Boy Soldiers of the Great War (18 page)

Barely ten weeks after arriving in France, he was dead, killed as he stood outside his dugout by a stray bullet glancing off the top of a sandbag. His parents, Arthur and Agnes Lawrence of Maidenhead, were informed of their son’s death a few days later. The news was sent by telegram and included the express sympathy of the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Such messages were changed later in 1915, extending the sympathy of the Army Council instead, an alteration probably made to depersonalize the telegram so as to forestall parents writing back – as Brian Lawrence’s father had:

23.6.15

To The Right Hon. The Earl Kitchener of Khartoum K.G.

My Lord

I beg to thank you for your kind expression of sympathy, on the
death of my only child Second Lieut. Brian Lightly Lawrence of the Second Batt. Middlesex Regt.

Please pardon me my Lord for saying, I do hope in future you will see your way not to send out such children, for what is 17??

He went gladly, and I would have had my tongue taken out, rather than have breathed a word to stop him; he has done his duty, and died a noble death, but the fact remains he was only a child, anyhow in years.

I have the honour to remain

Your Lordship’s obedient servant

Arthur L. Lawrence

All these young recruits had taken on and ascribed to themselves the attributes of an officer and this had made an enormous difference to their self-perception and confidence. The boy suddenly had a job, a wage, a chequebook and an account at Cox’s, the designated bank of an officer. With such accoutrements, ‘the umbilical cord was finally severed’, wrote Stuart Cloete. ‘That it had been replaced by an iron chain of army discipline meant nothing to me, I could accept that much more easily; indeed I embraced it.’ Keen to get abroad, after missing the first boat Stuart agitated to be sent on the next draft. When he finally went, his elation at stepping ashore in France was tangible. ‘My address was 32nd Infantry Base Depot. S.17. c/o APO, BEF. France. I was very proud of this. I was with the British Expeditionary Force at last.’

All such boys had willingly joined to serve as officers and took on the responsibilities of men. Nevertheless, they were young to bear such onerous burdens as that of leading men into battle. Remarkably, they were not even the youngest officers – they were to come later in the war – but of those under the age of eighteen who led the way in 1915, more had been killed than would die in any subsequent year of the war.

6
The Beginning of a Campaign

A YOUNG LIFE
CHEERFULLY GIVEN
GOD MAKE US WORTHY
OF SUCH SACRIFICE

16201 Lance Corporal Albert Taylor
12th Royal Sussex Regiment

Killed in Action 13 November 1916, aged 17

Only after the first offensives of 1915 at Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge did the issue of underage soldiering really begin to force its way on to the political agenda. Both Territorial and Regular soldiers were now abroad in force, in Belgium, France and, since April, on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Thousands of boys had been killed or wounded, lads who, just months before, were holding down civilian jobs in Britain. As the full extent of the losses started to appear in newspaper columns, parents began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of allowing their young sons to go abroad.

The War Office had first addressed this issue in late December 1914, in a memorandum reiterating the established principle that boys under the age of nineteen should not be allowed to serve overseas.

Complaints have been received that untrained and immature lads have been allowed to proceed overseas with certain Territorial
Force Units notwithstanding the orders that have been issued that no one in a unit of the Territorial Force is to be allowed to proceed to join the Expeditionary Force unless he is medically fit, fully trained and is 19 years of age or over.

GOs C.-in-C. should impress on all GOs C and OsC [Officers Commanding] Units the necessity of complying strictly with the instructions issued and so preventing a recurrence of these complaints.

This message was directed particularly at the Territorial units, which had recruited boys from the age of seventeen and allowed them to go abroad after just a brief spell of training. This created problems in giving boys the opportunity of serving at a younger age than with the Regulars. To rectify this, it was announced on 11 February 1915 that the age at which the Territorials could recruit for overseas service would be raised to nineteen, bringing them into line with the rest of the army. A week later, on 19 February, a reminder was issued by the War Office highlighting the fact that underage Territorials were still being sent to France:

GOs C.-in-C. are asked to impress upon all OsC Units that they are personally responsible that no NCOs or men are sent either with their units or as reinforcements, who do not fulfil the conditions laid down for the time being by the Army Council and that it is the duty of such officers to ascertain the age of every man in their units as recorded on his attestation papers.

This was not a problem when boys had no reason to lie on their attestation forms before the war, but virtually none had given their correct age since. Duplicate attestation papers were not held at battalion headquarters, and so officers in charge of Territorial Force records were quickly asked to dispatch details of all men serving with units yet to go overseas, showing their date of attestation and their age on those dates. It was now the commanding
officer who was made responsible for ensuring he had a complete record of the ages of every NCO and man serving under him.

The War Office was delegating an unfair duty to these commanding officers. Not only, as has been noted, was there no proper reserve for the Territorial Force from which to draw new recruits, but directives sent out only the previous month, January, had called on these same men to ensure that they held at ‘least 200 men trained and ready to provide possible demands for drafts’. Just where officers were to find such men, all of whom would have to be aged nineteen or over, was not entirely clear.

The War Office appears to have sent out these memoranda with little thought as to how they might be implemented, and the suspicion remains that they were not interested in the outcome. In any case, there was as yet little pressure on them to deal with the matter of underage boys serving overseas; these memoranda precede any of the 1915 offensives. A few battalions, such as the 1/10th King’s Liverpools and the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, responded, sending a few underage boys home, but the fact that the War Office was forced to make almost identical appeals later that year highlights the extent to which commanding officers felt safe in ignoring them in the first place. There were far more pressing problems that required their attention.

The Government’s handling of the war had so far gone largely unquestioned in the press and in Parliament, but by early 1915 the ‘honeymoon’ period, that political latitude given to all governments in time of conflict, was rapidly coming to a close. The war was going badly and there was increasing disquiet among politicians. Critics were starting to pass judgement on the dull and lethargic handling of the war by the Liberal Government.

Only a crisis would remove the general inertia and, in May 1915, one arrived. The Shell Scandal, as it became known, exposed through the pages of the press the apparent dire shortage of munitions available to British forces in the field. It was a scandal that
was to push many leading figures into openly criticizing the Government’s conduct of the war for the first time.

The storm broke on 14 May. An article in
The Times
by Colonel Charles Repington, a long-time friend of Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, reported that he had seen for himself that the recently undertaken offensive by the British army at Aubers Ridge and Festubert had stalled owing to a lack of firepower, specifically a critical shortage of high-explosive artillery shells. Repington also revealed that British artillery had been rationed during the offensive, news that caused consternation at home. French himself condemned the Government for what he saw as an almost criminal apathy in the supply of munitions. Clearly, a far greater number of shells would be needed to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

The
Times
story put the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, under almost intolerable pressure, and on 25 May he invited leading politicians from the Opposition benches to join him in a coalition government. Lord Kitchener remained Secretary of State for War, but responsibility for the supply of shells was taken from his control and given to a new Ministry of Munitions headed by David Lloyd George. The Munitions of War Act passed soon afterwards effectively gave Lloyd George carte blanche to raise munitions production by whatever route he thought appropriate.

Lord Kitchener was an icon, his name synonymous in the public’s consciousness with steadfastness and iron will. In 1914, he was admired almost immeasurably by public and soldiers alike, but he was never a politician. He was a loner, a man who inspired confidence in the public but behind the scenes was almost incapable of delegating authority. This was perhaps his defining weakness. He expected unfettered obedience to his wishes and plans, and, because of his prowess, regularly intimidated ministers. His far-sighted recruitment drive in 1914 had been remarkably successful on one level, bringing a million men into the army in the first few months of the war, but it had been a disaster for
industry, stripping skilled workers from an economy that now found it hard to supply ammunition to the very men it had lost.

It was difficult, if not impossible, to remain ambivalent about Kitchener. He inspired respect and devotion in some, frequently those who knew him at a distance. In others, he inspired fear while, in a growing number, he brought to the surface repugnance for his style of management, and a distaste for his domineering tactics and his unwillingness to delegate. What was plain to many of his parliamentary friends and enemies were the gaping cracks in the great man’s performance in office.

One MP who was highly critical of Kitchener and the War Office was a relatively unknown backbencher, Sir Arthur Markham, a wealthy forty-nine-year-old industrialist from Mansfield, with interests in mining, iron and steel, employing 25,000 people in Nottinghamshire. He had been a Liberal MP since 1900 and, from the start of his career, had chosen to concentrate his efforts in Parliament on his constituents’ welfare and interests.

Often irascible and short-tempered, Markham tended to see issues in black and white, and individuals in the same way. Yet under ‘a brusque and sometimes aggressive exterior’ he was, according to his sister, the writer Violet Markham, ‘extraordinarily sensitive to the sufferings of other people’. Markham’s sympathy for others was framed by an acutely developed sense of morality and decency, one that eschewed compromise. No issue was too trivial for his attention if justice appeared to be at stake.

Markham’s sense of right and wrong had been affronted by the bullying tactics of Germany and its invasion, against all international law, of militarily weak Belgium. It was this same natural compassion for the underdog that propelled him, months later, to take up the cause of the underage soldier. Little did he realize how much the issue would come to dominate the following year, nor how significant a role he would play in the campaign to halt the enlistment of young boys into the army. Characteristically, Markham would throw himself into
the campaign, exhausting himself in the process, and driving himself into an early grave.

An intensely patriotic man, Markham was never in doubt about the righteousness of Britain’s cause, but his campaign would now require open and concerted criticism of the Government. He had the confidence, born of a lifetime in business, to attack the Secretary of State for War as directly responsible for much of the prevailing economic mess. ‘In his opinion, the whole system of War Office administration was fundamentally wrong,’ wrote Violet Markham. It was elementary to her brother that conflict called for ‘an adjustment of effort between the claims of the armed forces and those of the industries which must supply every need of the fighting man’.

First-hand experience had brought the need for this adjustment to Markham’s attention. At least five thousand of his own employees had left to enlist and, typically, he visited some of them. He said:

They have always asked me the same question which I was unable to answer – why they were called away from their work before the Government were in a position to equip them.

It was concern for balancing these competing requirements and making the best use of resources that brought Markham to confront the iniquity, as he saw it, of underage soldiering. The fact that the questions he raised in the House were met with ministerial indifference only helped to drive him on. He quickly became identified with the issue, and although other MPs framed similar questions in the House, it was Sir Arthur Markham who became the focus for public attention and in particular that of the families who had young sons serving overseas. As one correspondent was to write:

You are becoming a Sir Arthur of the Round Table, redressing wrongs and succouring the distressed, and so you have to pay the penalty of getting constantly bothered.

Shortly before Markham took up the cause in Parliament, he wrote a thirteen-page polemic entitled ‘The Conduct of the War’, in which he attacked the Government, and in particular Lord Kitchener and the War Office, for their amateurism. It is not known exactly when he wrote this statement, although from certain allusions it was probably around July 1915. Nor is it obvious to whom the paper was sent, although it was clearly for wider consumption. It is infused with characteristic anger.