WHAT JOLTED you as you watched Secret History: Britain’s Boy Soldiers (Channel 4) was not so much that boys as young as 14 had volunteered to fight in the First World War — in search of what, adventure? Glory? Out of a sense of patriotic duty? — nor even that the government of the time seems to have connived to send schoolboy soldiers to the trenches. What jolted you was how hard it would be to imagine boys acting this way today (and thank God for that, you might add). Unless it were being filmed for a reality show, with the lure of a television presenter’s job for the victor, can you imagine British youths volunteering so zealously for a war today? Not just queuing to sign up, but lying about their age because they were still a few years shy of the minimum legal age deemed acceptable for sending a soldier to his death?
Recruiting Sergeant: Name?
Boy Soldier: My mates call me Tango. I’m a transvestite, and if you pick me I’ll really bring in viewers to your war. I’m crazy, me.
Recruiting Sergeant: Any fears about dying?
Boy Soldier: You mean running out of things to say on camera? Never! I can talk non-stop. Put me in a diary room and I could hold a TV audience for hours, I swear. Didn’t you see me jabbering away on my audition video? If they put me on Just a Minute I’d win every week. Ask my friends. “Tango, why don’t you just shut up for a while.” That’s what my mates say to me, like, all the time.
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Recruiting Sergeant: You realise that you’re going to be thrown in with a lot of aggressive Germans who won’t be happy till they see the back of you.
Boy Soldier: Not if I succeed in getting them voted off first. Bring it on, Fritzy!
Recruiting Sergeant: No, there’s no voting off. You just shoot them.
Boy Soldier: Wicked concept! That really ups the stakes. Will there be a hot tub? Any chickens to look after?
Recruiting Sergeant: Chickens? Chickens get court-martialled and executed.
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Boy Soldier: What about Davina McCall?
Recruiting Sergeant: I’m afraid the Geneva Convention doesn’t permit us to unleash anything that scary on the enemy, unless all else has failed and civilisation, as we know it, has completely broken down.
Richard Van Emden, the author of Boy Soldiers, calculates that “thousands of young boys went to the recruitment stations out of patriotic reasons, but also because they were responding to a national emergency”. As British troops were flattened like wheat in a hurricane, Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, urgently needed 100,000 volunteers to restock the Front. In the event, three-quarters of a million volunteered in just two months.
The enlistment age was 18 years; 19 for service overseas. But as many as 250,000 of the soldiers who fought for Britain in the First World War may have been under age. Boys such as Tommy Thompson, a recent school-leaver when war broke out: “I was plagued by recruiting sergeants . . . I couldn’t walk 50 yards without being interrogated. I said, ‘I’m only 17’, and they said, ‘Go around the corner and you’ll be 19’.”
Others, such as Tony Gay, a messenger boy in London, signed up eagerly. “I had to go in the Army because Lord Kitchener had put a poster on the wall and it said, ‘We want you. We want you’. When we went to the door the man said, ‘Oh yes, you’re just the lads we want’. I was 16 when I had to go in the Army, but I said I was 18.” Tony’s parents? They weren’t too pleased. “When I got home I got the biggest basting and good hiding I’ve ever had in my life.”
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Dick Trafford’s mother also took it badly when her son broke the news that he’d enlisted. “I was only 15 when I joined up,” said Trafford, then a coalminer from Lancashire. “The sergeant said, ‘What do you want, sonny?’ ” Trafford told the sergeant he was 18. They weren’t sticklers for birth certificates. “I got home and I told my parents and my mother played hell. She said I’ve no right, at my age. And my father said, ‘Let him go if he wants to’.”
Here’s another difference between these men, 104 years old at the time of filming, and the contestants of today’s reality shows: you’re happy to see them still so sprightly, glad to see that they survived way past 1918 to 2004, and you feel privileged to hear about their lives.
Out of interest, how do governments go about deciding how young is too young to die? Might not a boy of 14 actually be less of a loss than a 19-year-old? He has cost the State less in education; and being still relatively inexperienced about life, he is less aware of what there is to lose, isn’t he?
Occasionally the boy soldiers who fought in the First World War, shocked by the pant- wetting barbarity of warfare, would run from the trenches. When caught, they were court- martialled, and shot by firing squad. Even though you were too young to enlist, you were still old enough to take a man’s punishment.
Peter Baynham’s surreal animation series, I Am Not an Animal (BBC Two), also came to a bloody end last night as Julian, the animal liberator, finally lost patience with the snooty, twisted, pampered beasts he had risked his life to set free from their vivisection laboratory. But having just been reminded of the mass slaughter of the Somme, you couldn’t help feeling that, as satire goes, watching animals behave like humans can’t help but fall short of watching humans behave like animals.