THE STATISTICS OF SLAUGHTER from the First World War are mind-boggling. Around
nine million military personnel perished on all sides, with more than
700,000 from the British Expeditionary Force. Historians write of a whole
generation being obliterated at the Somme alone, where 19,000 British
soldiers were mown down by machinegun fire on the first morning.
The tallies that illustrate how small communities were torn apart by the Great
War are equally astonishing, and perhaps more meaningful, especially when
accompanied by individual stories of doomed youth.
At an assembly at The Coopers' Company and Coburn School in Upminster in Essex
yesterday they were commemorating the more than 120 old boys who died in the
Great War. School magazines unearthed in the archives present a vivid and
grim reminder of just how young were so many of the men who fought between
1914 and 1918. That sombre truth leaps too from the pages of two new
compendiums by Max Arthur.
The Coopers' School, which has origins in the 16th century, was a charitable
school in Mile End at the time of the war. The twice-yearly magazines
reflect the initial excitement of many in Britain as war began — and
continue to convey a gung-ho optimism rather longer than one might expect as
the death toll rises, before the terrible reality is unavoidable.
In early 1915, a full list of former students serving King and Country is
proudly published. There is just one obituary and in among detailed football
reports there is an account from an old boy at the front in France of how
initially the duties of his battalion “were not sufficiently exciting for
the majority of us, after having heard of the experiences of men just back
from the firing line”. When the order to move closer to the action came
there was “a great deal of rejoicing”. He got his excitement when the shells
started landing. “I thought I should be in blue funk but there is no time
for that and all you do is rush blindly along feeling sorry for the fellows
going down all round you and hoping not to be hit yourself.” He was wounded
and sent home and seems remarkably cheerful about the ordeal. By the summer
of that year, with the cadet corps at the school boasting record recruits,
the toll of old boys had reached 12 but another former pupil who was sent
home injured, referred to only by his initials R.B., says that “not for
anything would I have missed going to the front and having six months
exciting experiences”.
In 1916 the magazine notes that hardly a day goes by without visits from old
boys on leave or wounded. A cheery letter from the front from a young
master, Lieutenant Bernard Pitt, jokes that the mice in his dug-out “take my
cranium for a cheese” and describes the “broad grins and chuckles” that
accompany off-target shells and his delight when he hits his targets. “I go
away very pleased with the effect of my 60lb bombs. Hans and Fritz will have
a nasty job tonight.” He writes of picking up souvenirs “especially the
buttons, which I cut off a very odoriferous German whom my servant dug up”.
By the time many of his pupils were reading this upbeat assessment, along with
still extensive school sports reports, in the spring of 1916, Pitt may
already have been dead. The next issue of the magazine records that he was
killed while carrying out his duty as a trench mortar officer. A letter from
his brigadier-general to his wife says that he was “serving fire from the
front trench and had just sent the man with him back with a message to his
Mortars when the Germans exploded a mine close to the spot and we have been
unable to find a trace of him since... He was absolutely the embodiment of
dash and pluck”.
Such tributes could not mask the fact that the war was now a disaster. The
magazine appears to have been unable to keep track of who among its old boys
was dead, and with other priorities publication was suspended. When it
resumed in 1920, the death toll was put at 93. A year later that was revised
upwards to 1,921, presumably as more families got in touch.
Boys who signed up came from a complete cross-section of society. In his book
The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson writes that all but eight of the 539 boys
who left Winchester between 1909 and 1915 volunteered. “The Eton Chronicle
said explicitly that ‘it was there that they learnt the lessons which are to
enable them to stand the ordeal which must now be undergone.” In the early
years naivety abounded. Ferguson quotes a Croydon schoolboy, George Coppard,
who “knew nothing about” what was happening in France when he joined up.
They were desperate to enlist. In his new book Lest We Forget, a collection of
“forgotten voices” of the First and Second World Wars, Max Arthur includes a
16-year-old's account of telling a recruiting officer that he is 18, being
told he looks too young and going back in a bowler hat and getting accepted.
Rifleman Norman Demuth, another 16-year-old who had been turned down, tells
of his embarrassment when a woman in the street presented him with a white
feather, a symbol of cowardice often pressed into the hands of men who were
not in uniform.
Lieutenant Charles Carrington describes the arrival of new recruits. “When
they came to us they were weedy, sallow, skinny, frightened children — the
refuse of our industrial system — and they were in very poor condition
because of wartime food shortages.” But after a six-month crash course “they
changed so much their mothers wouldn't have recognised them” and “out they
went to France in batches”.
The horror of what these lads had to do when they got to the front is
recounted by a German sergeant, Stefan Westmann, who describes encountering
a French soldier, bayonet at the ready, as his comrades are falling all
around him. He felt “the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I
realised he was after my life, exactly as I was after his”. He was quicker
and killed the Frenchman with his own bayonet. He was nauseous and
trembling; his peers asked what was wrong with him. “I had the dead French
soldier in front of me, and how I would have liked him to have raised his
hand! I would have shaken it and we would have been the best of friends
because he was nothing but a poor boy — like me.”
The youthfulness of the fighting forces leaps from the pages. Private Raynor
Taylor recalls that amid all the atrocities what affected him the most as an
18-year-old was the letter from his teenage girlfriend back home telling him
she was now stepping out with his pal. Sergeant Cyril Lee has a memory of
being unable to rescue a soldier from a sea of mud. “He was only a mere boy.
It pricked my conscience, but I couldn't do a thing.” Sergeant W.Daniels's
first experience of the trenches was meeting a padre. “I said I was
frightened, more than once. He asked me my age and I said I was 16, which
was much too young to be out there. I really think without a doubt that
praying to God did save my life.”
In another book by Max Arthur,Faces of World War One: The Tragedy of the Great
War in Words and Pictures, we can see these adolescents. The new recruits
lined up for inspection at Bermondsey — sulky, wearing thin nervous smiles
or seemingly about to burst into tears — look like boys who would be at home
with their PlayStations today.
“You've got to know about it,” says Matthew Strover, a 16-year-old student at
Coopers' Company and Coburn School who has studied the archive material.
“You've got to appreciate the past. I knew a few had died but didn't realise
such a large number died from our school. That's like more than half our
school year.”
He says that it was sobering to realise that if he and his classmates had been
born at a different time they would have been facing the same poor odds on
surviving their teens. “It's terrible what happened. Our year group are not
adults yet by any means. We are only kids really.”
Faces of World War One:The Tragedy Of The Great War in Words by Max
Arthur
Cassell, £25
Lest We Forget: Forgotten Voices from 1914-1945 by Max Arthur
Ebury, £10.99
