudge. George White recalled:

One morning, I was asked by the sergeant when I shaved last. This was rather embarrassing as I had to tell him I had not started to shave yet. I only had soft hair on my face but I got the order to ‘get a shave’. Hence my first attempt with a cut-throat razor.

Shaving remained an irregular occurrence for most boys. Even after a year’s service, George Coppard reckoned that one shave lasted him ten days. Shaving did at least ‘even out’ a boy’s face with those around him. The problem came if the opposite occurred. One disgruntled fifteen-year-old volunteer recalled:

King George V made it known that he liked all his members of the Household Brigade to have a moustache. Of course they all started growing one and I couldn’t, all I had was a little mark above my top lip. You can imagine that I was outstanding and the sergeant would come to me and say, ‘You’ve not grown one, then?’ ‘No, Sergeant.’ So I got extra fatigues, peeling potatoes for one hour.

Not all boys were happy with the regime under which they lived, and the thought of doing a ‘bunk’ to another regiment was never far from their thoughts. Frank Lindley saw no immediate prospect of getting revenge while serving in the artillery, under NCOs he did not like.

It was too slow, mucking horses out and all that business. Of course we saw a gun or two, but we didn’t have much training on them. I used to think ‘this is not being a soldier’.

Fed up, he deserted.

They were a rotten lot, so about half-a-dozen of us decided to clear off and find somewhere a bit more soldier-like. It was a Friday night and we jumped a train at Belper, Sheffield. When the guard came down for the tickets, we said that we’d had to come down in a hurry and they hadn’t given us warrants. Fair play to the old boy, he let us through. On the Saturday we were going to meet in the city but only my friend Bert turned up. We changed into what civilian clothes we had and stopped with one of his relatives, sleeping on a rug.

The next day Frank and his friend enlisted once again, this time into the 13th Yorks and Lancs, better known to posterity as the Barnsley Pals.

It was overfamiliarity rather than any unpleasantness that made Horace Calvert desert from the West Yorkshire Regiment. He wanted a battalion that lived up to his childhood impressions of the army, and the friendly camaraderie in his Territorial battalion was just a little too chummy for his liking. ‘In our own way, we thought we were a good battalion but the discipline wasn’t there from my point of view.’ The problem stemmed from the fact that a large number of the men worked in civilian life for those who were their Territorial officers.

They were wool merchants and worked in the warehouses and the boss was on first-name terms with the staff and of course you got it in the regiment, calling one another Bill or Jack, even if he was a corporal or sergeant. I would have preferred orders to have been given in a proper way and then carried out, instead of ‘all right, Jack, I’ll do it’. To me, that wasn’t military discipline, or the sort of discipline that shows up in a tight corner.

In March 1915 the battalion moved to Gainsborough, where Horace and three other men were billeted on a widow.

I was sat in one evening and she produced a lot of photographs of the Coldstream Guards and she told me her husband had been a quartermaster sergeant. I was so taken with these pictures, the smartness, that it set me wondering. One evening I made up my mind, I’d go the following day. When it was dark, I left all my kit, just keeping my uniform, and set off following the road out of town to a country railway station four or five miles away. I had an old pass, which I hadn’t handed back in, and I went to the booking office and asked for a single to Bradford. He asked, ‘Have you got a pass?’ I pulled it out and he just looked to see it was a pass, never checked it, and I got a ticket. At home, I told my parents I was on leave, then, next morning, leaving my uniform in the copper in the kitchen, I went out in civvies and walked into the recruiting office in Bridge Street, Bradford.

Horace was passed straight away for his chosen regiment, the Grenadier Guards. At the beginning of March, he was sent to the training depot at Caterham.

I had to go up a long hill and as we entered the barracks there stood a tremendous figure of a man, Sergeant Major ‘Timber’ Wood, and he pointed his drill stick at me. ‘Hey, you, here. How
old are you? We don’t want sixteen-year-olds in this regiment.’ He’d picked me out straight away, but he knew somebody must have passed me, so he let me go.

At the end of training it was as much as any commanding officer could do to stop a lad, buoyed up by thoughts of adventure, from embarking for France. The 1/4th Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders had a large number of underage boys serving in France, but, as the War History of the 2/4th (Reserve) Battalion describes, more were willing to go.

One morning at orderly-room, a young soldier was charged with ‘breaking into the quartermaster’s store, removing a full set of uniform and equipment, rifle and ammunition, etc, secreting himself in the ranks of a draft and being found under the seat of a railway carriage
en route
for France without a ticket’.

The young soldier had tears in his eyes while the charge-sheet was read over before him – they quickly disappeared when I told him he was discharged, with a very big good conduct mark on his conduct sheet.

It seemed almost churlish to criticize a boy for wanting to fight. His actions belonged so much to the ethos of the time and it was gratifying to commanding officers to see so many patriotic lads, who wished, in the best traditions of the army, to serve their regiment and their country. It was also hard to refuse a boy who had perhaps never failed to finish a route march, had shot well on the ranges and had, to all intents and purposes, been a model soldier. When he was fully trained, age remained the only possible reason for leaving him behind. Leslie Walkinton was anxious.

When would we be sent out? Would I be allowed to go with the battalion? Even if I was only seventeen, I was as good a man as
the rest of them. I had never fallen out on a route march like some of the older men. I had even carried a man’s rifle on one occasion when he was nearly done.

Selection for overseas service, whether as an officer or other rank, was a moment of elation, mixed, if the soldier was honest, with a tinge of nervousness. In most cases, a short period of embarkation leave was granted, a chance to say goodbye. Alfred Anderson remembers:

We were told in mid-afternoon that we were getting a few hours off to go home and say goodbye to our parents. We went to where the transport was, a lorry and two horses and a driver, Dundee to Newtyle. It took about two hours to get there, it’s a nice flat road, you see, and we trotted all the way. I saw some of my relatives and I said my goodbyes and mother gave me a Bible; then it was back on the transport.

Saying goodbye was hard for all concerned. George Parker, who had enlisted at just fifteen, was told after a few months’ training that he was on his way.

I hated goodbyes, and still do. Leaving that weekend was awful. Mum tried to put on a brave show, but the strain for my parents must have been dreadful. I know it was for me. Honestly, I think that saying goodbye to them was worse than thinking of what I might have to face in the near future. Mum and Aunt Annie came to the station with me. Mum kept her pecker up for my sake, but Aunt broke down and I felt terrible.

George was among those being sent out as drafts to reinforce their respective units, already in France. Sometimes a large draft would be lucky enough to receive a proper farewell. In May 1915, William Sims left to join the 4th Rifle Brigade. His draft was
not only given a rousing send-off but had the honour of being inspected by Lord Kitchener himself. If that was not enough, as the great man passed by, he stopped and spoke to William.

He came up and looked at me. ‘How old are you, boy?’ ‘Nineteen,’ I replied. ‘You don’t look it,’ he said then moved on. I took it to mean young. I was. I was only sixteen.

In fairness, gauging age could be very difficult, as recruiting sergeants and medical officers had found. To an older man, perhaps one in his fifties, it was far from easy putting an age to a young face. George Louth had enlisted under age late in 1914 but had genuinely turned nineteen when the battalion left for France, yet the commanding officer was decidedly dubious about him.

We were lined up on Southsea Common when the colonel came to visit us – to size us up, more or less. He came round asking questions, how old we were and such like. I said, ‘Nineteen, sir.’ He said, ‘Nineteen?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Right.’ He went to the next man, spoke to him, then came back to me again. ‘How old did you say you were?’ I said, ‘Nineteen, sir,’ and he looked at me straight.

It was not the last time George’s age was questioned.

Before we left for France, the sergeant came up to me and said, ‘Louth, the captain wants to know how old you are.’ I said, ‘Why, Sergeant?’ He said, ‘’Cos he doesn’t believe you. If you are not nineteen you’re not allowed to go over. We’re going to France and we don’t want you crying when we get over there, saying you are not old enough, because it won’t happen, you won’t come back, so say it now.’

‘I’m going with the lads,’ I told him.

Within weeks of going to France in August 1914, sixteen-year-old cavalryman Ben Clouting had proved what a boy could do if given
the chance, allaying the fears of his troop officer, Captain Hornby. After Hornby was wounded and invalided back to England, he wrote a letter to a fellow officer praising the courage of the youngster: ‘… that boy Clouting, son of the groom, did most awfully well, a real tiger with an exceptional cool head on him …’

It had been a risk and officers, such as Hornby, had to take a view that the lad under their command would perform well on active service. The question still lingered nevertheless: should they really flout military law and let them go? It was a tough decision, as the commanding officer of the 2/4th (Reserve) Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders knew only too well.

A draft which was going to France had been inspected. One youngster, who seemed to me under age but who stoutly contested the fact, was found on reference to the enlistment sheet to be one year under age. I had reluctantly to take him from the draft. On returning to the orderly room, the regimental sergeant major asked if I would see the lad, he was so upset, and I did so. He was physically much fitter than several of the recruits older than himself who were going overseas, and he begged to be allowed to go with his own batch of recruits. I told him to telegraph to his father, and if his father and mother did not object, I would let him go. Their reply was that he might go.

The men of the 1/7th Royal Scots, who had spent the war so far on coastal defence, heard the news that they were finally on their way to the front, and they were jubilant. A and C Companies were to head south by train to Liverpool, to be followed two hours later by B and D Companies. A ship, the
Empress of Britain
, had been earmarked to take them overseas. Among them were a considerable number of underage boys allowed to go abroad – with, in at least some cases, the connivance of the regiment.

It was the early hours of the morning of 22 May 1915 before they were all on board the train. The wooden carriages were
divided into compartments, each holding eight men. As it was dark, the gas lamps had been lit, so the men could see what they were doing before they sat down; most went straight to sleep, while a few dozed. It was routine, once all were aboard, to lock the carriage doors before the train got under way.

The train trundled south, stopping at one point at Carstairs station where a few of those who were too excited to sleep leant out of the carriage windows to exchange some banter with a few local girls who were on their way to work.

It was Saturday morning, and near the village of Gretna Green at Quintinshill station, two signalmen were in the process of handing over just as a late-running London to Glasgow express was given clearance to pass through the station. As two goods wagons occupied the loop lines, a slow local train was temporarily positioned on the down line to let the express through. Almost as he took over, the relieving signalman received a call from a station further up the line to allow the train carrying the Royal Scots to pass. Forgetting that the local train was still at a standstill on the down line, he dropped the signal arm, indicating to the troop train that the track was clear. A catastrophic mix-up had occurred and a collision was unavoidable. Just before 6.50 a.m., there was an almighty crash. Seventeen-year-old Private Thomson recalled the moment of impact.