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Dear all
A hundred years ago… this week, the
horrible attrition of trench warfare continued with the French Army’s fizzling
Loos-Artoise Offensive and withering 2nd Battle Of Champagne. And – strange
detail, probably not widely known – on October 31 the British Army introduced
steel helmets, but only on the Western Front (they never reached Gallipoli, or
certainly not Suvla Bay where my father’s Royal Fusiliers were fighting).
In
the east, the Russian Army’s general retreat across (modern-day) Latvia,
Ukraine and Belarus proceeded, but still slowed and sometimes interrupted by
relentless resistance to the Germans in battles at Illukst, Uxkull and
Chartorysk (all October 25), the Styr (27) and Dvina (28) rivers and Tarnopol,
Galicia (30).
Further
south, the Bulgarian and German conquest of Serbia went ahead in orderly
fashion with barely a setback, although a substantial French force landed in
Salonika/Thessaloniki with some British and Italian support to further defend
Greece against Bulgarian attack (the French-v-Bulgar Battle Of Krivolak,
Macedonia, begun on October 17, still raged).
The
wider “world” aspect of the war saw more action in German colony Cameroons,
where the French took Sende and a third British onslaught on the German’s
northern fort at Mora petered out (October 30-November 4).
Meanwhile,
in Gallipoli, unannounced to the common soldiery, General Sir Charles Munro
took command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force 12 days after his
appointment to replace Sir Ian Hamilton (much reviled by FootSoldierSam in Blog
66, October 11)… and, turning to those Royal Fusiliers at Suvla Bay, having
landed on September 25, the thousand men of the 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, including my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe
from Edmonton, north London (still underage at 17) and a couple of his pals, sort
of settled into their first weeks on the battlefield… wounds and deaths from
bullet and shell, the debilitating grind of poor food and disease, the constant
endeavour to keep fear in check…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, while sleeping in his trench at
Suvla Bay, my father got a centipede bite between his fingers and it turned so
septic his arm swelled grotesquely to the shoulder and his left hand “looked
like a frog”. After rejecting the idiot Battalion MO’s offer of No. 9 laxative
pills, delirious, he tottered to a nearby tented RAMC field hospital on a
hilltop. There he got the treatment he needed – which involved a gruesome
process of lancing his hand and squeezing out bowlfuls of pus. After a few days,
the doctor there cleared him to return to his Battalion.
Sam
writes:
‘As I walked down the hill, the
awkwardness of my present position began to worry me. I had the vest, pants,
socks, boots, and tunic trousers I was wearing when I left my post to seek
medical help. Nothing else. No rifle. No pack… and it had contained all my
personal belongings including a towel and soap, an unwashed set of underwear
and socks, and my two bottles of water-purifying tablets.
I
had wandered off a fortnight earlier, suffering so badly from the poison that I
hardly knew or cared what I was doing or where I was going. I had departed
without authority to do so; that might be adjudged desertion from my unit – on
active service, one of the most serious crimes a soldier could commit.
I
was convinced I had at least told my mates I was going to see the Medical
Officer and perhaps one of them had told our Sergeant or an officer. Would old
Number 9, our long, miserable streak of an MO, recollect my appealing for his
help or was his memory as bad as his knowledge of medical matters?
I
hurried across the open country between the little Field Hospital and the
beginning of the trench system without stopping a bullet or anything equally
lethal. When I slipped down into a communication trench leading towards the
front line, I soon encountered a chap I knew and liked, named Whiting. He gave
me all the news as he’d heard it. The part of it concerning myself proved both
reassuring and disappointing.
The
pals I’d left behind had more awareness of my trouble than I’d suspected. They
had given the appropriate NCO lurid details of my condition – the throbbing,
twice-its-normal-size hand and arm – and he formed the opinion that, even if I
did not die, I would be put aboard a hospital ship and would not return to my
unit. It happened that, because of a lack of senior NCOs, this Sergeant
suddenly found himself in charge of supplies for our Company. So he decided
that my tablets should he distributed among our chaps in the front line to help
keep them free of the dysentery that was knocking out so many men.
This
Sergeant’s surprise at my reappearance matched his dismay when I demanded those
precious water purifiers. Nevertheless, he ordered the return of all those not
used and, eventually, I recovered a fair quantity of them.’
With his ongoing
existence demonstrated and the lifeline of those water purifiers (a gift posted
to him by his parents) restored to their rightful owner, he expected to resume
previous routines with his Battalion comrades in the shallow and flaky
front-line trenches. Instead, a surprise change of location ensued:
‘I didn’t actually rejoin my
Company, because a request had come through from Brigade Headquarters for a
Signaller to be sent to a hill with a commanding view of Turkish positions.
There, to provide some protection for our men in forward positions, they had
decided to bring together all the machine gunners from the four Battalions
constituting the 88th Brigade. This Brigade, part of the famous 29th
Division, was composed of regulars, the good old soldiers who made a career of
serving their country in peacetime as well as in war. I felt proud to be
allowed to join them, for I had seen how much better their organisation was
than ours.
I
found my way to the machine gunners on the hill. Below us, in places, I could
see the trenches of our forward positions; quite a network had been constructed
by now and I ruefully admitted to myself that the steam had gone out of the
whole operation, the purpose bogged down in holes and trenches.
The
machine gunners could give useful fire cover to our chaps down there should
they be attacked. But why should the Turk bother to attack? He must have
concluded by now that the British had failed in their original objective and
that, if he came forward to drive us into the sea, he would suffer many
casualties and gain only a useless strip of land. Leaving us where we were to
face a winter in terrible conditions was the better strategy; we would have the
awful burden of trying to get supplies ashore in bad weather to troops who had,
in many cases, fallen victim to sickness and depression. Meanwhile, the Turks
could withdraw some of their men to reinforce their other fronts.
As
a Lance Corporal, with one man to assist me, my job was to maintain
communications with 88th Brigade Headquarters. Clearly, that meant
one man resting, one on duty. I talked over the possibilities with my helper,
and we decided to try doing four hours on and four off, night and day. We
occupied a square hole, about six feet each way, with no roof. A short trench joined
it to the main trench along the top of the hill. This was to be my home.
Although on a hilltop, these trenches had been dug into the same soft, layered
rock as those first holes we’d worked so hard to excavate down near the beach,
so their unstable walls constantly flaked away.
My
first Signaller mate there* was a pleasant chap, quite a philosopher in his
way, probably my senior by four or five years. He showed me photographs of his
parents and a sister, and I warmed myself in the glow of love emanating from
him as he talked about them and their life together before the war. A good
worker too, meticulous in his time-keeping, he woke quickly during the night
when the luminous dial on my watch told me four hours had passed and I nudged
him to take over.
At
that point, you placed the headphones and microphone in the other man’s hands,
briefly switched on the torch to show him that the combined phone/Morse signal
instrument with its buzzer key, earth pin and single landline, and the message
pad and pencil were all handy. Then you swapped positions in the hole.
On
duty or resting, at night you arranged your thick, rubberised groundsheet so
that you rested on half of it and pulled the other half over your legs for
protection from the cold or rain. When writing down any messages coming in, the
groundsheet also came in handy to screen the heavy-duty torch beam.
But
it was all very difficult and uncomfortable.
Even
though the autumn weather in that little strip of Turkey remained dry –
pleasant, really – we learned that four hours on, four off, meant we never had
a satisfactory sleep. So we experimented with two on, two off, eight on, eight
off, every arithmetical combination we could think of to cover the 24 hours.
Nothing really worked.
When
you took over after whatever interval, your mate, released from that crampy
corner of the hole we lived and worked in, should have felt free for some hours
of beautiful sleep – but was he? On duty, you must want to go to the bog some
time, so your mate had to wake up and take over. During the day, you would need
nourishment, so your mate had to procure it, and very often cook it on our
small meths heaters. Actually, we catnapped day and night and just made the
best of a terrible existence.
The
resulting fatigue, along with poor diet, was reducing us to shadows of
ourselves.’
*
Called Bill Jackson, of whom more next week…
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam does Bill Jackson a kindness – he ends his war – but
gets glum Harry Green as his new hole-mate… still, the Essex machine gunners
scrounge a beef feast!
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