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

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’ (#litres_trial_promo)

22. ‘The ghosts of the people who never were’ (#litres_trial_promo)

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1

‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’ (#u6cf9eb80-3e39-57e4-9fb8-67f6c627632c)

I didn’t know it at the time but the silence on the other end of the line was the silence of nearly a century.

I’d been researching the family tree and was proving to be barely competent as a beginner genealogist. That said, I’d somehow managed to barge my clumsy way back through the records as far as the beginning of the twentieth century, and I was on the phone to my dad to update him on some of the things I’d found.

‘… So, yes, North Kensington was where your grandparents were living at the time, just by Ladbroke Grove,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ I added, almost as an afterthought, ‘and I’ve also found your uncle Edward who was killed in the First World War.’

Silence.

‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ said the quiet voice at the other end of the line.

Private Edward Charles John Connelly of the 10th Battalion, Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment was killed in Flanders on 4 November 1918. He was nineteen years old. Edward was my grandfather’s elder brother, my father’s uncle, and here was my father telling me that he didn’t even know he’d had an uncle Edward.

How could it be that my dad, who was given the middle name Edward when he was born more than two decades after Edward Connelly’s death, had never been told about his own uncle? Dad had always told me that his father, who was barely sixteen years old when the Great War ended, had lied about his age and enlisted, but never spoke about what he experienced. To think that included the actual existence of his brother, however, seemed an extraordinary thing.

But then, my grandfather’s reticence was not unusual. It’s something you hear quite often about men of that generation: how the things they saw and experienced had been so traumatising that they’d compartmentalised their memories and sent them away to somewhere in the furthest wispy caverns of the mind, never to emerge again. My grandfather was to all intents and purposes still a child during the war, yet he’d been to a place about as close to hell on earth as anyone could imagine. Is it any wonder that he wasn’t chatting amiably away about it at the kitchen table while filling in his pools coupon? Maybe in there, enmeshed among the memories and experiences that he’d closed away for ever, was his own brother who’d gone off to war and never come home. Maybe he’d felt some kind of survivor guilt – that the boy who really had no business being there in the first place had returned but his big brother never did, never had the chance to marry and have a family, to have a long and busy life and leave a legacy of memories and experience that would succeed him for generations.

Maybe this was how Edward Connelly fell between the cracks of history and the fissures of memory to lie forgotten in the Belgian mud for the best part of a century. Perhaps this is how the silence fell over a boy sent off to war, to die in a strange country at the arse-end of a horrendous conflict that was effectively all over, pending official confirmation from a bunch of paunchy bigwigs with fountain pens in a French railway carriage a week later. The mystery of the forgotten soldier in the family history was one that would come to intrigue me more and more.

Of all the pointless deaths of the 1914–18 conflict, Edward Connelly’s seems more pointless than most. The war on the Western Front was all but over, and the armies were effectively going through the motions. By 4 November 1918 the outcome was beyond doubt: the Germans had gambled everything on their spring offensive earlier in the year and, despite making significant territorial gains, had been forced back way beyond their original lines and all but collapsed. Morale at home and on the Front had imploded. The money was running out. The game was up. The last couple of weeks before the armistice were pretty much token efforts at attack and defence, largely spent with the Allies chasing the retreating Germans across the Belgian countryside towards Germany.

One of those token efforts killed a token soldier: Private Edward Connelly, a nineteen-year-old railway-carriage washer from West London.

I knew nothing about him or the circumstances of his death, but it all seemed so pointless and unfair and I wanted to know more. I tried to find out as much as I could about Edward Connelly to fill in the uncle-shaped hole in my dad’s life, but it soon became clear there really wasn’t much to go on. There was a birth certificate dated 25 April 1899. I found a baptism record. He appeared on the censuses for 1901 and 1911 as a two-year-old and a twelve-year-old living in North Kensington in London. There was an entry in ‘Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914–1919’ and a record of his grave at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. And that was it; that was all I could find.

There isn’t even a service record for him covering his time in the 10th Queen’s. These are often full of extraordinary detail, from the soldier’s physical appearance to their medical records and accounts of breaches of discipline and their attendant punishments, but around two thirds of these individual soldier files from the First World War were destroyed during the Blitz. Edward’s was one of them. The forgotten soldier was doing a flawless job of being forgotten.

Beyond these scant pieces of information Edward Connelly left nothing behind when he fell in the Flanders mud that cold November day in 1918, and within a generation all those who had known him and could remember him were dead. It was almost as if he died with them a second time.

As time passed I grew more and more uncomfortable about the way Edward had vanished from history. I began to feel ashamed that we didn’t know who he was, and angry that his life had been snuffed out in such a pointless way – a week before the armistice, for heaven’s sake. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the war itself, at least if he’d died at Passchendaele or the Somme there would be a sense that he had been fighting for something. The date of his death just made things worse: not only had he been forgotten, but his death had been for nothing.

Having rediscovered him, I began to feel responsible for his legacy, or lack of it. I wanted to find out more about his life and how, where and why he died. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission he was buried at the Harlebeke New British Cemetery near Courtrai (the French spelling of modern Kortrijk), close to the Franco-Belgian border. What was he doing there? Where had he been? How did a teenager from an Irish immigrant family in the poorest part of North-West London come to be a private in the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment and die in a futile battle in the final twitching throes of the First World War?

I resolved to find out, but given the dearth of records available I wasn’t just beginning from a standing start, I was practically standing on one leg.

For one thing, although I studied history and have written about it for a living, I’d never been remotely interested in war or military history. At school we’d covered the causes of the First World War in our history lessons, but given that I had spent most of them alongside Tim Bennett at the back of the class drawing recreations of the weekend’s better First Division goals in our exercise books, not many of those causes actually went in.

One November an elderly maths teacher who had fought in the Second World War addressed our morning assembly on the last Friday before Remembrance Sunday. It was one of the rare occasions that we all listened, as he described how if every British man killed in the First World War marched two by two in through one door of the building and out through the other at regular military marching pace, twenty-four hours a day without break, it would take three weeks for every dead man to pass through. That was something that stuck.

Studying the war poets piqued a little interest. We were handed a collection called Up the Line to Death, which made an impression on me in that I could remember some of Wilfred Owen’s famous lines, mainly because they struck me as so anti-war in sentiment. I had no idea at the time, of course, but Owen was killed on the same day as my great-uncle, a few miles further south.

I knew names like the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele but wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d laughed at Blackadder Goes Forth and been struck dumb by its poignant final scenes. I’d buy a poppy if I saw one and observe the minute’s silence in front of the television every Armistice Day, but that was about it.

In Sarajevo I stood on the exact spot from where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots into Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia that killed them both and pushed over the first domino in the chain that led to the largest conflict the world had ever seen, and found it strangely underwhelming. I was more interested in the scars left by the most recent Balkan conflict, which were still evident all around the city, from the shrapnel spatters in the plasterwork of just about every building to the red resin Sarajevo Roses in the streets that filled the star-shaped shell scars from the artillery that had rained down on the city during the siege of the early nineties. This had been a war from my lifetime, one I’d seen on news bulletins as it happened. The First World War seemed so distant; there was nothing in Sarajevo to evoke it for me. Even as I stood on the noisy, fumy Bosnian street corner where it had all started, the First World War remained purely one-dimensional, tangential at best to everything in which I was actually interested.

Stumbling inadvertently across my great-uncle Edward changed that. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, what he might have been through and about how unfair it was that he’d been entirely forgotten. I found myself feeling angry at the pathetic, pointless waste of a young life, and guilty that he’d been expunged from the family narrative. With the deaths of its last survivors still comparatively recent, it’s not long since the First World War passed from memory into history, yet for me it was trying to move in completely the other direction.

I was confused as to why Edward’s death might be affecting me more than any of the others that I found in my family research. There were a number of early deaths equally as tragic and untimely: I’m descended from dock workers, with all the attendant accidents and disease that went with that line of work and the way of life that went with it. I had ancestors killed on quaysides and dying young from diseases and medical conditions that are entirely preventable today: my grandmother’s tuberculosis, my uncle Eric, who died from gastroenteritis at the age of eight months in the 1930s, surely equally as poignant, equally as tragic?

But Uncle Edward’s death in battle came to dominate everything else I’d found. Why should death in combat be any different from other untimely Victorian and Edwardian demise? Why should that be?

War, whether necessary or not, is humanity at its worst. Sometimes it can bring out the best in humanity: compassion, courage and selflessness, but the unimaginable horrors thrown up by the arrogance of certainty are an awful way to resolve awful situations. I can’t bear conflict of any kind. I’ve not been in a fist fight since a disagreement over a cup of tea with Gary Wayman when I was fourteen, and even then I’m not sure he noticed. Maybe Edward Connelly’s death stood out because war is such an alien concept to me, and I was imposing myself on his experience, wondering how I’d have coped, if I’d have coped. The thought of having to create enough hate and aggression to be able to kill a person is a bizarre one – even if it is based on the grounds that if you don’t kill them they’re probably going to kill you – especially if, like me, you’re a yellow-bellied scaredy-cat. And maybe there lies the rub.

When I tried to imagine what he’d been through I was trying to imagine myself in that situation: enlisting, being issued with a uniform, being trained and turned into a weapon of war, travelling out of the country for the first time ever, travelling out of London for the first time ever, being thrown into a war that had already been raging for the best part of four years, being among total strangers in a way of life and a daily routine that was completely alien to me, the subsuming of the individual into the whole, the constant threat of imminent, random death from a shell, a gas attack, sniper fire, a machine gun while advancing through no man’s land, a bayonet in a trench raid – even drowning in a flooded shell hole.

It was me I was imagining there, not Edward Connelly. It was me I was displacing from a comfortable everyday life of DVD box sets, the corner shop, Charlton Athletic, paying the council tax and eating takeaway noodles in front of Coronation Street into the world of mud, trenches, lice, Woodbines, gas masks, artillery shells, bully beef and all-pervading death. My life, my circumstances and my character were not remotely like-for-like comparable with his. Not even close.

The less I knew about Edward the more determined I became to find out. Finding the location of his grave made him slightly less of an enigma. He was out there. There was a headstone with his name on it. There was something tangible of Edward Connelly beyond a scan of a census return on a computer screen. He had left something behind, even if it was just his name chiselled into a piece of Portland stone over a box of his bones in a country that’s not his own.

It struck me that it was unlikely to the point of near certainty that anybody had ever visited his grave. He’d lain there in the Belgian soil for nearly a century, alone, forgotten and unvisited, his grave meticulously tended by committed and dedicated strangers to whom he was just a name among names. His background was one of extreme poverty: his parents would never have been able to afford to visit Belgium even if they’d had the opportunity. It might never even have crossed their minds. All his mother had was a devastating telegram, his posthumous campaign medals and her memories. No funeral, no grave to tend, none of the accepted rituals that go with the death of a loved one, and that’s even before you consider that no parent should ever have to bury their child.

Edward Connelly is a shadow flitting on the very edge of history. He left behind no letters, no diaries, no poems, no sketches – nothing. There are no anecdotes or testimonies to his character or appearance, no eulogies to the cheekiness of his smile, the twinkle of his eyes, the quickness of his wit, the kindness of his heart. There’s no clue as to whether he spent his Saturday afternoons at Queen’s Park Rangers or took the bus to Lord’s cricket ground. We don’t know if he liked a drink, jiggled baby cousins on his knee, argued with his father, brought his mother flowers when he could, tickled his younger siblings until they begged him to stop, kicked a football around the streets with his friends, took my grandfather catching tadpoles by the canal, exalted in the freshness of a spring day, liked to sing songs after a couple of drinks, was perennially late for work, had a sweetheart or paid sixpence at the music halls to hear Vesta Tilley whenever he could. Was he known as Eddie, or Ted, or Ed, or something else altogether? We’ll never know because he’s gone. All of him is gone. He’s a name written on a handful of official documents and chiselled into a gravestone. Edward Connelly has no legacy.

I have nothing in common with him beyond a surname and the fact that his middle name matches my first name. I don’t know why it troubled me so much that my great uncle had been forgotten, why I could still hear that silence on the end of the phone whenever I thought about him. It was the silence that troubled me most, because it seemed it could never be broken.

When it became clear that he really had left nothing behind, my increasing desire to find out more about Edward Connelly forced me to take a different approach, an approach that led to two resolutions. If I couldn’t find Edward’s own personal story then I’d try to piece it together in other ways. I’d find other people’s stories. I’d seek out letters and diaries of lads like Edward, ordinary young men born at the twilight of a century and thrust into extraordinary circumstances while they were barely coming to terms with adulthood. Lads who never rose through the ranks, who didn’t write inspiring stanzas that would fill anthologies for decades to come, who in most cases did nothing special except survive. Lads who would have known the reality of the dugout, the duckboard, the puttee, the mess tin, the endless parade ground drilling, the channel crossing, the glare of the Very light, the whistle of the incoming shell, the banter, the songs, the latrines, the zing of a passing bullet, the ceaseless rain, the cloying mud and the constant presence of death.

I might not get to know Edward Connelly personally, but if I could get to know the lads who were there and left their memories behind then maybe, just maybe, I might know something of Edward Connelly, the life he led and the war he endured and almost survived.

In addition I wanted to make amends, probably to assuage my own wishy-washy feelings of guilt as much as anything. But I sincerely believed that the family owed Edward something for the near century of silence. When I found the Harlebeke New British Cemetery on a map I knew exactly what I had to do. I’d set off to walk from his birthplace in West London and keep walking until I reached his grave in Flanders, making a literal journey through his life and his war. A pilgrimage of sorts, and a penance, I suppose. From my home in London I could board a couple of trains and be at his graveside in barely three hours, but that felt far too easy; he deserved more of an effort than that. If I was going to be Edward’s first ever visitor I’d have to put in a bit more work than tapping my card details into the Eurostar website and booking a hotel. By making the journey from his cradle to his grave – on foot, out on the road, free of distraction – I’d have time to think about him and his war: crossing the channel as he did and seeing the horizons he saw, the towns he passed through and, finally, the grave where he lies.

From archive to footpath, I was going in search of Edward Connelly, the forgotten soldier.

2

‘The boy from Soapsuds Island’ (#u6cf9eb80-3e39-57e4-9fb8-67f6c627632c)

Edward Connelly was born on 25 April 1899, on the cusp of the twentieth century and in the twilight of the Victorian age. Indeed, as Edward drew his first breath, final tweaks were being made to the plans to mark Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations: in high streets across the land men sawed and hammered away on massive triumphal arches to be covered in flowers and draped with flags and banners.

Elsewhere, the new, £27,000 Palace Pier in Brighton was undergoing its last lick of paint ahead of its grand opening a few weeks hence. Aston Villa and Liverpool were neck and neck at the top of the Football League as the season entered its final weeks; W.G. Grace was a few weeks away from playing his final Test match.