Boy Soldiers of the Great War (14 page)

I loved to hear the artillery and the machine guns. I can’t tell you why but I did. I used to sweep the Germans’ parapet each night with a machine gun, just lift up the safety catch and press the button, brrrrrrrrrr brrrrrrrr and they done the same to us. That was a bit of fun, oh yes. Their bullets hit the top of the parapet and sent the dirt flying all the way along.

Smiler had arrived in France in November 1915 with a draft of men that included his best friend Lenny Passiful. Both boys had enlisted under age; Smiler had now turned eighteen but his childhood friend was still only seventeen.

In the line, snipers were active and Smiler and Lenny decided to while away the hours with a spot of retaliation.

Lenny was in a different troop from me but he had asked his sergeant if he could come and join me in the same bay of the trench. A German had been using a sniper’s shield and we reckoned there was a chance of getting him because when he shot there was a tell-tale flame from the barrel of his rifle. So what we’d try and do is get ready and concentrate waiting for the next time he fired, although we still had to be lucky to get him through that hole.

I’d had five or six shots when Lenny said, ‘Let me have a go, Smiler,’ and he jumped up on to the fire step. Now I’m down in the trench watching and he had a shot or two when I saw him suddenly fall. The German had got him right through that little hole in the shield with Lenny’s rifle still lodged up on the parapet. He lay at the bottom of the trench just coughing up a little blood. ‘Don’t worry, Len, you got a Blighty one,’ I told him. ‘When I get a chance, I’ll write to your mum.’ But he couldn’t, no, he couldn’t speak. I sent word by another chap to go and tell the sergeant, Sergeant Geoffrey Weir, that Lenny had been wounded. I begged this sergeant to let me take Lenny down the communication trench to a chalk pit where our dressing station was, but no, Sergeant Weir took him. I think he thought I was just trying to get out of the line.

I wrote to Lenny’s mother and told her to expect Lenny home but a little time later I got a letter back to say she was sorry to tell me that Lenny had lived only three days and was buried not far from me at Bethune. Oh, that was terrible, terrible. That finished me as far as that went. I had got two or three other good mates but Lenny! I never really forgot it, not to this day.

With thousands of men fighting in close proximity, the quantity of ordnance flying around at any one moment would prove lethal to someone, somewhere. Ben Clouting had been in France for nine months. He was serving in the cavalry but, owing to the emergency in front of Ypres, his unit, the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, had been dismounted to serve as stop-gap infantry. On 10 May the fighting was heavy and Ben had been given a casualty to carry out of the line. A sergeant had been sniped through the face and was almost unconscious when Ben and three other stretcher-bearers got him down to a dressing station. They left him soon after to return to the line and were on their way when one of the team, Frank ‘Mickey’ Lowe, suggested they broke for a cigarette.

We hadn’t halted long when Mickey muttered, ‘Anyone who gets through this war will be a lucky blighter …’ Then, almost as soon as he had spoken, he grunted, half spun around and fell backwards. I caught him underneath his arms and slid him down to the ground, blood literally pumping out on to my riding breeches. And that was it. He never mentioned another word and within three or four minutes he was gone.

Mickey Lowe was killed by a bullet in the middle of the back, a victim of one of the vagaries of holding the Salient, the land that bulged out beyond the Belgian town of Ypres. This land was occupied by the British right under the noses of the enemy who, having failed to take the town during heavy fighting in 1914, had taken up position on the first in a series of low ridges outside. The enemy had not just the advantage of higher ground but the opportunity to fire on the British trenches from north, south and east, thus giving the impression of fire from behind.

It was just such a stray bullet that got sixteen-year-old Norman Crowther. A lad from Leeds, he had joined up in Halifax in November 1914. Like so many, he had given his age as precisely
nineteen, although he was four years younger. At five feet five inches, with a thirty-four-inch chest, his enlistment papers noted his physical development as only ‘fair’.

A year later, Norman was in a trench in Belgium. His fate was described in a letter written by a comrade, Frank Cocker, on 22 November 1915.

We had another lad killed the last day in the trenches and the circumstances are particularly sad for he was only 16 years of age. He was an Elland lad, Norman Crowther by name. On Monday night I was sitting warming myself by the cokefire which we had by the telegraph operator’s dugout. Young Crowther was sitting there too and he looked so young and childlike as he nodded with sleepiness over the fire. Just then Mr Everitt came round to give a message to the telegraphist, and he stayed and sat with us round the fire. Mr E. is a nice, sensible man, who has been with us about two months. He looked across at the sleeping lad and a smile of pity came into his eyes. I said, ‘This kid is going to give himself a blighty if he nods his head much closer to the fire.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr E., ‘and he is a kid, too, is Crowther, how old will he be?’ ‘Oh, he is only just turned 16, Sir,’ I said. Mr E. shook his head, ‘Too young for this game but he sticks it very well.’ The next day at noon, I was on duty and went round to change the sentries. Young Crowther was one of the sentries and I gave the usual order ‘Next relief there!’ I stood a moment to see that the next man came along and then turned and went back. I had only just got into the next bay when I heard a call ‘stretcher-bearers’. I turned and rushed back and there was the poor lad face down in the trench reddening the water all round with his blood. I stooped at once to pick him up and inevitably I stooped in the nick of time for another shot came (from behind our trenches) and struck the parapet just above my head. I hoisted him over on to his back and the S.B.s having arrived, handed over to them. He only lived about ten
minutes. It appears he was following me to sit by the fire again when the shot came across (from a long distance where the line curved round to the left) and entered his back piercing the lung and bursting the main artery. So ended another young life, in the twinkling of an eye.

After three or four days in the line, a battalion would be relieved and taken back into ‘rest’ although rest did not mean relaxation, and much work lay ahead, carrying supplies up to the men who were now occupying the vacated trenches.

Handing over always took place at night, exhausted soldiers trudging back to their billets and to sleep. An officer, Sidney Rogerson, who served with the 2nd West Yorkshire Regiment, recorded the stark picture.

That march was a nightmare. Not till then did I realize how tired I was nor how done the men. I had snatched less sleep than they, my total for the three days was no more than six hours, and had been more continuously on the go. They on the other hand were overloaded with sodden kit. We had not gone far before requests were made for a halt. I turned a deaf ear. Men so weary, I argued, would only fall asleep the moment they broke rank. It would be harder to get them on the move again. Besides, we were still in the shelled area. Requests turned to protests. Some of the younger men could hardly walk.

Back at the billet, the men would form up before they were quickly dismissed, whereupon an exhausted rush would be made for the best shelter available. Men shattered by long days in the line were battle-worn and surly, and younger soldiers were often forced to miss out on the best spots, as Norman Gladden knew all too well.

I looked into two or three shelters which were by no means overcrowded but was made to understand in no unmeasured terms
that all the places were reserved. At last in desperation, for it was still raining, I pushed into one close at hand. Williams, a burly miner whose uncouth bullying manner I had already noted, occupied the end place. His raised fist moved to within a few inches of my nose as he told me to clear out.

Despite the threat, Norman persisted and managed to secure himself a spot. The camp was sited in a field of mud that oozed inside each bivouac when anyone clambered in and out. ‘It is less difficult perhaps to imagine the utter desolation in our souls as we huddled under the clammy canvas,’ he wrote.

After a good sleep, the men had a chance to clean up, scraping away the caked mud that clung on to uniforms and equipment, before having a wash and shave. Cecil Withers remembers the time:

Of course, you would get talking to one another. Lots of boys of fifteen and sixteen said they were eighteen and nineteen, shocking, you know, young boys, and the army took them as nineteen, they didn’t ask any questions, no birth certificates, no identity required at all. You knew they were that age, they told you on the sly you see, we’d be getting ourselves cleaned up, talking about one thing or another and they’d say, ‘Well, I’m only sixteen.’ To my eyes it was obvious, they hadn’t started shaving; they just had a whisker here and a whisker there, but you would never tell tales on each other, never betray each other.

Even though men would be ‘volunteered’ for jobs, there was always spare time to write a letter home, catch up on sleep, and, when the mood took them, sort through souvenirs found in the line or taken from bodies. Some picked up keepsakes either for themselves or, if they got the opportunity to realize a few shillings, to sell off to men of the transport who brought up supplies from the railheads.

‘Souvenirs are all the rage just now and we are in a good place for them. After we are shelled we go and dig out quite a number of them,’ wrote one soldier. Cyril José had collected ‘a German bullet found in my dugout, a piece of shell exploded in the fort we were in, and a Nun’s prayer book’. Ben Clouting collected a German knife and a Very light pistol from which he removed a severed hand. It was a collecting instinct that appealed to all, irrespective of age. The astute collectors only chose items of real value but boys new to the front, like Cyril, were less discriminating, and many continued to carry around hopelessly large amounts of junk instead of cherry picking.

George Coppard was out on rest near Gonnehem when he re-evaluated his collection.

I decided to jettison my souvenirs weighing nearly twenty pounds which I had been lugging around in my pack. German fuse tops, funny shaped bits of shrapnel and a rusty saw-edge bayonet were among this collection of old iron. Why I had been torturing myself with this agonizing load I don’t know, just a boyish habit of collecting something out of the ordinary, I suppose. ‘You’re just a bloody twerp carting that lot around,’ my pals scoffed. And so my eyes opened at last, I chucked the stuff away, not without regret but with substantial relief when the time came to move off.

It was a hobby not without its potential risks. Vic Cole was given leave in 1916.

It was night when we boarded the boat and the powerful lights turned on each man as he went up the gangway threw into instant relief any irregularity in dress or any bulge concealing forbidden souvenirs. I must confess to some apprehension at this point for tied to my rifle inside its dust cover was a German saw bayonet and in my pocket a Hun forage cap. The penalty for taking enemy
weapons out of France was immediate cancellation of leave, but with luck I remained undetected and all was well.

Vic was more than glad to go home. By this time it was evident that war was not the glorious adventure anticipated, and there were those for whom the novelty had worn off rather quickly.

Alfred Cowell, who had enlisted in the Birmingham Pals aged sixteen, managed only a few weeks in France before writing home dejectedly:

I got in on Dec 5th. I am fairly well in health, nothing to call ill, just fed up. We are in the trenches and I shall be very glad when we are out of them again as this mud is up to your neck, no swank. When I get to England again I bet you a quid I stop and I’ll chance being shot as it is awful.

George Coppard was feeling the effects of trench life too.

To tell the truth, deep down in me I was scared of the future. For the first few months trench warfare had been a kind of dangerous fun to me. Although only a boy, I had lived with grown men, sharing their fear and dangers. It was still fun when not in the trenches. Up in the front line, however, anything approaching merriment was dead.

There was a way out for those who were under age. A family could make an application for discharge or to have a son withdrawn from the firing line. It was an option that was not guaranteed to succeed and the boys themselves could not make an application, although a few wished that they could. Alfred Cowell did not hesitate to point out in a letter to his mother that three other underage members of the battalion were already due for discharge after their parents had written to claim them. They had corresponded with the War Office, enclosing their children’s birth certificates,
and these boys were due to leave for England on Boxing Day. Alfred suggested that his mother, Mary, did the same for him. She did and a month later he was on his way home.

There was no question of Ernest Steele going home. He had once been given the chance when, in September 1915, an NCO had approached the underage boys with a message. ‘Sgt. Clifford said all under nineteen years of age could go back to England if they wished. After long discussion we decided to stay.’ Ernest would stick it out and serve until the end, but his trench experiences had taught him a hard lesson and he was not about to let his younger brother make the same fateful decision. In a letter home, he warned him in no uncertain terms.

Belgium

Monday September 1915

Dear Harry,

I heard from Mater last night and she said you wanted to join up. Now I am going to talk to you seriously, or at any rate try to, so look out!