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The youngest authenticated British soldier in World War I was twelve-year-old Sidney Lewis, who fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Lewis' claim was not authenticated until 2013. In World War I, a large number of young boys joined up to serve as soldiers before they were eighteen, the legal age to serve in the army.
At the beginning of 1914 the British Army had a reported strength of 710,000 men including reserves, of which around 80,000 were professional soldiers ready for war. By the end of the First World War almost 25 percent of the total male population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had joined up, over five million men.
The last veteran who served in the trenches was Harry Patch (British Army), who died on 25 July 2009, aged 111. The last Central Powers veteran, Franz Künstler of Austria-Hungary, died on 27 May 2008 at the age of 107. The total number of participating personnel is estimated by the Encyclopædia Britannica at 65,038,810.
A fifth of the army's personnel were aged under 18, as were a quarter of the FMLN. [64] In a group of 278 former FMLN child soldiers interviewed for a study, the average age of recruitment was 10 years. [64] The large majority of child recruits on both sides were living in poverty, and had been largely deprived of formal education. [64]
This is a table of the number of recruits for the British Army during the First World War, 1914–1918. [1] [2] All recruits were volunteers until January 1916, when men were recruited under the Derby Scheme and as conscripts following the Military Service Act 1916. From July 1917, all recruits were counted as Conscripts.
Along with rapid promotion, the war also noticeably lowered the age of battalion commanding officers. In 1914, they were aged over 50, while the average age for a battalion commanding officer in the BEF between 1917 and 1918 was 28. [53] By this stage, it was official policy that men over 35 were no longer eligible to command battalions. [54]
From 1894, recruitment into the new part-time military reserves raised under the 1892 acts had originally followed the post-1850s practices in England for the Militia of the United Kingdom, in which soldiers voluntarily enlisted for six years (embodied for the duration of wars or emergencies, or otherwise only for annual training), and the ...
The minimum recruitment age is 16 years, [35] after the end of GCSEs, although soldiers may not serve on operations below 18 years. As of November 2018 [update] , the maximum age to enlist as a Regular soldier is 35 years and 6 months, and for Reserve soldiers, the maximum age is 49.