"When we reached the German lines, our numbers were reduced from 3,000 to 600. Division covered in glory – and gore. I fell over a dead man. Got hit slightly. Felt rocky. Wrist hurting and nerves going. Iodine for wrist, rum for nerves.” -Lt. Ernest Steele, age 17, Battle of Somme, France, 1916.
Ernest Steele, the son of a middle-class box-maker in Hackney, London, joined the army after working in a factory aged 15. He was offered the chance to return to England safely, after his sargeant gathered all boys under the age of 19 and invited them to apply to go home. After a "long discussion", he chose to stay, only to go on to experience harrowing conditions in the trenches for the next 3 years, fighting in places such as Ypres, Somme and Epehy.
The boy who had turned down a ticket home three years earlier was killed by a German sniper just six weeks before the armistice.
More than 20,000 underage teenage Tommies never came home and thousands more came home broken in body and mind. They had left their homes as boys but they fought, suffered and died as men. #reality #ww1 #war #stayzero #zerofoxtrot