1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [263]
I was absolutely staggered. They didn’t send me home, but I can’t describe what it was like staying behind in the barracks and knowing the Battalion would be going without me! Of course I didn’t know at that moment my brother had been killed. My mother had got frightened, you see – realised I was in for it too, and she wasn’t going to have that. They gave me leave to go home, and then I had to go back to the barracks, and stay there. It was awful seeing the Battalion go off. I was miserable. Really fed up. Of course the time passed and I got older and I had to go in the end. I was lucky to get back to my original battalion, but so many of them had been knocked out on the Somme by the time I joined them that if I’d gone out when the others went I might not be here now.
From the start of the war the Church Lads Brigade, like the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts, was a fruitful source of recruits and many local branches like Ralph Langley’s had joined up as a body. It was natural that the lads who had not yet reached the statutory age for military service had no desire to be left behind. They had been positively encouraged to lie their way into the Army for although all such organisations laid stress on the virtues of upright manly honesty, the ideal of service and patriotism was no less important. Even in peacetime they were trained in rifle-drill and marching, not as a means of inspiring a belligerent attitude but because the founders saw these activities as a means of banding boys together and inculcating the all-important virtues of ‘obedience, reverence, discipline and self-respect’. The Boy Scouts’ more adventurous pursuits of tracking and patrolling had not included formal military drill, but scouting was also intended to instil the spirit of patriotism and duty that would impel young men to spring to the defence of their country in time of need and it was more than a year since the War Scouts’ Defence Corps had been formed. Thousands of scouts had joined it and even twelve-year-olds were enthusiastically training in rifle shooting, signalling, entrenching, army-drill, first aid and camp cooking, and busily preparing for the day when they too would be tall enough and strong enough (if not officially old enough) to exchange the khaki drill of the Boy Scouts’ uniform for the khaki of soldier of the King. Their founder, Lieutenant-General Baden Powell, had inaugurated the scheme, with the words, ‘An efficient boy of sixteen in the event of invasion would be worth a dozen grown-up men trained to do nothing in particular.’
Since the start of the war Boy Scouts had been permitted, indeed encouraged, to wear uniform to school and to undertake a variety of patriotic duties. They were to be seen everywhere, from the hallowed corridors of Government offices where relays of boys were acting as messengers, to the forecourts of railway stations or cycling along country lanes in the self-appointed pursuit of suspicious characters who might be German spies, frequently causing annoyance to innocent citizens going about their lawful business. But the zeal of the Boy Scouts was not easily diminished. They were mainly affluent youngsters, for the uniform in which they took such pride was not cheap. The less well off were more inclined to join fraternities whose ‘uniform’ of cap and belt was more easily affordable and in recent months there had been a huge upsurge in the number of boys aged twelve to eighteen who had enrolled in all such organisations. But a universal source of inspiration for both rich and poor alike was the Boy’s Own Paper, which was avidly read, even at third or fourth hand, by almost every literate boy in the land. For thirty years