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

‘Well, I don’t know,’ replied the doctor. ‘Oh, all right, put him in the army and let them sort him out.’
    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 schoolon 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 andI 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