Just the eight months on from volunteering… Sam learns how to use a rifle!

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… today, on May 31, but a Monday, the first Zeppelin bombing raid on London caused an eruption of public outrage which, in retrospect, may seem disproportionate amid a war dealing in mass slaughter daily on the various frontlines. LZ38 flew from Evère, outside Brussels, found London – a tricky business in an airship – and, following the Kaiser’s instructions to leave his family at Buckingham Palace well alone, dropped 120 bombs (90 of them incendiaries) on a line from Stoke Newington to Stepney and then east to Leytonstone. Seven died, but several of the fatalities were children, which resulted in the British dubbing their enemy “baby killers”. Further mob attacks ensued on London Germans and other foreigners suspected of being German (earlier that month one victim was a Scot with an “ach” in his name, a Mr Strachan).

    Elsewhere, the bloody to and fro continued in France, Poland, the Italian Alps, Mesopotamia and in Cameroon.

    And at Gallipoli, a British/Indian and French attack in the Helles sector again ended in failure at the Third Battle Of Krithia (British/Indian casualties 4,500, French 2,000; Turkish reported as 3,000 dead). One controversy from a small detail of the action still rages today: Lieutenant GRD Moor of the Hampshire Regiment was awarded a VC for turning a mass of fleeing British soldiers from another Regiment back towards the Turks – according to some sources via the expedient of shooting the four leaders of the disorderly retreat; other sources say this is unconfirmed by any clear account or record and may have been put about by his seniors pour encourage les autres.

    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, 16 and 18 respectively as of early summer 1915), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, continued their training and wondering where they’d finally end up “in the trenches” (Gallipoli was the immediate answer; you readers can know, but nobody was telling the PBI). However, despite this certain sense of aimlessness, Sam had found new work he enjoyed by signing up as a specialist Signaller, developing skills he first acquired back home in the Boy Scouts...

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam luxuriated in recollection of Saturdays off, the young trainee soldier as tourist, taking his ease in a nice Valletta tea room and getting a guided tour of a French battleship in the harbour (here)… It’s quite a thought that for many of these working-class lads, like Sam and his pals, the war was the only time they ever set foot outside their own country.

    But, as he recalls in his Memoir, the time came to get down to business – the dirty work, you could say – beyond the rather technical, classroom atmosphere of Signals training. They’d been supplied with guns, finally, some weeks earlier; now they had to learn how to use them:

‘Life as a member of the Signals Section felt far more fulfilling than that of an ordinary “squaddie”, but now came our turn to learn something of armed combat. This brought our group under instruction from men who regarded soldiering as something much tougher and harsher than did our own Sergeant, to whom ohms and amps, dots and dashes, and field telephones were the tools which would actually win the war.

    A major part of the basic training concerned the ranker’s weapon, the rifle. Once issued to him, that rifle’s number was entered against his name. It became his main responsibility, a court martial for him if he mislaid it, and the “rookie” must learn the name, position and function of every part of his gun.

    The bolt was an intricate piece of mechanism, a moving and removable part containing within it a strong spring and a striking pin. Consider then what happened when you squeezed the trigger — the bolt spring was released, the striker pin pierced a small explosive cap, this ignited tightly packed strands of cordite in the cartridge case creating enormous pressure in that small space which propelled the metal cone blocking the outlet at express speed through the rifle barrel to the destruction or mutilation of some unfortunate person… or as the instructor would say, “It’ll put paid to some poor bastard”. If your aim was good…

    When you raised the bolt’s lever it came backwards, engaging, withdrawing, and expelling the cartridge case of a fired bullet. When you then pushed the bolt forward it shoved a fresh cartridge into position ready for firing. Speed must be developed in doing this, so that you could kill more enemies in a given time. The instructor pointed out a brass plate on the wide butt where a hinged, small tongue protected a hole out of which one could extract a small oil container and a pull-through — a cord with a slim metal weight at one end and a loop to hold a piece of cloth at the other. Lubricating and cleaning the rifle and its barrel was quite an important part of a soldier’s job.

    Now, dear reader, you are almost as proficient as I was in the mechanics of a lethal weapon and probably hoping, as I was, that you may never have to shoot a fellow human. You may say so freely, but I kept my trap shut, perforce. I continued adding to my knowledge thus… at the tip of the barrel is the foresight and, closer to the rifleman’s eye, the backsight, adjustable. Cut into the latter is a U or a V and so, holding the rifle tightly to your right shoulder, left hand supporting the barrel, you look with your right eye along the gun and bring the foresight’s tip into line with the shoulders of the backsight and both in line with the bottom of the object to be shot at. Pressing the butt hard into your right shoulder, now squeeze the trigger between the right thumb and forefinger…

    But, before actually firing a live round, we need more training. “Lie down,” says the instructor. “Take aim as taught.” He lies down too, a few yards in front of you, facing your rifle, brave man. The target, which he holds, has a tiny hole in the centre of its bull’s-eye through which he peers to see if your gun is correctly sighted. At his command you fire… fortunately, you are using wooden bullets, so when the trigger is pressed only a sharp click follows, but the instructor can see if, in the firing process, there is too much movement of the rifle barrel. By the way, the instructor examines these wooden bullets before and after each practice because, he says, a live round got among the dummies once and the Army lost a good teacher.’

Science and technique; every part of this training stayed with Sam. The deadly effect, as will emerge in due course, stayed with him for the rest of his life.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Rifle training continues – firing live rounds, the humiliating importance of the safety catch, Maltese fishermen duck for their lives…

Sam the WW1 soldier boy as gentleman of leisure in Malta – taking tea in a posh café and a guided tour of a French battleship

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… on May 25 the 2nd Battle of Ypres concluded with a British retreat at Bellewarde Ridge (total casualties since April 22 70,000 French, British Empire and Belgian, 35,000 German); the deadly to and fro continued on the Western Front in the 2nd Battle Of Artois and on the Eastern Front at Konary and Gorlice-Tarnów (Poland), but also on the Austria-Hungary coast as Italy launched its first attack of the war having just joined the Allies, at Urmia in North Persia where on May 24 the Russians regained a city they’d lost to the Ottoman Army on April 16, and at Njok, Cameroons, where, on May 29, Anglo-French troops defeated German colonial forces.

    In Gallipoli the prevailing status quo had already set in, but German U-boats scored two considerable coups by sinking British battleships HMS Triumph (May 25) off Gaba Tepe and HMS Majestic (May 27) in the Dardanelles. This looked like a grim commentary on domestic politics as, in London, on the latter date then Liberal Winston Churchill resigned after four years as First Lord Of The Admiralty under Tory pressure about his role in conceiving what was already understood to be a disastrous attack on Turkey. During this week, Prime Minister Asquith also succumbed to forming a coalition Government with the Conservatives – installing former Tory PM Arthur Balfour as Churchill’s replacement.

    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, then 16 and 18 respectively), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, learned new skills while entertaining themselves as best they could during their lengthy and much appreciated, though never explained, period of preparation for… whatever might come next.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam met and introduced to blog Memoir readers his new trainee Signaller comrades – in particular the mighty mite Peter Miter, the Swiss love machine, superpatriot for his adopted country England, and, as later emerged, a valiant sidekick during the worst Gallipoli could throw at them.

    Now, training proceeds, Sam enjoys it – finding his military vocation if ever he had such a thing – but, in his Memoir, turns again to writing about the, to him, wondrously flavoursome day-off experiences available to a poor London boy on the loose in his first foreign country:

‘The variety of work kept us youngsters fully interested. Because it concerned maintaining communications over distances, we frequently had to take light rations and full water bottles with us and spend whole days away from barracks. Generally, we were divided into four groups of four per station, either running out light cables for field telephones working between them, or perhaps using heliographs and flags.

     The old routine of drills and marches soon became almost a memory, and probably we began to regard ourselves as Signallers rather than soldiers — specialists, in fact. A jolt to our boyish fancies was delivered once in a while when an order went out that all specialists, cooks, officers’ servants, clerks and so on would have to rejoin their Companies for a day’s refresher training. Rather out of practice, we performed badly sometimes, feeling not quite so cocky about our status afterwards.

     The Saturday trips to town became less frequent, being subject to the exigencies of our special training. But, when free, I sometimes had the company of one of our young chaps with similar, limited requirements to myself. Usually, instead of spending hours in a bar listening to musicians and singers, we would look at the sights, buildings, or views, and sometimes have tea in a gem of a place we discovered in the main street of Valletta. After a surfeit of Army grub, a tea with waitress service, your own teapot and lovely, fancy pastries taken among pleasant civilians, mostly women, was well worth one of our scarce shillings. English people ran the teashop and, if you managed to get a table near a window, you could survey the gay scene below as people and horse-drawn traffic moved along the Strada Reale*.

     By way of a change, we might have coffee and sweet cakes in a place mostly used by Maltese businessmen. One seldom saw a soldier in there, but the regulars appeared to have no objection to our presence. On several occasions, local men sat with us and talked about civilian life on the island and sometimes of their own visits to Britain. I enjoyed these brief spells in a world so different to the Army in which I now seemed to have dwelt for so long.

     In town by myself one particularly hot day, I walked down to the Grand Harbour. A large battleship stood at anchor and a boatman offered to take me out to her for thruppence. Coming alongside I realised that, her name being Jean Bart**, she was a French Navy ship. But when a matelot, seeing my uniform, gave me a sign of welcome, I had no hesitation in stepping across on to the gangway.

     The friendly sailor became my guide on a long tour of that huge battleship and my eyes made up for his paucity of English words and mine of French. It may surprise you that the memory of her kitchens, with their large ovens, remained with me after much else was forgotten; even at sea, Frenchmen respected their tummies and catered for their needs on a grand scale.

     Ashore again, I found the waterside area where our Battalion first landed and spotted the Seamen’s Mission which had caught my attention while we waited for orders. Curiosity took me into the building and, there being no one around, I settled into a large leather armchair. On that hot, drowsy, late afternoon I soon dozed, contented, comfortable, unworried by thoughts of NCOs in search of victims.

     I awoke some time later, well rested, and looked around expecting to see perhaps a seafaring gent or some official, but all remained silent, nobody appeared. It reminded me of that small office in a street off Haymarket in distant London, next to a flat which one of my bosses owned or rented, on the door of which a brass plate announced the registered office of a fund for needy seamen. Never, in my visits there, had I seen any sign of life in the seafarers’ office. I wondered why. Would a needy seaman in London’s dockland ever find his way to the West End for a sub? Likewise, in that Maltese seamen’s home-from-home I found no one to thank, so left the place much refreshed and somewhat puzzled.’

* the Battalion marched along the Strada Reale when they first landed in Malta – Valetta’s main street then, lined with “churches, fine shops, restaurants, cafés” as Sam noted in blog 34.

** Jean Bart was the second Dreadnought-class battleship built for the French Navy, launched 1911; on December 21 1914, she was hit by a torpedo which struck the wine store(!), then she steamed to Malta for repairs; later she fought in the Mediterranean and then in the Black Sea, supporting Allied troops in the Russian Civil War – her crew mutinied in sympathy with the Bolsheviks until a Vice-Admiral acceded to the matelots’ demands to go home.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam – just the eight months on from volunteering – finally learns how to shoot… and it hurts!