No Man’s Land

Hundreds of boys falsified birth dates to meet the minimum age requirements. Desperate for soldiers, recruiting officers did not always check the boy’s details very carefully. A sixteen year-old later told of how he was able to join the army: “The recruiting sergeant asked me my age and when I told him he said, ‘You had better go out, come in again, and tell me different.’ I came back, told him I was nineteen and I was in.” Private E. Lugg was able to join the 13th Royal Sussex Regiment at the age of thirteen.

However, he was not the youngest soldier in the British Army, Private Lewis served at the Somme when he was only twelve. George Maher, who was only 13 at the time, claims that Lewis was too short to see over the edge of the trench.”The youngest was 12 years old. A little nuggety bloke he was, too. We joked that the other soldiers would have had to have lifted him up to see over the trenches.” Maher was eventually arrested: “I was locked up on a train under guard, one of five under-age boys caught serving on the front being sent back to England.”