Free My Brother's Keeper by Tony Bradman Page B

he found himself hoping it had been the same for Captain Johnson. But then nobody deserved to die in filth and agony, not even Mad Jack.
    â€˜The two men who brought me here heard it,’ he said. ‘They told a major and he told the military police, so I don’t understand how you can say I’m free to go.’
    â€˜You have a trump card to play – your age. Oh yes, it was fine to sign up lots of brave under-age boys at the beginning, but they’re getting killed and parents are kicking up a stink. So now the Army wants rid of you all. I’ve already spoken to Colonel Craig, and he says the choice to go or stay is yours. If it was up to me I’d have you out of here and your way back to Blighty in the next few minutes.’
    â€˜But the choice is mine?’ asked Alfie. ‘And I won’t be court-martialled if I stay?’
    â€˜No, you’re safe,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘The Colonel has other things on his mind.’
    Alfie closed his eyes and thought about the journey home, the march to the rail-head, the train full of soldiers, the ferry, another packed train into London, seeing his mum and dad and his brothers and sisters. Then he thought about the new soldiers who would be coming to replace those who had died. The men who would need someone to take care of them just the way Alfie’s mates had taken care of him.
    It was the easiest choice he would ever have to make.

Historical Note
    There were many boy soldiers like Alfie in the First World War – or The Great War, as it was called until the Second World War followed it 20 years later. Thousands of boys lied about their ages to enlist, some as young as 14. Before the war the minimum age for joining the Army was officially 18, and you had to be 19 to be on active service, but there had long been a tradition of recruiting sergeants and officers allowing themselves to be ‘fooled’ by boys eager to join up. In 1914 and 1915, the early years of the war, huge numbers of men rushed to enlist, and those doing the recruiting were not likely to turn away enthusiastic volunteers, even if they were clearly very young indeed.
    Of course, few of those who were volunteering to fight knew what war was like, and nobody understood what ‘modern’ weapons – heavy artillery, machineguns and poison gas, the first true weapon of mass destruction – could do. The soldiers who faced each other on the Western Front in France and Belgium found themselves in a truly horrific situation. Eight and a half million were killed, nearly a million of them from Great Britain and its then empire. All the things Alfie sees and experiences in the story were commonplace during the war, and were extensively written about afterwards. The trenches and no-man’s land were full of the dead, rats scampered under the men’s feet, the food supplied by the Army was often scanty or unpleasant or simply failed to arrive. And thousands upon thousands of men died because of the mistakes or poor decisions of their commanders, while to begin with those at home knew almost nothing of what was really going on.
    There was certainly opposition to the war from the beginning – many men refused to serve and were known as ‘conscientious objectors’. But the appalling numbers of the dead and wounded soon began to have an impact on their families and communities. The turning point came at the Battle of the Somme. On the morning of 1st July 1916, 30,000 British soldiers were killed in a ‘Big Push’, and many more were wounded. Opposition began to grow, at home andamong the officers and men themselves. Someone like Lieutenant Reynolds might even have gone so far as to make a protest in the same way as Siegfried Sassoon, a lieutenant and one of the famous poets of the war. He threw a medal he had been awarded for bravery into the River Mersey while he was on leave, and refused to fight. He did go back, although only after