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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… in
the UK, the big news was less the fighting than the implications of the
Military Service Act, passed on January 27. It introduced conscription into the
Army for men aged 18 to 41 unless married, widowered with children, already
serving in the RN (remember the air force then still came under the Army), a
minster of religion, a worker in a reserved occupation… or, a whole new legal
concept, a genuine conscientious objector.
Elsewhere,
pell-mell mutual destruction continued, though not in battles retaining grand
historical resonance: the Allies repulsed restive German Western Front
offensives at Nieuport (January 24), Arras (25), Neuville and Loos (27), Carnoy
(28) and Dompierre (29/30) though they did make small advances at Frise and
Givenchy (28); the Russians fought their way ever closer to taking Erzurum in
the Causcasus (24) while losing ground to the Austrian Army in Bukovina (29;
around the current Ukraine/Romania border); the Austrians also concluded their
conquest of Montenegro (25) and took more Albanian territory (28) while toing
and froing against the Italian Army near Gorizia (24) and on the Upper Isonzo
(27; both in northern Italy).
Further
south, the Allies occupied Kara Burun, Salonika (28), against protests from the
Greek Government, still apparently striving for some kind of neutrality. Down
in Mesopotamia the Ottoman siege of the British/Indian garrison at Kut proceeded,
as did the rather small scale, though months-long Battle For Lake Tanganyika, where
British and German motor boats and gunboats slugged it out (through to February
or July according to diverse accounts).
Meanwhile,
the 200-odd 2/1st City Of London Battalion Royal Fusiliers comrades
who remained after three months fighting at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, and a further
couple of weeks at V Beach began to enjoy R&R of a sort in Egypt. Among
them, my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), like many others, tried to get
over “the habit off the habit of being constantly alert, ready to run, fall or
take a dive” and move back into something like the tourist attitude he’d
developed when exploring the environs of Cairo a few months earlier – before
he’d ever been shot at, shelled or had bombs and darts lobbed at him from those
new-fangled aeroplanes…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, briefly encamped outside Alexandria,
Sam and a friend – both in many ways still innocents abroad despite their
terrible experience of battle – explored the city and ended up both embarrassed
and horrified as they realised an apparently friendly encounter with some
Russian children in their early teens was actually about a boy pimping his two
sisters.
In a
few days, though, the Battalion has to move on once again, out into a desolate
area where temptation, along with much else, is at a premium:
‘Still without money or new clothing, one day we filthy few
marched to a railhead where we loaded on to trucks a great many heavy, canvas
bags containing tents, along with several marquees, quantities of shovels and
picks, and provisions including packages of tinned bully beef, large tins of
“julien” (a shredded potato and vegetable preparation), and boxes of hard
biscuits – far from appetising fare, but precluders of starvation. We were
ordered to fill our water bottles in readiness for a long, dry rail journey.
Some lucky devils travelled in roofed wagons, most of us in open trucks*, while
a coach with proper seating housed the officers and senior NCOs.
At times the sun
irked those of us in trucks, but our troubles eased when we took a long break
in the vicinity of Cairo. With biscuits, bully beef and unlimited drinking
water available there, we had little cause for complaint.
Offering us
frequent views of the Nile, at times the railway passed through large
plantations. The workers in these places usually paused in their labours to
look at us and, if they were males, generally honoured us by raising their
gowns and displaying their genitals. Although the exact significance of these
gestures remained obscure to us, as soldiers we doubted that they intended
respectful salutes, and suspected the Egyptians were not exactly swooning with
love at the sight of us.
After some hours,
we detrained at a railway halt with several small buildings and a short wooden
platform. Immediately, the work of unloading commenced – much easier than
heaving the stuff on-board and a couple more hours saw the end of that chore.
Then, hard biscuits and individual tins of corned beef were handed out, large
dixies full of strong tea appeared and we took stock of our surroundings.
There was the
river, reeds and greenery along its banks, and on its far side a cultivated
area – irrigated by a piece of machinery which could well have been hundreds of
years old. An ox turned a large, wooden wheel by walking in interminable
circles; wooden cogs on the wheel’s underside rotated a shaft (a smoothed tree
trunk) which dragged a chain of leather buckets into and out of the river; these
buckets spilled their contents into a large, earthenware container whose
overflow poured into a wooden duct and supplied the irrigation system of
channels throughout the plantation.
Nearby, we could
see a village called Beni Salama*– or at least that was
the name of the railway halt. It mainly comprised small mud huts, the homes of
poor folk who worked the plantations. The flat roofs of these hovels bore piles
of ox dung, the round cakes used as fuel to heat the workers’ cook pots, we
guessed.
On our side of the
river lay the desert – sand and more sand, on and on forever, it appeared.’
* A repeated motif of the
Battalion’s travels in Egypt - “cattle-class” as the PBI called it.
** Beni Salama: in the
state of Al Jizah, 30 miles northwest of Cairo; later, when excavated, provided
evidence of the earliest known settlement in the Nile Valley.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Roasting on
the edge of the desert the battered Battalion are issued with lime juice “to
cool the blood and subdue men’s natural lusts”... and Sam’s brother Ted, left
behind on Lemnos, emerges from the desert like David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia…
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