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

Copyright

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      First published by HarperElement 2014

      FIRST EDITION

      © Charlie Connelly 2014

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      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

      For Edward Charles Manco

      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 …’

       8. ‘If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead’

       9. ‘I was seventeen years old and already I was well acquainted with death’

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

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

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

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

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

       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?’

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

       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’

       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’

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

       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’

       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’

       22. ‘The ghosts of the people who never were’

       Bibliography

       Author’s Note

       Exclusive sample chapter

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