Boy Soldiers of the Great War (44 page)

After a pause of a month, the third German offensive was launched in a final attempt to win the war before significant American forces took to the field. On 27 May, 4,000 guns fired a short bombardment at Allied defences on a ridge known as the Chemin des Dames. The British divisions included the 50th Northumbrian, which had suffered particularly badly during the German offensives of March and April.

Private Percy Williams, aged eighteen, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, and Private Frank Deane, nineteen, of the Durham Light Infantry, were both there. As before, the Germans had overwhelmed the British forward line, forcing the opposing units to fall back, frequently in total disorder. This time there had been no helpful mist to support the attackers, but a saturating cloud of gas had been almost as effective.

Percy recalled:

By this time the gas had lifted and I could see the Germans running across, scores of them, I was so confused, you see, and the noise had left me all of a muddle. I didn’t know where I was.

He was captured at bayonet point minutes later. Frank Deane managed to fall back further.

I recall seeing my platoon officer and he was just sat on the fire step with two men doing absolutely nothing, he just watched us go by and didn’t say a word. He seemed to me to be just waiting there until the Germans caught up with him.

We left the trenches and passed through a wood, crossing a road then up a hill on the other side. A couple of officers on horseback were on that hill, where they’d come from I don’t know, possibly headquarters, and it was they who lined us up facing these woods, waiting for the enemy.

The Germans came on as expected, and Frank was captured.

A machine-gun bullet crashed through the first joint of my thumb before going up my hand. My corporal friend next to me said, ‘Your hand is bleeding.’ I didn’t even know I’d been hit.

Both Percy and Frank were stripped of their webbing and marched to the rear.

The offensive continued to be pressed against both British and French forces, the Germans penetrating ten miles into Allied territory; once again a large salient appeared in the Allied lines. The Germans had crossed the Aisne, east of Paris, and reached the river Marne. They inflicted 130,000 casualties on the Allies, including taking 50,000 prisoners, but the German losses were commensurate, and Germany could no longer afford to suffer on such a scale. This offensive, like the others, fizzled out.

Prisoners such as Percy and Frank were marched into captivity but, as they were taken behind German lines, they were able to see for the first time clear evidence that their separation from home would only be temporary. Frank was encouraged.

I became quite cheerful because they seemed to have such a ramshackle lot of transport, an old harvest cart being pulled by a donkey, a mule and a horse. I didn’t see any motor transport, so I thought, ‘Well, if that’s the sort of equipment they’ve got, they won’t last long.’

He was right. A final offensive was undertaken against the French and American forces in July, but within two days the Allies were on the counter-attack. To all intents and purposes, the Germans as an attacking force were spent. A brief respite, particularly on the British front, enabled the Allies to concentrate their forces for an offensive, a long, costly but eventually victorious campaign, which the Germans fought hard to delay but which they could never stop.

Even before the end of July, the improving situation on the Western Front was being reflected in Parliament, as MPs questioned the Government on the continued need to send boys aged eighteen and a half to the front. On 30 July, Percy Harris, MP for Leicester South, asked the Undersecretary of State for War: ‘Am I to understand that … now that the emergency has passed, the Army Council and the Government are reconsidering their decision?’

James Macpherson replied: ‘I cannot, of course, admit that the emergency is passed, but I may assure the House and my Hon. Friend that this matter receives the gravest consideration.’

Richard Lambert, a backbencher, asked: ‘Is the Army Council considering the opportunity, if it arises, of withdrawing these young lads of eighteen and a half years from the fighting line?’

James Macpherson confirmed: ‘Certainly.’

A week later, on 7 August, the issue came up again when Percy Harris rose and addressed the House:

To take lads from homes as absolutely raw recruits, only give them three months’ training, and send them overseas is not doing justice to them or to our army … Military experts will agree that there is no better soldier than the fully trained youth or young man of nineteen and a half, the young man who has had six or nine months’ training in this country, who has been through camp life, and who has had the advantage of good food and proper care, but to take them before they are trained, and before they are fully grown and send them overseas is a profligate policy … Modern war is Hell indeed … I ask [the Government], now that the emergency is over, to toe the line with our Allies, and not to send overseas boys until they are nineteen. I say that in no spirit of criticism – I am not complaining about the past – but I think the House and the nation have a right to ask.

In reply, James Macpherson clarified the Government’s position:

The War Cabinet had decided that an emergency had arisen so great that it was absolutely necessary to send from this country every officer and man who was available. Unfortunately, within that category came boys between eighteen and nineteen years of age … [However] we have now decided at the end of this month that we shall return to the old regime.

Not only was the emergency over but the Government’s decision came just hours before events at the front improved spectacularly. A counter-offensive by the Allies east of Amiens against depleted German forces proved an outstanding success, the Australian and Canadian Corps advancing twelve kilometres by early afternoon. Thousands of enemy prisoners were taken and Allied casualties were relatively light. The day was a disaster for the German High Command and was later dubbed the ‘Black Day of the German Army in the History of the War’ by Erich Ludendorff, the General commanding the German forces.

At the end of the month, the decision to halt the frontline service of boys aged eighteen and a half was implemented as promised, and new drafts due to embark for France were suddenly shorn of boys under nineteen, lads literally being plucked from the ranks as they were about to set foot on the boat. Those already in France were kept at base camps, but those serving at the front remained in the line, for, despite representations made by the Government in September, the C.-in-C. felt unable to agree to their withdrawal. Haig was determined to press the enemy as hard as he could to win the war outright; it was not the time to release soldiers from the firing line. ‘It seems to me to be the beginning of the end,’ he wrote in his diary on 10 September.

A final flurry of questions was asked by MPs in late October about the issue of keeping boys in the front line, but Haig remained steadfast in his resolve and, in essence, the whole subject of underage soldiering had, at last, been drawn to a close.

During the summer and autumn of 1918, the Allies fought a series of rolling battles that pushed and harassed the retiring Germans, slowly sapping at the will of the enemy to continue the fight. In the first three and a half years of the war, 127,000 German prisoners were taken by British forces on the Western Front; in 1918, over 387,000 were captured, 186,000 in the last three months of fighting.

By early September, some soldiers too began to believe that the war might reach a conclusion, not in 1918 but perhaps the following year. Ernest Steele, the seventeen-year-old recruit of 1914, who had warned his brother not to serve under age, was now twenty-one. He remained on the Western Front for three years, gaining a commission on the way. His letters home became cautiously optimistic as time passed.

September 5th

I expect we shall be getting a little excitement shortly. Everything is going well, even better than the papers say, and I hope to be home for good in less than a year.

September 11th

We advanced umpteen kilometres carrying all our kit and got absolutely no sleep. I hope to have a couple of days’ real rest now, before going up again.

Jerry is beginning to make a greater show of resistance now, and it is harder work pushing him.

Lieutenant Steele was approaching the Hindenburg Line, the massive German line of defence, which for a long time had appeared impregnable. Before an all-out assault was possible, the forward outposts had to be taken, and an attack was ordered for the early morning of 18 September. British infantry would attack near the village of Epéhy, supported by a creeping barrage of 1,500 guns. Ernest Steele, serving with the 21st Battalion MGC, would take forward a section of machine guns in order to support the attack. The night before, he wrote a letter home.

September 17th

Dear Mater and Pater

As I don’t suppose I shall have a chance of writing to you again for a few days, I thought I’d take this chance of letting you know, so that you shouldn’t worry.

We had a bit of a storm last night, but today the sun is out again and it is quite fine. There is a strong wind too, to dry up the ground.

I think we are winning the war hand over fist now, and it won’t last much longer.

When I come home on leave I shall be able to tell you quite a lot of facts, which of course can’t be mentioned at present.

While I am out here, Mater and Pater, I realize more than ever all that you have done for me, and wish I could have a chance to repay you at least a part – I shall never be able to do it in full. However, the time will come after I get home, when I shall have that chance and then you will see, as I know you realize now, that I understand exactly what a lot I owe to you.

I spoke to our Padre the other day about my confirmation, and he told me that it would be difficult to have it done out here, but he thought I could consider myself a communicant until it could be done. So I feel easy in my mind about that.

Well, au revoir, Mater and Pater, God bless you and keep you safe till I come back.

The best of love from

Your eldest affectionate Son,

Ernest

P.S. – Please kiss Marie and Leslie for me, and give my love to Harry, and also to Grandma and everybody else.

Seventeen-year-old Reginald Kiernan would also take part in the fighting at Epéhy. After six months in France, his attitude to the war had profoundly changed. Just a few days before the attack, he had been deep in thought.

What I’ve thought of most today, and it has been running in my mind all the time for we had to learn it by heart, is Rupert Brooke’s
‘The Soldier’ [‘If I should die …’] I cannot feel like that. I do not want my body to rot away under this field, with its yellow earth and thin, pale grass. Perhaps Brooke could feel like that because he’d
had
something in this world. He’d been to Berlin, and he’d had lovely warm afternoons in Cambridgeshire, beside decent, quiet rivers; and he’s had time to
think
and enjoy things.
I
have never had time to think. I have had
nothing
,
nothing
. I want to get back from all this, back out of it – and sit and think, and look at clean things, and hear my people’s voices again … Rupert Brooke had longer than I’ve had to see things and enjoy them. He was ten years older than I am now.

Reginald was endlessly reminded of his short life by the dead. These bodies, he knew, received no attention. Even the living, the other men in his company, did not know one another’s names, so often were they replaced by new drafts, while the officers barely knew their own men by sight.

It’s the lying like those fellows we’ve passed – on your side with a fixed grin on your face, or on your back with your eyes turned up – and no one caring! And it’s the thought that you don’t die a hero. That would help. There are no heroes here. No one cares.

It was in this frame of mind that he prepared to go over the top. At 4 a.m., just eighty minutes before zero hour, he scribbled some notes, and wondered what the next few hours would have in store.

September 18th 1918, 4 a.m.

We have come up and are ‘lying out’ to ‘go over’. The air is alive and shaking with fire. It is hardly dawn yet, just grey and black. Along the railway line our barrage is down, a great wall of grey smoke covered with yellow flashes. It is the first time I have seen a barrage from behind. It is raining and very cold.

Everything is banging and roaring, and there is the steely shriek of hundreds of shells, and that great wind overhead. There’s the
big whistle and ‘shee-ing’ and hammering of the machine guns, firing over us from the railway embankment.

I do not feel at all afraid. A boy is lying near me on his back in the rain. He was tall and lanky and K-legged, and had a very small, grey face. He looked like a stalk a minute or two since, when he was standing up with his ground sheet round his shoulders. I noticed him suddenly then, and remembered I had seen him before, somewhere. He is on his back now, and his legs are wide apart. He has been killed by a stray bullet. No one knows who he is, or what his name is, or where the bullet has hit him, and no one has bothered to notice him. He looks quite natural, gazing up at the sky. But he is dead.

I think, myself, that he was always tired; tired beyond anything anyone can know, and that he is resting now.

I have come to write this in a little dugout, cut in the railway embankment. I have made an Act of Contrition, and I think that this time it was perfect. Before, there has always been fear in it.