Boy Soldiers of the Great War (5 page)

War brought a change to the qualification for enlistment. Before the war, it was recommended that lads under nineteen should not be able to join the Regular forces while those under twenty should be ineligible for service overseas as their stamina was not yet considered sufficient for the job. With war, enlistment into the army was altered to a minimum of eighteen years, while there was a broad rule that overseas service should be permitted for those aged nineteen or above. There were certain dispensations. Those in Boy Service, boy drummers, buglers, trumpeters or pipers, could proceed overseas if specifically authorized by the commanding officer, as well as those with specific technical abilities among units such as the Royal Engineers.

Boys who had enlisted at eighteen or younger and who had not completed the recruits’ course of training became panic-stricken at the prospect of being left behind when the regiment proceeded overseas. Across the country, confrontations between boys and officers occurred in almost every regiment. They asked for audiences with their commanding officers, appealing to be allowed to go, but they were frequently refused.

Sixteen-year-old Ben Clouting, by now a trooper in the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, was one of those who intended to go. He had completed all his drills in July and had just finished annual manoeuvres to qualify as a regular trooper in the regiment. The conflict came at just the right moment.

With the news that hostilities had broken out, Tidworth [Barracks, in Wiltshire] went crackers. Everyone was very excited at the prospect of a fight. We were going to war; we were going to do something. No one stopped to think about what that actually meant. We were about to wipe the floor with the Germans and anything else was inconceivable.

Within days, the troop lists had been pinned on the notice boards but Ben was in for a shock. ‘My eyes scanned the notice. I was dumbfounded; my name had been omitted.’

Stubbornness overrode bitter disappointment. Twice, Ben scrubbed the bottom name off the list and added his own; twice, Ben’s troop sergeant amended it as before, until, in exasperation, he took the young trooper before Captain Charles Hornby, second in command of the squadron.

‘You know your age. You are not entitled to come out with the regiment.’

‘According to my enlistment papers, sir, my age is officially nineteen, and, with all due respect, I am coming out.’

Hornby was well aware of Clouting’s real age, having connived to let the boy join the regiment a year before, and in the end he relented. ‘Fair enough, it’s against my wishes, but you shall come.’

Just ten days later, the regiment was on its way to France with its young trooper – one of the first of thousands of underage soldiers.

2
For King and Country … and Your Mates

FAREWELL BELOVED
SO YOUNG AND BRAVE
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
HIS LIFE HE GAVE

10675 Private Alfred Clark
1st Royal West Kent Regiment

Killed in Action 9 October 1915, aged 18

Back home, the British public heard of the declaration of war in their newspapers, on placards and, for the most part, by word of mouth. It came almost as a release from the anxious years of expectation. Although there were small demonstrations against the war, these were swamped by jubilant expressions of support indicative of pent-up excitement and nervous energy. Horace Calvert, a lad from Bradford, was fourteen years old.

I was going home from work at about seven o’clock in the evening and as I got up the top of Richmond Road, there was a newsagent’s shop and outside there was a big placard: ‘War declared on Germany’. Mobilization had taken place. I went to Bellevue Barracks, home of the 6th West Yorks, a Territorial battalion, and found there were crowds round there. Everybody was excited and
every time they saw a soldier he was cheered. It was very patriotic and people were singing ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, all the favourites. A challenge had been laid down over Belgium and they were eager to take it up. I should have been home at nine but I stayed there until late at night. Everybody stood in groups saying ‘We’ve got to beat the Germans’ and quite a number were already setting off to enlist.

Two hundred miles to the south, in London, seventeen-year-old Vic Cole was swept along in an eruption of public fervour.

In the afternoon, I went up to town and wandered about in front of Buckingham Palace and down the Mall. There was a great crowd of people outside the palace and other crowds were congregating in Whitehall and towards Westminster. Later on that night, just before midnight, the word went round that the ultimatum had expired and we were now at war with Germany. I don’t remember getting home but I was terribly excited. The thing that people had been talking about for years had at last come about.

The expressions of wild enthusiasm in the two cities belied the fact that there was no great urgency on the part of the British public to gear up for conflict. Some uniformed organizations, however, being readily available, were able to react to the declaration of war. The Scouts, for example – like the Territorials, on their summer camps – were prepared and keen to act. These boys, 25,000 in all, were used straight away to safeguard railways, telegraphs and reservoirs, or to run messages or act as dispatch riders. Down in Exmouth, Devon, fourteen-year-old Christopher Paget-Clark had just broken up for his school holidays and, being a Boy Scout, volunteered to help patrol the coastline to look out for anything suspicious. This he did for several nights a week on an isolated stretch of land midway between Exmouth and Budleigh Salterton, before being withdrawn. He then enlisted
into the Devonshire Regiment, being made a lance corporal, one of 10,000 ex-Scouts and Scoutmasters who enlisted in the first four months of the war.

George White was also sent on duty as soon as war was declared.

We senior Scouts were released from school to do a cycle patrol along four miles of the London Road to guard the telegraph wires, apparently to prevent any sabotage. This duty lasted for a couple of weeks, then some of us were dispatched to Harty Ferry [in Kent] for service with the coastguards. Each night, one coastguard and two of us boys rowed across the Swale carrying rocket equipment with us. The object of the exercise was to watch for any attempted landing by the enemy in darkness.

In marked contrast to this activity, ‘business as usual’ became a common phrase in civilian life. Even so, the decision for war created a degree of economic uncertainty, which over the following month resulted in the loss of around 500,000 jobs; nervous employers temporarily shut factory gates, in part to encourage workers to enlist but in the main because of anxiety about the future and the implications for their work of a widespread conflict. There was still no general conception of what war would mean. Newspapers – practically the only source of information on national matters – were often content to run patriotic stories in the face of a dearth of hard news, until it arrived at the end of August with the retreat from
Mons.

Popular belief today is that there was an immediate and overwhelming rush to the colours. In reality, peak enlistment – of almost half a million men in two weeks – was a month away. The majority of people were prepared to wait and see, while the machinery of government cranked into action and the first appeals for men were printed and issued.

Calls for recruits were not long in coming. Sixty-four-year-old Lord Kitchener – Britain’s most successful soldier and military
governor of Egypt from 1911 – was in London at the outbreak of hostilities and was immediately appointed Secretary of State for War, taking office on 5 August. Within two days he had issued an appeal for 100,000 volunteers. The age group first specified, nineteen to thirty, was soon adjusted upwards to include all men up to the age of thirty-five, and raised again intermittently throughout the war.

Young boys who desperately wanted to enlist had to resort to lying, and that did not always come easily to lads brought up to eschew deceit. Officially, of course, the age for recruitment into the Regular Army was eighteen, and nineteen the minimum age to go overseas on active service. If a boy was keen to go to France before the fighting was over, nineteen he would have to be, a point clarified by the recruiting sergeant when one lad, George Head, tried to enlist.

‘How old are you?’ asked the sergeant. I replied, ‘Eighteen.’

‘Yes, that will do for enlisting but not for Imperial Service Overseas. If you want to join in the war, go over there,’ and he pointed to a table on which lay some newspapers. ‘Have a read and perhaps when you return you will have grown another year older.’

Burney, who was with me, being over nineteen, explained this riddle and so I returned and when asked the age question again, I replied, ‘Nineteen.’

No such deception could help the very youngest volunteers. These boys, whose ages had barely broken into double figures, were patted on the head and escorted from the recruitment halls. Most went home to rue their lot and return to school, but an optimistic group persisted. Their only hope was to make a direct appeal to anyone who might listen, even the Secretary of State himself. Indeed, it was not unheard of for a boy to assail Kitchener on the steps of the War Office or Scotland Yard. One Reginald Smith was reported in the press as having made a sixty-five-mile journey
from Ramsgate to speak to the great man himself. ‘We will talk about it again when you are older,’ Kitchener is reputed to have told him.

If a personal meeting was impossible, then there was always a letter to explain a young boy’s plight, certain in the knowledge that the Secretary of State for War knew a good sport when he saw one. Alfie Knight had a touching faith in Lord Kitchener.

Dear Lord Kitchner

I am an Irish boy 9 years of age and I want to go to the front. I can ride jolley quick on my bycycle and would go as dispatch ridder. I wouldn’t let the germans get it. I am a good shot with a revolver and would kill a good few of the germans. I am very strong and often win a fight with lads twice as big as myself. I want a uneform and a revolver and will give a good account of myself.

Please send an ancncer

Yours affectionately

Alfie Knight

Far from ignoring the letter, Kitchener asked his private secretary to reply.

Lord Kitchener asks me to thank you for your letter, but he is afraid that you are not quite old enough to go to the front as a dispatch rider.

Yours truly

H. J. Creedy

Private Secretary

Quite how many boys were willing to lie is difficult to ascertain. However, in a study undertaken on a surviving Company Roll Book belonging to E Company of the 16th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, a statistical anomaly is evident. The book reveals that 21 per cent of all volunteers claimed to be nineteen, while fewer than 1 per cent were eighteen. This evidence is put into perspective when compared with other age groups: on average, each year broadly 7 or 8 per cent of those who enlisted were older than nineteen.

The frequency with which boys gave their age as exactly nineteen should have alerted recruiting sergeants to the fact that there had either been the most remarkable explosion in the birth rate in 1895, or a number of boys were consistently giving the wrong age. Most boys, if they thought about it, were careful to use their day and month of birth and subtract one, two or three years as required; a very few, aware perhaps that boys were using the age of nineteen, boldly claimed to be twenty for greater authenticity.

Inevitably, among the first to volunteer were those with few family ties, working in dreary dead-end jobs. These would-be recruits were likely to make a snap decision to join up, whereas men with steady jobs and a family to feed were more likely to ensure that their affairs were in order before offering themselves to the country.

Seventeen-year-old John Laister was in just such a dead-end job and was one of the first to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, on 6 August. His motive for lying about his age was less military glory and more that he was bored and keen for a change of scenery – typical of unattached youth.

I worked at Oldbury Carriage Works as a fitter and turner from six in the morning until six at night, with a long walk to and from work. I was on my way home and I’m looking at the evening paper and there was a picture of men queuing up to join the army in James Watt Street in Birmingham. ‘I’d like to join the army
better than slogging down at the Works for a few shillings a week,’ I thought, so without telling Mother I got my bike in the morning and went to enlist. I never bothered telling my employer what I was up to; I didn’t feel I owed them anything.

I had great difficulty in finding James Watt Street but I found an alleyway to park my bike and I went to get in the queue which was almost the length of the street. I almost gave up. I’d been going for about two hours to reach the building, one person going up a flight of stairs as another came out, before I was called to go up.

The sergeant major opened the door. ‘Come in.’ As soon as I got in, he says, ‘Take your clothes off.’ It wasn’t too warm and there were two doctors there in white coats and an officer sitting behind this table and they examined me and measured me. I was five foot one inch tall. I didn’t think I was so small. The officer looked up. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Nineteen, sir.’ ‘Are you sure you’re nineteen?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. You come back here in about two years’ time and then perhaps you will have filled out.’

So I’m making for the door with tears in my eyes, and a corporal who was there said, ‘Half a minute’ and he went to the sergeant major and he whispered something, and he went in front of the officer, saluted and said, ‘Do you think he’ll fill out, sir?’ ‘Well, I don’t know,’ replied the doctor. ‘Oh, all right, put him in the army and let them sort him out.’