Boy Soldiers of the Great War (47 page)

For Dick Trafford’s mother, the constant fear had ended and the separation was over. For those whose sons had died, there was only continuing grief; the pain and despair they felt could prove unbearable

Harriet Diprose’s son Claude Damant had died in the most unfortunate of circumstances. His was one of the few cases where had he remained at the front he might have survived. As it was he came back, contracted meningitis, and died shortly after walking through the family’s front door in July 1916. Six years later in June 1922, Claude’s stepfather had cause to write one last time to the military authorities. A letter, a ‘Verification of Address Form’, had arrived at the family home concerning Claude’s entitlement to the British War and Victory Medals. Unfortunately the letter was addressed to the dead son.

Dear Sir, I have
again to point out
that this lad died within a few hours of his discharge from the army of which fact the military authorities were duly notified and it is to say the least hurtful to his mother to have communications addressed here in his name …

The army duly apologized and amended the file. Harriet Diprose, whose husband had died when her son was barely a year old, had also lost her only son.

Agnes Cottrell’s plight was not dissimilar. She too had lost her husband but only after the death of both her boys at the front. Agnes’ younger son Harold, killed on the Somme in 1916, had been the subject of a long correspondence in 1917 with the military authorities, as she repeatedly sought for information about why he had been sent abroad so young. Now, having lost both sons and then her husband, she was alone. Before the army’s file was finally closed in 1922, she suddenly corresponded again, but this time she was irrational and rambling, referring to ‘conspiracies that would have to be exposed’. Mrs Cottrell was now ‘distinctly eccentric and unbalanced,’ a memo in the file concluded.

Her final, painful letter stands as a testament to the depth of her loss and there was little point in the army pursuing the matter. The last file note ends: ‘No reply was asked for really. It was a diatribe.’

The parents of Ernest Steele were also devastated by the loss of their son, killed so close to the end of the war, but their suffering manifested itself in a beautiful velvet-lined wooden box. It contains a book with ‘In Glorious Memory’ imprinted in gold letters on the front and sets out to commemorate their son’s life with pictures of Ernest as a baby and as a boy, the house from which he left to enlist and his letters from the front. Among the book’s pages are lines of remembrance written by his father over the next twenty-five years.

Memory keeps us close to him

But time brings us nearer. 18th Sept. 1921

The years will by – and time speeds on

We still don’t realize he’s gone

His memory’s with us all the while

And time brings scarce relief.

Pater

Nine long years that seem at times but a day. 18th Sept. 1927

At the end of the war, the boys who came home were men. Exactly what they took from the war, good or bad – and invariably it was a mixture of both – was up to the individual concerned. Hal Kerridge, who had enlisted aged sixteen, firmly believed that the war, for all its obscenity, for all its horror, was something that he would not have missed. ‘It’s an experience that can make or mar you for life but I have no regrets.’ Right up to his death in 1999, aged 100, Dick Trafford felt the same.

I’ve never regretted anything at all from joining up to today because I knew what I was doing. I must have done, else I wouldn’t have done it, that’s the way I look at it.

15
Counting the Cost

DO GOOD & BE GOOD

Killed in Action 24 September 1916, aged 15

There has always been a sense of comradeship between underage soldiers, a mutual recognition of the conditions in which they served, regardless of where, when and with whom. Thomas Hope understood this and dedicated his book,
The Winding Road Unfolds
, accordingly: ‘To the volunteers under military age of all the belligerent countries who served 1914–1918’. Perhaps he already suspected, when his book was published in 1937, that the next generation was about to go to war.

The vast majority of underage soldiers in the First World War, like Ernest Steele, became men during the war. Only those who died remained forever boys, alongside a few extraordinary cases of lads who enlisted so young that they were still under age on Armistice Day. George Maher was one. He had enlisted aged thirteen in 1916, but his sojourn at the front had been brief, before his tearful confession. At the end of the war, he was still only fifteen. Another boy who was also under age when the war ended, but who had seen lengthy frontline service, was Charles Thurlby. He was born on 29 November 1900, and had served in the Gallipoli campaign with the 1/4th Northamptonshire Regiment.
According to military records, he landed on the peninsula in late October 1915 and there, the following month, he celebrated his fifteenth birthday.

Charles’s brief story came to light in 1935, when, after an item on a radio programme,
In Town Tonight
, he responded with a letter to the
Radio Times
under the heading ‘Youngest soldier in the War’. The programme had examined the whole issue of underage soldiering, and the question of who was the youngest became of increasing interest to veterans. Many would stake a claim to the title, Charles included.

After Gallipoli, he had continued to serve with the same regiment until discharged in 1919. Later, he wrote:

At the time of my enlistment I was barely fourteen years and five months old, and on 11th November, 1918, I was still eighteen days off my eighteenth birthday. In view of this, I think I can claim to have been the youngest soldier on active service during the war.

The question of the youngest veteran has commanded many inches of newspaper column. As the years have passed and the boy soldiers themselves began to die, newspapers ran obituaries and inevitably picked up on their extreme youth, and at times, largely because the veteran himself had believed it possible, speculated as to whether he was the youngest soldier. Any claim could only be conjecture. Stuart Cloete wrote in the 1970s that when he received his temporary commission in 1914, he was not only a proud officer in the British Army but ‘Probably the youngest officer in it. I was seventeen and two months old.’ He might have been surprised had he known the truth.

Charles Thurlby may have a good claim to the title of youngest British soldier with the longest record of service at the front, but he was not the youngest veteran. That distinction perhaps belongs to a so far unidentified soldier. Known only as Private S. Lewis,
his story appeared in the
Daily Mail
in 1916: he had reputedly served several weeks on the Somme. He was twelve years old when he enlisted.

The truth about the identity of the youngest soldier will never be conclusively known; the same is true of the total number of boys who served under age. Both can at best be only the subject of informed speculation.

The figures given in this book are estimates, extrapolations from information sourced from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Over the period of a year, I examined the details of every man listed by the CWGC, noting relevant information whenever the age of a boy was given as seventeen or under. For those aged eighteen, a simple head count was taken.

I took the age of eighteen as the cut-off point. The minimum age for overseas service was nineteen until the last year of the war, when it was lowered to eighteen and a half. It would be impossible to untangle those who were killed aged eighteen and two months from those killed six months older. Purists will argue that this technically skews the figures; they are of course correct. However, I feel that other influences cited below tend to offset any discrepancy.

So much depends on what constitutes an underage soldier. Many boys who enlisted were kept back and served for years in Britain before being sent abroad. One veteran I knew, Alfred Wood, enlisted at fifteen into the 6th Leicester Regiment, but was kept back because of his obvious youth and eventually became a training sergeant. He was sent overseas only in 1918, when he was nineteen.

Perhaps ‘under age’ should be determined not by service at home or overseas at all, but service in a theatre of war. Many boys, such as Christopher Paget-Clark, who enlisted at fourteen, were sent on garrison duty to India to release regular units from those countries to serve at the front. Although Christopher lied about his age and enlisted during the war, he was actually no younger than some other boy soldiers sent out to India in peacetime.

It has been claimed that a disproportionate number of younger as opposed to older men will have had their ages registered with the CWGC. This is because older men, perhaps those aged thirty and above, were less likely to have had a living parent to register their ages. However, spouses and siblings could also supply personal information and a great many did. And besides, how many boys’ ages were not given by families too distraught or too disgusted at the loss of their son at fifteen or sixteen to bring themselves to contact the authorities again? How many boys could never be traced because they fought and died under an assumed name? It will never be known, but I cannot help but think that the number of unknown ages among boys at least equals those among adults.

One of the most interesting discrepancies that has come to light from my research has been the apparent rounding up of ages on the Commonwealth War Graves registers and website. The ages that appear on the website were given by the families themselves in response to a form sent out to every family who had lost a loved one in action. Around 50 per cent were completed. I have found a significant number of cases where the age of the casualty is given as a year higher than was actually the case.

What has become clear is that a family itself may have ‘rounded up’ the age, perhaps if their son was about to have a birthday when he died. William Brayshay of the 16th West Yorks Regiment is listed as dying at seventeen, yet he died in 1915 during training before his seventeenth birthday. James Walters’s grave in Delville Wood Cemetery gives his age as seventeen when he was killed on 9 August 1916. He was actually born on 15 September 1899, making him a month short of his seventeenth birthday. Could it have been that James was in his seventeenth year, and this was the reason for the error?

George Pulley, who enlisted with his friend Vic Cole, was aged eighteen when he was killed on 1 July 1916, not nineteen, as listed by the CWGC. Similarly, his brother Edward, who was killed in April 1918, was aged twenty-two, not twenty-three. In Edward’s
case, his surviving records at The National Archives show that when he enlisted in March 1916 he gave his age as twenty years and fourteen days. Unlike his younger brother George, Edward had no reason to lie about his age, and census records show that he was indeed born in 1896. The same source also shows that George Pulley was born in 1898.

This apparent rounding up is not restricted to other ranks. Lieutenant Jack Pouchot, the boy who won the DCM at fifteen, is listed as having died at twenty in October 1918, yet his date of birth was 2 April 1899, making him nineteen when he died.

This naturally leaves the question: how many boys who were killed aged eighteen, and so should have been included in my figures, were omitted because they are listed as being nineteen?

The figures I have given do not include any from the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve, or Royal Marines who served with the Royal Naval Division at Gallipoli and the Western Front. Nor do they include casualties from among the men of the Royal Naval Air Service. Some of these men served and were killed fighting on land alongside the army’s own infantry. John Roxburgh and Albert Davie of the RNVR were seventeen when they were killed storming Beaumont Hamel on the Somme in November 1916, the same age as Lieutenant Edgar Platts of the Royal Marine Light Infantry when he was killed at Arras in April 1917 – he had already been wounded at Beaumont Hamel. They were technically naval men but they were being used as infantry, and hundreds of them died aged eighteen or less.

Lastly, the dead of the Dominions are omitted. In total, around 140,000 men from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa died in the war, an enormous sacrifice by nations willing to commit their menfolk to a conflict thousands of miles from home. Many of these soldiers had in fact been born in Britain and emigrated some time before the war. Lads like Percy Layzell and Thomas Tombs still believed that the land of their birth held a legitimate call over them, despite their obvious debt to the
countries that had offered them new lives. Their deaths at sixteen are not included in the statistics. Yet what distinguishes them from the likes of John Mears, who had emigrated with his parents to Walkerville, Ontario, but who chose to return to Britain to enlist in the 2nd Cameron Highlanders? Or John McLachlan, who had emigrated with his parents to New Zealand but chose to enlist in Britain with the 1/6th Black Watch? Both were killed in action during 1915 and because they were serving in British regiments, they are included in the figures given. In reality there was no difference at all between any of them.

In short, 14,108 boys were counted as having died abroad aged eighteen or under during the war and are listed by the CWGC. If approximately 50 per cent of all the names listed have no known age, then, very crudely, the figure of 14,108 is doubled, giving a total dead of 28,216. As the ratio of dead to wounded averaged around 1:2.4, a total of killed and wounded is reached of 95,934. This figure excludes 2,516 boys who died at home from injuries, accidents or illness, with perhaps another 6,000–8,000 who recovered and were discharged. So perhaps a figure of between 100,000 and 110,000 would be a fairer estimate. As around 55 per cent of all those who served on the Western Front were killed or wounded, so in theory the number of underage soldiers who can be said to have served may, very broadly, be double this.