him and life in Kensal Town. His uncle Robert would have gone off to fight almost immediately, but we can only guess at how this might have affected Edward. Were they close? Robert lived in the same warren of streets, so he would probably have been a regular visitor to his sister and grandparents. Edward would have seen his uncle frequently as he grew up, but what would his thoughts have been about the war? How would he have taken the news of his uncle’s death in 1916? Would he have expected to go? Would he have tried to enlist under-age? What was the nature of discussion among his friends and neighbours? The talk around Admiral Mews – of enlistment, of the men who had already gone, of the prospects for a quick resolution to the conflict – would have been replicated in every street and among every boy of Edward’s generation. There hadn’t been an event in history at that point to unite a nation and affect its everyday life like the First World War. It permeated every county, every town, every street and every home. Nobody was unaffected.
Most of us will have an Edward Connelly in our backgrounds: a youngster born on the cusp of centuries who’d grow up to be a participant, willing or not, in the greatest war and the greatest tragedy of the modern age up until then. These lads weren’t poets, they weren’t officer material – they did nothing heroic beyond their best. They went off to war as cheerily as they could, made the best of it, had no say in its strategy or planning and just did what they were told. Many of them came home afterwards and resumed their lives; others didn’t and lie to this day in the soil of France, Belgium and further afield. These lads were raised among grimy cobbles rather than the playing fields of Eton, and there were thousands of them right across the land.
Take Admiral Terrace, for example, where the Connellys and the Christophers lived. According to the 1911 census there were twenty-nine households in Admiral Terrace containing 127 people of all ages, from elderly couples to enormous family broods crammed into the pokey rooms of eleven shabby buildings. I combed through these records for the names of men and boys who would have been of official military age during the First World War and then compared those names to any surviving military records I could find. I unearthed eight men, not including Edward, who went off to war, four of whom were killed. Two of those who died were brothers: William and John Lovell, twenty and twenty-three respectively, killed in March and August 1918. Including Edward, that’s five First World War deaths from one small North London street of eleven properties. Bear in mind how most soldiers’ records from the Great War were destroyed during the Blitz: these are just what I could find in the surviving files.
The war came to visit every street and practically every building. Everyone had a son, a father, a nephew, a godson, a son-in-law, a brother, a cousin at the Front. We all have grandfathers, great-grandfathers, even great-great-grandfathers who served, in addition to the attendant generational strata of uncles. Ordinary men, not heroes; men of whom there’s little of note: they didn’t win medals beyond the campaign ones that everyone received; they weren’t court-martialled; there’s no specific record of any acts of heroism; they were never promoted beyond the rank of private, and they didn’t expect to be. They just turned up, did their duty as best they could, smoked their cigarettes, drank their rum ration and tried to get through it.
Edward’s story isn’t unique. It’s the story of many, the story that’s in your family background as well as mine. Edward is an everyman, his experiences similar to thousands upon thousands of others who left nothing behind, no letters, no diaries, no poems. Yet some of them did leave stories behind. In order to fill in the yawning gaps in Edward’s life and war, it was time to unearth the narratives of his contemporaries, to construct the tale of all the ordinary men in the poor bloody infantry in the name of Edward Connelly. The forgotten soldier, anonymous for the best part of a century, would stand up from the decades of silence and shout on behalf of all the men like him.
I delved into archives, read yellowing letters and leafed through diaries, struggled through regimental histories and watched hours of documentaries. I listened to old recordings made years after the war, old men’s voices from broad Geordie to lilting Sussex burr, occasionally punctuated in the background by the chimes of a mantelpiece clock marking another hour passed since the horror of the trenches. Dead men’s voices now, but in my headphones they were alive, animated, chuckling, emotional, tentative, sad and forthright. Making sure that we would remember as they transported themselves in their minds from silent sitting rooms of china ornaments and antimacassars back to the mud, noise, fear and death of the Western Front. These men had seen what Edward had seen, heard what Edward had heard, feared what Edward had feared, yet they were able to tell their stories and make sure that they could still be told long after their own deaths – and longer still after the events they described.
I’d come to know well men like George Fortune, Fred Dixon, William Dann and the rest in my quest for the life of Edward Connelly and all the other forgotten soldiers.
5
‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’
When war was declared the British Army had just under 250,000 officers and men. They were backed up by just over 300,000 territorials and around 230,000 conventional reservists.
The British Expeditionary Force under Field Marshal Sir John French that crossed the Channel in August 1914 consisted of 81,000 men, including two cavalry divisions. It was, of course, all supposed to be over by Christmas, but by October the first trenches had been dug and four years of attrition on the Western Front were under way. When Christmas arrived there were nearly 270,000 British troops in France and Belgium. By the time of the German Spring Offensive of 1918, the front line, twelve miles long in the autumn of 1914, stretched from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border.
Once the stalemate had been established Lord Kitchener estimated that it could take up to three years to overcome the Germans, a lengthy war for which the British Army was utterly underprepared. He began vigorous campaigns to encourage recruitment in order to build an entire new army. In fact, there would be five Kitchener Armies, mostly comprising six divisions of twelve battalions each.
The initial reaction among the men of Britain was rampant enthusiasm: for one thing, early enlisters were generally able to choose their regiment, hence they could remain with their friends and colleagues, and for another, the wave of patriotism in the light of Blighty going to war washed thousands through the doors of the recruiting offices. Everything was done to encourage men to enlist, from poster campaigns to the creation of the ‘pals battalions’, which were raised in the belief that if groups of men from certain towns or professions could stick together the chances of mass recruitment would be greater. They were right, too: in Lancashire, for example, the Accrington Pals Battalion reached 1,000 recruits in just ten days. The intention might have been admirable, but when entire pals battalions were being all but wiped out (of the 720 Accrington Pals at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 584 were either killed, wounded or never seen again) it was leaving huge, irreplaceable holes in communities, and the idea was soon dropped.
At first, the enlistment procedure was fairly rigorous compared to how much it would relax later: you had to be between the ages of nineteen and thirty-eight, at least five foot three inches in height and have a reasonable level of fitness. If Edward had tried to join up under-age early in the war it’s likely his partial deafness would have seen him turned away.
The process was straightforward: each recruit was given a brief interview and filled out an attestation form which, when signed by both the recruiting officer and the recruit, committed the latter to serve in the army for the duration of the war. He then swore an oath of allegiance before an officer, underwent a medical examination, another officer countersigned his approval and the man was officially a ‘Soldier subject to the King’s Regulation’. He was given a shilling (the famous king’s shilling) and either handed a railway pass to a training camp or told to go home and await the call-up to begin his training.
George
