“I feel one can say with some conviction that no man should willingly leave his home to fight, wound, maim or kill other men about whom he knows little and whom he certainly does not hate. When all men refuse to commit such follies the foundations of a true civilisation will have only just started to be laid.”
- Sam Sutcliffe, circa 1974 (extracted from his Memoir)

Sunday 13 November 2016

Remembrance Day: Sam on the Somme, from bread to battlefield hell

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Battle Of The Somme came to an end (November 18 by British reckoning, just for the winter of course) after the concluding Battle Of The Ancre (13-18) added maybe another 40,000 to the toll of dead and wounded.
    The British initiated the attack, wading through mud to capture St Pierre Divion and Beaumont Hamel (November 13), then Beaucourt-sur-Ancre (14) and Grandcourt (the day of the winter’s first snow, 18). The French Army, a little to the south, fought off German counterattacks at Ablaincourt, Saillisel and Pressoir (14-16).
    And the whole campaign, dated from July 1 onwards, cost 419-432,000 “British and Dominions” casualties (including 24,700 Canadians, 23,000 Australians, 2,100 New Zealanders), and anywhere from 465-600,000 Germans in exchange for a 6-mile Allied advance on a 16-mile front.
    Down in Romania, the Battle of Transylvania which, in August, had begun so promisingly for the Allies’ new ally, Romania, tumbled rapidly towards a grim conclusion as the German Army broke through the Torzburg Pass and captured Targu Jiu (November 15), and had Romanian forces retreating across the board in the Prahova, Aluta and Jiu valleys, despite heavy resistance (14-17).
    Further south, in Macedonia one long story neared its conclusion as diverse co-ordinated Serbian, French and Russian troops took Monastir (November 19), forcing combined Bulgarian and German contingents to retreat – a campaign begun on September 12. The British contributed too in their sector, taking Kavakli on the left bank of the river Struma (19). Campaign casualties, counted through to December 11: 53,000 Bulgars, 8,000 Germans, 27,337 Serbs, 13, 786 French, 4,580 British, 1,116 Russian, 1,000 Italians.

Meanwhile, my father, under-age volunteer Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 18 on July 6, 1916, had fought with the Kensingtons Battalion from mid-May to September, at Hébuterne/Gommecourt on the north end of the Somme Front, then around Leuze Wood and Morval to the south (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated May 15 to September 25, 2016). About September 30 he was told his age had been officially noticed, he was still legally too young for the battlefield and he could take a break until his 19th birthday if he wished. He wished all right – though not without a sense of guilt. He left the Front for the British base camp at Harfleur and a surprise, temporary move into catering…
     But for the two Remembrance week blogs (6th and 13th) I’m leaving my father enjoying his respite from the battlefield and turning to some excerpts from the two major campaigns he’d already fought in: Gallipoli and the Somme.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
On November 13, 2016, in Remembrance of my father, his brother Ted (who died in 1922 from the aftereffects of poison gas), all their pals and comrades and all the millions who suffered…
    Last week, I tried to evoke aspects of a Tommy’s Gallipoli experience – Suvla Bay and V Beach because Sam’s Battalion was evacuated twice – through short quotes and stories from Sam’s Memoir. Now, the Somme – 100 years ago this year, of course. I’ve chosen excerpts from the time he moved to the Western Front in May, through to a few days after July 1, a grievous aftermath. It’s long but it’s strong stuff, essence of Remembrance Day I think.
    First, though, a contribution from a guest, the only and very welcome responder to my invitation for others to add their family Remembrance stories here. Janet Welch (alias #bakerboytom), from Camberley, Surrey, is writing a book on the intriguing subject of bread and the Great War – because her great grandfather, Acting Staff Sergeant Thomas Martin, served as a baker on the Western Front. She writes:

Although not as glamorous as the frontline regiments, the Army Service Corps was a vital part of the armed forces supplying everything from uniforms, ammunition and food. Thomas was a lifelong soldier having signed up with the Royal Berkshire Regiment before transferring to the ASC as a baker. Bread was a large and important part of the soldiers diet providing the bulk of calories in the army ration. Were it not for bread where would the butter and jam be?
       Thomas arrived on the Western Front on the 5th of August, 1914, as part of the British Expeditionary Force and didn't leave until the end of the war. In charge of setting up one of the first field bakeries, his resourcefulness and hard work eventually led to him being honored in 1916 with the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
       His first job was to set up the bakery, from pitching tents to house the dough-making facilities, to building and firing the ovens for baking the bread and then creating the stores and finally distributing the bread up the lines of communication. Whilst this sounds simple enough there were many challenges in those early days and as the war progressed the challenges changed but didn't diminish.
       Whilst iron rations consisted of biscuits, men much preferred bread. Hundreds of thousands of loaves had to be baked six days a week, every week of the year, without fail. Shifts of men worked around the clock on back-breaking and exhausting work. Flour had to be tested, yeast (a living organism) had to be procured or made and clean water obtained. The quantities were vast, the quality of ingredients variable and the working environment in the bake house a daily challenge. What appears a simple process required great organisation, great skill and know-how and a lot of manpower for the bakery to produce the very best loaves possible. Although the bakeries were behind the front lines many were repeatedly shelled or bombed; the light and smoke of the ovens, fair warning to the enemy!
       As the war progressed more and more bakers were recruited; all skilled men! As the years passed machinery was introduced to reduce manpower and release men to the front-line Regiments.
     Bread wasn't the most exciting part of the soldier's diet but it was hugely important. I have spent the past three years piecing together information about these unsung heroes of the Great War and I hope to put this altogether to pay tribute to the bakers who fed the army. Lest we forget.’

Before I move on to some snapshots of the Somme battle, including July 1… Food is certainly a subject to be taken seriously when talking Armies at war (remember what Napoleon said) and my father happened to write very appreciatively of victualling standards on the Somme front compared to his appalling culinary experiences in Gallipoli. And bread does get honourable mention here in his companion passage to Janet’s account of her great grandfather’s contribution:

I soon recognised that this Battalion was run by men more skilled in caring for and providing for their rankers than any I had encountered earlier. A Quartermaster Sergeant, a Sergeant Cook, and some well-trained men worked miracles with the rations to produce meals of a quality I’d seldom experienced in front-line soldiering. They had several mobile field kitchens, comprising large boilers, food store boxes, fuel containers, fire boxes under boilers with tubular chimneys and so on, along with two-wheeled vehicles, usually pulled by mules, which allowed cooking to proceed while on the march…
     Always, a substantial hot meal and good steaming tea arrived when needed – well, except when “enemy action” occasionally disrupted their praiseworthy efforts… For men who, for hours, had endured exposure to rain, cold, shot and shell to unexpectedly be given a mess-tin full of hot stew or tea with bread was to restore our faith and hope and courage – the very knowledge that others thought about our discomfort, even misery, and had been kind enough to do something about it heartened us… No going for days with nothing but hard biscuits, jam and a small allowance of water…
     With morning and evening tea, they also portered the usual solids, such as bread or biscuits, jam or cheese…’

So to Sam’s Somme: here he is, just transferred, to his disgust, from his Gallipoli Battalion to the Kensingtons, and despatched with a few comrades to meet them at Souastre, a village a couple of kilos behind the front at Hébuterne/Gommecourt – where he finds himself developing a new persona:

‘After detraining, we marched until we reached a quite pleasant-looking village, the first I had been able to see at close quarters. Far in the distance, I could hear the rumble and thud so familiar a few months earlier. Once more, the belly-tightening tension resumed its grip and I was all set to face and deal with personal risks to the limit of my physical ability… In that state, I could play a role apparently a shade more light-hearted and carefree than my normal one… Consequently, I quickly earned for myself a soubriquet I liked, to wit, The Pisstaker… The paramount necessity: to appear free of anxiety, as unruffled as possible by nasty things which might be happening in the vicinity.’

Getting to know his new Company, he realises many of them are from the first wave of conscripts to enter the British Army. They tell him a lot about life back home in Blighty – which he hasn’t seen since January, 1915 – and give him much to ponder, especially with regard to conscientious objection, a concept he’s never heard of before. Typically, he thinks his way through to an independent view:

‘… some prominent people concerned with improving the status of working-class people had promoted the idea that, if a man had religious convictions strong enough to forbid him taking part in warfare, he should be allowed to state them before a special tribunal, the members of which might decide that he should do “national work” other than join the armed services**. As World War I progressed the numbers of men who held or adopted these strong pacifist beliefs increased, and some men thus avoided all the risks and sufferings to which most were exposed… 
     And yet… here too was a concession which appeared to indicate that one fence separating The Workers from the rest had been demolished — in part, the “conscience clause” entailed an admission from on high that the dwellers in the terraced side streets were capable of thought, able to form, maintain and explain a conviction reached after study and evaluation.’
** The right to conscientious objection had been recognised in the UK since the 18th century, but only for Quakers; it became a general right in March, 1916, after the Government introduced conscription.

At 16, Sam had no ideology – yet, coming from poverty, he certainly expresses instinctive class consciousness in many ways. These include his attitude to rank. When he trained as a Signaller in Malta pre-Gallipoli, he earned the tiny promotion to Lance Corporal. But, his Signals skills not needed on the Somme, he soon begins a long campaign to lose even that rank:

‘I sought an interview with the Captain in charge of our Company and asked to be allowed to revert to the rank of Private, but he refused… I never gave an order to a Private; I did a job myself rather than tell anyone else to do it. In fact, I behaved in a manner which, I thought, would soon have me relieved of the fishbone on my arm.
     I wanted no rank, no responsibility except to myself. Rank entailed being careful, steady, a good example, even though a Lance Corporal was everybody’s lackey, often jeered at by the Privates and ordered around by Corporals and Sergeants. I longed to lose that stripe and be a carefree nothing.’

Now a couple of quotes in which Sam describes marching towards the Somme battlefield for the first time and entering the trenches:

‘Our Company, walking in twos, must have formed a considerable crocodile as we weaved around shell-holes and various vaguely visible humps which mystified me until ear-splitting explosions and skyward-leaping flame flashes, changing to brief red streaks and short-lived shrieks issued from one of them ­– British gun batteries, of course. Someone could have tipped me off – we were stumbling through such a concentration of guns as I had never imagined.’

‘As we approached the front, a stream of men passed us, going back the way we had come – happy, because we were relieving their burden of tense preparedness with no let-up, night or day. Always some part of the trench system was being damaged or destroyed, some danger threatened. Mates maimed, blown apart. So, as they threaded their way through our advancing line, they made quiet, little jests, wished us good luck, gave useful hints occasionally about special features of the terrain. Nice chaps going for a well-earned rest, blessem.’

Soon he encounters the Front’s second most dangerous activity (though way below number 1: going over the top in daylight) – patrolling and digging advanced trenches in No Man’s Land at night. The hair-raising thing was the work involved making so much noise it could hardly go undetected by the enemy for long:

‘… when, eventually, their wrath descended, we squeezed down into the hollows we’d dug and found we did have a few protective inches of earth above our precious bodies. Machine-gun bullets spattered around me and I marvelled that I should lie there, hear and see them striking, yet remain untouched. But our semi-trenches afforded little protection when light field guns joined in and their shattering whizz-bangs*** filled the air with noise and flying metal. One could only hug Mother Earth and wait for an order to retire, which didn’t come. I heard the occasional muttered request for “Stretcher-bearers!” – brave fellows indeed, themselves not immunised from injury or death by their labours of mercy.’
*** British soldiers nicknamed shells fired by the German 7.7cm field gun “whizz-bangs” because they travelled faster than the speed of sound, so recipients heard the “whizz” as they sliced through the air before they heard the “bang” made by the gun firing them.

A few days relief from all this could feel like going on your holidays – this is Sam’s Company on a long, but welcome march from Hébuterne to Halloy, about 20 kilometres from the Front, to rehearse their July 1 attack on a replica of the German trench system:

‘Soon, all the Companies of the Battalion came together in one long column. The drum and fife band took its place at the head and gave out sweet music. Cares fell away, and we sang and whistled joyfully. Kilometre after kilometre, with occasional ten-minute breaks, we didn’t worry, for this march was taking us in the one direction which pleased all of us – back!’

Well, my father’s memories cover a lot of ground – post-Gallipoli military innovations such as steel helmets and gas masks, touching encounters with women and children still living near the Front, converting his rifle into a guitar of sorts in an idle moment, angry reflections on their remote Generals lodged in châteaux miles away from danger – but I’ll conclude with some excerpts of his account of July 1, 1916, and its immediate aftermath:

We found the section of trenches we took over in fine condition. The Engineers had installed their “revetting with expanded metal” system quite splendidly, as well as a sump under the duckboard floor of the front trench, perfect drainage, and so superior to the old, sloppy, mud floor on which we had often slithered.’

On the day – which followed a period of massive bombardment of enemy positions to destroy their barbed wire defences etc — our Battalion was to occupy the ordinary front line, and our most advanced trenches where my Platoon found itself. The support trenches behind us sheltered a kilted Regiment who would come through our line to start the infantry attack, at which our men in the front trench would advance over the German front trench – by then in the hands of the Jocks – and go on to take the German support trenches. Finally, from the advance trenches, we would pass over all those people and clean up and occupy the German rear positions.’

‘… enemy machine guns massed at strategic points and they stood their field artillery almost wheel to wheel, or so it seemed, and the whole area became an inferno of explosions and bullets.
    When the kilted lads advanced, their numbers decreased alarmingly with every forward stride. Meanwhile, our own advanced position was being blown apart piecemeal; pockets of survivors lost touch with their leadership and the nearest NCO had to make decisions… If he could only see ahead that our first line of attack was destroyed before capturing its objective, that its members lay dead and wounded on the ground ahead or grotesquely draped over the enemy barbed wire which our bombardment should have destroyed, then when should he take his small force over the top?
    Some small groups did from time to time go ahead until killed, wounded and captured. Some dedicated officers achieved marvels within limits set by the powerful enemy, but in the end this massively prepared attack failed.
    Nothing was gained in our sector. Many good men were lost. Many normally strong fellows were reduced to trembling, inarticulate old-looking men.
    Our beautiful front line had become an uneven shallow ditch for most of its length, the expanded metal revetments either lost under piles of blasted earth or just sunk deep down in shell holes.’

‘I saw a Scot who, though not wounded, just sat and shook. His head nodded, his arms flailed feebly, his legs sort of throbbed, his eyes obviously saw nothing.
    One of our usually most happy and physically strong men was crying non-stop while violently protesting about something. He’d been buried up to his shoulders in earth and, even in that inferno, men nearby had paused in their advance to free him, yet he had this strange grievance.
    So, possibly, nervous shock afflicted everyone there to a greater or lesser degree, even though fear no longer weighed on us as earlier in the day.’

‘A gradual return to usefulness replaced the varying degrees of stupor and inertia which for many were the invisible wounds following many hours of explosion and upheaval, shattering to eardrums and nerves… and ruinous to pre-conceived ideas of what should be occurring according to plans worked out in grandiose HQ châteaux many kilometres away in the rear.’

‘Our Company – such as it was now, after its brush with hell**** – remained in what had been the front line. By dawn, most of us were ready to stop where we stood – crouched, rather – for under cover of dark we had searched for and found many wounded men, their chances of living diminishing with every hour in which they lay exposed with wounds untended.
    We felt that our work was very valuable and the joy with which injured men greeted their rescuers was reward indeed. Perhaps the failure of the massive attack had left us with a sense of guilt which the intensive rescue work relieved.’
**** The Kensingtons suffered 59 per cent casualties (wounded and dead) – about average for a British Battalion on July 1.

I’ll close these Somme excerpts with a touching passage Sam wrote about his Company’s work, a few nights later, on retrieving the dead. As I understand it from his Memoir, the Kensingtons’ War Diary, and Alan MacDonald’s wondrously detailed book, Pro Patria Mori: The 56th (1st London) Division at Gommecourt, 1st July 1916 (Iona Books, 2008), on July 2 they moved back to Souastre and then, temporarily, occupied trenches in front of Fonquevillers whence each night they went out into No Man’s Land:

We were given two or three days rest a couple of kilometres back and then returned to continue clearing up the mess – the first few nights devoted to recovering our dead mates, the living wounded having by then all been rescued. The identity discs we wore now became very important; each dead man having this link with the living could be identified and his death notified and a train of events set in motion to inform his family, finalise his service record, accord him a proper burial in a known cemetery, and finally secure for his nearest relative some sort of pension. The real difficulty was in regard to those so badly mutilated no way of identifying them existed.
    One discovery out in No Man’s Land deeply affected me. While working in bright moonlight on search work, I looked down into a length of communication trench in the advanced system we had helped to construct and saw the rather large face of a very good chap I had worked with for a while in Egypt. He had gone to a different Battalion from our camp near Rouen. And here he was, long dead, eyes blank, but still the features unmistakable and formerly so familiar to me. Charlie’s large face was all the more recognisable because of his large nose. The moonlight no doubt concealed the ravages of injury and exposure – perhaps the shade and coolness of the trench bottom minimised them too…
    As soon as possible, I guided two of the men doing recovery work to Charlie. I recalled then, as I do now, his special qualities. He was completely honest, stubborn about things in dispute, but usually found to be right about them in the end; Cockney in speech to an extent which, on first acquaintance led one to expect illiteracy, he soon made you realise your error – he handled sending and receiving Morse Code messages better than most. In fact, before the war he’d done that kind of work on the railways, but using a machine which emitted two musical sounds, high and low, instead of dots and dashes.
    Of the many men whose poor bodies we found and saw cared for that night, Charlie was the only one whom I had known well in life. He had been one of us, and thus special to us, during our first experience of Army life… Recollection of Charlie calls forth a mental picture of him walking away from me… large head, broad shoulders, sturdy trunk, strong, slightly bowed legs – more like a Frenchman than an Englishman, nothing of the Cockney about his build or his gait. Goodbye, Charlie.’

For more of Sam’s Somme story see his full Memoir or the extracted e-book episode on the Somme (all proceeds to the British Red Cross).

All the best – FSS

Next week: Meanwhile, back at Le Havre, a hundred years ago this month… Sam, as if on a working holiday from what he’s been through, enjoys observing some odd goings-on – but then tantalising news of his brother Ted still out there in the fog of battle…

* In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

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