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Dear
all
A hundred
years ago… this week nothing “legendary”/“historic” occurred, but thousands and
thousands suffered and lost their lives, limbs, elements of their mental
stability: at The Second Battle Of Krasnik (July 1-19, Russian Army versus
Austro-Hungarian; on the Western front at Vaux Fery (German success), Pilkem (British
advance, both on the 6th), and Fontanelle (8, French gained ground); in Austria
where the Italian Army took Trentino and Monticello (8), while on the Adriatic
an Austrian submarine sank the Italian cruiser Amalfi (7) and Austrian planes
bombed Venice (11); in the Caucasus where the Russians at Manzikert (10-26),
misinformed as to their enemy’s weakness, launched an attack and found the
Turks fielding 40,000 men against 22,000; in Africa, where General Botha’s
South African Army forced Germany’s South-West African Army to surrender (July
9), and on the Rufiji River, German East Africa, British monitors destroyed the
cruiser Königsberg (11); in Gallipoli, daily attrition via
shot, shell and disease proceeded in the aftermath of the Gully Ravine battle.
Meanwhile... a few miles north of Valletta,
Malta, in a rather barren Foreign Legion-ish stretch of land, the thousand men
of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers,
including my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe, his
older brother Ted (both underage volunteers, still 16 and 18 respectively in
early summer 1915), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, had moved from
the relative comfort of St George’s Barracks to tented Pembroke Camp – beside a
cemetery where Gallipoli wounded who’d failed to recover were buried daily with
full military honours.
In Malta since early February, the novice Battalion
had completed much basic preparation, including rifle shooting and, in Sam’s
case, specialist training as a Signaller. They felt they must soon be off to
face… whatever might turn up.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM
SPEAKS
Last week, Sam watched
fascinated as Lieutenant Booth (alias Nathan, promoted to Major and Battalion
commander in the field at Gallipoli) headed off a mutiny over the terrible food
provided to the common soldiery – first by sheer leadership, then by buying
them some nice snacks from a commercial canteen nearby, and finally longer-term
by persuading his superiors to give him oversight of the Quartermasters.
Now the Battalion’s on the move again and Sam’s about to find out
what he’s let himself in for, carrying all that signalling gear (and the rest).
Sam writes:
‘Most of our training completed and, in our case, much of
the specialist knowledge mastered, we were about to become a nomadic tribe, it
appeared. The camp site suddenly swarmed with busy men directed by skilled
NCOs.
Up tent pegs! We
reduced that town of tents to tidily stacked canvas bales of uniform size in a
remarkably short space of time. Pack kitbags – tubular, about 2ft 3 ins long
and 14 inches in diameter – don the ingenious arrangements of straps and
buckles which made it possible to carry high on the back the pack containing
overcoat, mess tin, boot brushes, housewife (remember?*), towel and toilet
items, socks, vest, shirt – and a knitted wool tube called a cap comforter,
which could be worn as a scarf or to cover head and ears – as well as ten
ammunition pouches each holding ten bullets across the upper abdomen, a
trenching tool handle and shovel-cum-pick head (attached to the belt at the
back), the musty-smelling water bottle at your left hip (I never saw the like
of that bottle after we left Malta, of Crimean War vintage we estimated and
made of wood of all substances…) – and your heavy Lee Enfield slung over your
right shoulder.
But then, we
Signallers – after rewinding our telephone lines and packing our instruments
into carrier cases – had to hang our specialist equipment over the basic
infantryman gear: a field telephone/telegraph, a message case the size of a
briefcase full of message forms and copies, and probably a mile spool of fine
enamelled wire for temporary communications… and a couple of signal flags.
Without the signalling gear, the infantryman of that period carried about 91
pounds** of equipment if his ammunition pouches were full, so with the
thermometer at about 80°F and soaring and that load suspended around or resting
upon my meagre body… I had little difficulty in restraining myself from
breaking into a gallop. In fact, I was sweaty and exhausted quite early in the
march.
Thereafter, my
will alone conquered the wish to allow knees to sag and collapse underneath
this hellish load, and crash on to the dusty, stony road. But had that
happened, I feared, my game would have been up, my true age discovered.
Wounding protests about cruelty to children would have been heard, I imagined…
Although, actually, I need not have worried for, later, many men around me
admitted they had felt pretty distressed — soaked with sweat, the salt of it
stinging their eyes, the load on their shoulders seeming to double in weight
with every mile.
Well, the march
didn’t kill us and we reached our new campsite – at a place called Ghajn
Tuffieha***. Some hutments there housed ablutions, cookhouse, officers’ mess,
and offices. And, mercifully, we were welcomed with pints of tea and hunks of
bread with melted butter — our cooks had moved in earlier and made this ready
for us, further proof of Lieutenant Booth’s good influence over the formerly
slack (or worse) Quartermaster’s department.
On arrival, the
officers granted us an hour’s rest. As one man we made for the sea where we
found the first sandy beach we’d seen on the island; off came every stitch of
clothing and we were into that lovely water quicker than our hands shot forward
on pay day. Previously barred to us, because of those dubious concerns about
“Mediterranean Fever”, the water was warm and salty enough for us to appreciate
its buoyancy.
After we erected
our tents, a silence settled over all, darkness came, and sleep began its
healing work – until, at midnight, a storm broke with a violence most of us had
never experienced before. The majority of the Battalion were housed in large,
pointed bell tents, hastily and perhaps carelessly erected given the day’s
weather. We Signallers had smaller bivouac tents, three and a half feet high
with rubber ground sheets secured to the tent all round; thus, our weight –
four of us per tent – and that of our equipment helped to hold it down. So we
dozed and sometimes chatted through the stormy hours, and by dawn the thunder
and lightning ceased.
When we opened the
tent flaps and crawled out, we were amazed. Everywhere, among dozens of fallen
tents, men wearing next to nothing struggled to put things right. Others
sheltered in the wash house. Those who had anticipated the swimming ban****
being lifted were wearing the trunks they had shrewdly procured. But as the sun
rose so did everybody’s spirits and the vast drying-out operation commenced.’
* Back in September,
1914, when he volunteered and the Battalion was issued with many of the basics,
Same noted “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”.
**
91 pounds is my father’s figure, an expert has told me that’s a bit too much…
but then it was Sam Sutcliffe carrying it so he might be right. Perhaps we
could agree on “bloody heavy”…
*** Nathan’s biographer
Hyde dates the move to Ghajn Tuffieha from Pembroke Camp as early June when
Pembroke, like St George’s Barracks before it, was requisitioned for care of
the wounded. Unlike my father, Nathan found the Ghajn Tuffieha camp
“indescribably… depressing” (as he wrote in a letter to his family, quoted by
Hyde, though with no further explanation as to why he disliked this spot which
my father relished like a heaven on Earth).
**** When in barracks and
camp on the other side of the idland they had been instructed not to swim
because the sea there might infect them with “Mediterranean fever” – a
mysterious ailment nobody seemed to know much about beyond the official
tooth-sucking and head-shaking.
All
the best – FSS
Next week: Young Sam meets the Maori Anzacs,
lands lookout-tower duty… and conducts careful observation of a local maiden…
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