THE POSTER OF KITCHENER with his hand outstretched, finger pointing, remains to this day one of the most enduring images from the First World War. The face of the Secretary of State for War was plastered on street corners, on pillar boxes and street hordings, and is commonly referred to by most soldiers who joined up in the British army, over eighty years ago. The eyes, looking straight down the gun-barrel arm, appeared to make the poster's appeal personal and inescapable and ensured a guilty conscience for any man not in uniform. Kitchener's unprecedented call to arms in August and September 1914 saw recruiting offices around the country swamped with 750,000 men eager to do their duty.
The cause of the conflict was ostensibly the invasion of Belgium by the Kaiser's forces, in the first stages of a wide sweep that would take them across the poorly-defended border of northern France and onwards towards Paris. Britain declared war because it had guaranteed Belgium's territorial integrity. However, for the soldiers who joined up in their tens of thousands, that was scarcely a reason to enlist. The broad fear that if Germany were not stopped, she would attack Britain in due course did provide such a motive. But a more common one was simply the contagion of the war fever which spread nationwide in August 1914. Men joined up because it was the thing to do, because their mates had all joined up, because work was monotonous, because war offered an escape from the daily routine.
The public expectation that the war would be brief was quickly dispelled by the fighting which took place in northern France and Belgium that autumn and winter. The regular and the territorial army had only just been able to hold the Germans at bay. But by the following summer the divisions made up of Kitchener's new army were beginning to arrive. The Battles of Loos and later the Somme gave these erstwhile civilians the chance to prove themselves. The cemeteries which dot the former Western Front are tragic evidence of their steadfast efforts.
The demand for recruits spawned a new style of unit, popularly known as the pals Battalion. While each conformed to the regulation army size of around a thousand men, containing the usual companies and platoons, uniquely they were made up of men who worked together and socialised together, because they had joined up en masse from their places of work. Born principally in the industrial towns of the midlands and north, such as Accrington, Grimsby, Birmingham and Hull, these men epitomised the enthusiastic spirit of the Kitchener battalions. No one foresaw at that time that when these battalions suffered heavy casualties in action, a town could be devastated.
As these men were recruited together, scant attention was given to whether they complied with the army's regulations on age and health. However, such was the number of volunteers in 1914 that the army could be particular about whom they selected for service. Many were rejected as unfit and found themselves back on the streets along with those who had still to enlist.
Public disapproval, even anger, towards those who were seen in civilian clothes when others were at the Front, persuaded the Government to introduce the Derby scheme early in 1915. This offered men the opportunity to join up but to return home to their jobs until the army specifically required their services. An armband was issued to all men who enrolled in the scheme, thereby reducing the risk of their being accosted by armchair heroes or white-feather-wielding ladies wanting to know why these men were not in khaki.
However, as the casualty figures continued to grow and the public's clamour to fight gradually diminished, fewer young boys were willing to countenance the idea of personal sacrifice in the seemingly endless attacks and counter-attacks at the Front. Only when voluntary recruitment was in precipitous decline did the British Government introduce conscription in January 1916. The age of enlistment was expanded from 19–38 to 18–41. The recruits of 1917 and 1918 still included men eager for action, but they also contained others horrified at the prospect of fighting, who could see no virtue in enlisting. These men would form the fresh drafts for the Front along with those returning to the fight after convalescence. Alongside them now were others unnecessarily rejected for service in the first months of the war, and increasingly, those physically undernourished and genuinely unfit to fight. Britain was beginning to exhaust its supply of manpower.
If an elixir of life does exist, then Robbie Burns secretly sampled it for many years. Aged nearly 105, he stood bolt upright and walked with the assurance of a man thirty years younger, and had a razor-sharp mind that comfortably lent itself to both deft wit and serious discussion. Born near Glasgow in November 1895, he joined up almost as soon as war broke out, inspired by the bagpipes playing beneath the office window where he worked as an “insurance wallah”. Sure in the knowledge that the war would last six months, he volunteered for service and fought at the battles of Loos in September 1915 and the Somme in 1916; in the December he was badly wounded.
Everywhere you went in Glasgow, there were great big posters of Kitchener with his finger pointing at you, Your King And Country Needs You. No matter where you went, it seemed to be pointing at you personally. I worked in an insurance office, and day after day I would hear a piper coming down the road and the left, right, left, right of feet. I went to the window and I could see probably two or three hundred men, some with bowler hats on and some with what we called “skips”, a flat cap, all marching down the road, with the piper playing to arouse enthusiasm.
I thought to myself, I want to do something like this, so I went to a recruiting office and the sergeant asked how old I was. I said that I was eighteen and a bit and he said “Oh you're too young, go back to your mother.” A fortnight or so after that, I met a good pal who was trying to join up and I told him what had happened, and he told me to follow him and when we got to the recruiting office to tell a little fib. You had to be nineteen to join up in those days, so it was a little fib because I was only a couple of months off being of age. I told my fib, was given a shilling, and I was in the army. I took my shilling and went with my friend to a restaurant, the MacDonalds of that time, and for ninepence you got a meal, more than you could eat. We'd threepence left so we bought a packet of Woodbine cigarettes and a penny for the matches, and that was the day.
I think it was excitement more than anything that made me join up. I was too young to understand what patriotism really was. I lived in the country and there were not many boys my age, so I thought it would be nice to be with a lot of lads on something of a picnic, because we all thought the war would be over by Christmas. When I told the manager of the insurance company I wanted to join up, he said “Well, it'll be a nice six month holiday for you, yes, you join up”.
At eighteen and nineteen years of age, one is not very clever. You stop, you look and you listen to other people and you think that if they are doing something, why can't I? My father had been in uniform practically from the day war was declared and I thought, I'll do what my father does.
By the end of the war all the family was in uniform, my father, myself, a younger brother and two sisters, which only left my mother at home to run a hotel out in the country.
A few days after enlisting, I received notification to take a train and go to Inverness for training. We reported to the barracks and they gave us a canvas sack, called a palliasse, which we were to take to the stables and stuff with straw and that would be our bed for the night, with just a couple of blankets. My pal and I, having got our beds ready, thought we'd go into town and have a bit of fun, so we got all dressed up and went off for the evening into town about a mile away from the barracks.
When we came back, our beds were missing. About twenty miners had arrived and apparently took our beds. We asked them but they just said “We've got them and we're just as much entitled to beds as you are.” I couldn't fight a miner – they were too big for me – so there you are, we just had to sleep on the floor.
The next morning, we paraded and the sergeant saw me and said “Ha, Ha, no shave!” I said that I was too young to shave, but he told me I did now and that after the parade I was to go and shave and report back to the orderly room at six o'clock. I went and shaved for the first time with an open razor and left a trademark on both sides of my cheek. I went to the Orderly room with blood running down my face. “Who are you?” asked the sergeant. I said “Private Burns, Sir”. “Well, what do you want?” he said. I explained that he'd told me to shave. “Oh”, he said, “I didn't recognise you, right, go and see the doctor.” That was my first shave in the army.
Over the next few months, we trained at the barracks at Aldershot, which was a military town. The training was very hard, we were youngsters, not hardened soldiers. The miners, they were hardy blokes, the training was nothing to them, but I was a weakling, being an insurance wallah, but others were weaker than I was. It was hard work – early morning runs, square bashing, rifle drill, musketry, bayonet practice and so on. We got fed up with it; “Let's get out there and get on with it,” that was the idea.
Like many young boys in 1914 and 1915, the glamour of joining up for a six month holiday with his pals was too much for George Littlefair. Escaping the drudgery of life on his father's farm, he enlisted with a close friend, Joe Coates. For George, it was the beginning of a three-year nightmare on the Western Front, culminating in Joe being killed by bursting shrapnel, a death that deeply affected George. Finally, in 1997, George went to see Joe's grave, returning to the battlefields he had not seen since his youth. George lived happily with his grand-daughter and great granddaughter near Bishop Aukland until his death, aged 102.
My mother died in August 1914 and her last words to me on her death bed was “George,” she says “There's a war on now, you know.” I say “Aye,” she says “Do not join the army.” And what did I do? Joined the damned army. I've thought about it many times, aye – whether she had an inkling I would do, I can't tell you, but I did.
I hung out to November, but I thought I would be helping the country. When you are young, all sorts of things go through your head – there's nowt can get through it now, even if I wanted – but I was ignorant, young and daft then. I was having a drink at the Cleaver Hotel in Darlington with two agricultural mates when we decided to join up, myself, Joe Coates from Shildon, and another lad, all of us 18 year-olds. We'd all known each other as children, and then as teenagers and single, we'd all go dancing together. Joe lived next door to the Co-operative store in Shildon and we were especially close mates.
We thought it would be a novelty, you know, none of us had ever been out of England. To see another country, we thought that was a great thing. We were raw country lads who'd never seen nowt. You thought you was something big, you know, you had the impression you'd grown up from being a lad to a man.
We were patriotic. It had been driven into us a bit that Germany wanted England, that's all we knew. We were young, strong lads, and thought we should go and help the old soldiers out. Anyway, when Major Spencer, the recruiting officer, heard that we were agricultural lads he didn't want us, he told us to get out and stop out; we were exempt.
Not for long though; they soon called us up, in 1916, March it was. Then it was six weeks' training in England before we went over the duckpond to Boulogne with the 8th Durham Light Infantry. We didn't have a clue what we were getting into but we damn well soon found out. First time up the line you wondered what it was like. Will I come back? Aye, I'll look after myself and if bloody Jerry comes for me I'll give him the bayonet.
None of the boys liked the treatment we got during training, getting us galloping about here and there. There was one bugger with a waxed moustache, from Birmingham, he turned up yapping and shouting carrying a big whip, cracking it, making us all run around, shouting, “You're not holding on to your mother's apron strings now,” and all that tittle tattle. I didn't like army discipline at all. These corporals had stood on civy street without a penny to their name but were made sergeants because they were good at yelling. They thought that they'd got a job now, they were somebody and they knew damn well they wouldn't have to go up the line. It seemed we went into the war to fight to save England and then you had these men shouting and yapping at you, and it upset you.
It was only when the troop ship was leaving Southampton that Dick Barron realised he might never see the country of his birth again. Having joined up believing war would be fun and games, Dick's naivety was shattered during a three-month spell on Gallipoli. Within weeks of landing, a close friend was killed in action and Dick contracted near-fatal dysentery. At 103 years old, he recalled his life at the front with passion.
Schools celebrated Empire Day because we had a great empire, a greater empire than the Romans, the greatest empire that had ever existed. As children, we felt that a British man was worth half-a-dozen of any foreigner and the Day was an important celebration of the extent to which the British Empire had spread its wonderful rule and civilisation across the world.
In the morning address at school, the headmaster used to mention any special anniversary of a battle, sometimes calling us to attention. He was a great patriot and would describe recent battles of the Boer War as well as battles further back such as Omdurman, Rorke's Drift, Waterloo; how we had fought at the Crimea and won, and the wonderful charge of the Light Brigade – it was all very romantic. We regarded battles as something very, very heroic you know, the Thin Red Line.
We were all patriotic in those days. I mean most of the colonial wars had been very successful, a third of the whole landmass of the earth belonged to the British Empire. We knew nothing about wars of course, not the sordid side. I'd seen pictures of the Zulu War where we just captured them – after all they were natives and they were fighting with spears. We didn't see the poor buggers that were wounded and lying there, or bodies stripped of anything worthwhile. No, soldiers were glamorous. The war in 1914 was totally justified in our eyes. Everything we did was right and the Germans were a lot of criminals. I think we hated the Germans and the poor German bakers, well, a lot of Germans lived in London as retailers, they were imprisoned when war broke out.
I saw Kitchener's famous poster, Your Country Needs You, but it didn't have a great effect on me because I had already joined up, 1st September 1914. Recruiting sergeants with ribbons across their chests often went around pubs looking for likely lads, trying to get them to take the King's shilling to make them soldiers. When I became a soldier they never gave me a shilling though so they owe me a shilling and interest, a big sum they owe me!
I was in the Boys' Life Brigade and a contingent of us went together because we were inspired to be patriotic. In those days volunteers swarmed up to recruitment offices – you had to queue up to enlist and sometimes they said “We can't take you today, come again”. You can't imagine the war fever in those days. Everyone thought we would beat the Germans – the war would be over by Christmas. I wanted to be a soldier – I wanted to fight for England so I went with my friends to the Duke of York's Headquarters in Sloane Square and enlisted.
I loved the training, it was tremendous fun. It was soon discovered that I had had some medical training. I was very good at First Aid, because I wanted to become a medical student and had led a team in the Boys' Brigade, tending accidents and such like, so I was sent to the Field Ambulance, 2nd London Mounted Brigade. I always remember that we had what we called a monkey box which was all first aid. It had pills with numbers on them for different ailments. Number nine was for constipation, and I always remember somebody, he didn't have any number nines left, so he gave this constipated soldier a five and a four!
Intent on filling the army's ranks with fit and enthusiastic volunteers, recruitment sergeants frequently turned a blind eye to the youth of lads who were eager to enlist. Many were allowed to join one or even two years below the required minimum. Few, however, were younger than George Maher. George had run away from home and presented himself to a recruiting sergeant in Lancaster aged just thirteen. He was accepted without question and, still three months short of his fourteenth birthday, he found himself in France. George lived in Australia, his home since 1924.
I had already tried to join up once at a recruiting office in Preston. I had borrowed a suit of my father's, turning up the trousers, but as I got half-way up the steps to the office somebody cuffed me behind the neck and gave me a kick up the backside. “Go home to your bloody mother,” a voice said. I turned and saw a police sergeant, a friend of my father's.
I didn't want to go home, though. I'd run away that morning, packing a small bag once my aunties had gone to work in the local cotton mills and munitions works. You see, after my grandmother died my mother uprooted the family and moved us into the same house as her sisters. My father was an army reservist and had gone to France when war broke out, so moving in meant they could all manage together. I did not get on with my youngest aunt and I was always getting into trouble for nicking food, that sort of thing, so I decided to enlist.
I failed to enlist at Preston, so I sneaked onto a train heading for Lancaster and slept overnight in the cemetery behind the priory. In the morning, I found a tap to have a wash and then joined a queue of men waiting to join up at the town hall. I was always a big lad, for as well as attending school I'd worked half days at the Horrocks Clothing Mill in Preston since I was eleven. I was five foot eight-and-a-half when I was 13 and nicknamed “Hefty”, so when I told the recruiting sergeant I was eighteen he believed me, he never asked for any proof at all.
I joined the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment and was sent to Aldershot and then to Salisbury Plain for training. Of course my mother hadn't a clue where I was, although I had told a cousin that I intended to join the army and I knew that he would tell her in due course. As soon as my mother found out, she would inform the military authorities, so to avoid being discovered I had enlisted under her maiden name of Ashton. This worked, for when the army did come looking for me they found no trace of me under my real name, Maher.
A big batch of newly-trained soldiers from different regiments was sent to France in February 1917 and I was among them. I was a bit excited at the time, but little knew what I was going in to – if I had, I wouldn't have gone, you can be sure of that!
Fred Hodges and his wife Olive were one of Britain's oldest married couples. Both were born in the nineteenth century, their lives first colliding, quite literally, on a frozen lake in 1917 – an incident about which there was much mutual ribbing. Within months of meeting Olive, Fred enlisted in the army and went off to serve his country in France. His autobiography, Men of 18 in 1918, was published in 1988; using Fred's photographic memory, it charts how the naive young recruits finally brought the conflict to a successful conclusion. Returning to Britain after the Armistice, Fred began to go out with Olive and in 1924 they married. They lived in feisty bliss in Northampton until their recent deaths.
We were boys, and war was seen as a kind of super sport. We were used to hard knocks in football, and competition in cricket and running, getting in the first three, well, war was an extension of sport and manliness. And bravery. If the army had put me down as class B at my medical, I should have been ashamed of myself almost, to think I wasn't fit to go. Of course every boy wanted to be in the army. In 1914, within days of the war breaking out, we'd had 25,000 Welshmen billeted in our town. We had two nice young men of the RAMC in our house and of course I used to try their hats on and their tunics, and fancy myself as a soldier. It was a bit of a dream, I suppose, because nobody in the family had ever been a soldier. However, since the age of thirteen I had been in the school's Cadet Corps, which was affiliated to the 1st Northants Regiment. We had two companies, A and B. A had uniforms and B wore only football kit. I was in B Company, so I went up to my house captain and told him I was disappointed. So he said “Oh, well, if you're keen I'll switch you. Some kids' parents don't want them to go in 'cos they're against war.”
I was only fifteen years old in 1914 and couldn't join up then, but I joined up when I was seventeen and a bit. I was due to be called up under the new arrangements at eighteen, into a Young Soldiers Battalion but I didn't want to wait. I discussed with two grammar school friends whether we should apply for a commission, and went to see our local rector who was said to have influence. We sat round a beautiful table in an octagonal room and he said “Yes, I can recommend you for the Inns of Court Officers' Training Corps, but they won't take you until you are eighteen.” Well, that was a great stumbling block, oh, we couldn't wait four months. We joined up in March 1917 at the age of seventeen years and eight months, swearing to defend with our lives King George V and his heirs. We were then sent for a medical examination at Northampton Barracks, where we came before a medical board which was seeing a lot of men who had recovered from wounds to find out if they could go back to France. When we three walked into the room with our chests bare, I heard one of the M.O.s say “Ah, these three look more likely. I'm pleased to see three young chaps raring to go.”
The officers and NCOs who trained us were no longer fit for active service, and were very kind to us as well as training us properly. Then on 21st March 1918, the big German attack started and on the 24th our training ceased, cut off, just like that. We were inspected in a big park in Norwich and we marched past the General, column after column. It was a cold frosty morning; our breath was ascending from our mouths as we marched, and then the General got up on his dais and said “You men, of course I know you're not men, you're only boys, but the Germans have broken through our fortifications and you're needed at the Front at once. You've now got to play the part of men.”
I wrote to my parents when I knew I was going to France, and they came to Norwich to see me. I was marching down the street when I suddenly saw my mother and father on the pavement, so as soon as I was free, I rushed up to them and got them a billet in a street near where I was. They stayed for about five days while I was getting ready to leave. We had our gas masks tested, that sort of thing. We had been billeted on landladies across Norwich and they really mothered us, but as we marched off that day they lined the streets and they were in tears. As we got near the station, the thicker the crowds got. The pavements were full, mostly of women, we were their boys. Some waved and said “Good Luck”, some were crying. We could hear comments: “Poor little buggers,” I remember one woman saying, “Fancy sending them out to France to die for us.” And it was true. There was nobody left. The army had squandered troops in '15, '16, and '17, and we were all that were left. My parents were there on the station platform and I remember my mother putting her arms round me and saying something about “If you don't come back...”, I don't know what she was going to say but I interrupted her and said “Don't worry, mum, I shall come back.” My father stood with her, I think he was shedding a tear. It was a very emotional moment so I broke away from her and got into the queue for the train.
We were aware of the critical situation in France. But we were anxious that the war shouldn't stop before we could get involved and we were genuinely excited as we took the train down to Dover. On the way we passed a train of German prisoners. We looked at them – they were laughing at us – they were safe, going into captivity, we were youngsters who didn't know what we were doing.
Every year on Armistice Day, the nation remembers with sorrow and with gratitude those who died defending their country. For veterans, it is often a time of mixed emotions as they recall the friends who survived and those who did not. For 101-year-old George Louth there were mixed emotions as well, but for probably unique reasons. He too remembered the friends he left on the Battlefield of the Somme, but he also recalled 11th November 1918 as a happy day for, totally coincidentally, it was the day he married. The bells he heard and the bunting he saw as he left the church at 11am that morning could only have been laid on to celebrate his marriage. At that moment he knew nothing of the end of the war.
We were lined up on Southsea Common when the Colonel came round to visit us – to size us up more or less – to see what we'd got. He came round asking questions, how old we were and such like. I said “Nineteen, Sir”. He said “Nineteen?”, “Yes, Sir”, “Right”. He went to the next man, spoke to him, then came back to me again. “How old did you say you were?” I said “Nineteen, Sir”, and he looked at me straight. Now I was only eighteen and I had put my age on, but he walked away and from then on it was all go.
We did our training at Aldershot, route marching with rifle and pack. We used to do a route march of about thirty miles one day, then perhaps just a few miles the next day. In the mornings we would get up and have a basin of cocoa, then we might have to go for a five-mile run before breakfast, then after breakfast square-bashing at 8 o'clock for four hours, then dinner and back to square-bashing again until five o'clock. We did all this for about six months until we were ready to go overseas.
Before we left, the sergeant came up to me and said “Louth, the Captain wants to know how old you are.” I said “Why, sergeant?” He said “'Cos he doesn't believe you.” The sergeant said “We're going to France and we don't want you crying when we get over there, saying you are not old enough, because it won't happen, you won't come back, so say it now.” “I'm going with the lads,” I told him.
During the long months of training, a lot of men built up resentments against sergeants and would say “I'll shoot him when I get to France”, that sort of thing. I remember just before the off, an officer getting us all in a ring and he said “Now if you have got any thoughts about what you would do with your sergeant major or your sergeant when you get to France, get it out of your head, 'cos you won't do it when you get over there because you'll be the best of pals, you'll help out, you'll do anything to help one another.” It was true. The attitudes of the sergeants and the officers changed when we got overseas, they were just the same as you when you're in a trench, the sergeants didn't shout their orders and the officers were friendlier, less distant. I remember the Company Sergeant Major, before we went into the trenches, he got up on a box and he sang to us in a ring. He had a candle and he was singing “My Little Grey Home In The West.” That's how they were, or they would run a game of bingo, they'd do all sorts of things to keep your morale up.
Unlike most of the young men who joined up to fight, Guy Botwright saw the outbreak of war as an international tragedy which no country could win. A sensitive young man, who loved nature, Guy joined the forces aged 18 in 1916, and went to France the following year as an officer in the Army Service Corps. Ten months later, he had returned to England with shellshock. Aged 101, Guy movingly recalled his recuperation and the fits of depression that made him want to die.
There wasn't any doubt about it, there was going to be a long war and to imagine such a thing was indescribable. I was 17 in 1914 and the world had gone mad. Hitherto I had led such a quiet, idyllic country way of life, everything was superb. I loved nature, I was a keen butterfly collector, and the whole idea of war was inconceivable. To think people could go to war, well, to me it was the end of everything, it was utterly depressing.
I had just begun studying at Brighton College and the first thing I had to do was to join the Officer Training Corps. It was compulsory, and each day I would work in the morning and then go and change into my uniform and parade every blasted afternoon for drill. I never, ever, thought I would go into the army, it never entered my head, but doing my duty was automatic.
Now England was in a dire strait, a major war had broken out and I simply had to play the part of a soldier. I couldn't see myself a soldier. I soon could, I soon had to. I felt we had to fight Germany or they would take over our country and dictate English law. The whole of Europe was being corrupted by this one nation. Gosh! there was no question of being a conscientious objector. I did not want to join up, no, I think I can definitely say that, but I was of age so I had to, full stop. However, I loathed the whole thing, I was going to be cannon fodder.
When I landed in France in early 1917, there was nothing doing, it was late winter, it was stalemate and we all knew that until the weather improved, Jerry could do very little. I was fortunate. The casualties I was to see in France, bits of arms, bits of legs, at that tender age you cannot imagine it. When I saw the devastation of the Front, my one thought was to live: can I get through this hell without being killed?
Percy Williams joined the British Army only because he knew he was about to be conscripted anyway. A reluctant soldier, he was one of the growing band of young men sent out to France in 1918 with few illusions about the maelstrom into which they were about to be thrown. Aged 99, Percy recalled with candour the feelings of helplessness, fear and sheer panic that gripped him as he held a third line trench during the great German offensive of 1918.
I was going to be eighteen on the 15th September 1917 and I was told, whether it was true or not, that if I joined up before I was conscripted I would be able to volunteer just for the duration of the war and no longer. If I waited for my call-up papers, I would be termed a conscript in which case the army could keep me for years. So I took the line of least resistance and went to a recruiting office with a friend about ten days before my birthday and took the King's shilling.
The patriotism of 1914, of Kitchener's men, had evaporated long before 1917. I wasn't patriotic – you may call me a bit of a coward – but I didn't want to join the army. At the beginning of the war it was said that it would be over by Christmas 1914, yet we'd had the whole of 1915, the whole of 1916 and about eight months of 1917. I could see by the casualty lists that so many had died during the battle of the Somme, I could read between the lines of the reports from the Front and I was hoping and hoping that the war would be finished before I was called up.
After joining the army, I was sent home to await further instructions and then on 23rd October 1917, I was called up. I was very apprehensive when I went in my civilian clothes to Whitchurch Barracks in Cardiff for training, forming fours and drilling with dummy rifles.
My only hope was, we were told when we joined up that we would not go abroad until we were nineteen, but I was sent to France six months before I should have been, at the end of March 1918. I knew what we were in for and as far as I am concerned, in the short time I was out in France, I hoped, along with others, that I'd get a blighty, a slight wound that would get me back to England.
Even when Royce Mckenzie was 100 years old he looked 30 years younger. Nicknamed “Lucky Jim” by the men he served with on the Somme and at Passchendaele, Royce served as a company runner, dodging the bullets and shells as he carried messages across the exposed battlefield. Aged 100 he was as likely to be found having a small flutter on the horses, an abiding passion, as he was to be found at the home he lived in since the 1930s. Ever “lucky”, Royce lived an independent life in Doncaster, his home town.
I was working at Bullcroft Colliery, pony driving, when I went to join up. I was only seventeen, and the sergeant looked at me, he says, “You'd better go home”. I went home and mother asked me where I'd been and I told her, to join up. She gave me a slap at side of face, she says “That'll learn you not to go and join the army.” I waited a year before I tried to join the Naval Division, with one or two more besides, so the sergeant says all right but you're not eighteen now, you're nineteen and you know what you're doing? The date was 21st August 1915 and we were all just young lads; king and country - that were it.
It was patriotism, that's all we joined up for. Old Kaiser Bill, he was aiming to get into this country and we had to stop him. Life was different in those days, you lived for your country and when Kitchener said “I want you”, well, that was it, millions joined up, millions of young fellows like myself.
I was sent to the Crystal Palace in London, a beautiful place, all the buildings being named after our colonies as they were then, Canada, Australia, India and South Africa. I was billeted in Australia and kitted out in navy blue. We got into a routine straight away, up at six with the first drill, physical jerks, then we were issued with a mug of cocoa and breakfast. Then it was on parade, all cleaned up, forming fours and other exercises. A couple of days later we were given rifles and learnt rifle drill so we could be put on guard duties, the pinnacle of which was main guard, for local people used to come and watch the guard drilling, a real spectacle. It was about that time when I was having a stroll in the grounds one night. I stood for a minute or two looking up at the sky because the searchlights were looking for something and then they got it. It was a wonderful sight, a German Zeppelin, shaped like a cigar, all illuminated.