Boy Soldiers of the Great War (6 page)

According to John’s surviving enlistment papers, he was just 7 stone 8 pounds, and the doctor’s comments are revealing: ‘A little underweight but well proportioned and will develop.’ Development was the key: what he could be, not what he was.

John was far from alone in being disenchanted with the daily grind of work. The vast majority of children left school at the age of fourteen, and even earlier if they had an excellent record of attendance. In Lancashire a child could begin part-time work at the mill at eleven and full-time work at thirteen. Leaving school
on the Friday meant adult work on the Monday. Invariably, pay was poor and hours long in frequently dangerous conditions. At the end of the working week, parents expected the child to hand over wages in their entirety for lodgings and keep. If the child was lucky, he might be handed back what was known as ‘odd’ money, perhaps a shilling or two in return, but rarely any more. It hardly eased the treadmill of work. Horace Calvert remembered:

Civilian life was a dull life when you looked at it, just work. Mine was a dirty job at an engineering firm, always lots of grease and the smell of metal being turned. I didn’t like the machinery, either. I was always frightened I might get caught up in it.

It was ironic that Horace should naively think that machinery in the factory was a greater threat than that of war.

I looked upon war as a big adventure, having read all those adventure stories in the
Wide World
magazines in the library. It made me feel what a nice life it would be.

If the war happened to be morally just, then all well and good, but boys like Horace did not need such a reason to enlist. They were just happy to escape hard, humdrum lives.

Dick Trafford enlisted not so much to escape his job as to keep up with the other men. He had been a miner for the best part of two years, although only fifteen, and was fit and strong.

I was working down a coal mine at a place called Rainford from the age of fourteen. About six men from Ormskirk and me used to be on night work, and this particular night we’d all turned up for work but one chap was late turning up. When he arrived, he said, ‘There’s no work tonight, chaps’; the war was going to break out tomorrow and, he said, we had better go and report to the drill hall. They were Territorials and had to report there and
I followed them to enlist. It wasn’t that I actually wanted to go, it was because the other men were going and I thought, ‘Well, I might as well be with them.’

It was always possible during enlistment for a boy to give a false name in the hope of escaping detection. Cecil Withers enlisted under the name Sydney Harrison, George Maher under his mother’s maiden name of Ashton. Morris Kroffsoff served as Jack Phillips. ‘It is customary for these boys to adopt their father’s first name,’ wrote his father, Phillip Kroffsoff, by way of explanation to the army. Other underage boys made slight but clever adjustments. Richard Kerr served in the artillery as Richard Farr; Michael Cohen enlisted in August 1914 giving the name Michael Cowan. Harold Lautenberg, from Hackney in London, became Harold Lawton, although in his case jettisoning his ancestry was probably as much a motive as concealing his identity.

Stuart Cloete, an eighteen-year-old officer in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLIs), recalled one fourteen-year-old in his company who had made it all the way to France.

He was big for his age, had lied about it when he enlisted under a false name, and then had sufficient self-restraint to write to no one. I had noticed that he received no mail and wrote no letters, but had never spoken to him about it.

In this particular case the boy was traced by his family and sent home, but the graveyards of France are littered with those who enlisted under assumed names and will for ever be lost to posterity.

There was another possible route to France for a keen young boy. The Territorials would take him at seventeen, and, although he was not officially eligible to go abroad until he was nineteen, they were desperate for men. Any assumption at the onset of war that all their existing part-time soldiers would patriotically
sign up for overseas service had proved wide of the mark. Many older men resented what they saw as the government’s attempted change to their conditions of service, and refused or were slow to sign.

This caused a problem, for there was no proper reserve for the Territorials, no pool of men upon whom the force could call to fill the gaps. Official sanction, allowing these soldiers to jump ship to the Regular Army, only exacerbated the problem. As a result, anyone, boys included, who was sufficiently well trained could expect to go overseas and youngsters were aware of this possible short-cut. They grasped the fact that the Territorials might take lads who had attempted and failed to get into the Regular Army. What was more, the Territorial Force’s pre-war attestation form, E.501, did not ask for a statement of age, and although in time new forms were brought out requiring such a declaration, many recruitment offices were still using the old examples well into the following year.

Seventeen-year-old Leslie Walkinton wanted to join a Territorial battalion of the London Regiment, the Queen’s Westminster Rifles (QWR). He was anxious on two counts: that he looked too young to be accepted and that the war would take place without him. He need not have worried. Boys as young as fifteen were enlisted into the battalion and Leslie was readily admitted. He was delighted with his choice, finding himself ‘amongst a congenial lot of men whose one idea was to train us as quickly as possible in the hope that we might all be lucky enough to see just the end of the fighting’.

Leslie’s vision of war was little short of quixotic.

We were a normal lot of healthy young men afflicted with romantic minds and large reserves of pent-up energy. Our real need was to rescue beautiful maidens from terrible dragons, but the beautiful maidens were so capable and standoffish and all the dragons had been slain long ago, so that when the
Daily Mail
told us that
beautiful Belgium had been violated and France was in distress, we all rushed to the rescue. But I think we did it for our own sakes very largely. The uniforms, the bands, the open air life, and most of all the feeling that one was a devil of a fellow, attracted us irresistibly … this wave of patriotic emotion which carried us into the army received its impetus from the publicity and the glamour of it all.

John Auguste Pouchot, born in April 1899, was one of the fifteen-year-olds who joined the regiment. His father worked as an auctioneer’s manager and lived in Belgravia, but, for reasons that are not recorded, Jack – as he was known – was fostered. When he left school, he took a job at the Army and Navy Store in London, but in August 1914 he joined the QWR. He was probably attracted to a Territorial battalion because of his age, but even so had to add a couple of years in order to enlist. His medical must have been perfunctory in the extreme, as he appears to have grown two inches in height and two inches in chest measurement between signing his attestation papers and being passed by a doctor.

Ernest Steele, aged seventeen, from Leytonstone in east London, was another who joined the QWR. A quiet, reserved boy, Ernest was fond of reading and noted for his studiousness. He had not been averse to outdoor activities, however, and while a member of the Island Rangers, a local military and scientific corps, he won several silver spoons for shooting. He had been working in the family business as a box maker when war broke out and enlisted, signing the Imperial Service Obligation as he did so. Leslie Walkinton also signed but in his case he was told to get parental consent as well.

My platoon commander wouldn’t take me abroad unless I got written permission from my father. This was a bit awkward, but by dint of assurances that we should probably be sent to India or
Egypt on garrison duty, or merely to the lines of communication in France, I managed to get the required signature.

Although the Obligation should have been signed individually, consent from serving Territorial soldiers was often obtained collectively, and in a manner that was more than a little underhand. In one case an entire battalion on parade had been asked to step forward to signal its group assent, sergeants being ordered to look down the line to check that every man had obliged.

This was not an isolated case. In Parliament, Liberal MP George Esslemont cited a similar example. He had been to see a battalion billeted nearby and had been struck by the number of obviously young boys in the unit.

I took the opportunity of having an interview with the commanding officer. I referred to the case of these lads and expressed the view that they should not have been mobilized at all but allowed to continue their education … The commanding officer said that those boys would not be sent away [overseas]. The next thing I heard, only a few days afterwards, was that he had paraded the whole battalion, delivered a speech and invited all the men and boys in the battalion to volunteer for foreign service. I would have no cause for complaint if in making that appeal he had clearly and distinctly said that it must be understood that he did not expect any lad under nineteen years of age to make application for foreign service. He did nothing of the sort. He asked those willing to volunteer to slope arms and of course the majority of the boys sloped arms along with the older men. I thought this was rather an extraordinary thing after the representations I had made and the assurances he had given me. I wrote respectfully calling attention to the matter and asked him how it had come about. He said he had acted on instructions from Headquarters.

Alfred Anderson’s company of the 5th Black Watch was paraded and asked one by one whether they would agree to go overseas.

The quartermaster sergeant called the roll out. He was sat at a table in the middle of the hall and he just took us as we were in the roll book. I was about the first to volunteer because my name is A. Anderson. I didn’t sign anything. You had to declare your willingness to go abroad in front of the others. That was enough. Only one or two said they couldn’t volunteer for home reasons, parents to support and things like that, but very few refused to go. We did have talks amongst ourselves about it and the main thing I remember was that we would stick together. We had drilled together, been at camps with the same fellows, what else could you do, you couldn’t say ‘I’m not staying with the battalion’.

If Territorial battalions had been forced to eject all aged under nineteen, then most units would never have set sail at all. It seems inconceivable that the authorities had any alternative but to turn a blind eye and send these units overseas, boys and all, as they did from the second half of September.

Meanwhile, the first troops had arrived in France only a week after the rapid mobilization of the BEF. From the coastal ports the first British divisions advanced only cautiously. The French had been optimistic that the Allies might make a stand near Charleroi in Belgium, but such hopes soon evaporated; instead, the first meaningful contact took place on 23 August near the town of Mons, much closer to the French border than anticipated.

One of the first battalions to arrive on 14 August was the 4th Middlesex Regiment. They had wasted little time in leaving Boulogne where they had disembarked, moving off in an easterly direction. A week later they were near the Belgian town of Mons, pushing forward, searching for the enemy who were as yet to be located, although they were known to be close and in great numbers. As no contact had been made, pairs of scouts were sent forward on bicycles to see what they could discover and report back. One of those chosen was Private John Parr, a golf caddie
in civilian life, born in North Finchley, London. He had enlisted in August 1912, stating his age as eighteen and one month; he was in fact fifteen and one month. Despite his age he was a fully trained regular soldier by the time he went overseas.

No one was certain precisely what happened to Private Parr once out on reconnaissance but he and another man named Beard were engaged by small arms fire. Private Beard returned to the battalion, Parr did not, and he was noted as missing. In the weeks following, Parr’s mother, Alice, first contacted the War Office, then wrote to the Infantry Record office in Hounslow asking for news, but no one could confirm his whereabouts; the War Office did not even know he was missing. Then Alice Parr received a letter from a British prisoner in Germany who informed her that John had ‘been shot down at Mons’, partly confirmed by Parr’s Company Commander, Captain Hanley, who wrote that her son had not been heard of since. The date was recorded as 21 August 1914 making No 14196 Private John Parr the first British soldier killed in the war. He was seventeen years and thirty-three days old.

Among the units slogging their way forward were an unknown number of underage soldiers who, despite the vigilance of commanding officers, had somehow contrived to go overseas, some as young as fifteen or sixteen. At Mons the units formed up and took part in the first set-piece engagement of the war. It was there that a young private by the name of James Price, of the 2nd South Lancashire Regiment, was killed. He was sixteen and, quite possibly, the second underage soldier to die on the Western Front.

The regulars who fought at Mons were able to give the Germans a bloody rebuff. Nevertheless, the small British contingent was faced by a force nearly two and a half times as big and with twice as many guns; it had little option but to fight and retire, and then retreat. It came as something of a national shock when, just three weeks after the declaration of war, news filtered through that the
regular British Army was in danger of annihilation. The nation hardly expected such a rapid reversal of fortunes.

In this international conflict, Britain would increasingly turn to her Empire and Dominions for vital help; they were not found wanting. Yet if Britain had only a small Regular Army, the forces of countries such as Canada and Australia were by comparison practically non-existent. Both nations were still technically dominions but Australia had been self-governing since an Act of 1901, while Canada was to all intents and purposes autonomous, though a Governor General still had the right of an imperial veto. Both nations had immigrant populations, large swathes of whom were still intensely patriotic to Britain. In August 1914, Canada automatically entered the war on the Allied side, making no independent declaration of war. Within weeks, 30,000 Canadians had enlisted, while in Australia news of the conflict was greeted with raucous approval. Recruitment was begun straightaway to send an initial force of 20,000 men to help the Allied cause. These men would form the newly established Australian Imperial Force (AIF), the first contingent setting sail on 7 November 1914.