Children and war
The Middle Ages to World War I
In medieval Europe, boys followed armies to war as squires, drummers and trumpeters. Travelling with the baggage, they were usually kept away from danger when the fighting began, but this did not always ensure their safety.
Agincourt and the Crusades
At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French were roundly defeated on the field of battle but succeeded in raiding the English baggage train and massacring the camp followers, including many young boys. That ignoble act prompted this memorable exchange in Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act IV, Scene vii) between two Welsh soldiers:
FLUELLEN
Kill the poys and the luggage? ’tis expressly against the law of arms: ’tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer’t; in your conscience, now, is it not?GOWER
’Tis certain there's not a boy left alive; and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter: besides, they have burned and carried away all that was in the king's tent; wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, ’tis a gallant king!
Equally ignoble was the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212, whose figurehead was the charismatic 12-year-old Stephen of Cloyes, said to have persuaded some 30,000 children to embark from Marseilles to the Holy Land, never to be seen again. Modern medieval historians are now sceptical that Stephen’s crusade – and a German equivalent led by one Nicholas – ever took place. But if any of the children did reach the Holy Land, they would in all likelihood have been sold into slavery or prostitution.
Nelson’s navy
Boy combatants fought in the Napoleonic wars. Familiar figures in Nelson’s navy were the ‘powder monkeys’ – officially, Ship’s Boys 3rd Class – many of whom were as young as 12 and the sons of serving seamen. Among their gruelling and frequently dangerous duties was supplying the ship’s gunners with bags of powder in battle. They were paid approximately £8 a year, enough to keep them in clothing and the small items that they required.
The powder monkeys scurried to and fro in the murk and din of combat with the powder bags stuffed under their shirts to prevent them bursting into flames. One reputed to have been on Nelson’s flagship Victory was 10-year-old John Doag, one of 68 young boys aboard, most of them orphans, all of whom did their duty amid the carnage of the gun decks.
The most junior officers aboard Nelson’s fleet were the midshipmen, most of whom had joined the Royal Navy at about the age of 12. This group would later form the Navy’s officer corps. At Trafalgar, they suffered approximately 12% casualties. Only eight of the 118 so-called ‘Volunteers First Class’ – embryo midshipmen of very tender years – became casualties, which suggests that their captains must have placed them out of harm’s way when the action began.
Waterloo and beyond
Boys were not confined to the navies of the combatants. For instance, at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, a French break-in at Hougoumont, a tactically vital farmhouse held by the Coldstream Guards, was followed by fierce fighting. All 40 French infantrymen in the break-in were killed. The only survivor was a 14-year-old drummer boy.
Throughout the 19th century, boys served in all major conflicts, including the Crimean War and the American Civil War. In the British Army, drummer boys and band boys (often soldiers’ orphans) accompanied their regiments across the empire. And it was a 12-year-old Boer boy who is reputed to have shot and killed the British commander, High Commissioner Sir George Colley, at the Battle of Majuba Hill in the Transvaal War in 1882.
World War I
In the summer of 1914, thousands of British teenage boys below the minimum age of 18 (or 19 for service overseas) joined up with the help of less than scrupulous recruiting sergeants, who collected a bonus for every man they conscripted.
When the sergeant asked 16-year-old Jim Norton his age and he replied truthfully, he was told to walk round the corner and come back with a different story. Norton returned, having aged three years in as many minutes. The same story was told by Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall, another underage volunteer who, until his death on 16 May 2005, aged 108, was the last surviving British cavalryman of the Great War.
During World War I, some 250,000 underage teenage boys enlisted in the British Army, of whom perhaps 50% were killed or wounded. Some won the highest honours for valour – on both land and sea. At the naval battle of Jutland (1916), the heroism of 16-year-old John Cornwell, a Boy Seaman 1st Class and gun layer on the cruiser Chester, earned him a posthumous Victoria Cross.
