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Dear all
A hundred years ago… today the First
Battle Of Woëvre began (April 5-May 5, in Lorraine)
– a French Army attempt to recover ground lost to the German Army the previous
autumn and restore rail and road links to Verdun. Beyond the bloody to and fro on
the Western Front, down in the Eastern Mediterranean the two warring alliances continued
sparring three weeks before the Allies’ strategists threw their neon-lit
telegraphed punch and landed at Gallipoli: a section of the Indian
Expeditionary Force sailed for the Dardanelles from Egypt (7th); the Allies
offered Turkish Smyrna and its hinterland to Greece if they would join in
(12th); the French Government assured Russia they recognised its claim to
Constantinople (12th – the Ottoman Empire may not have been consulted on that
one).
Meanwhile,
the then Great War’s global creep proceeded with the Battle of Shaiba,
Mesopotamia (12th, British and Indian forces successfully defending Basra
against Ottoman recapture; total casualties about 4,000 men), and a Congo-based
Belgian advance on Yaunde, Cameroons, a German colony since 1884 (12th again,
busy day).
Over
in Malta, though, lodged comfortably enough at St George's Barracks, north of Valletta, my father Private Sam Sutcliffe’s 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, was feeling lucky. A thousand
volunteers, including 16-year-old Sam’s brother Ted, 18, and their two mates
from Edmonton, north London, Len Winns and Harold Mellow, hardly any of them
had ever been abroad before and here they were settling into this lovely
island, sun, sea… when, on the day they’d sailed from Southampton, they’d
expected to be manning a Western Front trench within hours.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
In
last week’s excerpt, Sam wrote about his recurring fears that his age would be
revealed, resulting in, at best, sending home and separation from his brother
(who was his hero too), at worst prosecution and imprisonment for swearing a
false oath. But soon he started to feel that even those who regarded him with
suspicion had come to accept him. This Fusiliers, as you might guess, expressed
their approval by making him the first victim of a spate of practical jokes –
at least he gladly took it that way. (NB new readers, in this first part of the
Memoir Sam wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”.) As my father
recalled:
‘It happened one night, after lights out. Some talking went
on for a while, followed by comparative silence with the occasional bump,
grunt, or snore. Tired Tommy slept… until something he could not identify woke
him with pulse racing and a sense of shock, eyes wide open, but the room black
dark. He did not yell or speak, just lay there trying to decide what had disturbed
him. Smack! Something struck him in the face and he shouted in protest.
Responses varied from “What’s up, mate?” to “Go to sleep!” and “Shut up!” So he
told them something or someone had hit him. Accused of having bad dreams, he
said no more. But when another light blow landed on him, someone laughed.
Wide enough awake
to judge from which part of the room it came, Tommy said nothing, feigned
sleep, and for some time all was well. Then the joker struck once more, but the
lad grabbed at the offending object and found himself holding what, from the
feel of it, he guessed was a boxing glove… attached to a thread. Tommy snapped
it with a smart jerk and flung the glove in the direction from which the
laughter had come. As this elicited a loud curse and some threats, he lay
doggo, feeling he had not come out of the lark too badly.
Daylight revealed
a strong, black thread passing over a bracket supporting the shelf above him
and stretching over other brackets to a bed at the end of the row. Private
Willis had been the joker, raising and releasing the glove.
Interested blokes
wracked their brains in devising further funny tortures with which to enliven
the first hour or so after lights out each night. Grown men these, but in many
cases sharing a large dormitory with other males for the first time; they
perhaps felt impelled to behave like boys they had read about in The Magnet and The Gem weeklies*.
One man discovered
that the beds could be taken to pieces; so if the legs were detached and
re-placed in position so that it looked normal, of course, it collapsed as soon
as the occupant sat down on it too forcefully or rolled over in his sleep. One
evening, while others lingered in the canteen or perhaps, having avoided
detection, sampled the wines in some drink shop down the road, our funny men
faked about half the beds. Those who came home first had their crashes and
either laughed or cursed as they considered appropriate, Tommy among them. But
two or three who returned after lights-out were landed with wrecked beds in
pitch darkness, and their boozy efforts to reconstruct them kept the other men
amused for some time, until the victims settled for sleeping at floor level.
No harm done, but
the less ebullient of the roommates complained about this childish conduct. A
conference next day decided that they’d all had sufficient of these larks and
bed-wrecking was out. All settled down quietly that night… until, around
midnight, a crash broke their slumbers. Striking of matches revealed three beds
with front legs collapsed. Because the back legs hadn’t been tampered with, the
beds stood for some time then, a little after lights-out, someone crept about
passing a rope round each unsecured leg, then pulled hard. Real anger erupted,
and nobody admitted responsibility.
That was almost
the end of comedy japes and men once more became as adults. With one exception,
that is. The Orderly Sergeant doing his rounds, rousing men at 6.30 one morning
realised just how unpopular he was when someone (well, there must have been two
of them) tipped the piss-tub over him from the balcony high above.
No one confessed
so the innocent suffered with the guilty when Captain Boden ordered H Company
confined to barracks for several days and had them march up and down the square
during the mid-day hours when they would have been resting. Thereafter, Tommy’s
comrades lived the high life, if any, outside the barrack room. Within, they
just rested or ate their meals. Happy day.’
* The Magnet, a weekly “story book”, ran from 1908 to 1940,
carrying the Greyfriars School stories featuring Billy Bunter, written by Frank
Richards (real name Charles Hamilton, 1876-1961); The Gem was published from 1907 to 1939, its main story about
another public school, St Jim’s, its hero Tom Merry, the author again Hamilton,
here nom-de-plumed Martin Clifford; Amalgamated Press published both weeklies
and, according to Wikipedia, World War II killed them off, because of paper
shortages.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: At last the Fusiliers drop their woolly
long johns, get tropical gear – and visit their tailors…
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