My Brother's Keeper (8 page)

‘How many died when you were playing with your mortars, sir?' Alfie yelled, spit flying from his mouth, the last word filled with hate. ‘How many men died on the raid because of you, sir? How many are going to die this morning, sir?'

‘You'd better get him under control, Sergeant Jones, or I will,' the Captain said coldly. He stood his ground, raising his revolver, aiming it at Alfie's chest.

Alfie didn't care. He screamed abuse at the Captain, using the foulest swear words he could think of. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a movement, something swinging towards him, and a light seemed to explode inside his skull. He fell to his knees, then
onto his front, the back of his head throbbing with intense pain, and he realised that Jonesy must have hit him, probably with the butt of a rifle.

He heard shouting somewhere and there were boots too close to his face and his mouth was filled with mud. He felt hands under his armpits, two men lifting him back to his feet. His vision was blurred, huge faces looming in and out of sight around him, their mouths open and yelling, the Lieutenant and Jonesy and George and sad-eyed Ernie, the ladders behind them, and he tried to speak but couldn't.

He blacked out, his head falling forward onto his chest, and when he came to he was being dragged away, his boot tips bumping and thumping over duckboards. His first instinct was to struggle, to try and break free from the men gripping his arms, but they were too strong and he could do nothing but shake his head and groan. Suddenly a new noise cut through the fuzziness of his mind and filled it with pure anguish.

Someone was blowing a whistle, a high, clear note that was soon joined by the sound of cheering. Alfie could see in his mind what was happening, a thousand men swarming up the ladders, going over the top, advancing into no-man's land. Then he heard
the chatter of machine guns, and the cheers instantly turned into screams.

The Big Push had begun.

The two men holding Alfie dragged him to the end of the communication trench where they persuaded the driver of an empty ammunition lorry to give them a lift to Battalion HQ. They threw Alfie into the lorry and sat on either side of him, both men immediately taking out fags and lighting them. Alfie lay there, the back of his head banging painfully on the floor with every jolt as the lorry crawled down the road.

He was beginning to feel a little more alert by the time they arrived at HQ and he was taken in through the familiar main doors. Inside, staff officers with sheaves of papers hurried past, all far too preoccupied to take any notice of them. At last one of the men holding Alfie attracted a major's attention, and a brief conversation ensued. Moments later Alfie was handed over to a couple of burly military policemen.

They took him to an office where they made him empty his pockets and asked him his name and serial number. They wrote both down in a big ledger. Then they led him to a small bare room with a tiny, high window and no furniture, and locked him in. Alfie
sat down in the corner, back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, his head still throbbing but clear, and wondered how much longer he had to live.

It all seemed so pointless. He hadn't changed a thing. The attack had gone ahead, and he had simply guaranteed that he would be executed for cowardice. He had wanted to be a hero, but he had brought shame on his family instead. Alfie started to cry quietly. He should have kept his mouth shut. At least then he would have died with his mates.

Hours passed. A military policeman brought him a bully beef sandwich, a mug of tea and a bucket to pee in. Another came with a couple of blankets when the light had gone from the window. Alfie wrapped himself in the blankets and lay down, his mind full of images – Ernie and George and Cyril laughing, the dead German soldiers in the raid, the picture of Frieda, Captain Johnson's face – but he fell asleep in the end.

It was the door opening and the Lieutenant coming in that woke him.

‘You're free to go, Private Barnes,' he said. ‘You will face no charges.'

Alfie rose to his feet. ‘I… I don't understand,' he said. ‘The Captain…'

‘The Captain is dead,' said the Lieutenant. ‘Along with everyone else.'

The light in the room was still dim, but now Alfie saw the Lieutenant was more plastered with mud than usual. The left side of his face was covered in dried blood, and he looked exhausted. He removed his helmet, placing it on the floor and fumbling in the chest pocket of his tunic for a silver cigarette case and lighter. His hands were shaking as he took out a cigarette, but he got it lit, inhaling deeply.

‘What happened, sir?' said Alfie. ‘In the attack, I mean.'

‘The usual total and utter shambles, of course.' The Lieutenant's voice was full of anger and bitterness. ‘Jerry was waiting for us with his machine guns as soon as we climbed out of the trench, and they cut us down like wheat in a field. No one made it even as far as the Jerry wire, and not a tenth made it back. I saw things that will stay with me forever.' He paused and took a deep breath. ‘I was lucky, I suppose.'

‘And my friends, sir?' Alfie said. ‘Did Ernie and George make it?'

‘I'm sorry, Barnes.' The Lieutenant shook his head. ‘They were hit early on, as was Sergeant Jones, and nearly everyone else who heard what passed
between you and Captain Johnson. He's dead too, which means there are very few witnesses.'

Alfie thought about Ernie and George and Cyril and Jonesy and everything they had done for him, and he hoped their deaths had been as George had said, quick and clean. Strangely enough he found himself hoping it had been the same for Captain Johnson. But then nobody deserved to die in filth and agony, not even Mad Jack.

‘The two men who brought me here heard it,' he said. ‘They told a major and he told the military police, so I don't understand how you can say I'm free to go.'

‘You have a trump card to play – your age. Oh yes, it was fine to sign up lots of brave under-age boys at the beginning, but they're getting killed and parents are kicking up a stink. So now the Army wants rid of you all. I've already spoken to Colonel Craig, and he says the choice to go or stay is yours. If it was up to me I'd have you out of here and your way back to Blighty in the next few minutes.'

‘But the choice is mine?' asked Alfie. ‘And I won't be court-martialled if I stay?'

‘No, you're safe,' said the Lieutenant. ‘The Colonel has other things on his mind.'

Alfie closed his eyes and thought about the journey home, the march to the rail-head, the train full of soldiers, the ferry, another packed train into London, seeing his mum and dad and his brothers and sisters. Then he thought about the new soldiers who would be coming to replace those who had died. The men who would need someone to take care of them just the way Alfie's mates had taken care of him.

It was the easiest choice he would ever have to make.

There were many boy soldiers like Alfie in the First World War – or The Great War, as it was called until the Second World War followed it 20 years later. Thousands of boys lied about their ages to enlist, some as young as 14. Before the war the minimum age for joining the Army was officially 18, and you had to be 19 to be on active service, but there had long been a tradition of recruiting sergeants and officers allowing themselves to be ‘fooled' by boys eager to join up. In 1914 and 1915, the early years of the war, huge numbers of men rushed to enlist, and those doing the recruiting were not likely to turn away enthusiastic volunteers, even if they were clearly very young indeed.

Of course, few of those who were volunteering to fight knew what war was like, and nobody understood what ‘modern' weapons – heavy artillery, machine
guns and poison gas, the first true weapon of mass destruction – could do. The soldiers who faced each other on the Western Front in France and Belgium found themselves in a truly horrific situation. Eight and a half million were killed, nearly a million of them from Great Britain and its then empire. All the things Alfie sees and experiences in the story were commonplace during the war, and were extensively written about afterwards. The trenches and no-man's land were full of the dead, rats scampered under the men's feet, the food supplied by the Army was often scanty or unpleasant or simply failed to arrive. And thousands upon thousands of men died because of the mistakes or poor decisions of their commanders, while to begin with those at home knew almost nothing of what was really going on.

There was certainly opposition to the war from the beginning – many men refused to serve and were known as ‘conscientious objectors'. But the appalling numbers of the dead and wounded soon began to have an impact on their families and communities. The turning point came at the Battle of the Somme. On the morning of 1st July 1916, 30,000 British soldiers were killed in a ‘Big Push', and many more were wounded. Opposition began to grow, at home and
among the officers and men themselves. Someone like Lieutenant Reynolds might even have gone so far as to make a protest in the same way as Siegfried Sassoon, a lieutenant and one of the famous poets of the war. He threw a medal he had been awarded for bravery into the River Mersey while he was on leave, and refused to fight. He did go back, although only after the Army had sent him to a hospital for soldiers with ‘shell-shock'. Most soldiers fought on, although usually that was because they didn't want to let down their fellow-soldiers, their ‘mates'. Sassoon said he went back partly to look after his men – although they gave him the nickname ‘Mad Jack' because he was an enthusiastic raider of the German trenches.

There are many other books available if you're interested in finding out more about the First World War. Richard van Emden's
Boy Soldiers of the Great War
is excellent, and in its pages you will encounter the real boys who were like Alfie – many of whom were killed. We would also recommend the famous memoirs of the war written in the years after,
Goodbye to All That
by Robert Graves,
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
by Siegfried Sassoon,
Undertones of War
by Edmund Blunden. Everyone should also read the work of the great war poets – Sassoon himself,
Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney. And finally, there are several websites well worth checking out: the Imperial War Museum at
www.iwm.org.uk/centenary
,
The National Archive at
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/
and the BBC at
www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/
.

Tom and Tony Bradman

World War I Unclassified

From the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles,
World War I Unclassified
takes readers on a journey back in time to discover the amazing story behind one of the most terrible wars in history.

Photographs and original documents from the National Archives are reproduced along with artifacts and documentation that enable readers to build a true and real account of World War I and how it shaped the world.

ISBN 9781472905253      £10.99

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing

This edition copyright © 2014 A & C Black
Text © 2014 Tom and Tony Bradman

This edition published 2014 by
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50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
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The right of Tom and Tony Bradman be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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eISBN: 978-1-4081-9680-9

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