I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said.

From Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. From his experience in World War I.

I still have the roll of my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are misleading. On enlistment, all over-age men had put themselves in the late thirties, and all under-age men had called themselves eighteen. But once in France, the over-age men did not mind adding on a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age as forty or over, and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry-course at the depôt?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier in Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp, and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night discussing the different seams of coal in Wales, and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical comments.

The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section. I had five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance, who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty, an offence punishable with death, but could not help it. I had seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag open for another fellow to fill. So we got him a job as orderly to a chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all boys under eighteen got combed out. Bumford and Burford were both sent to the base; but neither escaped the war. Bumford grew old enough by 1917 to be sent back to the battalion, and was killed that summer; Burford died in a bombing accident at the base-camp. Or so I was told – the fate of hundreds of my comrades in France came to me merely as hearsay.