Soldiers: Fighting Men's Lives, 1901-2001 - Hardcover

Philip Ziegler was born in 1929 and was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford. He then joined the Diplomatic Service and served in Vientiane, Paris, Pretoria and Bogotá before resigning to join the publisher William Collins, where he was editorial director for more than fifteen years. His books include biographies of Osbert Sitwell, King William IV, Melbourne, Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Mountbatten and King Edward VIII.

Chapter 1

albert alexandre

It would be hard to imagine a less promising upbringing than that of Albert Alexandre. He was born in the Channel Islands, in the little Jersey town of Longueville, on 6 October 1901. The population of Jersey had been almost entirely Norman French until the early nineteenth century, when an influx from the British Isles began. By 1901, though the British element had grown substantially, the majority of the islanders still used a patois incomprehensible to English speakers and likely to cause confusion to the French as well. Albert's Catholic father, however, was an immigrant from France; his mother was born in Jersey but came from English stock. Their children spoke mainly English at home but were fluent in French; they hardly attempted to grapple with the local dialect.

Albert was the youngest of four children but his brother and two sisters were all considerably older and had left home by the time he reached the age of six. His father was a general labourer who spent much of his time in forestry work; money was extremely short but the family was never in need and Albert had enough to eat and was adequately clothed. Then, shortly after his sixth birthday, his mother fell ill and was removed to hospital. Within a few weeks she was dead, Albert thinks of a tumour on the brain. His father followed a few months later, when a tree which he was felling crashed on top of him. Albert knows nothing about the circumstances of the accident: perhaps grief at his wife's death had weakened his father's will to live; perhaps worry or lack of sleep slowed the speed of his reactions. His son found himself an orphan. None of his siblings had a home in which he could take refuge. He had one uncle living in Jersey but he was unable or unwilling to make room for him; Albert was consigned to the orphanage.

The "Industrial School," as this institution was optimistically entitled, provided shelter for some 120 boys. "It wasn't really a school at all," Alexandre remembers. "I wasn't educated there. I learnt how to read and write a little, that sort of thing, but I never touched arithmetic." There were only two teachers who were remotely concerned with education in the more liberal sense of the word; otherwise the emphasis was entirely on technical training. There was a tailoring master and a shoemaker master: any boy leaving the orphanage, it was hoped, would have acquired at least the rudiments of a trade. But though the surroundings were dour and the ethos utilitarian, the boys were not Oliver Twists oppressed by some latter-day Mr. Bumble. "It was a really good place," Alexandre insists. "They were very kind to you." The food was adequate if sparse; it was neither the time nor the place for displays of affection but the exiguous staff were concerned about the boys' welfare and did their best to ensure that they were happy as well as healthy.

He stayed at the orphanage until he was nearly twelve, during which time he scarcely saw any members of his family or ventured far beyond the grounds of the institution. Then the elder of his two sisters, who had married a farmer's son and lived in St. Peter Port in Guernsey, volunteered to take in her little brother. She could not afford to provide any further education for him, but at least he would have a home and be living with relations.

Albert left the orphanage without regret but without bitterness-bitterness seems, indeed, to have been unknown to him at any time; the singular sweetness of his disposition defied every brickbat that fate might fling at him. He at once looked for work and found it in the local brewery, washing bottles and occasionally filling them with beer. He had no wish to drink the stuff himself, but his sister deplored the temptation that was being put in his way and felt that a brewery was no place for a twelve-year-old boy. Instead, she found him a job in a market garden, where he washed pots and performed other menial tasks in the winter and picked flowers for export in the summer. It was hard and uninspiring work, ill-rewarded too, but Albert always did his best to perform whatever duty was imposed on him and it would never have occurred to him that he might be qualified for something more exacting and better paid.

Then, in 1913, his brother-in-law joined the Army and was posted for his training to the neighbouring island of Alderney. Albert's sister soon joined him there and Albert followed in their wake. He lodged in St. Anne's with an elderly lady, who loved him like a son and whom he came to consider almost as his mother. His first job was on a farm, in fact little more than a smallholding, but though he enjoyed the work the owner could afford to pay him only a pittance. For himself he would have been satisfied-throughout his life, what he was doing seemed far more important to him than the money he earned by it-but he knew that his landlady was making very little money out of him, was perhaps even losing, and he wanted to pay her more. The principal source of employment in Alderney was the quarries run by the Channel Island Granite Company and soon Albert was employed by them as a driller. With the outbreak of the First World War many of the Company's workers joined up and left the island. Albert was still only thirteen, but he was tall and strong and looked considerably older. Strictly speaking he should not have been allowed to handle explosives until he was eighteen but in wartime nobody was too fussy about the regulations and within a few months he was carrying out blasting work as if he was a man.

At first the war did not impinge on his life, but by the time he was fifteen he looked so mature that people began to ask him why he was not fighting for his country. One night a soldier stationed in Alderney accused him of shirking his duty. "And what are you doing out of the Front on a cushy island like this?" Albert retorted, but later the same evening he asked himself whether perhaps he should enlist. Restlessness, a wish to see the world, a craving for adventure, were as strong as patriotism among his motives but his brother and several of his friends were already in the Army and a feeling that he should do his bit by joining them was an element in his thinking.

At the age of fifteen and eleven months, Albert Alexandre took himself to the recruiting centre in Alderney and volunteered to join the Army. Though lying did not come easily to him he had prepared himself to claim to be much older than he was. He need not have worried; the question of his age was never mentioned. In the summer of 1917 the war had reached its most desperate stage. The United States had entered the war but any substantial help from the other side of the Atlantic still seemed a distant prospect. On the Eastern Front the Russians had been routed. The Allied High Command concluded that an all-out assault must be mounted if an overwhelming German offensive were to be pre-empted. Recruits were urgently needed for the Western Front, and provided a volunteer was not obviously a child he would be welcomed with alacrity. Alexandre was despatched to Guernsey to become a soldier.

He had wanted to follow his brother into the Royal Artillery but the recruiting sergeant told him that the Guernsey Light Infantry was in dire need of recruits and urged him to join his local regiment. Obligingly he agreed. The Guernsey Militia, as it had originally been styled, was a highly respectable and antique body whose oldest existing ordinance dated from 1546 and provided that haquebutes must be kept in good order and les boulvers (earthworks) properly maintained. Alexandre found that the new intake consisted largely of Irishmen who had been resident in the Channel Islands or of recruits to the North Staffordshire Regiment who had been drafted in to make up numbers; he preferred to consort with these foreigners rather than the native Guernseymen, whose patois he could hardly understand. He found that the sergeants knew their jobs and were firm but fair. The senior officers were equally acceptable-"mostly gentlemen, ex-militia and that sort of thing." It never occurred to men like Alexandre to question the higher strategy. Siegfried Sassoon pictured an affable general greeting the troops as they went up to the Front:

"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both with his plan of attack.

Alexandre was Harry and Jack, and though some of his regimental officers may have joined Sassoon in cursing the General's staff "for incompetent swine," he had no such feelings himself. His only reservations were about the younger officers who were frightened by their new responsibilities and tried to ensure that nothing would go wrong by fussing endlessly over trifles and bullying those under them: "They didn't really know how to handle men."

Seven weeks' basic training in Guernsey were followed by a move to Rouen at the end of October 1917, where training continued six or seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and sometimes overnight as well. Reinforcements were desperately needed to confront the big German push that it was feared was coming, and hardly a moment could be spared for rest or recreation. For all Alexandre knew or cared he might have been in Timbuctoo; he had neither time, energy nor inclination to get to know the country and its inhabitants: "When I was in France I did what I was told I had to do and that was that. Where I was didn't interest me whatsoever." Nor was he told, or even concerned, about the progress of the war. While still a civilian he had been influenced by official propaganda presenting the Germans as brutal barbarians but once he was enlisted this was spared him; he just got on with his work day by day and waited with some apprehension for the action that could not lie too far ahead. The actual training caused him few problems. He was among the fittest of the recruits and proved adept with rifle and bayonet. Because he was used to...