The gently rolling green landscape of the Somme is no longer recognizable.
It’s become a wasteland, the long grass dotted with craters, barbed wire and trenches. For the
last several days the British army has unleashed a methodical barrage of artillery on German
trenches and positions, aiming to decimate enemy forces before the ground war starts.
On July 1st, 1916 at 7:30 am the Anglo-French armies attack. Private William ‘Cyril’ Jose is
in the very first wave of men to go over the top of the trenches.
It’s a chaotic bloodbath. The British artillery has not destroyed the Germans as hoped.
German snipers and machine gunners unleash a hailstorm of bullets on the charging soldiers.
Less than 20 minutes into battle Cyril is wounded.
He’s shot in the chest and left shoulder. Two comrades grab Cyril’s field pack. They rip open
his uniform and drench Cyril’s wounds with iodine. They help Cyril press dressing to his chest,
trying to staunch the blood. However, in minutes his bandages are soaked through. In the mayhem,
he’s left for dead near the German wire. Private Cyril Jose is only 16 years old.
He spends the next few hours drifting in and out of consciousness. Eventually he
goes beyond fear and reaches a calm state of mind, thinking that he might survive.
It’s a cloudless, hot summer day and Cyril’s thirsty. Agonizingly slow, Cyril reaches for his
water bottle. He dares not move fast, he doesn’t want to alert the Germans that he’s still alive.
It’s many long minutes before Cyril is able to move the water bottle to his mouth
and take a sip. The day wears on. When Cyril runs out of water,
he slowly retrieves the water bottles of fallen comrades who lie near him.
Night falls. The stench of death hangs heavy in the air.
By now the battlefield is covered in thousands of dead and dying soldiers.
Germans patrols search among the fallen, taking wounded men prisoner.
Cyril lies clutching a grenade, ready at any moment to pull the pin with his teeth.
Around 7 am the next day, almost 24 hours after he was wounded,
Cyril thinks it’s safe enough to move. He begins a long, painful crawl on his belly through the
grass back towards the British trenches. His activity causes his wounds to bleed a fresh.
During the excruciating, hazardous journey, Cyril runs into Private Lamacraft,
who’s also badly wounded, but still clinging to life. For an hour they crawl together,
but make little progress. Both soldiers are weak and suffering from blood loss.
Worse yet, the Germans see them moving and start shooting at them.
Cyril’s in slightly better physical shape and they decide that he should go on alone.
Cyril spends precious time gathering nearby water bottles for Lamacraft. Then he continues on,
stiffly and painfully creeping through the grass, detouring around the dead and avoiding
craters. During part of his crawl the land slopes upward and frequently Cyril has to stop to rest.
To quote Cyril, “an eternity later” he finally reaches the British lines.
Mustering all his strength, Cyril struggles to his feet and quickly throws himself into
a trench. When he regains consciousness, two officers are trying to make him drink
rum. It’s taken him nearly 2 days to crawl about ¼ of a mile (.40 km).
Cyril begs that they send someone to rescue “Lammy”, but it’s far too dangerous. However
Private Lamacraft is found alive 3 days later, most likely sustained by the water Cyril provided.
Cyril is medically evacuated from the Somme and
spends nearly 6 months in the hospital recuperating.
Cyril isn’t the only underaged British soldier at the Battle of the Somme.
Although the official age to join the military in Britain is 18 and a soldier must be 19 to
be shipped overseas, an estimated 250,000 boys enlist into the British forces during World War I.
Cyril actually signed up when he was 15 years old. The youngest known British World War I soldier was
12. Wait a minute, didn’t recruiters notice that some of those enlisting looked suspiciously young?
During the early 20th century, many people didn’t have birth certificates and it was
a lot easier to lie about age. For recruits, Britain had a minimum height requirement of 5ft
3in (1.60m), and a minimum chest size of 34in (0.86m).
Often if a young man met the physical criteria, recruiters ignored that he was baby faced.
Beside, patriot fervor reigned in the country. Government propaganda pushed fighting for Britain
as a glorious adventure. In some areas, peer pressure was strong and groups of boys would join
up together. Some enlisted to escape poverty, unemployment or difficult home situations.
Also, when World War I broke out, the standing German army was over 3 times bigger than the
standing British army. A large number of soldiers needed to be mobilized as quickly as possible.
If a healthy young lad was eager to go off to fight, recruiters weren’t gonna say no.
The bounty recruiters were paid didn’t hurt either. Recruiters earned two shillings and
sixpence for each new army recruit or about £6 or $7.85 USD in today’s money.
14 year old Reginald St. John Battersby ran away from home, enlisted in the army and was promoted
to lance corporal within a week. When his father, a vicar near Manchester found out, he was upset.
Given their social standing in the community, he thought that his son deserved a higher position.
He sought support from the Lord Mayor of Manchester and the headmaster of
Middleton Grammar School where St. John had been a pupil. They provided letters of
reference to authorities regarding St. John’s leadership qualities.
And so, St. John was commissioned as an officer in the East Lancashire Regiment,
becoming the youngest known commissioned officer of the British Army during WWI.
Not long after his 15th birthday, he was stationed near Serre in the Somme region
and placed in charge of a 60 man platoon, some of whom were a decade or more older than him. T
During the first day of the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916, St. John was severely wounded by
German machine gun fire. As a result, he was medically evacuated to England. Three months
later, St. John had recovered from his wounds and was back at the Somme leading his men into battle.
St. John actually could have made the choice to stay in England.
Parents of young soldiers alarmed by newspaper reports of deaths
had lobbied the British government. By 1916, the government bowed to public pressure
and removed soldiers younger than 19 from the front lines. However, experienced officers were
in short supply and young officers such as St. John were allowed the option to stay if they wish.
The underage soldiers were sent to special camps where they remained until they turned 19 years old
and then they could return to fighting. Some were glad to be away from battle,
but others weren’t fans of the young soldier camps. Battle hardened teens,
some of whom had responsibilities far beyond their years--some even having earned
military medals for their heroic actions- balked at being treated like boys again.
Some of the young soldiers, completely disillusioned by the reality of war,
took their own lives rather than return to the front lines.
Private Cyril was shipped to a young soldier’s camp. In the summer of 1918, when he was old
enough to fight again, he returned to France. Cyril fought in the Hundred Days Offensive. He
ended up surviving the war, but came home changed. For the rest of his life he became anti-authority.
Compelled by a sense of duty, St. John returned to the front lines and spent the next few months
fighting in the trenches. On March 7, 1917 16 year old St. John and a few of his men
were standing under a bridge across the British trenches when they were hit by a German shell.
Several soldiers were killed. A piece of shrapnel mangled St. John’s leg and it had to be amputated.
He was evacuated to England again to convalesce. Though asked to resign his commission, St.
John was determined to continue to aid in the war effort. He got a prosthetic
leg and was declared fit for duty on March 13, 1918. Soon after he returned to service,
St. John joined the Royal Engineers Record Office Transportation Branch and worked an administrative
job in Britain until September 1920 when he resigned his commission. St. John then studied
theology in college and eventually became the vicar of a small rural parish like his father.
As World War I raged overseas, the women of Britain stepped up to take over jobs traditionally
done by men. Often it was teenage girls who took on various jobs to help support their families and
the war effort. Organizations sprang up to manage and support the young women taking on new duties.
The Women's Land Army (WLA), a civilian organisation, was created in 1915 by the
British Board of Agriculture. The “Land Girls” or women who worked for the WLA
harvested crops and performed other farm related tasks.
The Canary Girls worked in munitions manufacturing TNT. They gained the nickname because exposure
to TNT was toxic, and repeated exposure turned their skin an orange-yellow color.
The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was a civilian nursing unit that provided medical care for
military personnel. As the war wore on, young VAD nurses were dispatched to work in field hospitals.
Teenage girls as young as 17, who had only completed basic training, were required to treat
horrific war wounds and deal with death while under constant threat of attack from the enemy.
While it’s likely that during World War I, Britain had the most soldiers under 18 years of age,
all the countries at war had underage soldiers enlisted among their ranks.
8 year old Momčilo Gavrić of Serbia was the youngest soldier to fight in World War I.
He was born into a large family--the 8th child out of 11. The Gavrićs lived
in the small village of Trbušnica in the western region of the country.
In August 1914, Austro-Hungarian soldiers of the 42nd Croatian Home Guard Infantry Division
murdered Momčilo’s parents, grandmother, his three sisters, and four of his brothers. The
invading soldiers also burned his home to the ground. Momčilo survived because he wasn’t at
home when the attack happened. His father, anticipating trouble, had sent him to his uncle’s.
Momčilo returned home to a horrific scene which was burned into his mind for the rest of his life.
With most of his family dead and nowhere to live, Momčilo ran to a nearby town where the
6th Artillery Division of the Serbian army was stationed. Upon hearing Momčilo’s tragic news,
Major Stevan Tucović, accepted him into his unit. Another soldier in the unit,
Miloš Mišović, was assigned to look after Momčilo. The same evening, Momčilo took
revenge by going on a scouting mission with Miloš and showing the Serbian Army the location of the
Austro-Hungarian soldiers. He also participated in the subsequent bombardment of the invaders.
After the Battle of Cer, when Momčilo was 8, he was promoted to the rank of Corporal and given
a military uniform. During the winter of 1914, Momčilo fought along his unit in the Battle of
Kolubara. In early 1915 when the Serbian army crossed the snow-covered Albanian mountains,
Momčilo marched right alongside the rest of the soldiers.
When his unit was sent to Thessaloniki in Greece, Major Tucović sent Momčilo to a safe small town in
Macedonia where he quickly went through the equivalent of 4 years of elementary school
crammed into several months. Later Momčilo was wounded during the Battle of Kajmakcalan.
At 10 years old he was promoted to Lance Sergeant.
After the liberation of Belgrade in 1918, Major Tucović helped Momčilo receive aid from a British
mission that was helping war orphans in Serbia. Momčilo was sent to England for
high school. In 1921 after graduating at age 15, Momčilo returned to Serbia per the orders
of the Serbian Prime Minister who wanted all the war orphans to return home. He was reunited with
his 3 older brothers who had already left home before the family massacre in 1914.
In 1929, 23 year old Momčilo was conscripted into the army. He reported that he had already served
in the army during WWI, had been wounded and had even received an Albanian Commemorative Medal.
An ethnic Croat officer in the Royal Yugoslav Army tried to force Momčilo
into signing a confession that he was lying about his World War I service.
Momčilo refused to sign and ended up serving two months in jail. After another stint in the army,
Momčilo worked as a graphic designer and got married. Years later, he was called
up and served in World War II. Momčilo ended up being captured twice by German occupying forces.
It’s hard to estimate how many underaged soldiers were killed while serving in World War I.
For those lucky enough to return home, the horror of what they saw and experienced
often haunted them the rest of their lives.
Sadly, underaged soldiers are not just a phonomena that happened in the past.
Today, thousands of children around the world are forced into war
or forced to serve as menial or slave labor to support fighters.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations continue to work to
improve the plight of child soldiers and remove those under 18 from fighting wars altogether.
How and why did World War I start? You can find out here:
During World War I, a new kind of fighting machine was created:
the tank. However it took a while to work out some kinks in design.
Check out the story of Little Willie, the most useless tank ever made here: