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Dear all
A hundred years ago… on the Western
Front the Second Battle Of Artois, raging since May 9, ceased on June 18 (a
Friday in 1915) with the Allies gaining around three kilometres while yielding
a “German defensive victory”, apparently, as the infamous Vimy Ridge changes
hands to and fro. Casualties: French 102,000 (under Joffre), British 27,800
(under Haig), German 73,000 (under Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria).
On
the Eastern Front, the back and forth saw Austria in the ascendant against
Russia, recapturing Lemberg (June 22; now Lvov, Poland), a city they’d yielded
the previous September. Elsewhere, Italy took the left bank of the Isonzo from
Austria-Hungary (17; now part of Slovenia), Turkish forces attacked the British
coaling-station island of Perim in the Red Sea (14), and the South African Army
began an advance on Otavifontein in German South West Africa (19). And at Gallipoli,
with the initial Allied onslaught burnt out, attrition continued, with no major
action in the course of the week.
Meanwhile...
at St George’s Barracks, Malta, the thousand men of the 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers – Gallipoli-bound in due course,
though entirely unaware of the fact – continued their first spell of firearms training
(eight months into their Army lives). They included my father, Private Sam
Sutcliffe – by then in the process of converting to Signaller –
his older brother Ted (both underage volunteers, still 16 and 18 respectively in
early summer 1915), and their pals from Edmonton, north London.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, at the Malta butts down by the sea –
finally allowed live ammunition rather than wooden practice bullets – Sam got a
grip on the rudiments of firing the old long Lee-Enfield at ranges up to 900
yards, including snapshooting at 200 yards. In the course of his Signallers
group’s first few sessions he also learned to cope with the recoil so that he
no longer spent the rest of the day doubled up in pain. But in subsequent weeks
came more intricate demands from their instructors – based on the noted skills
of the British Expeditionary Force. Sam wrote:
‘The trickiest lesson of all demanded that we try to emulate
the renowned 15 rounds a minute fired by the soldiers of our standing Army –
already proven no match for German machine guns on the frontline in Belgium and
France. Each shot must still be carefully aimed, our instructors insisted.
Normally you loaded five bullets in the magazine, but for rapid fire you
inserted 10 – wooden ones at first as we tried to master the mechanics of just
getting the shots off so quickly – and fired them, then dealt with five more,
all in the space of 60 seconds. I failed time after time, as did many others,
even using dummies. How the heck would we cope with live ammunition, its
explosions, recoils, smoke and fumes?
One day, as we
Signallers struggled with rapid fire, what with the sun blazing down on our
frustrations and the general strain on nerves, we began to express our feelings
of discomfort freely, till the officer in charge, Captain Bicknell, yelled,
“You are the most foul-mouthed gang of louts it has ever been my misfortune to
command!”
While regarded as a
good sort, something of a showman and a dandy, sporting a Charlie Chaplin
moustache, the Captain did not know that the Signals chaps rather prided
themselves on being decently behaved and had only recently begun to emulate and
perhaps even improve on the swearing abilities of some real “old soldiers” they
swapped drinks with in the canteen. Thus, they felt they were becoming
old-timers themselves, but the officer’s rebuke stung, and shame brought on
milder forms of self-expression, the bs and fs fewer, damns and blasts more
frequent.
And, eventually,
they did complete their rifle-range programme – the 15 rounds a minute all
blazed away… On my card, with the final five bullets fired at 900 yards,
hitting anywhere on the target seemed tolerable, I thought. But, surprisingly,
when the instructor totted up the figures, they showed I was a “first-class”
shot, only a few points below the top level of marksmen qualified to work as
snipers when on active service.’
But if Sam could permit
his chest to puff up and his head to swell a little at this achievement – not
bad for a (secret) boy of 16, eh? – neither he nor any of his comrades took
pride in executing the other rifle skill they had to learn; one which Sam and
many others ended up vowing they would never make use of on the battlefield…
‘… between those weeks when we got our turn on the range,
the Signallers endured training in another combat function of their rifles. An
effective infantryman, it was then believed, must be able to shoot accurately
when at a distance from the enemy and then, with bayonet fixed, fight fiercely
hand to hand.
But the style of
bayonet fighting then taught caused much merriment among the troops when off
parade. It all started from a comical semi-crouching position, an unheroic
stance suggesting, some averred, a man who’d soiled his pants. To simulate
combat, little hopping forward movements were followed by similar retreats.
Thrusts and parries alike had to be executed from that preposterous
semi-crouch.
We did our best
with it, and put up the pretence required to satisfy the instructors’ test of
proficiency in this murderous occupation. The performance might have been more
convincing had we been allowed to leave the scabbards on our bayonets. But,
ordered to wield these short, sharp steel daggers unsheathed, we knew that an
over-enthusiastic movement could cause a comrade injury or even death so we
kept to our stilted, hopping about, more concerned with preserving life than
taking it. Anyway, given my lively imagination, I decided there and then that I
could never face goring a man and that I would always keep a round in the
chamber when face-to-face fighting threatened.’
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam’s Fusiliers leave their comfortable Barracks for a tented
camp handily placed beside a cemetery (rather busy in Gallipoli times) – and
the funeral band’s big, bass drummer becomes Sam’s hero…
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