YOUNG SOLDIERS
All armies in the Great War used kid soldiers. In the beginning of the war the enthusiasm to join the battle was so great that young boys (and even girls) could hardly be stopped to enlist.
Recruiting Officers in all countries closed their eyes when eager children clearly under the required age - 18 years old - showed up to join their armies.
At the end of the war children were even more welcome in the ranks, as the Great Mincing Machine continued to require human bodies with an astonishing need.
Hardly trained the kids were sent to the trenches in Belgium, France, Russia and Turkey, where they mingled with the older soldiers - and died with them.
ALEC CAMPBELL
Alec Campbell was another Australian boy who lied about his age. He enlisted as a 16-year-old.
"In those days if you were big enough you were good enough", he recalled later. "They didn't really care about your age."
Alec too fought in Turkey, where his comrades nicknamed him The Kid.
He remembered an "incredible hail of bullets" on landing at Gallipoli, where he was set to work ferrying water in the trenches, sleeping in a "cold, damp hole in the ground".
Six weeks later he was too sick with enteric fever to fight and he was invalided home.
Alec Campbell died in Hobart, Australia, on 16 May 2002.
He was 103 years old
JIM MARTIN
Jim Martin, at 14 was officially the youngest Australian serviceman to die at Gallipoli, Turkey.
As so many others the boy fibbed about his age to join up. When Jim's father was rejected for military service, the 5'6" lad said: "Never mind dad, I'll go instead".
Jim landed with his battalion on Gallipoli on 8 September 1915. He wrote to his family that the Turks are "still about 70 yards away from us", and asked them not to worry about him, "as I am doing splendid over here". But on 25th October he was evacuated to a hospital ship suffering from typhoid fever caught in the trenches. He died of heart failure that evening.