Boy Soldiers of the Great War (45 page)

The roar is greater outside, and the machine guns are madder and madder. The grey light is getting stronger and is creeping along the floor, whitening it. We shall go forward soon.

They are shouting outside. I must go.

Reginald Kiernan was lucky; he was wounded sufficiently to see out his war back in Britain.

Lieutenant Ernest Steele died that morning. He had been reconnoitring a position for his guns near a railway track when he came into close contact with the enemy who began to bomb and shoot at the machine gunners. It was at that moment that the young officer was killed, shot by a sniper. Ernest’s body was recovered and his private possessions handed in to the orderly room by the section sergeant, who remained with his officer despite being wounded himself. The next evening, at seven o’clock, Ernest was buried in the village churchyard under the shadow of the crucifix that still stood, though the church itself had been destroyed. The
Battalion Pioneers made a wooden cross and letters of sympathy were sent to the family, not just by the CO of the 21st Battalion MGC, but also by the CO of the company, the battalion padre, and Ernest’s wounded sergeant. Their loss was felt very deeply by everyone, not least the company CO, Major J. B. Hardinge.

I can say perfectly truthfully that, without exception, he was the best Officer I had. He was so exceptionally straight and conscientious. His men thought the world of him, and he gave his life for England as one could have imagined he would, in a gallant way, leading and protecting his men. He was not more than 20 yards from the enemy when he was shot straight through the heart and killed instantly. I saw him afterwards and although I have been out nearly four years, I have never seen so peaceful and wonderful a look on anyone’s face as was on his. I am glad to say he was buried, not on the battlefield, but by our own Padre in the Churchyard at Heudicourt. I feel sure he is at peace with his God.

‘Geordie’ Steele, as we called him, was also one of my dearest friends. I feel his loss so much that I can understand a little what it will mean to you. We had so much in common. We used to keep up our knowledge of German together.

He and I used to be very keen on chess and I think I knew a good deal of his private affairs. For instance, it was only three days before he was buried that he had gone to see the Padre about his confirmation. I knew he was engaged and I should very much like to have written to the lady concerned only I have no address.

He also often talked of his young brother, to whom he seemed so devoted, that I should like to have written to them all … Will you therefore express my most deep sympathy to all, but more especially to your wife and yourself.

Believe me,

Yours sincerely

J. B. Hardinge

A little to the north-east of Epéhy, Lieutenant Jack Pouchot was flying with 56 Squadron RAF. The fifteen-year-old DCM winner was now nineteen and flying SE5s against the Germans above the Hindenburg Line, close to Cambrai. He was enjoying a lucky month, having been reported missing in action once, only to turn up miraculously, plane-less but uninjured. In the build-up to the breaking of the Hindenburg Line he was flying daily to suppress enemy surveillance. On 27 September he took part in an early-morning sortie with nine other aircraft when they met and engaged the enemy. The attack proved highly successful and on his return Jack filled out a combat report claiming yet another victory for the squadron.

While on patrol at 15,000 ft over Cambrai we attacked a formation of E.A.[Enemy Aircraft]. I got in a short burst at close range at one [a Fokker biplane]. He went down in a spin and crashed a few miles N.E. of Cambrai. I was then attacked by 4 E.A. and driven down to the ground east of Cambrai and crossed the lines at 1,000 ft.

Two days later the most heavily fortified part of the Hindenburg Line was stormed. The line, which had been under construction since September 1916, was irreparably breached in a matter of hours, a remarkable feat of arms. The Germans, with no proper defensive position to fall back on, were forced to begin a retreat with no expectation that they could hold the Allied forces anywhere on foreign soil. Defeat was inevitable.

Sadly, Jack Pouchot, like Ernest Steele, would not enjoy the fruits of his four-year service. On 5 October he was shot down and killed; he is buried in the Marcoing British Cemetery near Cambrai. The two boys, who had independently chosen to join the Queen’s Westminster Rifles in 1914, were both dead.

The pursuit of the enemy continued and for six weeks, until the Armistice, it was relentless, stretching the lines of resupply to the
British and Dominion forces to the absolute limit. Dick Trafford, the fifteen-year-old miner who had also enlisted in the heady days of 1914, was still at the front. He had been wounded – he had lost a finger – and he had also been gassed. He had fought at Loos, on the Somme, at Passchendaele and throughout the campaigns of 1918, and he was still only nineteen years old. Like the rest of his platoon, Dick was both exhausted and hungry.

We seemed to be getting the Germans into a tight corner, and the officers were telling us ‘keep on, lads, keep on.’ They urged us to give everything we’d got because there were a couple of times when our fellows nearly gave up. They were that tired, with marching and they’d nothing to eat or drink for a couple of days, and there was no sign of rations because the Germans had blown up the crossroads and that had made it difficult to get supplies up. The men had all eaten their iron rations, which they weren’t supposed to, except in emergencies, well, the men put down that it had been an emergency and they’d eaten the biscuits and cheese a while back. Anyway, we were all of one mind, unless we had something to eat, we wouldn’t go on.

It was the officers who solved the problem. By pure luck, a bakery was found that had just made some bread. It was of dubious quality, ‘blackish stuff’ according to Dick, but it would do, and the officers bought a number of loaves out of the cash in their pockets and issued them to their men, so averting a potentially nasty situation.

Dick recalled:

We were capturing the enemy all the time. I wouldn’t say young boys, I’d say young men, I mean to say a young boy could be anything from about eight years old to about twelve, whereas a young man, he’d be about sixteen to eighteen, that’s the way I look at it. They were glad it was ending because from their point
of view they would be right for meals, that’s what they tried to explain to us, they’d not seen a decent meal in a long time. The only thing they could do had been to kill their horses and use the meat for food. You saw dead horses on the side of the road and you could see where lumps had been cut out, from the stomach or off its side, and that was a sure sign they were short of food.

‘We’d got them on the run,’ agreed Smiler Marshall. Like Dick Trafford, this onetime underage volunteer had gone right through the war and was enjoying these final scraps.

I thought this was smashing, we’d got them beat. I can’t tell you any dates, but we noticed the last lot that held us up were young boys and they hadn’t got the fight in them that the old ones had. If they saw the cavalry coming with their swords drawn, they’d scamper. They kept putting their hands up, ‘Kaput, kaput!’ The Germans would stand their ground if they’d got to, but if there was a chance to get away they would.

When the end finally came on 11 November, it met with a muted response by the men on the battlefield, who frequently felt at a complete loss. The army had dominated their lives for so long; now, all of a sudden, the yoke of war had been lifted, and many looked at each other as if to say, ‘What do we do now?’

Smiler was then a twenty-one-year-old man serving with the Machine Gun Corps (Cavalry). He wanted to go all the way into Germany.

We were in a factory in the town of Lille when the news was broken to the men and they were not happy. The officer came along and he said, ‘I’ve got some great news for you, the war’s over, there’s an Armistice.’ Oh, you never heard such language in all your life, you see, they were angry, we were all angry because we’d been going on two or three kilometres a day for the past fortnight.
Right at the end the Germans were throwing their rifles away. They weren’t going to fight any more, they told us that. One or two spoke English, one had been a pork butcher from York before the war, another had been a hairdresser in London, and they’d had enough. They were ambling along, without their rifles, walking towards Germany, accepting defeat. We believed we could go all the way to Berlin.

The casualties in 1918 were by far the heaviest of the war. Month after month a continuous offensive had been conducted by one side or the other as decisive victory was sought. It had been the war’s worst year for British casualties but few were underage soldiers. The number of these who had managed to gain entry into the army was now very small indeed, and the losses numerically insignificant. Only 109 boys from Britain aged seventeen or under are recorded as having been killed, with a further forty-seven deaths at home, an unknown number of whom had succumbed to wounds. Very broadly, these figures represent less than a tenth of those
known
to be killed under age in 1915. Given that the size of the British Army in 1918 was between three and four times the size it had been in 1915, so the number of underage deaths per head of the BEF in the last year of the war, compared to 1915, is equal to a ratio of roughly 1:40.

Nevertheless, the death in action of exceptionally young boys had not been eradicated entirely. Two boys in particular stand out. Private Frederick Steward of the 1/18th London Regiment, a lad from Surrey, was killed aged fourteen on the first day of the German March offensive; while David Ross, at fourteen and three months, was killed just four days later on the 25th while serving with the 2nd South African Regiment. Frederick is buried in Heudicourt Communal Cemetery, next to the small extension in which Ernest Steele lies buried.

The real tragedy of 1918 concerned the boys who had once been designated under age but who, in the March crisis, became
legally old enough to serve abroad. Their losses in the final year of war grew remorselessly until the Government, in response to the ending of the German offensive, withheld such drafts from going to the front. In the end, slightly more than 10,000 boys aged eighteen died at home or overseas in the army between March and November 1918.

The majority of these boys, over 60 per cent, died in three months: April, August and September 1918. Contained within these figures is the interesting statistic that three times as many eighteen-year-olds died as a daily average in April compared to the daily average in March, underlining the desperate need to send out boys to France to shore up the front. The losses later that summer, in August and September, reflect the heavy casualties that were suffered as a rolling battle was joined with a determined, if retreating, enemy.

In one of the final actions of the war, in mid-October 1918, a soldier from Newfoundland called Thomas Ricketts volunteered to go out with his section commander and a Lewis gun in an attempt to outflank an enemy battery causing casualties at point-blank range. They were still 300 yards from the battery when their ammunition was exhausted. Private Ricketts, under heavy machine-gun fire, doubled back a hundred yards to replenish their supplies and, amazingly, got back to the Lewis gun alive. Together, the two then drove the enemy and their gun teams into a farm, and the platoon was able to advance, capturing four field guns, four machine guns and eight prisoners.

For this action, Thomas, who had already been presented with the Croix de Guerre, was awarded the Victoria Cross. At his investiture after the war, King George V presented him as ‘the youngest VC in the army’. He was just seventeen.

If the standard for winning the Victoria Cross was maintained throughout the war, and there is no reason to doubt that it was, then the number of men awarded the honour for conspicuous bravery is testimony to the terrible nature of the conflict in 1918.
Between August 1914 and December 1916, 172 Victoria Crosses were awarded, or 6.14 decorations per month. Between January 1917 and the end of the war, 287 VCs were won, on average 13.04 per month, but, if 1918 is taken alone, then the average stands at 16.5 VCs per month, more than one every other day. Many were won in the final hundred days of the war, when, after the German forces suffered their catastrophic reversal on 8 August, the enemy were remorselessly pushed back across the old battlefields of the Somme and Ypres, and then, for the first time in four years, over open countryside largely untouched by war.

A predominance of Allied firepower, the superiority in the quality of equipment and its regular supply, superb training combined with the ascendancy in troop numbers, were fundamental ingredients which, once in place, could only ensure victory for the Allies. Nevertheless, owning the tools of victory was not in itself victory: the war still had to be won and that was achieved by the willingness and determination of the men on the ground to see it through. It was won at great cost, although few expected, until the very last days of the war, that the Germans would capitulate so soon.

14
Aftermath

HE GAVE HIS YOUNG LIFE FOR ENGLAND

Killed in Action 25 July 1916, aged 17

At 11 a.m. the guns stopped firing, and an almost uncanny silence lay across the battlefield.

Fred Hodges always remembered the effect the ceasefire had on him.

I was silent too, feeling no desire for any conversation with the gunners, who began to clean their guns and tidy up the gun sites. The occasion was too big, too poignant, for words and I walked slowly back to the village, mind and spirit strangely numbed.