Boy Soldiers of the Great War (42 page)

In February 1918, the police were making enquiries about my brother, who had left home with the intention of crossing to Ireland – he told me that he hoped to secure a passage for the 2nd of March [to Cork]. To stop the police enquiries I dressed in my brother’s uniform, [he also had his kit and pay book] and impersonated him and gave myself up as a deserter to the Ilford police.

The statement taken down by an Intelligence Officer ended with an assessment of the case and the verdict that ‘the Prisoner has committed an offence in England Viz:- “Falsely describing himself as an army deserter”, for which he is liable for three months imprisonment.’ Henry Stevens was brought before Folkestone Magistrates and charged with ‘Being an unauthorised person wearing Military uniform “without authority”.’ Sense prevailed, the case was dismissed and Henry returned to his parents.

In Britain’s darkest hour of the war, this was a good news story and details of Henry’s pluck appeared the following week in
The
Times
under the title ‘The Family Honour: Boy Who Killed Many Germans’, the journalist unquestioningly repeating the boy’s own embellishment and the guff that he had attached to his recollection of events. ‘When the German offensive began, the youth, although he had no military training and did not know how to use a rifle, went up with his unit. He said that he killed many Germans, and that he “could not help it when they came so thickly”.’ Henry’s local paper also ran with the story, repeating Henry’s claims and adding: ‘I think it will be universally agreed that young Stevens is made of the right stuff.’

Twenty-two-year-old George Stevens was in all likelihood never in Ireland. Wherever he went, he surrendered to police on 8 April. In June he was subjected to a Field General Court Martial for desertion. He pleaded ‘not guilty’ but was found guilty and given seven years’ penal servitude for his crime, the sentence being suspended for the duration of the war. George returned to his unit and was reported missing during a daylight trench raid on 22 July 1918. His body was never found.

George Stevens was an experienced soldier and despite his crime he was needed at the front not languishing in a prison cell. Cyril José’s crime had been to lie about his age but this was now irrelevant and he too, as an old soldier, was required back in France.

Sent home after being wounded on the Somme, Cyril was swept up in the rush to get men abroad, embarking for the port of Le Havre on the night of 31 March and arriving back in France on his nineteenth birthday. Cyril had assumed that he would be sent to join his old battalion, the 2nd Devons, but on landing he and his friends were sent as a draft to the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, which had been very badly knocked about on the first day of the German offensive. Cyril was an experienced hand and, as he sported a wound stripe from his actions on 1 July 1916, he was afforded instant respect by the ‘kiddies’, as he called them, sent across from England.

Vic Cole was back, too, although not as part of a draft. The 1st Royal West Kents, to which he had been transferred in late 1916, had been part of Haig’s reserve hived off to Italy at the end of 1917. For a few months Vic and his friends had been having fun in this relative backwater. Unfortunately the fun had gone too far and Vic had been demoted, losing his only stripe after a drunken night in Padua. Then came the March offensive and his division had been rushed back to the Western Front, the Royal West Kents arriving at Doullens on 6 April before being marched to the town of Armentières.

The March offensive against the Fifth Army in particular had been ferocious but the Germans had failed to separate the British from the French. A fresh onslaught was now ordered, and unfortunately for Vic Cole and Cyril José the direction was switched so that this time it was against the thinly held line just east of Armentières. The front line around this town had been generally quiet – indeed, new battalions sent out to France in 1915 and 1916 had often been directed to this sector to get used to trench life. For the first time since 1914, the town would be in the direct line of fire.

The intensity of this second phase of the campaign would hardly slacken as the German High Command threw in division after division in their desperate bid to make a decisive breakthrough. Geographically, this attack looked extremely dangerous for the survival of the BEF in France. The front under pressure was further to the north than the fighting hitherto in March, as it was the Germans’ intention to capture the three significant heights to the rear of Armentières. This would enable them potentially to surround the town of Ypres to the north, making the whole British line untenable, and ultimately threatening the Channel ports. Vic and Cyril would be right in the way of the proposed advance, as indeed would the thousands of teenage boys shipped to France, one of whom was eighteen-year-old Corporal Ernest Stevens.

Ernest had been in France only a matter of days. His father had been a professional soldier and had fought and died for Britain during the Boer War. His son had grown up with a picture of a proud father holding him on his knee, and ever since he was a small boy all Ernest had wanted to do was follow in his father’s footsteps and serve overseas. The army granted his wish by drafting him to France at the end of March, and with ninety-six other lads he joined the 20th Middlesex on 7 April.

The first day with the battalion was peaceful enough, and that evening Ernest’s company moved into a farmyard.

We slept on the hay that night, and next day we were put on trucks which took us up as near to the second line as they dared go. We then marched along both sides of the road with at least four feet between each man in single file, to reduce the risk of heavy casualties if we happened to be shelled.

We were to be in support but when we arrived we found there wasn’t really a trench at all; all we had was a built-up earthwork.

The company dug in, improving the position and deepening some shallow trenches, but the weather was bad and these soon filled with water.

That night was hectic and we were shelled for at least two hours, not with high explosive but with poison gas. I was tired and managed to sleep but the bombardment woke me up many times. Everybody was alive to the fact that the Germans were strafing behind our lines where the reserves would be congregated, to try and knock them out and isolate the men in the first and second lines.

At daybreak, a ration party came up with bread and cheese and this was dished out. I had just got my share when the platoon sergeant shouted out, ‘Stand to!’ It was a very misty morning and we were in lowlying ground, but it was also quiet at this time
and I don’t recall any shelling. Two figures were seen coming through the mist and the platoon sergeant ordered us to fire five shots, rapid fire, thinking they were Germans. As soon as we started firing, up went their hands, and as they approached we could see they had no helmets and that they had discarded their arms and equipment. They were our lads and one of them had a bullet wound in the back of his neck. The Germans had obviously reached our front line and had probably been reorganizing for the next attack, and these two managed to get away.

The position of the 1/4th East Yorks was just as precarious. On the morning of 9 April, Harold Lawton and his company had been told to pull back from their hastily constructed positions, but in doing so the men had become split up into groups.

The Germans had infiltrated our lines and had already swept around the flanks. We could hear plenty of firing but we hadn’t a clue what was going on, not an officer was to be seen, it was shocking. We were stuck, and began to eat our iron rations hoping all the time that we would be found or someone would tell us what to do. Eventually the Germans returned and mopped us up; there were only half a dozen of us so there was nothing to do but put up our hands.

Ernest Stevens remembered:

We stood behind the earthen wall we had built up, when suddenly we heard this chatter of a machine gun behind us. We knew we were in for some trouble but we thought we were going to be attacked from the front, never imagining that we would be machine-gunned from our rear. That was extraordinary. I heard the bullets whizzing past me as I made a run for a small slit trench and I jumped in to find myself up to my waist in water, next to my platoon commander. He was new out to France and looked very
worried. He turned to me and said, ‘Corporal, I’m afraid we’re absolutely hemmed in, it’s impossible to make a fight of it. The only thing I can suggest is if you have a handkerchief bring it out, tie it to the end of your bayonet and indicate to the Germans that we are prepared to surrender.’ I didn’t want to do it but as an NCO I had to obey commands, but being taken prisoner, oh, what a disgrace!

A large proportion of the 20th Middlesex, Ernest’s regiment, managed to escape, but the battalion lost a total of eight killed, fifty-nine wounded and 281 missing, almost all of whom became prisoners of war.

Ernest Stevens and Harold Lawton were each marched away to captivity. Unfortunately for Harold, he was taken to a fortress known in the British press for its dire reputation as the Black Hole of Lille. As he and the other prisoners went there, the towns-people came out and tried to offer them bread, even though they were hungry themselves.

Once in the fortress, we were taken down underground to a room, a truly awful place. Hundreds of men were crowded into cells, men lying on wooden shelves for day after day. The conditions were terrible. Men were dying in there from wounds and dysentery but there were so many prisoners you couldn’t move in the filthy conditions. I was kept for twelve days, hardly able to move, and it came as a relief to be taken to Germany.

The German battle tactics, although costly in terms of men and equipment, were pushing the British troops back at an alarming rate. Huge numbers were taken prisoner, and battalions, once more, almost ceased to exist.

The casualties on both sides were huge but there was a critical difference between those inflicted on the Somme two years before and those of 1918. In July 1916, British and Empire troops
had suffered 187,300 casualties, of whom just 8.8 per cent were prisoners, and over 41,300 were dead. In 1918 the figures were reversed. In March, nearly 40 per cent of all 165,000 casualties had been taken prisoner, and fewer than 19,000 were killed. In the six weeks to the end of April, over 93,000 British and Empire prisoners were taken, testament to the successful infiltration tactics of the Germans, helped, in part, by the lack of battlefield experience of thousands of eighteen-and nineteen-year-old boys.

Despite the numbers being taken prisoner, there were still plenty of wounded filling the casualty clearing stations (CCSs). VAD Marjorie Grigsby had been asked to volunteer to go forward to a CCS just a few miles behind the lines. Some nurses had been taken ill, she was told, and the rest could no longer cope with the wounded.

It was hell, absolute hell. We were doing things we knew nothing about, giving injections to people with legs hanging out of trousers, heads half blown off, and using the same needle, just dipped in carbolic twenty, one after another. All we were anxious to do was to put them out of their pain. A lot of them were not even conscious. Some were moaning, some groaning, calling for their mums or girlfriends; one particular lad I remember singing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, he kept on all the while and I got sick to death of it, I wished he’d stop.

The CCS itself was an old barn which was full, there was no room for anybody else inside, so the wounded were just put down on stretchers, perhaps a mackintosh sheet, or pieces of fencing, just put down and left. Remember, they were not coming in in ones or twos but in twenties and thirties. First thing they wanted was a cigarette. I had cigarettes in my pocket which I used to give them. You lit it yourself and put it in their mouth and hoped they’d be able to hang on to it; they used to say ‘cig’. Often they’d have a puff or two and it would drop out of their mouths.

It was a slaughterhouse more than a clearing station, and if they died you had to clear them away as quick as you could. You took
off one of their identity discs and took everything out of their pockets and handed it all in at the office where belongings were put in a bag with their name on it. The bodies were just put into bags and driven off.

We worked around the clock and got very little food. They would bring some milk round, they seemed to have plenty of milk – the cows didn’t seem to get shot as much as the men. Then, when you couldn’t carry on any longer and just had to stop, you just plonked down wherever you were, perhaps leant against a tree, then you’d pull yourself together, enough to go to your bed for a while. I mean, you reached a stage where you were too exhausted to do anything.

You don’t cry easily, not when you’ve got things to face up to. People think you would cry but you don’t, not when you’re really up against it with your back to the wall. You don’t cry then. It’s afterwards, when you think about it, perhaps years afterwards.

Helen Gordon-Dean, also working at a CCS, was even younger than Marjorie Grigsby, and it was debatable whether she should have been in France at all. At her interview – an intimidating experience with a panel of no fewer than eight people – she had lied about her age.

I told them I was nineteen but I was a year younger. I got away with it; telling fibs is a gift, but you’ve got to be convinced yourself. I wanted to go to France very badly. One lady was very sceptical about my answers. ‘What age are you? What year were you born?’ I resented the questioning, because of all the things I could have chosen to do it was nursing that inspired me.

Dad had to pay for everything when I joined up, but then I could always get round him. I could make the job sound frightfully important. I don’t think I thought much about patriotism. There was a war on and we had to win it, I knew that. At home
we were on the fringe of things, in France I would see things other people would never know.