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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… attritional
“low-key” (still deadly) winter activity continued on or near the Western Front
at Lille (January 11 and 16) and Givenchy (14) while British monitors shelled
the occupied Belgian port of Westeinde (15).
The
multi-faceted involvements of the Russian Army proceeded as they made headway
on the Eastern Front throughout the week, and launched a fresh attack against
the Ottoman Army in the Caucasus (January 10-February 16; mountains between the
Black and Caspian Seas) – they began a long advance towards Erzurum, eastern
Turkey, amid snow that caused thousands of frostbite casualties in order to
catch the Ottomans short of manpower because their “Armenian Massacre” had
reduced numbers of troops and the traders to supply them (they also hoped to
win before Turkish reinforcements could move north after their defensive
triumph at Gallipoli).
Further,
in their steady invasion of west Persia the Russians entered Kangavar (January
15) only to be ousted the next day – I can’t find a reference to who did the
ousting, but it may have been the Turkish Army who’d just occupied Kirmanshah
(13) in the same region.
During
the week the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Montenegro drew close to a conclusion
when they reached the capital, Cetinje (January 13), and the Serbian Army
they’d played a part in crushing shipped across from Albania to Corfu (15) – lately
occupied by the French Army (11), contrary to protests from the Greek
government.
Down
in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the British Army trying to relieve 10,000 comrades
besieged by Turkish forces at Kut, 100 miles south-east of Baghdad, followed
last week’s costly defeat at Sheikh Sa’ad with a costly victory in the Battle
of Wadi (January 13; 1,600 British/Indian casualties, 500 Turkish).
Meanwhile,
the last Allied troops had evacuated Gallipoli on January 9, a Sunday 100 years
ago. In the immediate aftermath, the remnants of the 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Lance Corporal
Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London
(still under-age at 17), paused and gathered their thoughts on a troopship in
Mudros harbour, Lemnos. Nobody offered them a clue as to what might come next…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, the roughly 200 remaining members of
my father’s 1,000-man Battalion – who’d volunteered 16 months earlier – sailed
away from V Beach overnight January 6-7… having sailed away from their long
stint at Suvla Bay less than three weeks previously.
Finally,
the Battalion had transferred to the SS Minneapolis
without setting foot ashore on the Greek island that sheltered them. There they
waited:
‘We actually remained on-board the Minneapolis* for three days while more and more men
boarded her as well as other waiting ships. Brother Ted did not appear, so I
guessed he had already gone to Egypt.
We few remaining
Signallers did two-hour spells on the bridge each night, in pairs, and I became
familiar with the names of several ships in the vicinity including, I remember,
the Nestor and the Minnewaska** (the latter belonging to the same line as our ship). The ships’
officers probably did their business during daylight for most of the messages
we handled came before midnight and concerned inter-ship visiting.
Because the ship’s
third officer proved extremely kind and friendly, I didn’t always bother to go
below and wake up the next pair for duty when my stint ended. A steward
supplied him with large helpings of coffee and sandwiches which, he pointed
out, had been warmed “to take the chill out of them”– and he shared everything
with us. Talking of his home, wife, children, friends, gave him and us great
pleasure; he lived in a well-known Surrey town and spoke in pleasant English
country accents.
Such a lovable
bloke; I learnt later that after we left the ship at Alex, she put to sea
again, but half an hour out of port she was torpedoed***. The odds were that
the happy family he’d talked about lost their very fine daddy. A warm heart had
shared those warm sandwiches with two scruffy Tommies.
Shortly before we
left Lemnos our ship’s Captain, complete with gold braid on a smashing uniform,
was rowed out to join us. The last man aboard, he stood on the platform at the
bottom of the gangway for a moment, chatting with the two men in the boat. And,
while I watched, something puzzling happened: a fairly big flag escaped from
under his jacket, landed at his feet and opened up as he retrieved it –
revealing the Stars And Stripes! As you can imagine, seeing this early in 1916
my mind got busy searching for the significance of the incident. The States
were not at war at that time****…
Finally, we set
sail***** and the Minneapolis gave us a
comfortable run at first. But then that violent weather which starts suddenly
in the Med brought rough seas and torrential rain. There being no signalling
work at sea, I’d copped a guard duty – down below, fortunately, so I kept warm
and dry. While not too clear what I was supposed to be guarding, I had to
patrol a long corridor. The ship reared and rolled, but no one came my way, so
perhaps they all slept deeply.
We maintained a
southerly course and the rough weather came from the west for we frequently
rolled sideways – further over each time. I gripped a large, door handle to
help keep my footing, but at one moment I was horribly scared because the great
ship lay over on her side and stayed there. “Next she’ll capsize,” I thought –
nothing I could do except hang on with my feet just about able to touch the
facing wall which had now become my floor, if you understand me. A few more
degrees over and we would all drown, no doubt about that.
What all the
sleepy devils did during those awful minutes I never found out; probably rolled
to one side of their bunks and continued snoring… But to lonely me the danger
of flooding and capsize felt very real and frightening.’
At least this proved the
last time Sam had reason to fear for his life… until he reached the Western
Front and the Somme four months later. His immediate future offered only minor
inconveniences by comparison with the Gallipoli experience:
‘It was good to see the chanting dockworkers haul two
gangways into position on the quay at Alexandria and to join the queue of men
slowly making their way ashore. Our contingent grouped alongside a railway
track. Then we were directed into goods wagons and travelled a comparatively
short distance to that dreary place called Sidi Bishr****** where we had spent
a short time just before sailing for Gallipoli.
There we had to
remove all our apparel, wrap our overcoats round the lot, secure the bundles
with several big safety pins, and print our names on cotton labels to identify
them. Orderlies of some sort packed these bundles into goods vans connected by
flexible pipes to each other and, finally – ingeniously – to the railway
engine. Hot steam was thereby forced into the vans and so into the clothing.
One visualised blood-gorged fat lice bursting under the pressure and derived
quiet satisfaction from that hopeful justice.
Meanwhile, we
naked, skinny specimens entered a large shed with a concrete floor; facing us,
several men sat on boxes, each of them with a paintbrush in hand. We formed up
in single lines and, as each of us reached the painter, he dipped his brush
into a bucket of dark liquid and slapped it under our armpits and around our
dickies. “Creosote!” yelled somebody, and how right he was. We needed no urging
to jump into the tanks of water which lay ahead of us, the first consideration
being to get rid of that blasted burning fluid. After that, the coarse, yellow
soap provided helped us to get clean again. We dried ourselves on linen towels
and our bundles of de-loused clothes awaited us outside.
“Shake each
garment thoroughly!” yelled a Sergeant and his promise that all dampness would
vanish if we did this proved correct. Not exactly mother’s washday routine, but
we felt good. The ravenous lice were dead and this we really did appreciate.
At about this
point the New Year is just getting under way, so I’ll pause here as 1916 begins
to offer a new set of experiences. I must decide if there is justification for
recording some of them.’
* SS Minneapolis: in case you didn’t see last week’s blog… launched
1900, as part of the Atlantic Transport Line she regularly sailed between London
and New York – in 1907 she conveyed Mark Twain on his last trip to Europe;
requisitioned as a troopship at the start of World War I.
** SS Nestor: a Blue Funnel Line ship,
launched, 1913, for the Australia run and a claimant to the “tallest ship’s
funnel ever” at 80 feet; operated as a troopship by the Australian
Expeditionary Force. SS Minnewaska,
launched 1908/9, like Minneapolis
owned by the Atlantic Transport Line running London-New York until
requisitioned in 1915; damaged by a mine at Suda Bay, Crete, on November 29,
1916, beached and wrecked, but all 1,600 troops and 200 crew on board survived.
*** My
father heard an inaccurate account of the Minneapolis’s
demise – over-pessimistic too; a torpedo struck her on March 23, 1916, en route
from Marseilles to Alexandria but, because her cargo then comprised 60 tonnes
of horse fodder, rather than hundreds of troops, and she took two days to sink,
“only” 12 died out of 179 men on board, so the third officer may well have
survived.
****
The USA did not “enter the conflict” until April, 1917.
***** H. Montgomery Hyde’s
Strong For Service, the biography of
the Battalion’s then commanding officer, Major Harry Nathan (later an MP, then
a Lord and Cabinet member in Attlee’s post-WW2 Labour Government), quotes one
of his letters home saying the Minneapolis
sailed from Mudros on January 12, 1916, and docked at Alexandria on the 14th.
****** Sidi Bishr: see
Blog 62 September 13, 2015, for the original reference to this barren location.
My father really meant
that last paragraph about deciding whether he should continue with his Memoir.
He was in his mid-70s, afflicted for 20 years already by incurable
post-operative pain from a rectal cancer operation. It left him dependent on
morphine or synthetic equivalents for analgesia, so in pressing on with his
writing he had to deal with pain caused by sitting (because the surgery removed
his coccyx, the spine’s “tailbone”) and then with sleepiness brought on by his
tablets. Given his own lack of education as a school-leaver at 14 and limited
experience as a lifelong market trader/small shopkeeper, he also wondered
whether the book would be worthwhile to potential readers (general or academic
as the case might be) – or the recollections too painful for himself.
Fortunately, after his pause for thought, he did continue,
sometimes typing, handwriting more and more of it, always supported and
encouraged by my mother, Mona… for what turned out to be another two years and
300 pages.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: While the
Battalion counts the cost and regroups, Alexandria offers Sam some colourful
tourism – including yet another chance of the ex-Boy Scout to prove and
maintain his innocence in a Red Light district…
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