The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy

The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy
Charlie Connelly

Bestselling author Charlie Connelly returns with a First World War memoir of his great uncle, Edward Connelly, who was an ordinary boy sent to fight in a war the likes of which the world had never seen.But this is not just his story; it is the story of all the young forgotten soldiers who fought and bravely died for their countryThe Forgotten Soldier tells the story of Private Edward Connelly, aged 19, killed in the First World War a week before the Armistice and immediately forgotten, even, it seems, by his own family.Edward died on exactly the same day, and as part of the same military offensive, as Wilfred Owen. They died only a few miles apart and yet there cannot be a bigger contrast between their legacies. Edward had been born into poverty in west London on the eve of the twentieth century, had a job washing railway carriages, was conscripted into the army at the age of eighteen and sent to the Western Front from where he would never return.He lies buried miles from home in a small military cemetery on the outskirts of an obscure town close to the French border in western Belgium. No-one has ever visited him.Like thousands of other young boys, Edward’s life and death were forgotten.By delving into and uncovering letters, poems and war diaries to reconstruct his great uncle’s brief life and needless death; Charlie fills in the blanks of Edward’s life with the experiences of similar young men giving a voice to the voiceless. Edward Connelly’s tragic story comes to represent all the young men who went off to the Great War and never came home.This is a book about the unsung heroes, the ordinary men who did their duty with utmost courage, and who deserve to be remembered.

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Copyright (#u6cf9eb80-3e39-57e4-9fb8-67f6c627632c)

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Charlie Connelly 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Background photograph © Imperial War Museum

Charlie Connelly asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780005784628

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007584635

Version: 2014-10-08

Dedication (#u6cf9eb80-3e39-57e4-9fb8-67f6c627632c)

For Edward Charles Manco

Contents

Cover (#u631c2a52-9668-58a9-8b31-aed1df32ea3e)

Title Page (#ulink_e313e814-a381-5963-bed8-85b8a1ae1052)

Copyright (#ulink_e2bda409-00c1-546e-b50d-52845d145fd1)

Dedication (#ulink_2e98b80c-58aa-55a8-8ad7-f77a81a1169a)

Map (#litres_trial_promo)

1. ‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’ (#ulink_8aefad49-cb33-50f6-affa-f2b08b277497)

2. ‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’ (#ulink_f2e81a4e-103b-5f91-9493-f524acb152cf)

3. ‘A long, hard journey through a short, hard life’ (#ulink_3ec01525-871e-5afe-b3ba-462f3e365cf6)

4. ‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’ (#ulink_84bf640e-96cb-5eec-b208-7c73da402d44)

5. ‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’ (#ulink_a734cfb0-679d-5ae6-8e31-aa65ae8a34a2)

6. ‘I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow’ (#ulink_7b624582-651e-5d24-b361-e1caa7f46a8e)

7. ‘In the event of my death …’ (#ulink_e6d8af23-7f05-58a2-91b8-6cc121c91288)

8. ‘If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead’ (#ulink_a49c70f1-ca1b-57d0-a2f5-974012f11e79)

9. ‘I was seventeen years old and already I was well acquainted with death’ (#litres_trial_promo)

10. ‘Though many brave unwritten tales, were simply told in vapour trails’ (#litres_trial_promo)

11. ‘When we got to him all his insides were out. He had a girl’s face. He was ever so young’ (#litres_trial_promo)

12. ‘A boy of eighteen, looking around at the sea of faces that seemed so assured’ (#litres_trial_promo)

13. ‘It used to make me cry sometimes to see a big man like that grovelling for a little bit of bread’ (#litres_trial_promo)

14. ‘I am troubled with my head and cannot stand the sound of the guns’ (#litres_trial_promo)

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?’ (#litres_trial_promo)

16. ‘The farmhouse had taken the main shock of the blast, but the shack with the two girls in it had completely disappeared’ (#litres_trial_promo)

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’ (#litres_trial_promo)

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’ (#litres_trial_promo)

19. ‘If Edward was everyman in the First World War, equally he was every ordinary man who’d fallen in battle over the centuries’ (#litres_trial_promo)

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’ (#litres_trial_promo)