Boy Soldiers of the Great War by Richard van Emden Read Free Book Online

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 militarygovernor 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 journeyfrom 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.
21 Park Avenue
Dublin
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