Sam, the boy soldier, finally gets his uniform – and wonders if he'll ever have what it takes to be "a real man"

Outnow on ebook! Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier's Memoir Of WW1…Paperback out soon!

Dear all

A hundred years ago… the battles ground on at Ypres (French, British and Belgian Armies against the German Army), the Yser (Belgium and France against Germany), and the Vistula (Russia against Germany), but the major development was the Ottoman Empire’s entry into hostilities – announced, not diplomatically, on October 29 by its Navy beginning to bombard the Russian Black Sea ports Odessa, Sevastopol and Feodosia. Meanwhile, the conflict spread in Africa: today, October 26, is the centenary of France occupying parts of German colony The Cameroons and of German forces invading Portuguese West Africa (later Angola).

      Also, away from these grand, terrible events, a hundred years ago today my father, 16-year-old volunteer and Edmonton boy Sam Sutcliffe, at last got issued with his Royal Fusiliers uniform – seven weeks after enlisting.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Following England’s Indian summer, in October the weather turned cool and rainy. New junior officers, learning on the job, squarebashed Sam, his three pals, and the rest of the thousand-man Battalion (2/1st City Of London) around the parade ground at the Foundlings Hospital in Kings Cross and marched them miles on city and suburban streets -–Hampstead Heath a popular destination. They could think of nothing else to do; they had no weapons, nor even any uniforms.

       As Sam recalls (new readers note my father called himself “Tommy” and wrote in the third person for the first part of his Memoir):

“Tommy surmised that residents, and others... might speculate as to how all this was helping the troops already fighting and being wounded or killed. How about giving each man a rifle and showing him how to fire it, how to use a bayonet? Many people were saying that would have been better preparation for war. Tommy agreed. But we hadn’t the uniforms or the arms apparently... And Tommy and many thousands of other early volunteers may have owed their survival to that lack of war materials...

The famous Spaniards Inn at Hampstead found itself swamped with customers on days when Army trainees were in the vicinity. Tommy enjoyed the cheap, satisfying lunches there. He felt good beer replenishing his strength, chunks of bread and cheese satisfying his hunger, the crunchy crusts adding to the meal a rhythmic percussion... War, according to the school history books he’d read, had never been this pleasant. But, while good weather lasted, the men naturally enjoyed this period of playing at soldiers, as some described it.”

Bar the days when they got soaked, that was. Having worked for a couple of years since leaving school at 14, Sam/Tommy had a decent coat and “sound footwear... but what of the poor devils in flimsy suits and shoes?” he writes. “Even those who had joined for some imagined advantage had, for the most part, also believed the cause was a good one and so had tackled the new life with zest and good intentions. The temporary stagnation was depressing... ”

       Until, finally:

“However, came the day when all doubt and disappointment vanished: an announcement that, from the last Monday in October [the 26th!], the two Companies who, each day, took their turn to occupy the Battalion Headquarters would be solely occupied with the long-anticipated distribution of uniforms: greatcoats, tunics, trousers, socks, boots, puttees, undervests, shirts, pants, all crowned by a military cap with a Regimental badge. Much mirth ensued from the announcement that each man would be issued with a housewife, but this turned out to be nothing more sexy than a roll-up cloth pouch holding needles, cotton, buttons and so on.

The recruits were expected to buy tins of a paste called Soldier’s Friend, also a small brush and a peculiar six-inch piece of metal with a lengthwise slot — called a button stick, for reasons soon revealed. An instructor demonstrated the art of accurately directing a shot of spittle to the centre of the paste, scooping some buttons into the slot on the stick, dabbing the brush into the paste, scrubbing the buttons, and finally polishing them.

Then the NCOs showed them how to convert their great coats into long slim rolls, the ends of the rolls to be brought together and secured with a cord or strap, the loop then passed over the head to rest on the right shoulder diagonally across the body. In fine weather, the welcome order to listen out for was ‘Great coats will be worn en banderole’. Was this expression borrowed from Napoleon’s Army, Tommy wondered. Nobody enlightened him and he never heard the phrase used by officers of any other Army unit. He assumed the Foreign Legion and his Royal Fusiliers had at least those two words in common.

On receiving his kit he couldn’t get home fast enough.

Later in the war he sometimes recalled that day. He didn’t realise its importance at the time, none of them did as far as he knew. Quite light-heartedly, he wished to throw off the clothes of a mere civilian and be seen as a soldier — after weeks of trying to be one while still dressed in his boyish suit and bowler. But, in truth, he was shedding the garb of freedom, doing so eagerly, divesting himself of clothing which entitled him to go almost anywhere in Great Britain without let or hindrance and putting on the uniform of service or maybe of serfdom. From then on, if called upon to do so by Military Police or gentlemen holding His Majesty’s Commission, he would have to account for his presence in any location.

His family showed great interest in the quality of the clothing, touching the uniform and rubbing it between thumbs and forefingers like so many tailors. All good stuff, they agreed: vest and long pants of wool, warm, heavy garments; socks too would obviously stand much hard wear and ensure warm feet in he coldest weather. The name Schneider in the cap struck them all as being rather strange. ‘What,’ asked Dad, ‘is the British Army doing with headgear of apparently German manufacture?’

Hastily, Tommy changed into the uniform. He found all the garments fitted him well, except that the boots were too big, albeit the smallest in stock as the Quartermaster had explained when issuing them. So, for his early months in the Army, Tommy had to wear two pairs of grey socks to fill out the heavy boots. He would have to buy two pairs of socks as near to the official ones in colour and weight as possible so he could rotate two pairs on and two in the wash.

He’d put on everything but the puttees. He began his first attempt to wind these bandages round his calves, starting with a turns around the ankle... spacing each turn evenly a requirement not easy to satisfy. However, after a few awkward failures, he came close to achieving the correct outcome. Then he stood up straight and still, eyes looking straight ahead at their own level, chin in, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in, knees back, heels together, toes apart at an angle of 90 degrees — all as per instructions, the very figure of a soldier, he hoped.

Mother studied him, tears in her eyes... and she laughed and laughed and laughed. This puzzled and disappointed the self-conscious lad. He searched her face to discover if the mirth was a derisory reaction. As he watched her, understanding came to him and he also laughed and laughed. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘You can see it all as I do. I’m not sneering at the boy soldier, but to see one of my children dressed as a fighting man for the first time, standing stiff as a ramrod and so serious with it. Well, it’s just too much.’ The laughter petered out with some quickly concealed tears.

Tommy ventured into the street to avoid further embarrassment and perchance to see if neighbours had any comment to make. Looking up the street towards the main road he thrilled to see brother Ted already wearing his Army gear, striding briskly towards him.

His keen scrutiny turned to pleasurable surprise and pride when the boy saw how neatly the clothes fitted Ted’s small, but well-proportioned body. He would have valued a pair of legs of that shape himself — slightly bowed, the calves flattered by his carefully rolled puttees. A flicker of the heartache he felt throughout life, whenever it seemed that someone he loved was drifting away, assailed him briefly at that moment. Faulty reasoning, sentimentality, a soft streak, these he always feared were at the root of these feminine lapses which must be concealed if he was ever to become a real man. Other people didn’t appear bothered by them. In any case, people’s feelings were only of interest to themselves, not to be indecently exposed.”

All the best — FSS

Next week: Finally, Sam, Ted and the lads leave London – and home for the first time in their lives...

Sam's first march — London gentry tip their hats at the volunteers

Dear all

A hundred years ago this month… at 16, Sam Sutcliffe, my father, ceased to be a poor working lad from Edmonton, north London, a junior office boy at a mining company HQ near Liverpool Street station, and became a soldier. Albeit by lying about his age and with precious little idea of what that might entail although the papers had already begun reporting “heavy casualties” on the Western Front – retreats, defeats if you read between the lines.

    But, still only seven weeks in, it evidently wasn’t one-sided either way as the French-British Allies toed and froed with the germans at the Aisne, then Albert, and the Russians besieged the Austria-Hungary Empire at Przemysl (now in Poland), and a German cruiser sank a British cruiser off Zanzibar… and Sam got his first chance to observe and admire “the calm, efficient manner” in which Army men could “organise a thousand strangers into easily controlled groups”.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

After a hard evening persuading his parents that he should be allowed to stay in the Army along with his 18-year-old, ergo less-of-a-liar, brother Ted, Sam didn’t really know whether they’d agreed because if they reported him he might go to jail… or because soldier’s pay, 21/- a week, would be so useful to a poor family with four children and a toddler to feed.

    But the main thing was they’d let him stick with Ted, and their slightly older pals, Len and Harold. So, remembering that Sam, in this first part of his Memoir, wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”, here’s his story of his first day in the Army, if not yet in uniform (supply a long way short of catching up with volunteer demand at that point):

“Next morning the lads were up in good time, met as arranged, and took the tram back to Bloomsbury… When they arrived they were amazed to see the road in front of the adjacent Royal Fusiliers and Royal Field Artillery depots packed tight with men and hundreds more queuing along another road behind them — all enlisted men like themselves, they learned, and ordered to parade that morning. Harold observed that it would take a mastermind to sort this lot out. But he was soon proven too skeptical.

    Presently, a uniformed man, stout and ruddy-faced with several chins, mounted a box or chair, they couldn’t see what. In an extremely powerful voice, he called for quiet, then issued instructions. With surprising, almost professional, speed, men on the outskirts of the crowd formed into lines of four across, and the mass became a somewhat ragged column.

    The rotund Regimental Sergeant Major took his place at the head of it and, with no attempt at ceremony, started marching. Stragglers at the back attached themselves in new lines of four and followed in his wake. Within a few hundred yards, the whole of the leading formation had fallen in step to a man. That almost spherical RSM necessarily set a steady, almost slow, pace. But two streets crammed with men had to be cleared and he’d achieved that very quickly.

    Had he been dealing with conscripted men, he would undoubtedly have had a problem on his hands. These were volunteers, though. A small, but sufficient, proportion of them had seen service previously and, of the remainder, many had come through various youth organisations, Scouts, Boys Brigades, and others, companies of which trained and marched in every town throughout the land.

    No new experience for [Boy Scout] Tommy, of course, this marching in step, but the pace, the stride, felt different — longer, slower, heavier, and somehow more exhilarating.

    On this, their first rhythmic progression as an Army unit, each member carried himself as he believed a real soldier would and kept in step with the man in front of him. No one shouted, ‘Keep in step there, left, right, left!’ None of that. Crunch, crunch, rrrp, rrrp, a steady pace with arms a-swing.

    Tommy liked the rhythm — and the thrill as he saw the column of men ahead, bearing left round the far side of a London residential square. ‘We’re all in step then,’ he thought. ‘Marvelous.’ He did notice the odd one lose the step and touch the heel of the man in front or trip the man behind — no natural sense of rhythm or perhaps over-eager or anxious. But correction soon followed. Such culprits would later endure the wrath of newly appointed non-commissioned and commissioned officers who had to justify their existence. But today not a word.

    Every man wished that he should do well and that his comrades should do well… and that perhaps some famous General might be watching unseen, later to issue a full report full of praise for the volunteer soldiers… who reminded him of the Guards…

    If Tommy dreamed thus, we may assume others did too. But he did notice, at first with incredulity, that some men on the pavement — invariably smart well-dressed types — raised their hats on sighting the column. One such, coming down the steps of a large house, reached the pavement as Tommy drew level. He raised his bowler hat, and as his eyes rested momentarily on Tommy’s the boy felt himself blushing. ‘Ridiculous,’ he told himself. ‘The gentleman was saluting the volunteers, not a lad who had lied to get in. There’ll never be another march like this one.’

    The houses they passed interested him, and he resolved to take walks in this district, so redolent of London life from bygone days with which he felt he had ties somehow, he didn’t understand why — until, that evening, he concluded that gazing year after year at a picture hung in his parents’ bedroom may have caused his sense of familiarity with the area. It showed a woman, a shopping basket on one arm, descending the several steps from her front door to the street; her young daughter, with a tiny Pekingese dog on a lead, waited on the pavement. Both wore bonnets and the full-skirted costume of the Victorian era. And both, Tommy used to think, looked far too prim and prissy.

    Their house could have been almost any one of the hundreds lining these Bloomsbury streets and squares, their aspect solid and enduring. Much stone had been used in the arches that topped front doors and windows and to face ground floors. Stout iron railings prevented people from falling into the small paved areas outside the basement rooms 10 or 12 feet below street level. While many basement windows were barred, during the day the residents often left open their porch doors, adorned with brass knockers and letter boxes. Tommy reckoned such houses would all have been built with servants’ quarters and he wondered how many were still occupied…

    These wanderings as he marched relieved him, for the moment, from his constant twinges of anxiety and nervous tautness. Would someone suddenly point the finger at him and yell ‘You! Out!’? Probably most of the others had their worries, especially family men. Tommy glanced at the three men along his line, then did as they were doing, stared steadily ahead and kept in step with the thrump, thrump, of all those marching feet.

    The head of the column had disappeared now as they swung into a wide street ahead, then left through large, iron gates into a spacious sanded area with a substantial building facing them and high walls on either side bordered by roofed walkways supported by stone columns. Inside the gates, the column turned right, then left, until the RSM ordered a halt. The men lined two sides of the square.

    A separate small group stood apart from, but close to, the head of the column, one of them obviously the senior officer, the others men of various ranks, some in officer’s uniform, but several well-dressed in civilian clothes, mostly bowler-hatted and all carrying walking canes or rolled umbrellas.

    The RSM approached the senior officer. Halting two paces in front of him, the RSM saluted smartly, the right hand remaining over the right half of the forehead for three seconds before being briskly lowered to the side, thumb in line with the seam of the trousers… these details and many more were to occupy the hours and anxious efforts of Tommy and thousands like him for some time to come. But here was the first military occasion of which they had actually been a part. Really the beginning of their war.”

Thus, for Sam/Tommy and millions of recruits the road to Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras began with a left, right, left right…

All the best — FSS

Next week: Sam/Tommy gives up his day job — and a toff gives him a sovereign.