Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
This year is coming
to an end and we're in the final
few episodes of 2025.
And as we move towards the sixthanniversary of the Old Frontline
podcast, I'm beginning to lookahead to next year, 2026, which
will be the hundred and tenthanniversary of nineteen sixteen.
(00:31):
And I'm aiming next year to becovering aspects of that year's
conflict, from Verda to theSomme, but also some of the
lesser known actions that tookplace that year, including, for
example, the Battle of theSaint-Loire craters in March of
nineteen sixteen and thefighting involving the Canadians
at Hill 62 in June of that year.
(00:54):
And perhaps next year we'll havesome special Q ⁇ A episodes
covering 1916.
It's certainly going to be aninteresting year, and while the
hundred and tenth anniversary isnot the Centena, it's not like
it was a decade ago, andinterest in the Great War has
undoubtedly dropped a little bitsince then, but the podcast
(01:17):
statistics tell me that there isan ever increasing audience that
is interested in finding outabout the history of the First
World War, and long, long maythat continue.
And in that respect, the Q ⁇ Ascontinue to come in thick and
fast, and once more astound mewith their depth and breadth of
(01:37):
the kind of things that you wantto know about, that you're
inquisitive about.
It's just brilliant, and it andit sets me a fresh challenge
every time.
So please keep them coming viathe usual methods.
But let's get to this week'squestions.
Question number one comes fromDaniel Prosser.
Daniel asks I have a questionthat has interested me for a
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while, but I hope it's not toobase or vulgar a topic for you.
It's perhaps understandably notsomething that you often hear
about in accounts of the war.
But how did latrines work in thefront line on the Western Front?
Presumably there must have beenprovisions for this basic
hygiene.
Were there specially madesubsections of trenches within
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close reach of the front, andwere soldiers free to use these
latrines at their own discretionor was permission sought from
superiors?
Well, this is not a vulgarquestion, Daniel, because we've
kind of covered this a littlebit before in an episode that we
called Tommy Tucker, whichlooked at food on the Western
Front, because, as I'm sure Istated there, what goes in must
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come out.
And if you've got an armyessentially living in ditches
right across northern Europe andin static positions for long
periods of time, whatever theyeat must result in human waste,
and you can't just let them goanywhere because armies will be
literally living in that wasteand the chance of disease
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spreading and causing problemsto your army will be much
greater, and that is the kind ofthing that had hampered armies
in previous centuries ofcampaigning right across the
world.
Now in the army toilets wereofficially called latrines in
the British Army, and in thenineteen eleven Royal Army
Medical Corps manual, which is athick green book that was
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published by the StationaryOffice for RAMC personnel, it
states every soldier shouldremember to ease himself only in
the authorised places, that is,in the latrines and urine pits
or tubs provided.
On no account shouldindiscriminate or casual
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easement be permitted.
It merely means fouling of theground with possible infectious
matter.
So that was the army's way ofsaying this is how you must go
to the toilet, how you must easeyourself.
You must use a speciallyprepared area, whether that's a
physically constructed latrineor a pit or tubs, buckets,
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whatever it is.
Now that was prepared inpeacetime long before people
considered trench warfare on thekind of scale that would exist
in the First World War.
And once the Great War did gostatic in that first winter of
nineteen fourteen-15, this ofcourse became an immediate
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issue.
And I'm speaking here prettymuch solely from the British
side because that's where I haveaccess and have knowledge of the
records concerned.
I'm sure there must be a similarstory for the Germans and also
for the French who wereobviously holding most of the
Western Front at that point.
But in a British infantrydivision there was an ADMS, an
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assistant director of medicalservices.
And what those senior officers,senior medics did during that
winter of nineteen fourteen-15,is took their already acquired
knowledge of the problems ofcreating facilities for soldiers
to go to the toilet to uselatrines, and then adapt that to
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the evolution of trench warfareand from the point of view of
toilets, the evolution of trenchlatrines.
They realise again that goingback to these notes in the REMC
manual, going back to theknowledge of military history
over many, many periods beforethe Great War, men couldn't go
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to the toilet in their owntrench, not even urinate in
their trenches, because thatwould create vast areas with
lots of body fluids in them,which would increase the chances
of disease within whatever unitwas holding that part of the
line.
So one of the earliest type oflatrines that was constructed in
the trenches was acquiring anearby shell hole, normally at
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the back of the trench.
So behind the trench somewhere ashell had pitched over and
created a ready-made hole.
And at night they would dig atrench to that and initially
just probably put a plank or asection of duckboard across it,
a bit of walkway, so that themen could sit on that and go to
the toilet.
And the problem with that was isthat during the day,
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particularly as the weatherbegan to change from that winter
period on into the spring, isthat then the human waste that
was in that shell hole at theback of the trench could result
in flies, the collection offlies around the hole, and when
someone walked into that hole togo to the toilet, the flies
would disperse.
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The enemy on the other side ofthe battlefield could and did
see this, and then would oftensend over shell fire, mortars,
machine gun fire, whatever itwas, and there were men killed
going to the toilet.
So that was an early way ofdealing with this, which had its
problems, and those problemswere soon realized.
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So it got more technical.
Let's appoint men to be incharge of these lavatories,
these latrines.
These were men from the sanitarysection, and in an infantry
battalion there would often be asanitary corporal whose job it
was to oversee these latrines,and the types of latrines that
then were gradually employed asthe war moved on got more and
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more sophisticated.
So there's a contemporarydrawing that shows, for example,
a schematic of a frontlinetrench system.
It shows urinals in the frontline, which were buckets or
pails in a little side bit oftrench with a lid to stop the
collection of flies, and mencould then just go at their own
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discretion to those and utilizethem, and it would be the
sanitary section's job or thosethat were on detail, they were
on kind of general labouringjobs, often because they'd been
crimed for misdemeanours eitherin or out of the trenches.
It would be their job to collectthese buckets and dispose of the
human waste.
And then also in the frontlinearea, this drawing shows a
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proper toilet down in a shallowdugout.
So not a deep, deep dugout, buta shallow kind of dugout et
which you'd go down a few stepsto a toilet facility, which
would be a box with aself-closing lid, usually made
out of wood, and there might besome other materials employed to
make it more rigid and tosupport the weight of soldiers
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regularly kind of plunkingthemselves down on it, and that
then would be used, and againthe waste would be collected in
something and then disposed of.
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Sometimes burned as well, and inthe back areas there were
flyproof box seats over muchdeeper pits for the main camp
areas with short shallow trenchsystems for the troops who were
on the move or in camps untilflyproof boxes could be obtained
for the use of soldiers in anarea where there would be a
permanent camp, for example, andthen waste would go off for
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incineration at casualtyclearing stations that had big
incinerators for the burning ofblood stained webbing equipment
and uniforms and other kit, andthat human waste could be burned
in there as well, and the samefor field hospitals much, much
further back.
So it was a thought-out,considered system for the
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realities of trench warfare,holding a front that got bigger
and bigger as the war moved on,with greater and greater volumes
of men eating more and morefood, and obviously going to the
toilet on a more regular basisas well, and creating
unparalleled levels of humanwaste that the army had to deal
with.
And diet was a part of that aswell, because the kind of food
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that the army would feed men wasto a certain extent to make them
a bit more constipated so theyweren't going to the toilet all
the time.
And one of the elements of yourquestion was about going to the
loo.
Did men have to ask permission?
Now I think in the front linethe urinals appear to have been
given for free use.
(11:11):
If you needed to go to use aurinal, you just went there.
But for the toilet in the littleshallow dugout, I suspect you
either had to ask your platoonsergeant or your section
corporal or possibly theofficer, but more likely one of
the NCOs, and then he would giveyou permission to go down there.
Because they wanted obviously inthe front line, the very front
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line, as many men on duty aspossible, and not people
lingering in toilet facilities.
The further you got back to thesupport and reserve trenches,
that I would guess would beprobably a bit more relaxed.
But again, it is one element ofthe First World War that we
don't know everything aboutbecause this isn't something
that soldiers always recorded intheir memoirs.
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And while occasionally I canrecall having conversations
about this with veterans, itwasn't something that I asked
them about on a regular basis,much to my regret now, because I
think these kind of littledetails about a soldier's life
are really, really important.
And Daniel, thank you for thisreally interesting question, far
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from vulgar, which I think isimportant for us to understand
in the wider experience of thatwar on the Western Front and the
social history of that war too.
Question number two comes fromChris Hornsby.
Chris says, I'm a former RoyalMilitary Policeman, and since I
left the army I've been a prisonofficer.
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Is much known about the RMP onthe Western Front.
It appears hard to research tofind any decent accounts.
There is a saying that the RMPderived the nickname monkeys, as
the RMP soldiers would jump offparapets like monkeys near the
trenches to arrest deserters.
This may or may not be true.
And second, at a prison Isometimes work at, there is a
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roll call for prison officerswho were honoured in both world
wars.
It's fascinating to see whatkind of regiments the prison
officers served in and theirranks.
I just wondered if there was aprovost service that covered
prison duties on the WesternFront.
Well, I know that quite a fewveterans like you, Chris, of the
RMP listen to this podcast,including a couple of friends of
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mine, so it's long overdue thatwe talk about the role of
military policemen in the FirstWorld War.
And as I mentioned, I think in aprevious Q ⁇ A, at battalion
level the war was calledregimental police.
They had a little armband withthe initials RP on, and they
assisted with militarydiscipline within that unit and
issues of arrest, detention,court martial within the actual
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unit at battalion level.
But there was a much biggerframework of that, and at the
time of the First World War, theRoyal Military Police as such
did not exist.
It wasn't its own corps, it wasmade up into separate sections
of military police.
It would become the core ofmilitary police in 1926 with the
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amalgamation of these differentbranches which dated back to the
eighteen eighties.
So in the First World War therewas the military mounted police
and the military foot police,and you see MMP and MFP using a
lot of records of that period.
And as the name suggests, themilitary mounted police were on
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horseback, so a lot more mobileand can move from location to
location without any need fortransport, and the military foot
police were just that on footand would be posted to locations
to do their duty.
And when war broke out in 1914,from what I can gather, there
was about 500 men serving inthese branches of the Military
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Mounted Police and the MilitaryFoot Police in August 1914.
Each division that was createdto become part of the British
Expeditionary Force that thenleft England for France in the
opening stage of the Great War.
They went overseas and had anassistant provost marshal
appointed to that division to bein charge of military police
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units, whether MMP or MFP, andto be responsible for discipline
and order within that widerformation.
And by 1915 the APM was the rankof brigadier general, so quite a
senior officer, and it wasconsidered a really important
position within an infantrydivision which could comprise of
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20,000 men.
You needed someone in charge ofdiscipline, the wider discipline
and order within that unit onthe battlefield.
And that was a practice thatthen went beyond the original
BEF to be the same for allBritish and Commonwealth units
that then served in France andFlanders during the Great War.
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From the very beginning, themilitary police, both MFP and
MMP, helped with traffic duty onthe battlefield, particularly in
that more mobile war of 1914,when the posting of military
police to main road and railjunction areas to get men off
trains, onto the right roads, uptowards the battlefield,
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required a degree of command andcontrol, not just from the
officers commanding the units onthe battlefield, but assisted by
police units, military policeunits to ensure that the men
took the right route to where itwas that they were going.
So they provided a very usefulservice in that respect.
And also troop control in theseareas as well.
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So if you've got stations withlarge numbers of men coming off
trains, coming out of railwaystations, coming through an area
full potentially of a civilianpopulation, you needed the
military foot police and themounted police to be there to
ensure that order was maintainedand that no civilians came to
any harm and that there wasn'tproperty damage, whether on
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purpose or by accident.
So again, they were all part ofthe control of the movement of
people on lots of differentlevels.
And again, during that mobilewar, particularly the retreat
from Mons, the famous retreat,over 200 miles from Mons to the
Marne.
There were lots of stragglersduring that retreat of the BEF,
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and the military police went outto ensure those stragglers were
picked up, moved on, and there'sa kind of fine line between
stragglers and deserters, andthat was part of their duties to
work out which men werelegitimate stragglers and which
men were chancing their luck andwere actually deserters.
One of the very first menexecuted after a field general
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court martial and shot at dawn,as the phrase later became, was
a man in the retreat from Monsin August 1914.
That was Thomas Highgate of theRoyal West Kent's, and his case
really I think exemplifies theproblem that the military police
would have had in working outwhat that line was between
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stragglers and deserters.
And in his case, it wasconsidered that he was a
deserter.
He was tried by court martialand executed down on the man
front in September of 1914.
As the war went static, theseproblems didn't go away.
There was still this fine linebetween stragglers and
deserters, particularly whenunits were out of the line and
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men were on rest and perhapswent to local stamina's and
drank too much of the local wineor beer.
And with the increased size ofthe army, the occupation of
civilian areas for billeting,again the military police forces
got involved when there wasproperty damage, when things
windows were broken, propertywas smashed, chairs, tables,
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beds, I mean just abouteverything.
You read the war diaries of someof the units for this period,
you'll see all kinds of thingsthat British Tommies were
getting up to, and locals werealso kind of making use of
because there are quite a fewexamples of where locals go to
the assistant provomar for thatparticular unit in that area and
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claim that X number of hundredsof bottles of champagne had been
stolen from his cellar.
There was no evidence that thechampagne had ever existed, but
it seems that the army kind ofjust paid out.
So all of this theft, damage,the control of people in a
civilian area, the control ofpeople going to and from
military zones, battlefieldareas was all part of their
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work.
Traffic control remained reallyimportant.
So if we think of a place likeHellfire Corner at Eap on the
Western Front, military footpolice were on patrol there, on
duty there, posted there.
Later on they had a permanentdugout and a concrete bunker to
control the movement of trafficacross that area.
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You didn't want all of the guns,all of the limbers, all of the
men going across Hellfire Cornerat the same time, and the
military foot police were thereto ensure that that didn't
happen, to minimize casualtiesand make sure people had as safe
as a route as they could have toget up to those forward
battlefield areas.
And as the size of the armygrew, and especially
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post-conscription, the work thatthey did and the kind of
incidents they got involved inreflected the crime of that
period, which filtered intomilitary life.
If you recruit and you conscripteveryone from 18 to 55, as they
did in the last period of theGreat War, you're going to get a
lot of very good men, but you'realso going to get some pretty
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bad men as well, who may wellhave been criminals or involved
in criminal activity in civilianlife, which they then try on in
military and army life as well.
So that was part of the militarypolice, foot police, military
mounted police, their roleduring the Great War.
And also they had a lot to dowith civilians in the
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battlefield area as well, bothbehind it and the ones that
tried to venture up to it andhad to be prevented from doing
so.
They had to assist civilians inensuring that civilian
casualties were minimized, andthey had slightly more delicate
work to do with prostitutes notjust regulating them but
ensuring their safety, ensuringthat nothing terrible happened
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to those women.
And when you read again some ofthe cases of British discipline
during the First World War,unfortunately there were quite a
few cases in which women wereraped, and that was treated very
seriously by the militaryauthorities, just as it should
have been.
They were also, as the war movedon, in the areas behind the
lines, which were largely ruraland agricultural.
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The military police were thereto deal with the ill treatment
of animals by the military.
If a tank ran over a cow, forexample, they would have to be
responsible for that and writethat up as a case.
And in the early period of thewar, there was quite a scare
about German espionage behindthe Western Front, and they were
involved in the search for andthe arrest and detention of
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supposed enemy agents and anyoneelse involved in that kind of
thing.
There were cases where localFrench people were accused of
signalling to the Germans by thekind of washing they put on
their washing line.
I mean all that kind of stuff.
Whether that proved to be actualespionage or whether it was
basically local rumour control,nevertheless the military foot
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police and the mounted policewere involved in dealing with
that.
And essentially at the core oftheir work was the maintenance
of order under allcircumstances, and that was
quite a broad ranging thing whenit came to a vast conscript army
by the end of the Great War.
Now, by the conclusion of thatconflict, nearly 400 men from
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the military foot police and themilitary mounted police had
died.
Many were awarded decorationsfor gallantry.
Something like 13,000 men hadserved in these branches during
the Great War.
Gary Sheffield's history of theRoyal Military Police, a general
history from pre-First World Warup to modern times called Red
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Caps, is a very good source andhighly recommended.
And just to come to your otherpoint about military prisons and
prison officers, there was aMilitary Provost Staff Corps as
well, formed in 1901 as theMilitary Prison Staff Corps and
then became the Provost StaffCorps in 1906.
They ran the military prisons athome, and the main one of those
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in 1914 was at Aldershot, notColchester.
That was much later, and theterm glass house for a military
prison is said to have come fromthe glass roof of that building
in Aldershot.
Overseas they also ran prisonswhere men were sent following
field general court martials.
Not every soldier who wascourt-martialed was shot, far
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from it, and men would be sentfor prison sentences behind the
lines, and prisons were thenused.
Initially there were two mainprisons at La Have and Rouen,
and these were in theatre ratherthan back in Britain.
It was seen important that whenmen did something wrong in the
theatre of war where they wereserving, if they were sent back
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home to serve that sentence, itcould be seen as a reward.
So it was important to keep themin their theatre of war.
And later on on the WesternFront, there were five main
prisons known as number one tonumber five military prison in
different locations, includingin an area on the Somme, for
example.
And not just British soldierswere in there, but all of those
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men that were part of theBritish Expeditionary Force from
all over the British Empire.
And finally, in terms ofnicknames for men who'd served
in the military foot police, inthe military mounted police, in
the military provost staffcorps, yes, you see the phrase
red caps being used.
Cherry knobs is another one thatI've come across, again
referring to the colour of thecap that military policemen
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wore.
And monkeys, as you suggest, wasalso used, but the reasoning
behind the use of that phrase isnot entirely clear.
Some accounts claim that it wasto do with the physical stature
of the policemen, that they looklike monkeys.
There's another story about amonkey, an actual monkey being
hung from a tree, and many, manyothers besides.
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But I think what this shines alight on, and I've mentioned
this before in the podcast, thatwe are going to have an episode
about military discipline on theWestern Front and the kind of
crimes that British soldiers,British and Empire soldiers were
involved in.
But I think this is a reallyimportant subject that the Great
War is not just about thebattlefield and bombs, bullets,
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and baynets.
This element of it, theemployment of military police
forces on and near and behindthe battlefield, is a massive
kind of element of ourunderstanding of this wider
subject of service in the GreatWar.
So thank you, Chris, for yourfor your question.
A great question.
Question number three comes fromAnita Gallio from Canada.
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Anita asks, My question is aboutGerman trenches.
I understand that generallyspeaking German trenches were
well built and more dug incompared to many Allied
trenches.
However, I've come acrossphotographs from the time
showing British or Canadiansoldiers in what's described as
a German trench, but thetrenches look hastily dug or
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poorly constructed.
I'd love to know more about thatcontrast.
Well, when we travel to the oldfront line the landscape of the
First World War today, we comeacross preserved trench systems
or we come across trench systemsin the vast wooded areas,
particularly on that French partof the Western Front beyond the
Somme.
And when we compare those Germantrenches that survive, whether
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preserved or just in woodedareas with Allied positions,
whether British or French orBelgium or American, generally
the German ones look far moreimpressive, far more permanent.
And we see this at Vimy Ridgewith the concreted trenches that
are obviously based on an actualtrench system that was there in
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1916-17.
We see it when we walk throughthe grassed over Newfoundland
Park at Beaumont Hamill, withthe fairly basic British
trenches on one side, originallydug by the French, and then the
far more impressive lookingGerman trenches around the Wire
Ravine on the other side of NoMan's Land.
We see it at Verdun in thewooded areas there.
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If we go right up to the Bois deCour where Colonel Drion was at
the very beginning of the Battleof Verdun and walk in the wooded
area there, we see the fairlybasic French outpost line there.
And if you cross over into wherethe German trenches were, you'll
see their dugouts, theirStollen, and all their other
positions as well.
And beyond Verdun in the SamuelSalien and then down in the
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Vosges, you'll see this time andtime again.
And what we've got to rememberis that once the war did go
static, that mobile war wasover, Germany dug in, and their
war philosophy became aboutfighting a static war, a
defensive war.
And the idea was to build theseincredible defences so that the
Allies would throw men at them,hopefully lose thousands of
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casualties and then perhaps suefor peace.
And you see right across theWestern Front examples of just
how seriously the Germans tookthat defensive technology that
they employed, whether dug intothe landscape or created using
modern techniques, they tookthat really, really seriously.
So if we went from betweenAmentier and La Basse, behind
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the German lines there or closeto the German front line
positions on places like theAlbers Ridge, we would find a
huge number of concretestructures from observation
posts to machine gun bunkers toinfantry shelters to artillery
positions, just abouteverything.
And I think there's well over2,000 German concrete structures
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in that area from Armontier tothe La Basse Canal, and that's
just in one little part of theWestern Front.
And if we look at thephotographs that we have of
German trenches on the Somme in1916, we see these very deep,
well dug, well constructedGerman trenches dug into that
chalk landscape.
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And as the British discovered asthey gradually captured those
German trenches in 1916, deep,deep dugout, some of them as
much as 80 feet beneath thesurface.
So all of this, yes, is givingus an impression that the
Germans constructed theirtrenches very well, and
generally they did.
But the war moved fluidly andthe landscape changed as well.
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And after those great staticbattles in the first half of the
war, if we move to theHindenburg line, which by
definition is this incrediblesystem of defences, almost
Impregnable, thick belts ofwire, interlocking machine gun
fire from the bunkers, deep,deep shelters, I mean just about
everything you can think of interms of modern defensive
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technology.
But the Germans believed indefence in depth, and when we
look at air photos of theHindenburg line attacked by
British troops, for example, inApril-May 1917, we see the
forward area of the battlefieldcomplete with these kinds of
defences.
But the further you get back,the next line and the next line
that is incomplete.
(30:31):
So the kind of photographs thatyou've probably seen,
particularly from the 1917-18battles, show these incomplete
German trenches.
I gave a talk recently for thepodcast supporters about
official photographs of theBattle of Combray in November
1917, and this is a really goodexample of it because one of the
(30:52):
series of photographs that wastaken showing men from the 51st
Highland Division in the attacktowards Fleskier, occupying
captured German positions,crossing captured German
trenches, and they are trencheswith just a duckboard in no
trench supports, there's nosandbags, there's no revitment,
there's no proper parapet,they're just very basic trenches
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because that line, second,possibly even third line
position, is not yet complete.
So not every German trench onthe Western Front was this
incredible stronghold.
And if we move on to the mobilebattles of 1918, where the
Germans broke through, pushedthe British back on the Somme in
March and April 1918, and newtrench lines were eventually
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established east of Amiens,where Australian and British
troops stopped the German armysouth of the river Somme, for
example, both sides dug in, andthose trenches were very, very
shallow.
So it again, even though theGermans had advanced to a new
position, dug new trenches, theywere not building a new
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Hindenburg line.
The trenches of that last fewmonths of the war were often
scrapeholes, shallow trenches,and of course by October
nineteen eighteen the Germantrench system had been broken
completely on the British andCommonwealth Empire part of the
front, with the final trenchline of the Beauvoir Fonsom line
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breached in early October 1918,leading to open warfare.
So as I think with so manyelements of First World War
history, there's a lot more toit.
We can say German trenches good,Allied trenches bad, but
actually there's lots ofexamples where the German
trenches are pretty poor, theAllied trenches are excellent,
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and the Allied trenches probablylook much more like German
trenches, and there are parts ofthe line where German positions
look really primitive.
So possibly this is a subjectfor a wider podcast episode.
But I hope Anita that's givenyou a little bit of a kind of
insight into it with this answerto your question.
So thanks for that.
(33:02):
Our fourth and final questioncomes from Carl Thatcher.
Carl says, I have one relativewho we draw a blank on.
We know he joined up underage inNewcastle, most likely in 1915,
and must have used an alias.
We've tried using his mother'smaiden name as suggested by the
Commonwealth WargavesCommission.
The only thing we know is hedidn't come back from the war.
(33:23):
No letters from him exist thatwe know of, there's no living
relatives, and we're stillsearching.
What happened to boys inregiments if it was discovered
that they were underage?
Also, any ideas on how toprogress our search?
Well, Carl, I mean our oldfriend Richard Van Emden, good
friend to this podcast, we'vehad on several times, has
(33:44):
written about this extensivelyin his book on this subject, Boy
Soldiers of the Great War,Teenage Tommies, we can call
them as well.
And when Britain went to war in1914, there were essentially
different types of these boysoldiers.
There were legitimate ones, andI've mentioned him many times
before.
George Butler, one of theveterans that I knew, had walked
(34:06):
out of his family home, lived asa beggar on the streets of
Manchester for a year, andjoined the regular army, aged 12
in 1910 as a boy soldier,legitimately.
Didn't need to lie about hisage, didn't need to give a false
name.
He joined the LancashireFusiliers and after four years
training became a privatesoldier at the age of sixteen.
(34:27):
So he was still too young to besent overseas, and in fact,
because of the war, he goes overin 1915 when he's still only
seventeen.
But he's a legitimate boysoldier of the First World War,
and in territorial units itwould have been the same, and
when you look at those, therewere quite a lot of younger
soldiers in those as well.
But when the war broke out, youhad to be a minimum of 18 to
(34:51):
join.
That generation didn't carry thekind of paperwork that we carry
with us now.
And if you looked 18, you weregoing to be accepted.
Again, one of the veterans thatI interviewed, he went in.
Sergeant Major at the tablesaid, How old are you, Sonny?
And he said, 16, he was honest,and he said, Well, go outside,
march around the block and comeback in when you're 18.
As long as you said you were 18,you looked 18, then you were
(35:13):
going to be accepted.
And what Richard Van Emdenoriginally thought back in 2014
is that something like a quarterof a million young men who were
under military age had served inthat early phase of the war.
He now, given later research,more in-depth research that he's
been able to do with thedigitisation of records, he now
(35:35):
believes that it's well over400,000, which is a an entire
army really of boy soldiers.
So, in terms of what happened tothem, well, I'll give you an
example in the South DownsBattalion to the Royal Sussex
Regiment.
When the first South DownsBattalion was formed, its
regimental sergeant major, SD1.
He was the first man in theunit, and he was given the
(35:57):
regimental number of one, SD forSouth Downs, number one is he
was the top man, the first manin.
RSM May was an old soldier who'dserved right across the British
Empire and in many conflicts andsmall wars, and he brought with
him two of his sons.
One of military age, who wassadly later killed at Richborg
in June 1916, and another onewho was still only a boy, but he
(36:20):
wanted to do his bit as well,and he got in.
He was allowed in.
The RSM made sure that he gotin.
And he was given a uniform, hewas given a regimental number,
and he served with the firstSouth Downs Battalions in Cooden
Camp and then at Detling andthen at Aldershot in 1914 to
1915, and then they were takenover by the War Office.
(36:43):
And when the War Office movedin, it looked at these very
young soldiers, and some of thephotographs I've seen of them
all, it's quite clear that thereare some very, very young boys
in this battalion.
And the War Office did a kind ofsurvey like this and looked into
it, and if there was any doubtas to their age, they were
discharged from the army.
(37:04):
So RSM May's youngest son wasdischarged from the South Downs
battalions and then waseventually conscripted at the
end of the Great War.
But afterwards, although he'dserved in the artillery later
on, he never considered himselfa gunner veteran, he was always
a South Downs veteran, and heattended all of their reunions,
(37:24):
for example, many, many yearslater.
So when young soldiers werediscovered, they were
discharged, very oftendischarged from the army.
But they weren't alwaysdiscovered, and they weren't
always discharged.
So Lance Catamole, a Canadianthat I knew, a veteran who'd
served in the CanadianExpeditionary Force, his true
age of 16 was discovered when hewas on the Somme during the
(37:45):
fighting at Corsolette inSeptember 1916.
He was sent home to the Canadiandepot where he remained until he
was 18 and able to go overseasin the latter part of the war.
So it's quite a complex subjectreally, and there isn't one
clear answer to this.
And if the soldier had enlistedunder an alias, unless that is
(38:06):
noted down within the family,there's almost no way of tracing
who they could be.
It makes it very frustrating forsearches like this, with a name
change, and you see nameschanged by soldiers when you
look at the war graves and thememorials to the missing.
You see Smith served as Brown, Imean all kinds of different
(38:27):
things where men had Germanicnames and they changed them to
Anglicised names, following theexample of the Royal Family, of
course, at the time, and allkinds of other things as well.
Men were too young, too old,served before, were on the run
from something, then they oftenchanged their name, and the fact
that that is recorded means thatsomebody in the family knew
(38:47):
about it, knew what that namewas and was able to correct it
when it came to theircommemoration.
If your relative changed hisname, no one knew what it was,
and he was killed, I'm sad tosay that there's almost no
chance of tracking down who hewas.
You could work perhaps throughthe ages, but again, unless the
(39:08):
family knew who he was, gavethat information about his age,
then it will not be recorded bythe Commonwealth Wargraves
Commission.
And we can find plenty of 14,15, 16-year-olds in the records
of the Commonwealth WargravesCommission, but again, they are
ones where the family havesupplied that information.
(39:29):
So lads like James Condon andValentine Strudwick are two of
the famous ones, Jimmy Condon,14, or though perhaps he's
actually probably 19, andValentine Strudwick killed one
month before his 16th birthday,age 15.
There are so many of these youngsoldiers' stories that are known
and are out there and arefeatured in many books and other
(39:50):
podcasts.
But it is amazing, tragic in inmany ways to think of so many
young men in Kharki in thatGreat War along that old front
line.
But of course, if we go backmore than a century to the Great
War, did these young men thinkof themselves as boys?
Probably not.
They saw themselves as youngmen, even at fourteen, fifteen.
(40:13):
It was a very different societymore than a century ago.
But I hope you get your answerone day, Carl, and do keep in
touch and let me know what elseyou find.
So that's it, that's ourquestions for this week.
I hope it's been anotherinteresting series of questions
and answers, and keep themcoming in via email or the
Discord server and the othermethods that you send these
(40:35):
questions in, and we'll be backsoon for some more QA's on the
old frontline.
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcore, you can follow the
(40:55):
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Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
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(41:16):
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