The Forgotten Soldier (Part 1 of 3): He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy

By 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 country

The 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9780007589531

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Copyright

HarperElement

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9780005784628

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007589531

Version: 2014-10-08

Dedication

For Edward Charles Manco

MAP.pdf

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

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 …’

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1

‘A shadow flitting on the very edge of history’

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