Lost boys

The desperation of many young men to go to war throughout history is well documented. The power of a figure like Napoleon to galvanize – even those from nations other than France – is captured in novels like The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black by Stendhal. The hero of the first novel, Fabrice del Dongo, leaves his family home on Lake Como in search of glory in France.

During the first week of WWI, one hundred men an hour signed up to join Britain’s armed forces. Queues lined the streets outside registry offices. Within the year, more than a million had enlisted. Many teenagers lied about their age. Perhaps 250,000 boys under the age of 18 served Britain during the conflict, some as young as 13.

Registry office queues

I remember leaving my first viewing of the WWI film, 1917, one of my favourite films of recent times. There’s a scene towards the end. Under the cover of dense woodland on the edge of a battlefield, a battalion is serenaded by one of their number in preparation for the final assault. The camera pans across the faces of the seated boy soldiers, listening in total silence. One of the most common rebukes from a superior in the British Army regards a soldier’s facial hair. These boys would never have to worry about such a transgression.

Leaving the cinema, I overheard a couple of conversations about how young the boys looked. “That shot at the end,” a daughter said to her mother, “they looked like Ben.”

A shade of reality, even humanity, is stripped from a person when we see them in black and white. It takes films like 1917 or works like Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old to remind us that the boys who died, bewildered, cold and afraid were no different from boys today.

They Shall Not Grow Old is a 2018 documentary film using colourised WWI footage. The footage is also rendered with sound and voice acting. The effect evokes greater feeling, closing the gap between us and them that has been opened by time’s passage.

An article published by the BBC titled, The teenage soldiers of World War One, details the short life of one of these boys.

Aby Bevistein was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1898 and moved to London at age three. In September 1914, he volunteered for the army, changing his surname to Harris.

Upon arriving in France, Aby quickly discovered the horrors of trench warfare. He wrote to his mother:

Dear mother, I've been in the trenches four times and come out safe. We're down the trenches for six days and then we get relieved for six days' rest. Dear mother, I do not like the trenches. We're going in again this week.

On 12 February 1916, the Germans attacked Aby’s frontline position. Suffering from shock, Aby wandered along the British lines, was arrested, and charged with desertion. His letter home downplays the severity of his situation, presumably to relieve his mother’s concerns:

Dear mother, I'm in the trenches and I was ill so I went out, and they took me to the prison and I'm in a bit of trouble now.

In March 1916, at age 17, Aby was executed, one of the 306 British soldiers executed during WWI.

Before Hollywood movies, there was the life of Napoleon and other military myth and legend to inspire young men towards the adventure, excitement and danger of the battlefield.

However, there is often an interesting contrast in the poems of soldiers before confronting conflict, and their works during and after experiencing its reality.

Two poems illustrate this contrast. First is The Soldier by Rupert Brooke.

Born in Warwickshire, England, in 1887, Brooke was educated at King’s College, Cambridge where he became a member of the literary collective of writers called The Bloomsbury Group. Key members included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes.

Rupert Brooke

Brooke’s idealistic and romanticised view of war captured the early sentiments of WWI, before the grim realities became widely understood. His early death at the age of 27 contributed to his lasting image as a symbol of a lost generation.

Riding the wave of patriotic fervour that swept Britain after the outbreak of war, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

For many, Brooke’s poems are considered a kind of propaganda. I think it’s an inaccurate term to use. In the case of Brooke, the individual creating the work is himself wrapped up in its idealistic, romantic possibilities. The propagandist is usually considered a conniving, manipulative type, aware that he is misleading the public. Here, the propagandistic nature of the poem comes from the poet’s genuine belief that war and death can be in some ways beautiful. There’s a sensitive naivety to crafting something as touching as The Soldier about the ugliest of acts.

The Soldier
By Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

A dramatic contrast to the poems of Rupert Brooke can be found in the work of Wilfred Owen. His poetry provides a grim and unflinching perspective on war, emphasizing its brutality, futility, and senselessness. In his anti-war poem, Dulce et Decorum Est (‘It is sweet and proper to die for one's country’), Owen rejects the romanticism of war that compelled so many to fight.   

Dulce et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

In our era one can watch frontline footage from current wars taking place across the globe. In doing so, we get a better understanding of what war really involves, without the editing or narratives imposed by films or our news cycle. You see the messiness, disorganisation, confusion and ultimately, the horror.   

People do not die in the kinds of heroic explosions portrayed on film, where the soldier is blasted into the air in epic fashion, cartwheeling in a mix of flame and dirt. Rather, they die sipping on air, quietly moaning.