The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy
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Charlie Connelly. The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
1 ‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’
2 ‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’
3 ‘A long, hard journey through a short, hard life’
4 ‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’
5 ‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’
6 ‘I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow’
7 ‘In the event of my death …’
8 ‘If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead’
9 ‘I was seventeen years old and already I was well acquainted with death’
10 ‘Though many brave unwritten tales, were simply told in vapour trails’
11 ‘When we got to him all his insides were out. He had a girl’s face. He was ever so young’
12 ‘A boy of eighteen, looking around at the sea of faces that seemed so assured’
13 ‘It used to make me cry sometimes to see a big man like that grovelling for a little bit of bread’
14 ‘I am troubled with my head and cannot stand the sound of the guns’
15 ‘We used to sit in the corner of the trench and think about it: we’d say, all this going on, is it worth it?’
16 ‘The farmhouse had taken the main shock of the blast, but the shack with the two girls in it had completely disappeared’
17 ‘I wasn’t scared advancing. As far as I remember there was just a blind acceptance that we were going forward and that was that’
18 ‘The surgeon couldn’t find the bullet and I was in agony, so they gave me a cup of tea and gave me heroin’
19 ‘If Edward was everyman in the First World War, equally he was every ordinary man who’d fallen in battle over the centuries’
20 ‘I felt it was a great responsibility leaving eighty women and children behind to die with nobody looking after them, but there it was’
21 ‘During that last half hour before the armistice, a corporal who was with us got shot, in that half hour, right at the end of the war, and he’d been in it since 1914’
22 ‘The ghosts of the people who never were’
Bibliography
Author’s Note
1. Sylvia
2. Rae
About the Publisher
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Title Page
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Like his siblings, Horace was sent to Drummond Road School, where he received a basic education that was fairly typical of the times: ‘It was a big school and we were well looked after by the teachers, who were very nice. I learned the three Rs, a little history and we were given talks about behaviour after school hours. We had a concert once a year for the parents.’
At the age of twelve the need to bring some money into the household meant that Horace stopped going to school full time and took a part-time job at Field’s Mill in the spinning department. He’d start at 7 a.m., finish at midday, go home for lunch and then spend the afternoon at school. All his wages went into the household, other than the sixpence he was given every Saturday.
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