Tim Lynch will be at Winsford Library and Upton Library on Tuesday 4th March talking about his book, They Did Not Grow Old: Teenage Conscripts on the Western Front, 1918.
Looking beyond the war as portrayed by poets and playwrights, Tim Lynch tells the story of Britain’s true Unknown Soldiers – the teenage conscripts who won the war only to be forgotten by history. These were not the naïve recruits of 1914 who believed it would all be over by Christmas, but young men who had grown up in wartime – men who knew about the trenches, the gas and the industrialised slaughter, but who, when their time came, answered their country’s call anyway. For the first time, following the experiences of a typical reinforcement draft, this book explores what turned men so often dismissed as ‘shirkers’ into a motivated, efficient and professional army, but it also reminds us that in the cemeteries of France and Flanders, behind every headstone is a personal story.