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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… the
Battle Of Verdun continued back and forth, the constant and sole outcome being
carnage… but the French repulsed German attacks at Douamont (April 17), Les
Eparges (19) and Mort Homme (23) and made small advances near Mort Homme and
south of Douamont (both 20), Vaux fort and Bois De Caillette (21) while the
German Army gained ground only at the Bois De Chaudfour salient (17).
Strategically, the Germans under General Falkenhayn shifted infantry tactics in
various ways, but nothing changed as artillery dominated the action (and the
casualties).
Elsewhere
on the Western Front, the Germans progressed at St Eloi and Langemarck-Ypres
(April 19, Belgium). But over in the Irish Sea their attempts to help the
upcoming rebellion failed when a ship full of arms, the Aud, was captured and scuppered and then Roger Casement, human
rights campaigner and Irish nationalist, landed from a U-boat only to be
arrested at once (both 20).
Down
south, rather intriguingly, Russian troops from the east landed at Marseilles,
their immediate destination not noted by the basic online sources. Over in
Armenia their Army finally concluded the occupation of Trebizond, Armenia (17
or 18 by different accounts), and took Turkish positions in the east of the
country around Bitlis (20).
However,
the final British attempts to relieve the four-month siege of Kut on the Tigris
failed with defeats at Bait Aissa (April 17/18), Sann-i-Yat (22) and the
sinking of the SS Julnar (23).
Meanwhile,
after three months in Egypt, my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe
from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), his older brother Ted, 19,
and their mates – the 200-odd 2/1st City Of London Battalion Royal Fusiliers comrades
who’d come through Gallipoli – finally have to leave the relative ease of their
encampment at Beni
Salama on the banks of the Nile and the edge of the
Sahara, 30
miles north-west of Cairo…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, as my father’s editor, I put the
blog into retrospective mode to consider, between his battlefield stints at
Gallipoli and on the Somme, how he came to be the character he was at this
point – a 17-year-old lad who, despite some enduring teenageness, could stand
alongside his comrades amid the terrors and horrors of the battlefield and maintain
discipline and self-respect in times when every natural instinct said “Run for
it!”
But
now the story resumes. At the end of Blog 91, posted on April 3, the Battalion
had just enjoyed its last big post-Gallipoli R&R event – a day at the races
(between the officers’ horses). Now, not unexpectedly, they’re uprooted and, as
usual, set off for destination unknown – though probably guessed.
The
background here, as mentioned in several recent blogs and again here in the
reference to them seeking “reinstatement as a Battalion”, is that Army admin.
is holding over them the threat of disbandment when they, as a veteran “band of
brothers” (my father’s phrase, writing in the early ‘70s pre-Spielberg!),
desperately want to stay together and form the basis of a new outfit:
‘A day or so later, even while the festive light still shone
in our eyes, came the order to break camp and entrain once more for Alexandria.
We embarked on a large liner-troopship and in no time I was watching the
familiar coastline of Egypt recede, and feeling deep regret about leaving a
country I should have liked to know better*.
On this voyage, to
me the only event of note was passing close to a huge ship with four funnels. I
had thought that our boat, the Transylvania,
was a big’un, but this was colossal and chock-a-block with troops, thousands of
them. Several years later when I was buying a pair of shoes, the chap serving
me said, as we discussed the late war, that he was on the Transylvania when, just south of Italy, a U-boat
torpedoed her; he survived because a Japanese cruiser rescued him and many
others and put them ashore in Italy – in that war, Italy and Japan were among
our allies**.
How lovely France looked when we anchored off Marseilles,
the shore lined with the white, usually flat-roofed buildings I’d found so
attractive when viewing other Mediterranean towns from the sea. Close up they
usually didn’t look quite so white, nor did the air around them always carry
aromas as pure as sea breezes, but I preferred the illusion to the reality
until proved wrong.
A three-day rail
journey followed. I found it delightful. No hurry about it, evidently. We would
be shunted into a siding for food and natural relief and, if the streets of a
village or town were adjacent, we’d take a stroll. A wave or shout would fetch
us back to the train in a moment – we were good boys, still chasing that
soldierly perfection which would win for us reinstatement as a Battalion.
The beautiful
greenness… I couldn’t describe the pleasure it gave me. Grass, green acres of
it. Trees – copses, woods, forests of the lovely things. Until I saw all this
beauty I didn’t know I’d been missing it. And another kind of vision on show to
us could stir a young man’s pulse to extra activity – the sight of a European
girl with white and pink complexion, brunette and blonde, as opposed to sallow
or dark tan with near-black hair.
At the time all
these differences aroused thrills of appreciation in me. So when, on one
occasion, I inadvertently stepped from the train almost into the arms of a
girl, words failed me. When she indicated she would like a tunic button for a
souvenir (one of the few words we both understood) I cut one off with my
jackknife pronto – in exchange for a kiss.
During the night,
when our train paused in a big, well-lit station, local people brought along
big jugs of red wine from which they filled our mess tins. No charge! Living it
up, indeed, and we quickly became a joyful crowd. Although we had to sleep
sitting up in crowded compartments, no one complained; who knew what pleasures
the morrow might yield?***’
* The 2/1st sailed from
Alexandria on April 17, 1916 – according to Strong
For Service, H. Montgomery Hyde’s biography of Major Harry Nathan (later a
Lord and a Minister in Attlee’s post WW2 Labour government), the Battalion’s
popular CO in Gallipoli, unfortunately ousted in Egypt. In a letter home on
April 12, Nathan – far from impartial in the circumstances, of course – wrote
that Colonel Kennard, who would now apparently be leading the Battalion on the Western
Front, had failed to gain the men’s respect. But, in one of his regular paeans
to his men, Nathan praised “those that remain” after Gallipoli for their
spirited recovery, and called them ”first-rate men” because they could “be
relied on: and in war that is everything.”
** SS Transylvania: a Cunard/Anchor liner
launched in 1914; Transylvania took
1,379 passengers ordinarily, but 3,060(!) as a troopship. The voyage would seem
to have taken eight or nine days, which is quite possible given potential delays
and digressions to avoid U-boats and such. She was sunk on May 4, 1917, en
route from Marseilles to Alexandria, torpedoed close to the Italian coast near
Genoa; Japanese destroyers Matsu and Sakaki, serving as escorts, became
rescuers – out of 3,000 on board, 10 crew, 29 Army officers, and 373 ranks died.
My father’s four-funneller could well have been the Aquitania, which, at over 900 feet, was even longer than the Titanic, though slightly smaller in
tonnage – and the only liner to serve as a troopship in both world wars.
*** Newcomers to my
father’s often dead-pan humour should factor it in right here – the Battalion
knew fine well they were heading for somewhere on the Western Front (although the
name “the Somme” hadn’t yet acquired its special resonance).
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: In Rouen, the
Battalion remnants again diligently strive to prove they should be kept
together… and on a day off Sam enjoys the glory of the cathedral and innocently
cringes when a friend leads him unwittingly to a brothel.
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