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First published by HarperElement 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Charlie Connelly 2014

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Source ISBN: 9780005784628

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Dedication

For Edward Charles Manco

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

1. ‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’

2. ‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’

3. ‘A long, hard journey through a short, hard life’

4. ‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’

5. ‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’

6. ‘I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow’

7. ‘In the event of my death …’

8. ‘If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead’

9. ‘I was seventeen years old and already I was well acquainted with death’

10. ‘Though many brave unwritten tales, were simply told in vapour trails’

11. ‘When we got to him all his insides were out. He had a girl’s face. He was ever so young’

12. ‘A boy of eighteen, looking around at the sea of faces that seemed so assured’

13. ‘It used to make me cry sometimes to see a big man like that grovelling for a little bit of bread’

14. ‘I am troubled with my head and cannot stand the sound of the guns’

15. ‘We used to sit in the corner of the trench and think about it: we’d say, all this going on, is it worth it?’

16. ‘The farmhouse had taken the main shock of the blast, but the shack with the two girls in it had completely disappeared’

17. ‘I wasn’t scared advancing. As far as I remember there was just a blind acceptance that we were going forward and that was that’

18. ‘The surgeon couldn’t find the bullet and I was in agony, so they gave me a cup of tea and gave me heroin’

19. ‘If Edward was everyman in the First World War, equally he was every ordinary man who’d fallen in battle over the centuries’

20. ‘I felt it was a great responsibility leaving eighty women and children behind to die with nobody looking after them, but there it was’

21. ‘During that last half hour before the armistice, a corporal who was with us got shot, in that half hour, right at the end of the war, and he’d been in it since 1914’

22. ‘The ghosts of the people who never were’

Bibliography

Author’s Note

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1
‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’

I didn’t know it at the time but the silence on the other end of the line was the silence of nearly a century.

I’d been researching the family tree and was proving to be barely competent as a beginner genealogist. That said, I’d somehow managed to barge my clumsy way back through the records as far as the beginning of the twentieth century, and I was on the phone to my dad to update him on some of the things I’d found.

‘… So, yes, North Kensington was where your grandparents were living at the time, just by Ladbroke Grove,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ I added, almost as an afterthought, ‘and I’ve also found your uncle Edward who was killed in the First World War.’

Silence.

‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ said the quiet voice at the other end of the line.

Private Edward Charles John Connelly of the 10th Battalion, Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment was killed in Flanders on 4 November 1918. He was nineteen years old. Edward was my grandfather’s elder brother, my father’s uncle, and here was my father telling me that he didn’t even know he’d had an uncle Edward.

How could it be that my dad, who was given the middle name Edward when he was born more than two decades after Edward Connelly’s death, had never been told about his own uncle? Dad had always told me that his father, who was barely sixteen years old when the Great War ended, had lied about his age and enlisted, but never spoke about what he experienced. To think that included the actual existence of his brother, however, seemed an extraordinary thing.

But then, my grandfather’s reticence was not unusual. It’s something you hear quite often about men of that generation: how the things they saw and experienced had been so traumatising that they’d compartmentalised their memories and sent them away to somewhere in the furthest wispy caverns of the mind, never to emerge again. My grandfather was to all intents and purposes still a child during the war, yet he’d been to a place about as close to hell on earth as anyone could imagine. Is it any wonder that he wasn’t chatting amiably away about it at the kitchen table while filling in his pools coupon? Maybe in there, enmeshed among the memories and experiences that he’d closed away for ever, was his own brother who’d gone off to war and never come home. Maybe he’d felt some kind of survivor guilt – that the boy who really had no business being there in the first place had returned but his big brother never did, never had the chance to marry and have a family, to have a long and busy life and leave a legacy of memories and experience that would succeed him for generations.

Maybe this was how Edward Connelly fell between the cracks of history and the fissures of memory to lie forgotten in the Belgian mud for the best part of a century. Perhaps this is how the silence fell over a boy sent off to war, to die in a strange country at the arse-end of a horrendous conflict that was effectively all over, pending official confirmation from a bunch of paunchy bigwigs with fountain pens in a French railway carriage a week later. The mystery of the forgotten soldier in the family history was one that would come to intrigue me more and more.

Of all the pointless deaths of the 1914–18 conflict, Edward Connelly’s seems more pointless than most. The war on the Western Front was all but over, and the armies were effectively going through the motions. By 4 November 1918 the outcome was beyond doubt: the Germans had gambled everything on their spring offensive earlier in the year and, despite making significant territorial gains, had been forced back way beyond their original lines and all but collapsed. Morale at home and on the Front had imploded. The money was running out. The game was up. The last couple of weeks before the armistice were pretty much token efforts at attack and defence, largely spent with the Allies chasing the retreating Germans across the Belgian countryside towards Germany.

One of those token efforts killed a token soldier: Private Edward Connelly, a nineteen-year-old railway-carriage washer from West London.

I knew nothing about him or the circumstances of his death, but it all seemed so pointless and unfair and I wanted to know more. I tried to find out as much as I could about Edward Connelly to fill in the uncle-shaped hole in my dad’s life, but it soon became clear there really wasn’t much to go on. There was a birth certificate dated 25 April 1899. I found a baptism record. He appeared on the censuses for 1901 and 1911 as a two-year-old and a twelve-year-old living in North Kensington in London. There was an entry in ‘Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914–1919’ and a record of his grave at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. And that was it; that was all I could find.

There isn’t even a service record for him covering his time in the 10th Queen’s. These are often full of extraordinary detail, from the soldier’s physical appearance to their medical records and accounts of breaches of discipline and their attendant punishments, but around two thirds of these individual soldier files from the First World War were destroyed during the Blitz. Edward’s was one of them. The forgotten soldier was doing a flawless job of being forgotten.

Beyond these scant pieces of information Edward Connelly left nothing behind when he fell in the Flanders mud that cold November day in 1918, and within a generation all those who had known him and could remember him were dead. It was almost as if he died with them a second time.

As time passed I grew more and more uncomfortable about the way Edward had vanished from history. I began to feel ashamed that we didn’t know who he was, and angry that his life had been snuffed out in such a pointless way – a week before the armistice, for heaven’s sake. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the war itself, at least if he’d died at Passchendaele or the Somme there would be a sense that he had been fighting for something. The date of his death just made things worse: not only had he been forgotten, but his death had been for nothing.

Having rediscovered him, I began to feel responsible for his legacy, or lack of it. I wanted to find out more about his life and how, where and why he died. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission he was buried at the Harlebeke New British Cemetery near Courtrai (the French spelling of modern Kortrijk), close to the Franco-Belgian border. What was he doing there? Where had he been? How did a teenager from an Irish immigrant family in the poorest part of North-West London come to be a private in the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment and die in a futile battle in the final twitching throes of the First World War?

I resolved to find out, but given the dearth of records available I wasn’t just beginning from a standing start, I was practically standing on one leg.

For one thing, although I studied history and have written about it for a living, I’d never been remotely interested in war or military history. At school we’d covered the causes of the First World War in our history lessons, but given that I had spent most of them alongside Tim Bennett at the back of the class drawing recreations of the weekend’s better First Division goals in our exercise books, not many of those causes actually went in.

One November an elderly maths teacher who had fought in the Second World War addressed our morning assembly on the last Friday before Remembrance Sunday. It was one of the rare occasions that we all listened, as he described how if every British man killed in the First World War marched two by two in through one door of the building and out through the other at regular military marching pace, twenty-four hours a day without break, it would take three weeks for every dead man to pass through. That was something that stuck.

Studying the war poets piqued a little interest. We were handed a collection called Up the Line to Death, which made an impression on me in that I could remember some of Wilfred Owen’s famous lines, mainly because they struck me as so anti-war in sentiment. I had no idea at the time, of course, but Owen was killed on the same day as my great-uncle, a few miles further south.

I knew names like the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele but wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d laughed at Blackadder Goes Forth and been struck dumb by its poignant final scenes. I’d buy a poppy if I saw one and observe the minute’s silence in front of the television every Armistice Day, but that was about it.

In Sarajevo I stood on the exact spot from where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots into Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia that killed them both and pushed over the first domino in the chain that led to the largest conflict the world had ever seen, and found it strangely underwhelming. I was more interested in the scars left by the most recent Balkan conflict, which were still evident all around the city, from the shrapnel spatters in the plasterwork of just about every building to the red resin Sarajevo Roses in the streets that filled the star-shaped shell scars from the artillery that had rained down on the city during the siege of the early nineties. This had been a war from my lifetime, one I’d seen on news bulletins as it happened. The First World War seemed so distant; there was nothing in Sarajevo to evoke it for me. Even as I stood on the noisy, fumy Bosnian street corner where it had all started, the First World War remained purely one-dimensional, tangential at best to everything in which I was actually interested.

Stumbling inadvertently across my great-uncle Edward changed that. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, what he might have been through and about how unfair it was that he’d been entirely forgotten. I found myself feeling angry at the pathetic, pointless waste of a young life, and guilty that he’d been expunged from the family narrative. With the deaths of its last survivors still comparatively recent, it’s not long since the First World War passed from memory into history, yet for me it was trying to move in completely the other direction.

I was confused as to why Edward’s death might be affecting me more than any of the others that I found in my family research. There were a number of early deaths equally as tragic and untimely: I’m descended from dock workers, with all the attendant accidents and disease that went with that line of work and the way of life that went with it. I had ancestors killed on quaysides and dying young from diseases and medical conditions that are entirely preventable today: my grandmother’s tuberculosis, my uncle Eric, who died from gastroenteritis at the age of eight months in the 1930s, surely equally as poignant, equally as tragic?

But Uncle Edward’s death in battle came to dominate everything else I’d found. Why should death in combat be any different from other untimely Victorian and Edwardian demise? Why should that be?

War, whether necessary or not, is humanity at its worst. Sometimes it can bring out the best in humanity: compassion, courage and selflessness, but the unimaginable horrors thrown up by the arrogance of certainty are an awful way to resolve awful situations. I can’t bear conflict of any kind. I’ve not been in a fist fight since a disagreement over a cup of tea with Gary Wayman when I was fourteen, and even then I’m not sure he noticed. Maybe Edward Connelly’s death stood out because war is such an alien concept to me, and I was imposing myself on his experience, wondering how I’d have coped, if I’d have coped. The thought of having to create enough hate and aggression to be able to kill a person is a bizarre one – even if it is based on the grounds that if you don’t kill them they’re probably going to kill you – especially if, like me, you’re a yellow-bellied scaredy-cat. And maybe there lies the rub.

When I tried to imagine what he’d been through I was trying to imagine myself in that situation: enlisting, being issued with a uniform, being trained and turned into a weapon of war, travelling out of the country for the first time ever, travelling out of London for the first time ever, being thrown into a war that had already been raging for the best part of four years, being among total strangers in a way of life and a daily routine that was completely alien to me, the subsuming of the individual into the whole, the constant threat of imminent, random death from a shell, a gas attack, sniper fire, a machine gun while advancing through no man’s land, a bayonet in a trench raid – even drowning in a flooded shell hole.

It was me I was imagining there, not Edward Connelly. It was me I was displacing from a comfortable everyday life of DVD box sets, the corner shop, Charlton Athletic, paying the council tax and eating takeaway noodles in front of Coronation Street into the world of mud, trenches, lice, Woodbines, gas masks, artillery shells, bully beef and all-pervading death. My life, my circumstances and my character were not remotely like-for-like comparable with his. Not even close.

The less I knew about Edward the more determined I became to find out. Finding the location of his grave made him slightly less of an enigma. He was out there. There was a headstone with his name on it. There was something tangible of Edward Connelly beyond a scan of a census return on a computer screen. He had left something behind, even if it was just his name chiselled into a piece of Portland stone over a box of his bones in a country that’s not his own.

It struck me that it was unlikely to the point of near certainty that anybody had ever visited his grave. He’d lain there in the Belgian soil for nearly a century, alone, forgotten and unvisited, his grave meticulously tended by committed and dedicated strangers to whom he was just a name among names. His background was one of extreme poverty: his parents would never have been able to afford to visit Belgium even if they’d had the opportunity. It might never even have crossed their minds. All his mother had was a devastating telegram, his posthumous campaign medals and her memories. No funeral, no grave to tend, none of the accepted rituals that go with the death of a loved one, and that’s even before you consider that no parent should ever have to bury their child.

Edward Connelly is a shadow flitting on the very edge of history. He left behind no letters, no diaries, no poems, no sketches – nothing. There are no anecdotes or testimonies to his character or appearance, no eulogies to the cheekiness of his smile, the twinkle of his eyes, the quickness of his wit, the kindness of his heart. There’s no clue as to whether he spent his Saturday afternoons at Queen’s Park Rangers or took the bus to Lord’s cricket ground. We don’t know if he liked a drink, jiggled baby cousins on his knee, argued with his father, brought his mother flowers when he could, tickled his younger siblings until they begged him to stop, kicked a football around the streets with his friends, took my grandfather catching tadpoles by the canal, exalted in the freshness of a spring day, liked to sing songs after a couple of drinks, was perennially late for work, had a sweetheart or paid sixpence at the music halls to hear Vesta Tilley whenever he could. Was he known as Eddie, or Ted, or Ed, or something else altogether? We’ll never know because he’s gone. All of him is gone. He’s a name written on a handful of official documents and chiselled into a gravestone. Edward Connelly has no legacy.

I have nothing in common with him beyond a surname and the fact that his middle name matches my first name. I don’t know why it troubled me so much that my great uncle had been forgotten, why I could still hear that silence on the end of the phone whenever I thought about him. It was the silence that troubled me most, because it seemed it could never be broken.

When it became clear that he really had left nothing behind, my increasing desire to find out more about Edward Connelly forced me to take a different approach, an approach that led to two resolutions. If I couldn’t find Edward’s own personal story then I’d try to piece it together in other ways. I’d find other people’s stories. I’d seek out letters and diaries of lads like Edward, ordinary young men born at the twilight of a century and thrust into extraordinary circumstances while they were barely coming to terms with adulthood. Lads who never rose through the ranks, who didn’t write inspiring stanzas that would fill anthologies for decades to come, who in most cases did nothing special except survive. Lads who would have known the reality of the dugout, the duckboard, the puttee, the mess tin, the endless parade ground drilling, the channel crossing, the glare of the Very light, the whistle of the incoming shell, the banter, the songs, the latrines, the zing of a passing bullet, the ceaseless rain, the cloying mud and the constant presence of death.

I might not get to know Edward Connelly personally, but if I could get to know the lads who were there and left their memories behind then maybe, just maybe, I might know something of Edward Connelly, the life he led and the war he endured and almost survived.

In addition I wanted to make amends, probably to assuage my own wishy-washy feelings of guilt as much as anything. But I sincerely believed that the family owed Edward something for the near century of silence. When I found the Harlebeke New British Cemetery on a map I knew exactly what I had to do. I’d set off to walk from his birthplace in West London and keep walking until I reached his grave in Flanders, making a literal journey through his life and his war. A pilgrimage of sorts, and a penance, I suppose. From my home in London I could board a couple of trains and be at his graveside in barely three hours, but that felt far too easy; he deserved more of an effort than that. If I was going to be Edward’s first ever visitor I’d have to put in a bit more work than tapping my card details into the Eurostar website and booking a hotel. By making the journey from his cradle to his grave – on foot, out on the road, free of distraction – I’d have time to think about him and his war: crossing the channel as he did and seeing the horizons he saw, the towns he passed through and, finally, the grave where he lies.

From archive to footpath, I was going in search of Edward Connelly, the forgotten soldier.

2
‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’

Edward Connelly was born on 25 April 1899, on the cusp of the twentieth century and in the twilight of the Victorian age. Indeed, as Edward drew his first breath, final tweaks were being made to the plans to mark Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations: in high streets across the land men sawed and hammered away on massive triumphal arches to be covered in flowers and draped with flags and banners.

Elsewhere, the new, £27,000 Palace Pier in Brighton was undergoing its last lick of paint ahead of its grand opening a few weeks hence. Aston Villa and Liverpool were neck and neck at the top of the Football League as the season entered its final weeks; W.G. Grace was a few weeks away from playing his final Test match.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had just completed its serialisation in Blackwood’s Magazine, while Rudyard Kipling had recently published ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Edward Elgar was putting the final touches to his Enigma Variations as Monet was establishing himself on the fifth floor of London’s Savoy Hotel, ready to commence his famous series of Thames paintings.

Guglielmo Marconi was sending the first radio signals across the English Channel, on the other side of which the messy Dreyfus affair was finally drawing to a close: the much-sinned-against French officer would be out of prison before the century ended. The Boxer Rebellion was prompting endless column inches in British newspapers on the moral failings of the Chinese, while even further away the British Antarctic Expedition was hunkering down for the first ever over-wintering on the continent.

Art, music, exploration, literature, sport, science, imperialism: as the nineteenth century eased towards its close, the themes that had defined it were preparing to push on into its successor. All of this was happening a long way from Gadsden Mews in North Kensington, however, where Edward Charles John Connelly was born to George and Marion Connelly ten months after their marriage the previous year.

Mews properties may sound quite fancy these days, but as London slums went Gadsden Mews was among the worst. It was a small, cramped, overcrowded clutch of dingy tenement buildings squeezed into a tiny space to the rear of other streets of slum housing, the centre of a triangular street pattern that began with the borders of the Great Western Railway to the north, the Grand Union Canal to the south and east and Ladbroke Grove to the west and shrank concentrically to the cramped, claustrophobic dankness of Gadsden Mews. Victorian poverty campaigner Charles Booth noted around the time of Edward’s birth that Gadsden Mews was ‘very poor looking, dirty, grimy’. The area had grown up rapidly from the 1840s with the coming of the railways and the canal, to become known as one of London’s worst slums. So many women worked as laundresses – including Edward’s mother and grandmother – that the area became known as ‘Soapsuds Island’. Charities including the Protestant missions did their best to alleviate some of the poverty, but it was a losing battle. This was the world into which Edward Connelly, the boy from Soapsuds Island, was born.

In many ways Edward was a product of the century that was ending as he entered it. He came from Irish stock: his great-grandfather John and great-grandmother Catherine had come to London from a small townland outside Youghal in the east of County Cork in 1842. It was just before the Great Famine, but there had been a number of smaller famines at the time and the Connellys were living in a tiny one-room house, trying in vain to live off the land. John, as the eldest, had to leave to make one less mouth to feed. He took advantage of a price war between steam packet companies to find a cheap passage on the crowded deck of a boat that docked at Shadwell in East London some time in 1842, where he and Catherine would live in various tenements for the rest of their lives while John got what work he could ‘on the stones’ at the docks until his death from tuberculosis in 1890 at the age of sixty-five. The desperate times are no better demonstrated than by the four months’ hard labour John did in Newgate Prison in 1852 after he was caught selling watches stolen from the hold of a ship on which he was working.

Around 1890 Edward’s father George moved from the East End to the burgeoning North-West London Irish community in search of work on the railways. While living among Irish immigrants in Admiral Place, a stone’s throw from the mews in Kensal Town, he courted an English girl living in the same building; they married and the newlyweds took a room in Gadsden Mews as their first marital home.

Marion Christopher, Edward’s mother, came from Dorset agricultural stock. The Christophers had lived for many generations in and around Blandford in Dorset, never owning land but always working it. Her parents joined the increasing migration from the uncertainty of the countryside to the greater employment prospects of the cities at the height of the Industrial Revolution, making the long journey from rural Dorset to the tenements of West London in 1874. Marion was the first Christopher to be born among the cramped, dirty streets of North Kensington, in the summer of 1877 to George and Mary Jane Christopher. George had been in the Royal Artillery for a period as a younger man, but on moving to London he found himself getting whatever labouring work he could.

At the time of Edward’s birth, Marion’s younger brother Robert Christopher had just left for the Boer War as a soldier with the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment, the same regiment that Edward would join eighteen years later. Robert had enlisted the previous year at the age of seventeen and would spend three years fighting in South Africa before being wounded and sent home to England in 1902. When the First World War broke out he was labouring in a power station, but his previous military career led to him being recalled to the army as a private in the 6th Battalion of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment. Robert Christopher died of wounds sustained in a raid on German positions at the Hohenzollern Redoubt near Bethune on 5 April 1916.

Born to Irish immigrants on one side and refugees of the Industrial Revolution on the other, Edward was an archetype of the late-nineteenth-century urban working class. His and their worlds were small, their horizons narrow: both families lived for more than half a century within the same tiny network of streets in North-West London. It was from there that I would set off on my journey to find the forgotten soldier.

3
‘A long, hard journey through a short, hard life’

One hundred and fifteen years after his birth, almost to the day, Edward Connelly’s locality looked quite different to the one he knew, especially on one of those spring mornings that make even the Harrow Road happy. There was the cheeriness of renewal everywhere – a freshness in the air; even the rattling rasp of the grilles going up at the bookmakers and money-transfer shops seemed to have a tangible jauntiness. The half-dozen people waiting for the post office to open smiled and chatted. Two men in bright-blue overalls with the legend ‘Love the Town You Live In’ written on the back of their hi-vis vests rumbled by, wheeling a bin full of brushes. As the sun climbed higher into the sky and forced the shadows into retreat towards the shop fronts, a young woman wearing a puffa jacket waiting in the post-office queue put her head back, closed her eyes and smiled to herself as the sunshine warmed her face. The sky was deep blue and cloudless, bare save for the swollen ghost of an aircraft contrail.

I ordered a cup of tea in a café, sat down at a Formica table, reached into my bag and pulled out a dog-eared copy of the London A–Z along with a folded map: a reproduction of an Ordnance Survey of the area from 1913. I found the right page of the A–Z and opened the old map, placing them side by side on the table, two landscapes divided by a century but whose urban contours made them recognisable as the same place. I ran my forefinger down the page of the A–Z and then did the same to the map until I found where I needed to go.

On the old map, Gadsden Mews is there in the east of Kensal Town, a wedge of North-West London still hemmed in today by the canal, the railway and Ladbroke Grove. Within this triangle on the old map, concentric streets of tightly packed houses shrink towards the very centre where, shoehorned into a cramped space between the backs of the residences, there are two rows of tiny squares named Gadsden Mews. There’s no Gadsden Mews on the A–Z, it’s long gone, but the surrounding streets survive and I could at least get close if I could find Hazelwood Crescent.

I drank my tea, headed back out into the sunshine, turned east along the Harrow Road, crossed the bridge over the canal and walked towards where Gadsden Mews used to be.

After crossing the canal I headed for the landmark of Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower until I found Hazelwood Crescent nestling in its considerable shadow. The entrance to Gadsden Mews had been at a slight dog-leg kink in Hazelwood Crescent that’s still there today, so I’d be able to pinpoint almost exactly where the mews once lay. The streets were quiet as I reached the hint of a bend I was looking for. On this spot had been the only way in and out of the slum tenements, the tiny three-storey wooden houses packed with the poorest of the poor, where whole families often lived in single rooms with little in the way of comfort or sanitation. Kensal Town itself was a poor area, but even Kensal Towners would probably have looked down on Gadsden Mews.

I gauged my bearings and stood for a moment looking into where the entrance used to be. Ahead of me was Hazelwood Tower and to my right was the gable end of a low block of flats. I was about to move on when the sign on the front of the block of flats caught my eye – it was called Gadsden House. So there was an echo of the old place here after all. I walked around a little further, passed between a couple of apartment blocks and made my way into the centre of the Kensal New Town estate at the heart of which was a tarmacked basketball court bordered by a bright blue metal cage where the breeze moved a few leaves around in a far corner. The gate was open; I walked onto the court and stood at its centre. Hazelwood Tower dominated one end and on one side the court was overlooked by the balconies of Gadsden House. Somewhere beneath my feet lay the heart of Gadsden Mews. Somewhere here, within no more than a few feet of where I stood and where my shadow fell, was where my great-grandparents had eked out their lives of relentless hardship and poverty, and where Edward Connelly was born.

Ahead of me lay a long, hard journey through a short, hard life. Around 175 miles south-east of me, as the crow flies, was a small, neat, unvisited grave. I looked a little incongruous standing in the middle of an empty public basketball court on an estate in North-West London clad in full walking gear and rucksack, but this was where a story with a mysterious, tragic ending began. I was beginning my physical journey from the cradle to the grave, through the all-too-brief life of Edward Connelly. I took a last look around, shifted my rucksack into a more comfortable position, strode away from the basketball court and set out for Belgium.

4
‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’

It would be more than a year before Edward was christened, perhaps suggesting he was a sickly baby for whom the first year was touch and go. But he survived and by 1901 the family had moved from Gadsden Mews to Admiral Mews, a few hundred yards west, close to the railway lines. It doesn’t seem as if they were moving up in the world. Booth’s notebooks, having set out the extreme poverty of the surrounding streets, described Admiral Mews as: ‘If anything worse than the foregoing. Houses on north side only and a few stables at the eastern and western extremities. Rough, noisy, all doors open, passages and stairs all bare boards, the usual mess … Gipsy looking women standing about, Irish. The worst of this block of streets.’

Two-year-old Edward was no longer living with his parents. Instead he was living with his grandparents, which was probably more to do with the nature of the tenements than any family disagreements. They were living in the same building, but George and Marion were in one room with Robert, my grandfather, aged eight, while Marion’s parents, the Christophers, George and Mary-Ann, lived with Edward in two rooms along with their 42-year-old son John.

Edward received some rudimentary schooling at the local mission school, but for families like the Connellys the capacity to supplement the meagre household income was always the priority, and Edward would have been sent out to work as early as possible, probably at the age of fourteen. In the 1911 census, when he was twelve, he was still living with his grandparents and his uncle John in Admiral Mews, close to his parents, but there’s one extra detail: on the census return Edward is described as ‘a bit deaf’.

Within weeks of that census John Christopher died suddenly at home from a brain haemorrhage. It’s very possible Edward was there as his uncle held his head, let out an agonised cry and lurched across the room, scattering furniture and belongings before crashing to the floor in the corner, limp, motionless and ash-grey.

Edward next turns up in the 1915 wage books of the Great Western Railway’s Old Oak Common railway depot, a vast establishment that employed a large number of local men and boys. Edward’s job was washing railway carriages, not a pleasant task in the age of steam and unchecked industrial pollution. He’d finish his shifts grimy and black with soot and filth, exhausted and arm-sore from the relentless brushing, but he was bringing in an income, which for a half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town was about all that could be asked of him.

It’s after this that the trail goes cold until Edward’s death. He would have been fifteen years old when war broke out in the summer of 1914, but it’s impossible to know what kind of impact it would have had on him and life in Kensal Town. His uncle Robert would have gone off to fight almost immediately, but we can only guess at how this might have affected Edward. Were they close? Robert lived in the same warren of streets, so he would probably have been a regular visitor to his sister and grandparents. Edward would have seen his uncle frequently as he grew up, but what would his thoughts have been about the war? How would he have taken the news of his uncle’s death in 1916? Would he have expected to go? Would he have tried to enlist under-age? What was the nature of discussion among his friends and neighbours? The talk around Admiral Mews – of enlistment, of the men who had already gone, of the prospects for a quick resolution to the conflict – would have been replicated in every street and among every boy of Edward’s generation. There hadn’t been an event in history at that point to unite a nation and affect its everyday life like the First World War. It permeated every county, every town, every street and every home. Nobody was unaffected.

Most of us will have an Edward Connelly in our backgrounds: a youngster born on the cusp of centuries who’d grow up to be a participant, willing or not, in the greatest war and the greatest tragedy of the modern age up until then. These lads weren’t poets, they weren’t officer material – they did nothing heroic beyond their best. They went off to war as cheerily as they could, made the best of it, had no say in its strategy or planning and just did what they were told. Many of them came home afterwards and resumed their lives; others didn’t and lie to this day in the soil of France, Belgium and further afield. These lads were raised among grimy cobbles rather than the playing fields of Eton, and there were thousands of them right across the land.

Take Admiral Terrace, for example, where the Connellys and the Christophers lived. According to the 1911 census there were twenty-nine households in Admiral Terrace containing 127 people of all ages, from elderly couples to enormous family broods crammed into the pokey rooms of eleven shabby buildings. I combed through these records for the names of men and boys who would have been of official military age during the First World War and then compared those names to any surviving military records I could find. I unearthed eight men, not including Edward, who went off to war, four of whom were killed. Two of those who died were brothers: William and John Lovell, twenty and twenty-three respectively, killed in March and August 1918. Including Edward, that’s five First World War deaths from one small North London street of eleven properties. Bear in mind how most soldiers’ records from the Great War were destroyed during the Blitz: these are just what I could find in the surviving files.

The war came to visit every street and practically every building. Everyone had a son, a father, a nephew, a godson, a son-in-law, a brother, a cousin at the Front. We all have grandfathers, great-grandfathers, even great-great-grandfathers who served, in addition to the attendant generational strata of uncles. Ordinary men, not heroes; men of whom there’s little of note: they didn’t win medals beyond the campaign ones that everyone received; they weren’t court-martialled; there’s no specific record of any acts of heroism; they were never promoted beyond the rank of private, and they didn’t expect to be. They just turned up, did their duty as best they could, smoked their cigarettes, drank their rum ration and tried to get through it.

Edward’s story isn’t unique. It’s the story of many, the story that’s in your family background as well as mine. Edward is an everyman, his experiences similar to thousands upon thousands of others who left nothing behind, no letters, no diaries, no poems. Yet some of them did leave stories behind. In order to fill in the yawning gaps in Edward’s life and war, it was time to unearth the narratives of his contemporaries, to construct the tale of all the ordinary men in the poor bloody infantry in the name of Edward Connelly. The forgotten soldier, anonymous for the best part of a century, would stand up from the decades of silence and shout on behalf of all the men like him.

I delved into archives, read yellowing letters and leafed through diaries, struggled through regimental histories and watched hours of documentaries. I listened to old recordings made years after the war, old men’s voices from broad Geordie to lilting Sussex burr, occasionally punctuated in the background by the chimes of a mantelpiece clock marking another hour passed since the horror of the trenches. Dead men’s voices now, but in my headphones they were alive, animated, chuckling, emotional, tentative, sad and forthright. Making sure that we would remember as they transported themselves in their minds from silent sitting rooms of china ornaments and antimacassars back to the mud, noise, fear and death of the Western Front. These men had seen what Edward had seen, heard what Edward had heard, feared what Edward had feared, yet they were able to tell their stories and make sure that they could still be told long after their own deaths – and longer still after the events they described.

I’d come to know well men like George Fortune, Fred Dixon, William Dann and the rest in my quest for the life of Edward Connelly and all the other forgotten soldiers.

5
‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’

When war was declared the British Army had just under 250,000 officers and men. They were backed up by just over 300,000 territorials and around 230,000 conventional reservists.

The British Expeditionary Force under Field Marshal Sir John French that crossed the Channel in August 1914 consisted of 81,000 men, including two cavalry divisions. It was, of course, all supposed to be over by Christmas, but by October the first trenches had been dug and four years of attrition on the Western Front were under way. When Christmas arrived there were nearly 270,000 British troops in France and Belgium. By the time of the German Spring Offensive of 1918, the front line, twelve miles long in the autumn of 1914, stretched from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border.

Once the stalemate had been established Lord Kitchener estimated that it could take up to three years to overcome the Germans, a lengthy war for which the British Army was utterly underprepared. He began vigorous campaigns to encourage recruitment in order to build an entire new army. In fact, there would be five Kitchener Armies, mostly comprising six divisions of twelve battalions each.

The initial reaction among the men of Britain was rampant enthusiasm: for one thing, early enlisters were generally able to choose their regiment, hence they could remain with their friends and colleagues, and for another, the wave of patriotism in the light of Blighty going to war washed thousands through the doors of the recruiting offices. Everything was done to encourage men to enlist, from poster campaigns to the creation of the ‘pals battalions’, which were raised in the belief that if groups of men from certain towns or professions could stick together the chances of mass recruitment would be greater. They were right, too: in Lancashire, for example, the Accrington Pals Battalion reached 1,000 recruits in just ten days. The intention might have been admirable, but when entire pals battalions were being all but wiped out (of the 720 Accrington Pals at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 584 were either killed, wounded or never seen again) it was leaving huge, irreplaceable holes in communities, and the idea was soon dropped.

At first, the enlistment procedure was fairly rigorous compared to how much it would relax later: you had to be between the ages of nineteen and thirty-eight, at least five foot three inches in height and have a reasonable level of fitness. If Edward had tried to join up under-age early in the war it’s likely his partial deafness would have seen him turned away.

The process was straightforward: each recruit was given a brief interview and filled out an attestation form which, when signed by both the recruiting officer and the recruit, committed the latter to serve in the army for the duration of the war. He then swore an oath of allegiance before an officer, underwent a medical examination, another officer countersigned his approval and the man was officially a ‘Soldier subject to the King’s Regulation’. He was given a shilling (the famous king’s shilling) and either handed a railway pass to a training camp or told to go home and await the call-up to begin his training.

George Fortune, born in Dover in February 1899 and the son of a diver at Dover Harbour, was six weeks older than Edward.

‘My father used to say that a man who goes into the army is not fit for anything else,’ he recalled. ‘“Once a soldier, never a man,” that’s what he said.’

George’s father, also called George, worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and walked three miles to work every day, and then three miles home in the evening. According to George the only time his father would take the tram was if he’d been bell diving and come up with the bends. He was a tough, taciturn man and he was tough on his son.

‘I think he was a bit disappointed in me,’ George recalled. ‘He would say, “Give him another basin of sop, we will never rear him.”’

George’s grandmother on his mother’s side was Annie Ovenden from Cork in the south of Ireland, the same part of the country from which Edward’s family had come. His father’s family also had Irish roots and George liked to think of himself as Irish. He was very close to his grandmother and would visit her whenever he could.

‘I used to go straight from school and she’d be waiting at her gate,’ he said. ‘She used to cuddle me up to her and always smelt of snuff and peppermint. Sometimes she used to send me to the pub to get a gill of gin for sixpence: I knew then that Father Laws was coming to see her.’

Although his mother left his father when George was five years old, and his father didn’t seem like the warmest of men, George appears to have had a happy childhood. As youngsters he and his friends would play and bathe by Shakespeare’s Cliff.

‘The trains used to come through the tunnel there from Folkestone’, he recalled. ‘When we heard a train coming, we used to come out of the water and dance, and the old ladies would pull down the blinds.’

Young George even witnessed, practically on his doorstep, one of the great moments from history when, one morning in 1908, he and his brother Walter got up early, walked to North Fallen and watched Louis Blériot make a bumpy landing to complete the first air crossing of the English Channel.

Dover has always been an important place geographically and strategically. The imposing castle still overlooks the town and George was always keenly aware of the military, especially the Navy. The Fortunes lived at Clarendon Place in a working-class area in the west of the town, and one of their neighbours was a naval seaman.

‘Whenever he came home on leave he set the street alight. He would hire a barrel organ in town and park it outside his house. He would have everybody dancing and singing,’ said George.

Soldiers had been a common sight in the streets of Dover since before the Napoleonic Wars, and they were equally visible during the first decade of the twentieth century. One hot day George was drinking from a horse trough on the Folkestone Road when a horse galloped up and arrived next to him.

‘I saw a bundle of khaki on the ground hanging from a stirrup,’ George recalled. ‘It was a soldier who had been thrown from his horse and dragged about a mile.’

It wasn’t all hapless horsemen and innocent mischief, though. On his way home from the cliffs one day George came across the body of a soldier with his throat cut. The boys raised the alarm, but not before George secured himself a souvenir.

‘I took his hat,’ said George. ‘He was in the Buffs [the Royal East Kent Regiment] and I played soldiers with it. My brother Walter told my dad I’d pinched the soldier’s hat but all he said was, “Well, he won’t be needing it any more.”’

Things changed for George a year or so before war broke out when his father was badly injured at work. Going to school one day he’d seen George senior on a tram and, given the time of day and the fact that his father was proud of how he walked everywhere, he knew immediately something was wrong.

‘He was sitting, leaning forward,’ George recalled. ‘He’d had an accident and broken some ribs. There were always accidents and people killed at the harbour. It was dangerous work. He never went back to work at the harbour and I don’t think he got a penny from them.’

George was sent to live with his grandmother while his father recovered. When George senior was well enough he found a job at the local convent repairing boots for fifteen shillings a week. Meanwhile, having been rejected by the navy because his chest measured an inch below the minimum, Walter, whom George looked up to like a hero, joined the army.

Times were hard for the Fortunes and George left school at fourteen for a job as a lather boy at a local barber’s shop. For his 3/6 a week George worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, and then 8 a.m. to midnight on Saturdays. As well as the lathering, he had to clean the windows, sweep up the hair, clean the copper urns in which the barber heated the water and he even had to clean the boots of the barber’s entire family. He was harshly treated, certainly in today’s terms, but this elicited little sympathy from the elder Fortune: ‘The barber was a little man, about five feet tall, half German, and he was horrible to me. I told Dad about him swearing at me and he said, “It will do you good; you need someone to wake you up.”’

When the war came in August 1914, the talk among the young men of Dover was all of joining up and fighting the Hun. Fuelled by boyish bravado the talk might have been, but George’s friends soon began disappearing to training camps and then to the Front. Still only fifteen years old, George tried to enlist: ‘All the lads were joining up so I tried and said I was nineteen. I was a big boy but I failed the doctor, who said I had a hernia.’

The army doctor referred him to the local hospital for an operation to the remove the hernia, but when he arrived George found the place overrun with wounded men from the Front brought home by ship from Dunkirk. Reluctant to go under the knife, the youngster instead set about making himself useful.

‘The hospital was full and I helped the nurses,’ recalled George. ‘I was in there three weeks and they forgot who I was: I was like a hospital orderly. I had a fine old lark with the wounded men. I used to jump right over their beds for a bit of fun. Then one day the house surgeon was walking round. He saw me and said, “What’s this fellow doing here?” I told him and he said, “Right, we’ll have him on the table.”’

After the operation George was flat out for ten days, in constant pain. No one visited him except a priest, and when he was well enough to leave he had to walk the mile and a half home. Soon afterwards his sister Cecilia, aware of the fractured nature of the Fortune family in Dover since their father’s accident and mother’s departure, took him to London while he recuperated from the operation and found him work with her plumber husband in West Hampstead.

‘Ciss was a godsend to me,’ he remembered. ‘I was ill and she brought me back to health. Then I went to work as a plumber’s mate and I loved the work.’

This fledgling apprenticeship was brought to an end all too soon, however, when George’s brother-in-law joined up and went off to war. George moved on to Highgate to live with his mother and found a job on the Underground. Once settled he wrote to his father but never received a reply – he found out later that his father had emigrated to Australia, taking one of his younger brothers with him. George never saw either of them again.

By 1916 George was working as a gateman at Hammersmith Underground station and living with another older sister, Gladys, whose husband was also away at the Front. Feeling a little like an imposition as Gladys brought up two children in cramped conditions, George decided it was time to try to enlist again and attended the recruiting office at White City: ‘The doctor hardly looked at me this time and I was passed A1. I told the railway and they said they couldn’t keep the job open for me. I didn’t worry much as I was going to be a soldier.’

William Dann, also born in 1899, a couple of months later than Edward, lived along the coast from George in Brighton and would go on to join the same battalion as Edward, the 10th Queen’s (Royal West Surrey). Descended from a long line of Sussex agricultural labourers, William bucked the family trend when he left school at fourteen to be apprentice to a painter named Fisher, who employed him to assist in the painting of brewery vans in red, black and gold-leaf livery. It wasn’t long before the war impacted on William, too.

‘He was a very nice man indeed,’ recalled Dann of Fisher. ‘But as a reservist in the Royal Marines he was called up almost immediately, and we heard he was killed about three months later.’

Like George, all the talk around him was of the war. The army had sergeants walking around Brighton stopping men apparently of military age and asking them pointedly why they hadn’t joined up. One day in 1916 one of them stopped William and, despite being barely seventeen, he decided to go and enlist.

‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army, then,’ he remembered. ‘So I went to the drill hall in Church Street in Brighton, queued up past the sergeant and the policeman on the door and eventually came around to the officers and the sergeant at the recruiting desk. They said, “How old are you?” I said, “Seventeen.” “Ooh, no,” they said, “that won’t do; come back when you’re nineteen.” As I was going out, the sergeant on the door said, “What? You back already?” I said, “It’s no good. They won’t take me.” He asked why and I said, “I told them my age, seventeen.” He looked from side to side, lowered his voice and said, “Well, go and join the queue again and when you get to the front again just say you’re nineteen.” So that’s what I did. Next thing I was sent along to the barracks in Lewes Road for a fitness examination. I came out with an A1 and I was in the army.’

In West Yorkshire, Horace Calvert was another young working-class boy like Edward trying to make his way in the world. Horace was born in September 1899 in Manningham, Bradford, to a father who worked as an assistant to Horace’s grandfather at an ironmongery business on Carlisle Road. Horace was one of six children, four girls and two boys.

‘It was just the usual everyday life of that time,’ said Horace of his childhood. ‘I started going out delivering papers and running errands at the age of nine or ten, anything to get some extra money because there were eight of us in the family and money was tight.’

The Calverts lived in a typical northern working-class back-to-back house. It had a parlour, cellar, kitchen, two bedrooms and an attic pressed into service as a bedroom. There was no hot water, the lighting was gas powered and the toilet was outside, but Horace certainly didn’t feel he had a deprived upbringing.

‘There was plenty to eat because it was drilled into me by my mother to always make sure you had a roof over your head, warmth in the house and food on the table,’ Horace said. ‘I don’t know how she did it but we had meat every Sunday, which lasted till Monday. We managed all right. Clothing was patched hand-me-downs but on Sunday you were always well turned out as far as possible.’

Like his siblings, Horace was sent to Drummond Road School, where he received a basic education that was fairly typical of the times: ‘It was a big school and we were well looked after by the teachers, who were very nice. I learned the three Rs, a little history and we were given talks about behaviour after school hours. We had a concert once a year for the parents.’

At the age of twelve the need to bring some money into the household meant that Horace stopped going to school full time and took a part-time job at Field’s Mill in the spinning department. He’d start at 7 a.m., finish at midday, go home for lunch and then spend the afternoon at school. All his wages went into the household, other than the sixpence he was given every Saturday.

‘I’d buy little toys, pea-shooters, catapults, a bow and arrow,’ he recalled. ‘I had plenty of mates and five or six of us would all go to the local park, but you had to be back for bed by 9 o’clock.’

At fourteen Horace went to work full time in a small engineering shop on Richmond Road in Bradford. His father had wanted Horace to learn a trade and wasn’t keen on him staying on at the mill doing simple manual work as a full-time occupation.

‘The first thing I had to do when I got there in the morning was turn on the gas engine. I didn’t like doing that. Then I used to go to a place called Slingsby’s, where they made handcarts for warehouses. I had to go and collect the wheels, put them on the boring machine and bore them out ready for fitting on the axle and deliver them back to the firm. Also, I had to take out all the filings from the lathes which were then sold as scrap. I kept the floor clean and would go and watch a chap working the machine to see how it was done: it was a good place for training but after twelve months of this I didn’t like it any more. I think it was the dirt and the noise and the running about you had to do. Also, I was on 7 shillings a week; the average wage for a skilled engineer was about 23 shillings.’

Horace, like his contemporaries Edward, George and William, was fifteen when the war broke out, and he remembered it vividly.

‘My father told me there could be trouble among nations because we were being warned in the Telegraph and the Argus about what was happening with Germany,’ he said. ‘The territorials were actively recruiting even before the war broke out so the authorities must have been expecting something. I was interested in the military because we had a quartermaster sergeant in the territorials living near us and I would see him in his scarlet uniform. Also, our headmaster at school, Lodge was his name, was a sergeant in the TA. In addition, I had a friend whose father was in the artillery, so there was always a little link between me and the military. Believe it or not, in those days before the war if people joined the army you thought they either didn’t want to work or they’d got a girl into trouble.’

On 4 August, Horace was up early and on his way to work as usual. When he reached the top of Richmond Road he saw a billboard outside the newsagent announcing in stark black letters ‘WAR DECLARED ON GERMANY’.

‘Even on that day the military was stopping all the horse-drawn vehicles and examining the horses before taking some of them away,’ he said. ‘People welcomed the war in the sense that a challenge had been thrown down over Belgium and they were eager to take up that challenge. That first evening a crowd gathered outside the Belle Vue Barracks and they were cheering every time one of the territorials came out. People were singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and all the old favourites outside the barracks. I got so carried away with it all that I stayed there till half-past ten, and I was supposed to be home at nine.’

There hadn’t been scenes like it since Bradford City brought home the FA Cup in 1911. In those early days of the fledgling war, when everything seemed so glamorous and easy, Horace watched the men queuing at the recruitment office at the ice rink near his home on Manningham Lane and was already thinking of joining them. The Bradford Pals had just formed, the rink was their headquarters and Horace liked what he saw (2,000 of the Bradford Pals, incidentally, would be at the Somme and 1,770 of them would be killed or wounded on the first day). Bradford was on a war footing and Horace was up for the fight. Every night when he finished work he’d go to the nearby barracks and glean the latest information from the sentries about the war and all the new recruits until he could contain himself no longer.

‘I was fifteen when I decided to join up. One morning instead of going to work I left my working clothes in the scullery head, went out in my better clothing, walked into the barracks, lined up, the doctor looked at me, I received the King’s Shilling and that was it, all done inside an hour. They never questioned my age – I just said I was eighteen and that was it. I looked at it as a big adventure: I’d read all the stories in the Wide World magazines in the library and it made me want an adventurous life, so I thought this might be more exciting than the alternatives. Otherwise life was just work and a penny to go in the bioscope at the fairground every now and then. I wanted more than that.’

Horace’s enlistment received a mixed reaction at home. As soon as he walked through the door his father, who’d seen Horace’s work clothes hanging up in the scullery, demanded to know where he’d been. Horace informed him he’d just joined the army. There was a pause and his father said, ‘Well, you’ve made your bed.’

‘There were tears from my mother and she said I shouldn’t have done it,’ recalled Horace, ‘but that was it; it was done. I told them not to get me out because of my age or I’d just go somewhere else, like the navy.’

Horace Calvert was going to war.

Fred Dixon came from a slightly less impoverished background near Dorking in Surrey. His father was a draper, although he would die in 1909 when Fred was just thirteen. Born in 1896, he was a little older than my great-uncle in that he was eighteen when he joined up in 1914, but he would come to fight alongside Edward in the 10th Queen’s Royal West Surreys later in the war.

His father’s death had put paid to Fred’s hopes of earning a scholarship to Dorking High School and instead he had to leave at fourteen to become an apprentice to a hosier. Fred didn’t take to hosiery and before long secured a job on the bottom rung of the ladder in the stationery trade. ‘It was rather Dickensian,’ he recalled later. ‘I worked more than 60 hours a week for 5 shillings. I didn’t have a great deal of leisure time either: on Wednesdays, which was supposed to be my half day, I frequently had to catch an early morning train to London to collect special orders and wouldn’t get back until 4:30.’

Despite this demanding work schedule, Fred was able to obtain some basic military training long before the onset of the war, thanks to the lads’ brigade at his local church in Woking. Three times a week he’d walk to the drill hall and learn some basic military skills, and received a medal for his aptitude with a bayonet.

The training and drilling sessions always commenced with a hymn, the highly appropriate “Fight the Good Fight”, with the curate and captain of the lads’ company Reverend Bates at the harmonium.

‘He was over 6’3” and sat at this little harmonium pedalling away, looking as if his knees were under his chin, and we’d all sing lustily,’ recalled Fred. ‘He joined up and later on helped in the forming of Talbot House in Poperinge with Tubby Clayton, which became very famous. He was wounded soon after he got there by a bomb dropped from a German plane over the square, a wound in the foot that ultimately shortened his leg. The bomb killed a girl who was there at the time, too. Tubby Clayton ran over and bandaged his foot for him. Reverend Bates came back from the war, eventually became Canon of Leicester Cathedral and was a very fine man.’

One skill instilled in Fred by Reverend Bates was signalling, which would come to feature very strongly in Fred’s time with the 10th Queen’s. He also learned gymnastics and map reading, and there would be occasional night operations on local commons. They even had a field gun.

‘We used an old muzzle-loading naval gun, with drag ropes like you see on the Royal Tournament on television,’ said Fred. ‘Teamwork was the essence of the exercise as the gun had little value except for display. It was fired on the odd rare occasion, but the last time the gun was taken out onto Horsham Common it was sponged, failed, rammed and then fired again, but it seems the lad who was sponging the barrel got rather excited and didn’t do it properly. When the next charge went in, it was accidentally lit by a spark remaining in the barrel and blew the ramrod out, followed by the hand of the lad who’d been doing the ramming. It probably saved his life when you think about it because the majority of the chaps on the common that day lost their lives during the war. The fellow who lost his hand went on to become the church verger.’

This basic military experience led to Fred becoming among the first to volunteer, enlisting at the end of October 1914 to join a cavalry regiment, something that fulfilled a long-held ambition for him.

‘When I was around four years old, the Surrey Yeomanry had a camp on Ranmore Common, on the North Downs between Westcote and Ranmore,’ he recalled. ‘My mother took me down on a mail cart on the Sunday after they set up camp to see the yeomen. Everything was in apple-pie order when we got there, and it made a deep impression on me seeing these lovely horses and the yeomen walking about in their spurs and riding breeches and uniforms with red facing on the front. Every year after that they’d come through Westcote. My father had a shop on the main road, and I’d stand outside and watch these lovely animals with their shining coats and the men with their spurs, so when the war came it was natural that I’d go into the Surrey Yeomanry, even though I’d never actually ridden a horse.’

At that early stage, however, the ordinary men of England were already seeing through the veneer of cheery optimism that pervaded the posters and propaganda.

‘All over by Christmas, they said. I didn’t believe that, not a bit of it,’ recalled Fred. ‘I said to my mother – and I was only eighteen at the time and a young eighteen at that – this affair isn’t going to be over by Christmas. They’ll have to bring conscription in and I’d sooner volunteer for a regiment of my choice than be conscripted to one I hadn’t chosen. She thought I was quite right. That’s what I did, and I was very glad I did, too.’

Like Edward, Walter Cook was from North London. Born in June 1899, a few weeks after my great-uncle, in Finsbury Park, Walter would go on to become a stretcher-bearer and medical orderly on the Western Front. His father was an electrician and gas fitter, and Walter had five brothers. It wasn’t long till he found his vocation.

‘When I was ten I joined a local Boy Scouts unit and found the first-aid work particularly interesting,’ he said. ‘I managed to get a certificate for it, much to my parents’ amazement.’

Blighted by poor eyesight, Walter left school at twelve, even though he wasn’t really supposed to: ‘They didn’t bother with me much. My parents knew the local school inspector well and he liked a drop of the parsnip wine my mother made. One day he came round and it was agreed I’d be better off finding odd jobs than going to school.’

Also like Edward, Walter had a family connection to the military, and the Boer War in particular. His mother’s brother was a regular soldier who’d fought in South Africa and would occasionally visit and entertain the Cook brood with tales of his exploits and adventures. When the First World War was declared, Walter’s uncle Robert was one of the first to go.

‘When the war started he did pay a visit, and I heard him say he was hoping to go to France very shortly,’ Walter remembered. ‘We liked him, us kids. He drew sketches for us and always seemed to have a joke or a funny story at his fingertips.’

Once he’d left for the front, the Cooks heard little of Robert until January 1915, when he came home wounded and a changed man: ‘He came back with a limp and we learned that many of his men of his men who’d been wounded had to be left lying where they were. It was the retreat from Mons, where there’d been many casualties and not nearly enough stretcher-bearers. The fighting had been so fierce and the guns so lethal that going back for the wounded was almost out of the question. He was very glum, thinking about the men they’d had to leave behind for want of a stretcher. That caused me to think a little. That night I went to bed and thought that knowing a bit about first aid I might be able to enlist and help – if I could get past the recruiting officer.’

The next day Walter presented himself at the church in Tollington Park, where he’d once been a choirboy, whose hall now served as the local recruiting office. He joined a long queue of volunteers and, producing his first-aid certificate from his time in the Scouts, declared his intention to join the medical service – while also adding the small matter of two and a half fictional years to his age.

‘The doctor quizzed me in a manner that made it clear he doubted my age,’ he said. ‘But my desire to go and help those fellows lying wounded on the ground was so great I considered it a risk worth taking. I pulled it off and was assigned to an ambulance unit. I didn’t tell my family until I’d joined up. They’d always known that if I made up my mind I’d carry it through, so they knew there was little point in protesting.’

I have no way of knowing exactly when Edward enlisted, or even whether he was conscripted, as his records are among those lost in the Blitz. He turned eighteen in April 1917 and might have tried then. He might have tried earlier, like the rest of the lads already mentioned, but been turned down for whatever reason, possibly the deafness cited on the 1911 census.

He might have waited to be conscripted. For all the razzmatazz and rush to enlist in the early years of the war, once word filtered back of the terrible things happening and the enormous numbers of dead, the recruitment of volunteers began to tail off. In August 1915 a national register was taken, a sort of supplementary census, to give the government an idea of just how many men of military age were in the country, and of those how many were fit and willing to volunteer. The results were not particularly encouraging. In January 1916 the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, proposed the Military Service Act, in which unmarried men or widowers aged between eighteen and forty-one without children or dependents (the act immediately became known as the ‘Bachelors’ Bill’) would be required to join the fight. It wasn’t an immediate success: in the first two months, a quarter of the nigh-on 200,000 men who had been sent call-up papers simply failed to show up. Serving soldiers were sent to large gatherings, like football matches and busy railway stations, to buttonhole men apparently of military age in the crowds and find out whether they’d been avoiding the call. Even with these measures, in May it was deemed necessary to extend the bill to apply to all men between eighteen and forty-one, married, single, widowed, whatever. Later in the war, the high number of casualties and the need for new recruits was so great that in February 1918 the upper age limit was raised to fifty, and the law specifying that a recruit could not actually participate in the war until he turned nineteen was relaxed.

It may have been Edward’s youth and deafness that kept him from the front earlier if, as I suspect, he didn’t see action until the spring of 1918. The medical examinations varied in their rigorousness at different points of the war. In the early days the doctors were paid a shilling for every man passed but received nothing for a man deemed unfit for service, so the temptation to err on the side of enlistment must have been great. Under conscription, however, the doctors were paid a flat rate and a three-tiered system of fitness was introduced. An A grade meant a man was fit for general service, B meant he was fit for service abroad but in a support capacity, while C designated a man fit for service at home only. Each category was then given a grade between one and three, one being the strongest. By the end of 1916 this system meant that only 6.5 per cent of new recruits were rejected as completely unfit for service, but as the war went on, and the need for more and more troops grew, a greater laxness crept into the system. When murmurs of public disquiet began about the apparent weakness of some of the troops being packed off to the Front, things were tightened up again in 1917.

If the accounts in this chapter are anything to go by, Edward would have been keen to sign up. For one thing, for a boy from a poor background with a pretty rotten job, the army would have been an appealing prospect in many ways. It was a career, a steady job, soldiers were well fed and the money wasn’t too bad: a private earned a shilling a day, with an additional penny for every day spent in a war zone (raised to 3d a day in 1918), a little better than George Fortune’s 3/6 a week for those long hours at the barber’s shop and Fred Dixon’s 5 shillings a week as a stationer’s runner.

At the same time, however, Edward would have had some idea of the horrors taking place on the fields of France and Flanders. His uncle had been killed. Many of his contemporaries from Admiral Place had gone to war; a few of them were never coming home. At this distance it’s impossible to know what Edward’s motivations or reservations would have been but, whether he was called up or volunteered, he entered the army at the age of eighteen, and I strongly suspect that he was first sent over to Flanders in the spring of 1918 once the law regarding nineteen-year-olds was relaxed. The 10th Queen’s had suffered heavy casualties in the German Spring Offensive and they needed to make up the numbers fast. One account of the 10th Queen’s mentions the arrival of ‘a load of nineteen-year-olds’ as new recruits around that time, and when the National Archives made the wills of soldiers available in 2012 I found Edward’s, made on 2 April 1918, three weeks short of his nineteenth birthday.

If the accounts above are anything to go by, there was no sense of fear among the young lads at enlistment. There was just a feeling that it was something you had to do, something that got you out of the routine of industrial life, something that promised adventure and something that made you feel that you were genuinely contributing to the war effort.

Enlisting was only the start, however. The next step was to turn these youngsters into soldiers. Meanwhile, I was trying to turn myself into a walker.

6
‘I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow’

I left what had been Gadsden Mews, re-emerged from the shadow of Trellick Tower into the glorious spring sunshine, made for central London, passed through Hyde Park and Victoria, walked through Westminster, over the river and onto the Thames Path. As I reached Bermondsey, the sky bruised and darkened, a chill wind blew up and the heavens opened. There wasn’t another soul on the Thames Path, and I walked for two and a half hours through Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Deptford with the relentless pock, pock of raindrops on my waterproof and millions of pinpricks bursting on the grey-brown surface of the river. I was glad that I could stay at home that first night.

The next day my route through my native South-East London into Kent was arrow-straight and I was able to walk all the way out past the M25 without need for deviation until I reached Dartford, one of the first towns in the country to take in significant numbers of refugees fleeing the fighting on the Western Front. Within weeks of war being declared, bewildered Belgians began arriving in Dartford to be at first installed in the less-than-salubrious surroundings of the local workhouse before most were settled with obliging local families. Many found jobs in the town, including at the local Vickers munitions factory, where they made shells that could feasibly have ended up landing in their own back yard.

Such was the Belgian presence in Dartford that at one point a Belgian café opened, and the town began to take on a distinctly cosmopolitan air. The German prisoners of war in local hospitals before they were transferred to camps, as well as the arrival of Australian and American wounded, meant that the walls of the wards echoed with a range of accents and languages and, given the pain most of these men were in, rarely can so many swear words in so many languages and dialects have been heard in one place.

Further east I arrived one sunny spring afternoon in Gravesend, which was the scene of one of the war’s more curious incidents. Captain Robert Campbell of the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, had been a reservist before the war and was among the first to cross the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force in July 1914. A month later he was badly wounded near Mons – possibly he was one of the men left behind that troubled Walter Cook’s uncle Robert so much and led to Walter’s enlistment – captured and taken to a military hospital in Cologne, from where he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Magdeburg.

Two years into his internment, Campbell learned that his mother was gravely ill back home in Gravesend. Helpless and frustrated behind the wire of a prison camp far from home, and with nothing to lose, he wrote a letter to the Kaiser asking to be granted permission to see his mother one last time. Campbell must have been surprised to receive a reply at all, let alone one in which the German monarch granted him two weeks’ leave from the camp, relying on his honour as an officer to ensure his return within the time allowed.

Campbell made his way back to Kent by train and boat via the Netherlands, arriving home on 7 November to spend a week in Gravesend with his ailing parent. Captain Campbell was sure to depart again in good time to honour the terms of the Kaiser’s dispensation and returned to Germany to see out the remainder of the war in the Magdeburg camp. Mrs Campbell died eight weeks later.

Leaving Gravesend I rejoined Watling Street at Strood, walked along the western bank of the Medway, turned left over the bridge and crossed to Rochester, its castle high on a promontory before me as the ancient town woke up, stretched and prepared to embark on a warm spring Saturday. Skirting the centre, I turned along the riverside esplanade and followed the Medway south. On the outskirts of Rochester I was at last able to leave the sole-bruising hardness of tarmac and paving stone to join the waymarked North Downs Way, the national trail that would escort me the remaining fifty-odd miles to Dover and the English Channel. It was a steady climb onto the Downs, passing the churned chalky grey of recently ploughed fields, until in a break in the trees that lined the path I spied Kit’s Coty, a trio of ancient standing stones topped by a large, heavy capstone just off the path at the edge of a field.

This is purportedly the location of a great battle that took place in the middle of the fifth century, at which Vortigern and his forces took on the Jute army of Hengist and Horsa, whose assistance he had solicited for his own domestic power struggles only for the Jutes to decide they quite fancied sticking around and running the place themselves. The ‘Kit’ of the name is thought to come from Catigern, a son of Vortigern, who died on the battlefield that day and whose grave the ‘coty’ is purported to be. It is definitely an ancient grave of some kind: a barrow some seventy feet in length used to be visible until centuries of ploughing levelled the ground, leaving this clutch of ancient stones encased by railings at the edge of the field as the only apparent remnant of a battle that no one is actually certain even took place. Its mysterious provenance has made the Coty an attraction for visitors for centuries: George Orwell passed by in the 1930s, while Samuel Pepys pronounced it ‘a thing of great antiquity and I am mightily glad to see it’.

It’s an incongruous sight, this pi symbol in three dimensions: a grave from a possibly mythical fight in a farmer’s field high on the North Downs. There’s even some doubt that Vortigern and his sons even existed, making this visit to Kit’s Coty practically the antithesis of my own quest. Here was an event and people whose lives and stories might possibly have been conjured from thin air, or loosely based on facts, that had lasted through many centuries, while I was making a journey to find someone who had certainly existed, yet had passed entirely from memory within a generation of his death.

In the afternoon I rested for a while on a bench at the top of the village of Detling, next to its RAF memorial, before pressing on, passing through some of Kent’s – and England’s – most beautiful countryside. I had found a good walking rhythm at this stage and my steps and breathing were in perfect tandem, creating an almost trance-like state in which I rarely looked up from a spot on the road a few yards in front of me. The miles and hours were disappearing under my feet on a flat, single-track road, as I headed east between rape fields of deep-green stalks sprinkled lightly with yellow that would be ablaze with colour a week or two hence.

After what must have been a good hour or more after leaving Detling, I lifted my gaze from the tarmac in front of me and was stopped dead in my tracks. I’m not usually one for postcard representations of England. For me, a suburban street of terraced houses with a Mace on the corner evokes England as much as an ivy-clad thatched cottage with a well in the garden, but the sight that greeted me there on the road somewhere in Kent was enough to terminate my walking rhythm and bring me to a toe-crunching halt.

The day was easing towards late afternoon and the fledgling shadows were just gaining the confidence to commence lengthening. In the field to my right two horses, one brown, one white, grazed lazily, the late afternoon sun warming every detail and contour of their bodies. Behind them, the white-tipped conical roofs of two oast houses peeped over some trees, while in the distance a square church tower interrupted the hazy horizon. Above the idyllic scene was a bright-blue canopy marked only with a few cotton-wool puffs of cloud. Somewhere up there, a skylark was singing its tiny lungs out as, in the distance, the church bell began to ring.

This was just the kind of idyll for which the soldiers were told they were fighting: the classic image of England, the type of scene crying out for a soundtrack by Vaughan Williams and captured by generations of painters. It was a vista that had remained unchanged for a good couple of centuries, the same bell tolling for generations, the same birdsong from the heavens, the same shadows stretching across the grass year after year. I stood for a while, watching nothing in particular yet watching everything: history, nature and society in a view utterly devoid of people but which has somehow come to define a people.

Once I’d got moving again, perhaps lulled too far by this watercolour perfection and having spied on the map a dotted green line that represented a more direct public footpath route to Harrietsham, I left the waymarked security of the North Downs Way to struggle clumsily across a recently ploughed field. Too accustomed to the well-trodden, signposted trail, I’d been tempted into a shortcut, one I messed up and led to me straying unawares into a wood that turned out to be private property. Ahead of me I heard the throaty rumble of a quad bike on which a man dressed in a green sweatshirt and combat trousers appeared, pulled up, switched off the engine and regarded me as if he’d just walked into his living room and found me sitting in his favourite armchair flicking through the television channels. Fortunately his initial save-it-for-the-judge-bucko demeanour as I explained where I thought I was soon gave way to a helpful point in the direction of the public footpath I’d believed I was on. Thankfully he’d realised he was just dealing with an incompetent buffoon with barely cursory map-reading skills rather than someone intent on pilfering birds’ eggs or putting on some kind of free festival. He even gave me a cheery ‘happy hiking’ as he gunned the quad bike and plunged back into the undergrowth.

Once on the right path – which turned out to be ankle-deep in mud – I arrived in Harrietsham just as the shadows disappeared into the twilight and lights were winking on behind thick cottage walls. The weatherboarded Roebuck Inn was blue-white in the gloom, and I stayed there the night, my feet sore and my face tingling from the unseasonably warm weather. Warm though it was – strangely so for late March – even in the height of summer the fate of the long-distance walker is such that one is forced to crank up the radiators to ensure the underwear and socks rinsed out in the sink are dry by the morning.

It was another sunny day as I headed out of the village the next morning to pick up the trail. After half a mile or so I came upon a bench, at one end of which sat a full-sized wooden sculpture of a fat friar cheerfully asleep, with his head resting in his hand to remind you that this path was also part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. I sat with him for a while, looking out across the valley as the Sunday morning church bells echoed around the villages, and could easily have joined him in a morning snooze if I hadn’t needed to be in Wye by sunset.

Late in the afternoon I stopped to rest at a ruined church by a lake below a grand old house. All that remained were a tower, a small section of wall and a tiny side chapel. St Mary’s, Eastwell, dates back to the fifteenth century, and the flint-built tower in front of me was part of this original construction. It was a peaceful, shady spot and I ended up staying longer than I’d anticipated, poking around the graveyard, reading the stones and just sitting looking through the trees to the lake and listening to the birdsong echoing from inside a belfry long ago relieved of its bells.

I was sitting on a stone slab that, judging by the remains of the walls around me, was once inside the main body of the church. St Mary’s had been badly damaged during the Second World War, then all but abandoned afterwards. In earlier times it would have been the place of worship for the family and workers of the Eastwell Place estate, but presumably an evolving social structure and the impact of the Second World War had seen the congregation decline almost to nothing. When the roof fell in in 1951 repair seemed pointless. The nave and everything but the tower, the small stretch of wall and the little chapel were demolished and removed in 1956, leaving just a tranquil ruin to be gently reclaimed by nature.

I didn’t realise until I stood up to leave, but the slab on which I’d been resting my weary bottom was actually the key to the greatest story associated with St Mary’s. It’s a rectangular rubble-brick construction with a flat stone top, on the front of which is a plaque that’s quite hard to decipher unless you squat down in front of it and look closely, to read: ‘Reputed to be the tomb of Richard Plantagenet, 22 December 1550’.

Richard Plantagenet, who was born around 1470, was an illegitimate son of Richard III, a boy raised in isolation, living and working with a tutor with very occasional visits from a man dressed in fine clothes the only break in the routine of endless one-to-one study. One day in 1485 the teenage Richard was hurriedly dressed by the tutor, put onto a horse and taken on a long journey that ended at a field in Leicestershire full of tents and apprehensive-looking soldiers: this was the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the ultimate showdown of the Wars of the Roses. Young Richard was shown into the grandest tent of them all, where someone he recognised as the man who had been visiting him for as long as he could remember introduced himself as his father. If that wasn’t surprise enough for someone who had met few people other than the old boy who drummed Latin declensions into him, the man in the tent continued, ‘My boy, I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow, for the rebels are strong. If the Earl of Richmond wins the day he will seek out Plantagenets wherever they may be and crush them. Tell no one, absolutely no one, who you are unless I am victorious.’ This was to be Richard’s last meeting and only conversation with his father.

The following day’s battle brought a bloody end to the reign of the Plantagenets in England, and when news filtered back from the fight that his father had been killed, the younger Richard immediately made himself scarce. He fled to London and commenced an apprenticeship as a stonemason, a trade he would continue for the rest of his life.

In 1540 Sir Thomas Moyle employed an elderly mason in the building of his home and estate at Eastwell Place, a man who would stay working on the project for a full ten years until his death. Moyle noticed that the older man stayed aloof from the rest of the builders and masons, and he became, from a distance, fascinated by this enigmatic, faintly melancholy old workman. It was some time in the mid-1540s, when Moyle noticed the mason reading a text in Latin – most unusual for a labouring man – that he engaged him in conversation and eventually coaxed Richard’s story out of him. On hearing of Richard’s royal connections Moyle allowed this last of the Plantagenets to build himself a small cottage on the estate in which to live out his final years. He was buried on the estate and the tomb where I’d parked my rear end is his reputed last resting place.

It’s a terrific story and one that I find myself hoping to be true. But as I looked at the tomb in what would have once been the nave of the church, I was well aware that wishing something to be true doesn’t make it so. I thought about Richard and I thought about Catigern of Kit’s Coty, both victims in different ways of wars and battles, and both possibly nothing like the men of their respective legends. These mythologies made me think about Edward: in a way I was mythologising him by trying to recreate his story and fashion his personality. Through the character traits and personal attributes I was attaching to him every time I imagined his experiences, I was creating a myth. The sketchy account of the basic movements of his regiment in the 10th Queen’s Royal West Surreys’ war diary provided the only clues I had to where he was and what he was doing in his final months, and even that was vague. I had no idea where Edward had been or what he was doing, and certainly I had no idea about who he actually was. Most disappointingly of all, I had no idea how, where or why he died. Was he single-handedly charging a machine-gun post and saving countless lives in exchange for his own? Was he taken out by an artillery shell while advancing across no man’s land? Did he absent-mindedly stick his head above the trench parapet just as a sniper fixed him in his sights? Was his death heroic, tragic or even comic? At the back of my mind I was even starting to wonder whether the decades of silence that followed his end had something to do with the nature of his death. Could he, I wondered, even have been one of the 300 or so British soldiers court-martialled and shot by their own side? Hero, traitor, coward or deserter, I reminded myself that I might never know for certain the truth behind Edward’s final days and death. Despite this resignation I still had to be careful not to create a mythology that might be at best misleading and at worst a gross distortion of the truth, even though I might never learn what the truth actually was.

I heaved my rucksack onto my back and set off again, passing Sir Thomas Moyle’s old Eastwell Manor, now inevitably a hotel and conference centre, and walked up the hill towards the village green of Boughton Aluph.

7
‘In the event of my death …’

Basic training for new recruits took place in Britain, either at an established camp like Aldershot or Shorncliffe, near Folkestone, or one of the many new camps that sprang up as the war progressed. Initially, the emphasis was on getting the recruits fit, teaching them about their equipment and how to use it, and instilling discipline. For most of the new lads this was a completely alien way of life: the endless drills, the constant cleaning and polishing of equipment, how to salute a superior officer correctly, how to dig a trench and the route marches of up to twenty-five miles with a fully equipped pack. They were given a number, a haircut and a uniform, as the army set about stripping them of as much of their individuality as it took to make them into fighting and killing machines.

On arrival there was another, more rigorous medical for which the men had to strip naked and wait in line to see the doctor, who would prod every limb, check the pulse, examine the teeth and test eyesight and hearing.

The new recruit was then given his basic kit: two tunics, two pairs of trousers, an overcoat, a cap, a pair of boots, three pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, three shirts, a set of cutlery, a mess tin, a razor, toothbrush, shaving brush, shoe brush and a needle and cotton. With the kit the quartermaster handed the new man some string and brown paper: civilian clothes, the last link to a previous life, were to be wrapped up and sent home.

One of the positive aspects of camp life was the three meals a day, something men from poorer backgrounds would not have been used to. Breakfast consisted of bacon with kippers or a slice of bread and a mug of tea. Lunch was pie, stew or boiled beef and potatoes, while at tea time you were provided with bread and jam and more tea. The helpings were not enormous, and with all the relentless physical exercise the younger recruits were often hungry, meaning they were thankful for the recreation huts set up by churches and voluntary organisations where the lads could go to sit in the evening with a cup of tea and a bun.

George Fortune was sent initially to Hounslow Barracks with the Royal Fusiliers but then moved on to Aldershot with the Middlesex Regiment, where he was soon given a taste of what military life had in store.

‘When we arrived at Aldershot we had to parade at the gym for a lecture from the adjutant,’ said George. ‘He was a little man, I think he was Jewish, name was Lewis. He jumped up on the platform and shouted, “I’ll break your hearts!” Someone wrote to John Bull about him and in the article he was referred to as the Khaki Heartbreaker.’

In order to build up fitness, George and his colleagues were marched constantly around the square in all weathers in a training regime that bordered on the brutal: ‘They would have us up at five in the morning, shaking blankets out on the square, then for the rest of the day they drilled the life out of us. Our hands used to be at our sides. The weather was freezing and I got bad chilblains: my hands were like sausages and the chilblains were broken too. Waiting for pay outside our barracks one day Sergeant Watts – he was a real snaggle-toothed bastard – came up to me, barked, “Take your hands out of your pockets,” and slashed at them with his cane. I was a bit slow getting them out as they were so sore. When I hadn’t whipped them out as quickly as he’d liked, he asked me my name and told me to fall in once I’d got my pay. When I went to see him he made me clean metal washbasins with sand. The water was ice cold and the sand got into my broken chilblains, and since 1919 I’ve been looking for that bastard. It’s not too late to kill him.’

William Dann’s experience of his basic training was altogether less unpleasant. After enlisting, he was billeted at home for six weeks and drilled at Preston Park in Brighton before being sent to Canterbury where he was transferred to the 10th Queen’s as an infantryman.

‘The training I thoroughly enjoyed,’ he said. ‘It was so exciting with plenty of interesting things to do. The discipline was a bit tight, but you could take it – that’s what you went in for. After a while at Canterbury we were transferred to Colchester Barracks, which was an infantry barracks. The officer shouted at parade one morning, “All men under nineteen remain and the rest dismiss.” They gave us all a form and a railway warrant home to get our parents’ permission to go to France, even though we were still under nineteen. I went back to Brighton and my father and I had a chat. He asked me if I wanted to go and I said, “Well, I’ve been with these chaps a long time and I know them. If I don’t go I’ll have to make new friends, so I think I’d rather go.”’

William Dann was going to France. Meanwhile Fred Dixon also found himself training at Canterbury, working with horses: ‘We had the stiffest training with the 6th Dragoon Guards at Canterbury. It was the dragoon depot down there and we came under the instruction of the peacetime sergeants, who were a tough lot. They tried to impress upon us what a subhuman breed we were; if they set out to break our hearts they didn’t succeed, but it wasn’t for want of trying.’

The recruits were roused at 5:30 a.m. by a bugler playing ‘Reveille’. Not only was this to wake the men, it also told them that they were required on parade fifteen minutes later washed, shaved and clad in shorts, singlets and plimsolls. After parade they’d be given breakfast and sent on a four-mile run, at the end of which they were required to clear a succession of horse jumps. Finally they were sent into the stables.

‘That’s when Sergeant Jock Simpson entered the arena, bade us good morning in an appropriate fashion – “Now then you bloody shower of bastards” – and had us commence the mucking out,’ said Fred. ‘This consisted of removing the horses’ bedding with our hands and taking it outside to dry off and use again. The sergeants were very particular about us removing every piece of straw. Then grooming and feeding followed, then the cookhouse rang – no time to wash our hands – then we dressed for parade, then the real ordeal of the day, a terror: one hour in the riding school, much of the time without stirrups. At the end of the hour we’d emerge from the school sweating, with grimy faces, dusty uniforms, and the horses were all white foam.’

In Bradford, Horace Calvert was also commencing his basic training. At first he was billeted at home, reporting to Belle Vue Barracks every morning to parade and drill from 9:30 until lunchtime. After a week he was given a uniform, and a week after that their rifles arrived.

‘We got a khaki jacket, then trousers, socks, puttees, heavy marching boots, cap, badge, brass numerals for our shoulder straps and a greatcoat, but no other kit because we were still living at home,’ he recalled. ‘Puttees came with practice, till you knew exactly how many turns there were on each leg. They were awkward, but they supported you. Much better than thick stockings in that respect.’

As a change from the parade ground, twice a week Horace and the other recruits would be marched through the town as a recruiting exercise. Men intending to join up were encouraged to fall in behind the unit and follow them back to the barracks to begin the process.

‘Sometimes there’d be twenty or thirty behind you,’ he said. ‘Some lined up because of drink, I’m sure. We definitely seemed to bring in a few when the pubs had shut in the afternoon. The crowds all clapped and cheered: I enjoyed it and I was proud. The other recruits were very friendly and you’d all help one another.’

Being an underage recruit did have its drawbacks, however: ‘At that time King George V had made it known that he liked all members of his household brigade to have a moustache, so the chaps all grew one – but I couldn’t. I was only sixteen and hadn’t started to shave yet. I tried to start shaving, and using a razor, but nothing was happening. I even got extra fatigues, peeling potatoes and what have you, for not growing a moustache, but I took it all in good part.’

Victor Fagence, a farmer’s son from Surrey, had volunteered almost reluctantly for the 10th Queen’s in December 1915, a few weeks before the first conscription bill was passed. He was eighteen years old.

‘There were pressures on me, such as how all the young men around my age had joined up, but I was rather fed up with things in general,’ he remembered. ‘Eventually, I thought, Well, I’ll have to go in the army before long anyway so I might as well join up rather than wait for the Conscription Act. I was posted to the 10th Queen’s at Battersea, given six days’ leave before I had to report and then reported a few days before Christmas at the battalion headquarters at Lavender Hill. I gave them my papers and was measured up for my uniform. By the time I joined, the war had been on about sixteen months and the uniform suppliers were better than they had been in the early days. It wasn’t made to measure but I was fitted out pretty well.’

The 10th Queen’s would train in Battersea Park with a similar intention to Horace Calvert’s marches through Bradford: to encourage others to enlist. They’d have squad drills, bayonet practice with straw-filled sacks, and marching in column, but the effect seemed to Victor to be negligible: ‘People would watch us train in Battersea Park but by then everybody was used to seeing troops and soldiers everywhere so we were nothing special.’

In January 1916 the battalion moved on to Aldershot, where they learned skills that would come in useful but couldn’t really be indulged in Battersea Park: trench digging, sandbag filling and the laying of barbed wire. It would be a while, though, before Victor could use those skills in earnest.

‘The government had given a pledge that no man under the age of nineteen would see active service,’ he said. ‘But I think with me it was discovered by accident that I’d put a year on my age when I joined. So, when the 10th went to France in May 1916, I was sent to the 12th Battalion in Northampton, a reserve battalion.’

Alan Short from Bromley-by-Bow in East London was born a month after Edward, in May 1899, the son of a lighterman on the River Thames. He left school in 1914 and worked at the Joseph Rank flour company, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, and had experienced the reality of the war when the first boy from his local church had been killed in May 1915.

‘Alfred Ernest Crawthorne. He was older than me but he was a friend of the family,’ said Alan. ‘He’d helped carry me around the playground to celebrate my elevation to the main school from junior school. He was a very nice man. I knew his two brothers and they took it hard. The families were more or less left to fend for themselves. One conveyed one’s sympathy but there was no spare money in the community to support them.’

After losing his job in a dispute over wages in January 1917, Alan decided to join up, despite still being four months short of his eighteenth birthday: ‘I went to Stratford in East London. I didn’t want to be called a conscript; it indicated that you weren’t too keen on going. I knew that I was approaching military age, when I could be called up, so I just went myself. I sat there, was called forward, signed forms to join the service for the duration of the war, took the oath of allegiance and got a shilling, which I immediately went out and spent on riotous living.’

Alan was called up to the Training Reserve, a battalion of underage boys that were given a year’s training in England before they could go out to the Front. With his friend Ernest Moyes he reported to Horse Guards Parade, where they joined around fifty other boys and marched to Paddington Station. From there, they were taken by train to Sutton Veny Camp, near Warminster.

‘The others came mostly from East London too, and some of them were already pretty tough,’ he said. ‘There were huts for about thirty men at a time. Your bed was a low trestle, three planks, a short mattress and pillow, and a couple of blankets. After “Reveille” they were packed up and your mattress had to be folded over, all very regimental. The inspections were pretty thorough – they even insisted you had no mud between the studs on your shoes.’

Like most of the youngsters hoping for a bit of adventure, Alan found the monotony and routine of camp life took a little getting used to: ‘The day would start at 6, and if you were struggling to get up the sergeant would tip your bed up and out you’d get. Then you folded up your mattress and dry-scrubbed your floor with a short-haired brush. Breakfast was mostly bread and butter and tea. I don’t remember any bacon and eggs … Then there’d be training till lunch, and my favourite was a lovely meat pie with a soft thick crust: the quality was good. Then there’d be more training. I found the constant drilling a bit boring, but it meant you learned to stand to attention and obey commands. We learned how to throw bombs too – you got the bomb, pulled the pin out and threw it round arm. I could manage about thirty feet. The bombs were about the size of your hand and were quite comfortable. There were a lot of accidents but I was never nervous with it. Some of the fellas were, but if you followed instructions you were perfectly safe. If a man did a thing wrong they’d call him this, that and the other. It upset me in the beginning but you got hardened to it.’

Basic training was usually completed in around six weeks and, depending on the state of the war and how urgently recruits were needed at the Front, full training could last anything up to five months.

Eventually, the new recruits would receive word that they were to be sent over to France, at which point they would be issued with their combat kit: a steel helmet, body belt, field dressings, gas mask and ground sheet, goggles and vests.

It was around this time that the soldiers would make their wills. If the nerves and the cold, creeping fear of impending departure hadn’t done it, and if the last vestiges of glamour, flag-waving crowds and cheers had not been battered out of the men by the relentless drilling, being handed a folded piece of paper marked ‘Informal Will’ and told to complete it would have been the final realisation that this was actually happening. They were going to war and there was a strong chance they wouldn’t be coming back.

When the British Probate Office made thousands of soldiers’ wills available online in 2013 I managed to find a scan of Edward’s, one of the saddest documents I’ve ever seen. It’s in his handwriting, controlled and well-practised, if slightly spidery, and it’s dated 2 April 1918, seven months almost to the day before his death. There isn’t much space on the single sheet, and the writing bunches up a little towards the bottom of the page where he’s signed and dated it, with his rank and regiment, but it’s clear and coherent:

In the event of my death, I leave my War Savings Certificates to my goddaughter, Miss Lily S Hill of No. 6 Spencer Street, Southall, and £2 to my grandmother Mrs Christopher, No. 5 Branstone Street, N Kensington, the remainder of my money and effects going to my mother, Mrs G. Connelly, No 6 Branstone Street, N Kensington.

And that’s it. That’s all Edward Connelly seems to have left behind of himself: fewer than fifty words of right-sloping handwriting, conventional in its well-practised flourishes and loops, and clearly carefully thought out. I wonder where he was when he wrote it. Surrounded by similar lads to him, the George Fortunes, Fred Dixons and Horace Calverts, sitting on their beds hunched over these flimsy pieces of paper following the guidelines they’d been given as to what to write?

‘In the event of my death …’ What a thing for an eighteen-year-old to have to write, miles from home in a strange place, in an unreal world of drills and orders and bugle calls and bomb-throwing practice. How he must have longed to be at home among those familiar cramped streets, still just yards from where he was born, and see his mother and father and grandparents again. Instead he had to prepare to sail for a foreign country, departing Britain for the first time a matter of weeks after leaving Kensal Town for the first time.

As he thought about the event of his death, he thought about his goddaughter, his grandmother and his mother, arguably the three people closest to him in the world. He didn’t have much to leave, a couple of quid, some savings certificates and the odd few coins and bits and pieces, but he shared them out thoughtfully. That was his legacy, all he had in the world.

(Lily S. Hill, incidentally, wasn’t dealt much of a better hand by fate than her godfather. Barely a year old when Edward was making her the first beneficiary of his will, Lily married in March 1937 but within six months was dead from a lung abscess.)

The image of all those young lads, lined up in regimented rows, sitting on their bunks, hundreds of them, all just setting out in life, not even having got to grips with the world yet, not even having discovered who they are, is a powerful one; all of them hunched over like khaki-clad beetles, concentrating, making sure they used their best handwriting as they formed the words, ‘In the event of my death …’

8
‘If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead’

The stone cross of the Boughton Aluph war memorial stood silhouetted starkly against the sky, with around thirty names from the First World War, including three sets of brothers.

I couldn’t really define why but there was something particularly forbidding about this memorial. It could have been that the sun had gone in, the wind was whipping up and the late afternoon was turning chilly. Boughton Aluph has a large, triangular green, with houses and a pub on two sides embracing the village cricket field. The memorial stands away, on the furthest part of the green, facing away from the houses, with its back to the pub and cricket pitch. The image of its simple cross, stark against the grey sky as I’d approached, stuck with me, and later I investigated some of the names on the stone. They ranged from the teenaged to the middle-aged, and their deaths covered every year of the war (one man had even died in 1920, the result of injuries and shock sustained by being wounded and buried alive in a shell explosion).

There are thousands of these memorials in Britain (estimates of their numbers range wildly between 54,000 and 70,000), each of them the gateway to stories and lives, some remembered, some forgotten. Every one of those thousands of memorials can be taken individually, and a narrative of the Great War constructed from them – from vast, ornate, mournful angel-topped plaques listing hundreds of dead in the centre of a city to a handful of names on a simple stone in a remote hamlet, the story of one is the story of them all. The story I was pursuing is multiplied millions of times over by every man that went to war and never came back, every name on every last weather-beaten, forsaken, moss-smeared tablet that commemorates the fallen.

Continuing east I crossed the Great Stour, paused at the level crossing and arrived in Wye, grateful for a bed and a warm eyrie room high up in the King’s Head. The window afforded a view across the rooftops to the giant crown carved into the hillside chalk to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, as the nation came to terms with the end of the Victorian age and ushered in the Edwardian.

Early the following morning I found myself standing above the crown looking back at Wye from the opposite aspect. I continued over the top of the Downs through the villages of Stowting and Etchinghill, before arriving in Folkestone.

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