The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ 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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