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Dear all
A hundred years ago… on the static
Western Front the Allies advanced a little at Hooge (Flanders, August 10) and
repulsed a German attack in Argonne (north-west France, 13), while on the
Eastern, the Russian Army continued its massive retreat across Poland
throughout the week, evacuating Sokolov, Syedlets, Lukow…
Further
south, the Second Battle Of the Isonzo ended inconclusively when both sides ran
out of ammunition – though not until the Italians had suffered 43,000
casualties, the Austro-Hungarians 45,000.
And
down in Gallipoli the Allies’ August Offensive reached its conclusion. The
so-called diversionary Krithia Vineyard attack in the Helles sector got nowhere
and ended (August 13) with 4,100 British casualties, 1,500 Ottoman. At Lone
Pine, the Australian forces breaking out of the Anzac Cove area, achieved their
objective, taking and defending Turkish trenches until counterattacks ceased
(10), at a cost of 2,277 Australian casualties, 5-7,000 Ottoman. The parallel
Anzac and Gurkha attacks at Sari Bair and Chunuk Bair similarly lacked overall
direction and any advances achieved came at terrible cost (to both sides).
At
Suvla Bay, where British troops had landed (6) to establish a new beachhead,
plans and battlefield command went so wrong that war correspondent Ellis
Ashmead-Bartlett wrote that “no firm hand appeared
to control this mass of men suddenly dumped on an unknown shore”; the chaos
enabled heavily outnumbered Turkish troops to be reinforced and the status quo
which was to last until the end of the campaign soon set in (15; casualty
figures for Chunuk Bair, Sari Bair and Suvla Bay differ widely and I couldn’t
guess which are correct).
Meanwhile...
in Malta, the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London
Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, among them, my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam
Sutcliffe, his brother Ted (17 and 18 then, underage
volunteers), had no idea that Suvla Bay would
quite soon introduce them to war’s realities…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, Sam and Ted, poor boys from Edmonton, north London, feeling rather
well-heeled on their respective 8/9 (44p) and 7/- (35p) a week (the difference
because of Sam’s loathed promotion to Lance Corporal) – availed themselves of a
scheme to each send 2/6 a week home to their mother, which the Government would
more than double. They still had enough to spare for beer and fags.
But the
bad news was their realisation that the Fusiliers’ idyll camping at the paradise beach
of Ghajn Tuffieha must shortly come to an end – which could surely mean only
that they would soon find themselves on a battlefield. No more target practice
at the butts by the sea. Instead… whatever the real thing turned out to be.
Sam
had just said goodbye to “Mossy” Mossgrove, a good Signaller friend transferred
to the Navy…
‘Subsequently, blows to my hopes of spending the rest of the
war by that heavenly beach at Ghajn Tuffieha fell thick and fast.
One day, I spent
much time lining up outside the Medical Officer’s hut with hundreds of others,
being dismissed when meal-times came, then resuming my place in the long line
until I eventually got inside. “Shirt off!” said somebody. Right. A medical
orderly wiped my left upper arm with spirit, and a Corporal held a very thin
sort of blade in the flame of a Bunsen burner, withdrew it and made scratches
on my arm. Then, the Medical Officer painted the scratches with fluid from a
bottle. Those three men did that hour after hour, to hundreds of men.
Next morning, I
knew that I had been well and truly vaccinated and was glad to rest whenever
possible. Urgent activity everywhere now, though, much packing of stores and,
finally, down came the little homes we had become so used to. Headed by our now
very proficient drum and fife band, our long procession headed for Valletta
where we spent a couple of days confined in a children’s school — no passes to
leave the building were issued. Medics examined our vaccinations and applied
new dressings. The old, long rifles were withdrawn and, once more, we became
weaponless warriors. We Signallers had to hand in all our instruments and,
thank goodness, those weird, clumsy, oil signal lamps — surely the
Quartermaster placed them back in the museum from which they had been borrowed…
A short march from
the school, there we were again at the Grand Harbour and I was one of a line of
men moving up a gangway to embark on, this time, a fine, big liner turned
troopship, the Ivernia* – spacious enough to
accommodate our thousand or so men without looking crowded.’
The Battalion left Malta
on August 27, 1915 so we’re moving a little ahead of the story in terms of the
100-years-on centenary paralleling I try to adhere to on the FootSoldierSam
blog. However, my father’s about to move into a passage of restrospection about
his some ways glorious, all ways formative months in Malta – so, as he moves on
in the general direction of the battlefield consider time and chronology on
pause for a week or so…
‘Excitement concerning future events did not smother my
sadness at leaving an island which, though small, still had many features I had
not been able to view. I recalled that, oddly, my natural boy’s homesickness
had shown itself only during sleep, in the form of dreams wherein I once again
lived my daily routine from the time before I enlisted. This occurred
frequently and, discussing the subject with young pals, I summed it up by
saying that, by day, I lived in Malta and by night in dear old England, all
quite happily.’
*
SS Ivernia was a Cunard liner, launched
in 1899, her 60-foot funnel the tallest ever fitted to a ship, says Wikipedia
(but there are other contenders!); she was sunk by a German submarine south of
Greece, on January 1, 1917, with the loss of 120 troops and crew, when under
the command of Captain William Turner, previously skipper of the Cunard liner Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk
off southern Ireland in May, 1915, with the loss of 1,195 lives. Captain Turner
suffered much criticism over the circumstances of the Lusitania sinking, not least for not being the last person to leave
the ship – although, surviving by clinging to an oar, he averred he believed he
had been; in the case of the Ivernia
he was definitely the last person to leave, swimming off as the ship sank. Cunard retired him to a
desk job after the Ivernia sinking.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam, 17, looks back ashore and fondly reminisces about his
blessed six months in Malta, the sweetest place he was ever to experience in a
long lifetime…
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