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Dear all
A hundred years ago… today, August
16, a Monday then, a German U-boat shelled two villages near Whitehaven,
Cumbria. And the sea featured heavily in the week’s diverse action including
the first “authenticated” instance of a German submarine firing on a ship’s
crew in open boats (21st, one dead; part of a series of abuses/rewritings of
rules of engagement by both sides), and a major battle between German and
Russian squadrons in the Gulf of Riga (19th; with British submarines present,
one of which torpedoed and severely damaged the German cruiser Moltke).
On
land, while the French made some modest advances on the Western Front amid the
general bloody attrition, the Russian Army’s extraordinary reach/stretched
resources is evident from assorted timeline reports of their continuing retreat
on the Eastern Front (in Poland 19th/20th losing Novo-Georgevsk, 22nd
Osovyets), alongside successes against the Ottoman Empire in taking Kep in
north Persia and Olti in east Turkey (both 16th).
In
Gallipoli, though, after the previous week’s terrible defeats in the Battles of
Krithia Vineyard, Sari Bair and Chunuk Bair, the Allies – under a new commander
Major-General Beauvoir De Lisle, after Lieut-Gen Frederick Stopford’s August 15
dismissal for ineptitude (and never stepping ashore) – tried one last (tragic)
heave. The Battles Of Scimitar Hill and Hill 60, begun on the 21st, sought to
finally link the beachheads at Anzac and Suvla Bay. But Turkish troops beat
back attacks which cost 5,300 British casualties, Anzac/Gurkha 1,100, and an
unknown number of Turks. Next week, a century ago, saw the very last Allied
attempt at progress in Gallipoli…
Meanwhile...
after months training in Malta the thousand men of the 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, are coming to the end of this
extended phase of training while feeling guilty/thanking their stars about
still being remote from the hazards of any front line so long after they
volunteered in September, 1914. Among them, my father, lately promoted to Lance Corporal
Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, his brother Ted (still
secretly underage at 17 and 18), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, have
boarded the SS Ivernia in Valletta’s
Grand Harbour/Marsamxett. To sail
where? they wonder… They’ve seen the Gallipoli casualties arriving at the
military hospitals on Malta… and watched the funerals (see FSS blog 50, June
21, 2015)…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, we left Sam gazing from ship to
harbour, recalling how he’d loved Malta and lived all his homesickness in his
sleep via dreams of home – a perfect balance, rather than anything upsetting.
Since
the Battalion’s arrival on the island in early February, the experience of his
first ever foreign country had leapt and bounded his youth onwards apace. The
lad whose previous experience comprised suburban poverty consoled by the
fellowships of school, Boy Scouts, church choir and then, from the age of 14, a
couple of years as an office dogsbody in the City suddenly encountered…
dark-skinned people, a language he didn’t understand, blazing heat,
agricultural peasants, the knockabout life of barracks and tents, military
discipline and learning how to kill with bullet and bayonet… and sweeter exotica
the poor boys on soldier’s pay could suddenly afford such as beer, wine and horse-drawn
buggy/karozzin rides, gratis joys
like swimming naked in warm sea… and embarrassed visits to the Strada della
Fontana Red Light District (where Sam kept his innocence, though many didn’t,
or had none to preserve).
Well,
he’d loved it, nearly all of it, and he wanted to relish whathe’d seen and what
he’d learned one more time:
‘Looking across the water at the familiar scene as the Ivernia moved slowly away from the quay, I felt
reluctant to take my eyes off the place I loved; while I could still gaze
shoreward, I wanted to remember everything…
Bunches of oval
green grapes, sugar melons whose dark-green skins contrasted with the sweet,
pink flesh inside…
Lying on the
quayside at St Paul’s all afternoon, watching baby swordfishes swimming about,
then walking back through the village and people on their steps saying “Buona
sera” and me saying it back to them – I felt a different person, a man, when I
got away from the Army like that, not a number any more…
That poor man who
stood in an upended barrel and let people throw heavy sticks of wood at him,
three goes a penny, in beautiful San Antonio Gardens, near Valletta; not as
terrible as it sounds, because he just ducked down into the barrel to the accompaniment
of much laughter and I never saw him hit, nor did I even see a nasty type with
a strong arm really trying to catch him out and hurt him…
Night hours of
training, during a break, resting in a plantation, back against a cool, dry
stone wall, sometimes reaching up to pull a green fig from the tree above…
The pleasure of
sitting shaded inside a stone structure over a well from which water was
constantly drawn by means of a bucket-chain contrivance; inside, beautiful
coolth enhanced by the sound of dripping water, outside, in a temperature of
about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a mule trudged round and round to work the gadget
which brought up the water – resting in there was one of my ideas of heaven…
And the battered
roller-skating rink I’d come across on one of my outings with Hayson*… Beside
the sea, on a headland just off the coast road near the barracks the Battalion
occupied for our first few weeks in Malta; nobody in attendance, it seemed. We
opened a gate by the ticket kiosk and walked in. The floor of the rink was in
poor condition, patched and filled by someone who obviously didn’t know how to
do the job. After a while, a smallish man approached and told us that, since
the war started, hardly a soul used the rink, but for sixpence we could hire skates
and stay as long as we wished. Although we had little money, this bargain was
too tempting to turn down. As we inexpertly teetered, laughing and joking, or,
when fortune favoured, glided between those lumpy patches – paying for our
carelessness if we didn’t – a recurring thought entered my mind and wouldn’t go
away: “There’s a war on”… A scruffy old roller-skating rink it might be,
deserted by all except for two boys larking about, but what a setting. A blue,
cloudless sky, sea on this side, sea on that, all to be enjoyed indefinitely,
whereas a year ago a cheap, Sunday excursion by rail would have yielded perhaps
three hours on some English beach or promenade, the weather would have been
uncertain, likely as not wet, grey, chilly…
But perish
memories like that and above all appreciate this present loveliness. And I did,
I really did. Every moment of every day men are being mutilated, shot to the
point of collapse, killed, buried when found. I joined the Army to join them.
But wise men have decided that a reprieve shall be mine for a while, so be
grateful. I did not share these thoughts with others, perhaps fearing ridicule.
On the other hand, of course, I never knew what the other chaps were thinking,
did I? Hayson and I skated on…’
* Sam’s pal Hayson was
introduced in FSS Blogs 41 (April 19, 2015) and 42 (April 26, 2015).
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: (Temporary) destination: Egypt – Sam horrified to see Alexandria
dock workers treated like slaves… then the British Army loads the Battalion
into open railway trucks under the scorching sun...
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