Sam’s Battalion say goodbye to their Malta paradise – and he realises that, strangely enough, he’s only been homesick in his dreams…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir in paperback or e-book & new excerpted Gallipoli episode mini-e-book & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to British Red Cross

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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…

Sam on rifle training graduates from wooden bullets to live rounds, squeezes the trigger and feels the Lee-Enfield “come alive with awful power”…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir in paperback or e-book & new excerpted Gallipoli episode mini-e-book & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago… the to and fro battles on Eastern and Western Fronts continued throughout the week, with little ground gained, cities recaptured that had been lost a couple of months earlier and trench-based attrition the norm, including in Gallipoli where the action steadied down for a while after June 4’s Third Battle Of Krithia in the Helles sector… and, supposing an average week for this phase of the war, a further 66,000 casualties resulted (dead and wounded).

    So, for once in this summary passage before continuing my father’s just-one-foot-soldier story, a brief account of one man’s courage and tragedy. This day a century ago (June 7, a Monday then), Sub Lieutenant Reginald “Rex” Warneford, 23, from Exmouth, of the Royal Naval Air Service, flying a Morane Parasol wood-and-canvas biplane, became the first aviator to bring down an airship. It happened near Ghent, Belgium. The Sub Lieut, on his first ever night flight, climbed above Zeppelin LZ-37 and dropped his 20lb bombs on it. Then, caught in the flames, he crash-landed behind German lines. But, with a piece of pure David Niven/Terry-Thomas stiff-upper-lip genius he repaired a broken fuel line with his cigarette holder, took off again and made it back to base.

    Immediately awarded the Victoria Cross and the French Legion Of Honour, on June 17 he was flying a new plane when it bucked on take-off and threw him out of the cockpit to his death. For a time, in 2013 a controversy blew up when, because he was born in India, the Government omitted him from a list of WW1 VC winners due to be memorialised –after a couple of months of indignation they U-turned.

    Meanwhile... at St George’s Barracks, Malta, the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe and his older brother Ted (both underage volunteers, still 16 and 18 respectively in early summer 1915), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, had begun learning how to shoot – some eight months into their Army lives. They’d heard some glimmerings of news about Gallipoli, but no clue that, in due course, it would turn out to be their first battlefield. Having signed up as a trainee Signaller, Sam found his group at the back of the queue when it came to rifle instruction.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the young Signallers finally got their turn at learning how to use the long Lee-Enfield – but loaded with wooden “bullets” only until they got the rudiments off pat (especially because the instructor had to lay in front of them staring down the wrong end of the barrel until satisfied they were aligning the sights and aiming correctly).

    However, toiling in the heat of the Maltese early summer, they all knew this had to get real at some stage – another rite of passage in prospect for Sam who, at every new stage of becoming a soldier, felt a profound anxiety that his under-oath lie about his age when he volunteered would be discovered and result in humiliating rejection or even a jail term. In his Memoir, he resumed by referring to all that bullet-less drill…

‘For several weeks, we dedicated day after day to this sort of repetition, longer than necessary in all likelihood, because the policy was that, in any given five days, only one Company at a time could be accommodated on the range where we were all introduced to firing live ammunition. But finally H Company Signallers got their chance, all of us thrilled and nervous as, clearly, this would be a crucial time of testing for these would-be soldiers. As ever at such moments, I was in a state of tension, but determined to show no sign of it while we marched the two miles to the range along the seashore in the morning sunshine with prickly lava underfoot.

    Waiting for your turn to fire your first live rounds felt like pretending to read in a dentist’s waiting room. When, finally, I stepped forward, the instructor showed me once more how to position myself, lying beside him, facing the sea. Then he reminded me of two important things about firing a rifle with real bullets rather than wooden fakes. Having taken aim, I must press the butt of the rifle into the hollow of my shoulder as hard as I could, he cautioned, or risk having my jaw broken by the recoil. And then the trigger must be squeezed, not pulled. The latter would spoil my aim.

    He told me that, lying beside me now, he would take notes and every shot would be assessed – the man at the butts who controlled the targets would signal by how much I’d missed the bull’s-eye and at what angle. I knew from others that even my behaviour would be marked too.

    No need to hurry for the first exercise, he stressed, just concentrate on every detail of what you have practised. Although the gun is stronger than you, you be the master… I took aim – the target, at 400 yards initially, represented the appearance of a man’s head and shoulders, grey with no white background to help the marksman’s focus… tip of the foresight in line with the shoulders of the backsight, both in line with the bottom of the bull’s-eye. I pressed the butt back hard and, with thumb against trigger guard, forefinger on trigger, I squeezed. Nothing happened.

    “What about the safety catch?” my trainer asked quietly. My right hand fumbled about and pressed the catch forward. Back to firing position, trigger squeezed… and for a fraction of a second the gun came alive with awful power. The jolt almost detached my head from my shoulders, the explosion deafened me, the shock shot through my whole body.

    Firing .22s with the Scouts had not remotely prepared me and I had to repeat that shattering experience between 50 and 60 times that day. The old long Lee-Enfield was the very devil, a hellish shoulder-bruiser.

    Every few shots, the instructors increased the range by 100 yards until we were trying to take good aim at the unheard-of distance of 900 yards, over half a mile. This has to be tried to be appreciated; at that distance, although the target was now on a white background and greatly increased in size – they were mounted on “butts”, iron frames raised and lowered by chains and pulleys – the whole business seemed detached from reality. I thought, how can any action of mine affect a man so far away from me? Perhaps the weapon’s designers had outstripped practicality.

    As each man finished his first morning stint, he was allowed to make his own way back to barracks. When I neared my quarters, an awful pain drew down my right shoulder and I walked into our barrack room in that contorted attitude. Enquiries as to my trouble I answered with my self-diagnosis that I’d got indigestion, hoping that was correct. I looked around for a cure. On the table stood a bottle of Worcester sauce. I promptly unstoppered it and took a long swig of the stuff. It burnt mouth and throat and probably worked as a counter-irritant, so gradually I was able to straighten up. Indigestion or battered nerves, I never found out.

    After that first day, we had to take our noon break for dinner, then return to the range for repeated drills on various different ways of firing a rifle – in the course of which I got over the shoulder-bashing ache. Snapshooting at 200 yards proved an exciting session, but sailing vessels passing close behind the butts distracted my attention. Then a phone message from local police complaining that fishing boats were being shot at brought a temporary halt to the work. In truth, some of the lads, aiming high, had deliberately sent a few whizzing among the masts.’

All the best – FSS

Next week: The young volunteers strive to emulate the Old Contemptibles’ 15-rounds-a-minute quick fire – but find bayonet drill involves a farcical hopping semi-crouch like “a man who’s soiled his pants”…