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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… On
the Western Front, the Allies pressed ahead so consistently you might have imagined
the war was almost over, not just halfway through.
Down
in the southern Somme region, victories for the British and French Armies in
the adjacent Battles Of Morval (September 25-28; 5,000 Allied casualties,
German unknown) and Thiepval Ridge (26-30, the Canadians heavily involved there
too; 12,500 Allied casualties, specific German figures not known, but along the
Front as a whole they suffered their worst month so far, 135,000)… but an
overview would show each costly “win” amounted to an advance of a few thousand
yards at best.
On
the Eastern Front, despite the declared conclusion of the Brusilov Offensive,
the Russian Army still moved forward in Ukraine around Brody and Zlota-Liepa
(September 30-October 1), and the promising period of new Ally Romania’s
ill-fated invasion of Transylvania continued with the opening gambits of their
Flamanda Offensive against the Austro-Hungarian and German Armies (September
29-October 5) immediately resulting in a bridgehead across the Danube at
Flamanda itself.
And
down in Greece, the multi-faceted Allied forces gathered in Salonika – British,
French, Russians, Italians and the de-patriated Serbs – all made headway
against the Bulgarian Army in Greek Macedonia with the Serbs getting to within
25 miles of the campaign’s main objective, Monastir (September 30, now Bitola),
when they took Mount Kaymackchlan and pushed onwards.
Meanwhile, my father Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 18 on July 6, 1916, and lately promoted to Corporal, had returned from home leave
in August to find his Kensingtons Battalion happily resting for a few days at Millencourt-en-Ponthieu, 30-odd miles
west of the Somme Front, before moving back into battle further south around
Leuze Wood from September 6.
For Sam, a September 1914
volunteer, this followed a ’15-’16 winter at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (250 out of 1,000
avoided the lists of shot, shell and disease casualties). They’d sailed to
France in late April,
where – to their disgust – they were disbanded and transferred to other outfits…
Sam to the Kensingtons and the Somme front-line
at Hébuterne/Gommecourt,
where
they’d fought from mid-May onwards. There, on July 1, they’d suffered 59 per cent
casualties (see FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated June 26 and July 3, 2016) – and
fought on and on until that August break, and subsequent move to yet another
battlefield…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, with the Kensingtons installed on the
Somme Front around Leuze Wood*, Morval, Bouleaux Wood, Maltz Horn Farm and
Falfremont Farm (in action September 9-27), my father resumed his trench
mentality – though, to me, with a degree of fatalistic insouciance he hadn’t expressed
before, not during the Gallipoli campaign nor around July 1 up at Hébuterne/Gommecourt.
“Never a dull moment,” he wrote of the incessant, deadly
skirmishing, while nonetheless welcoming the respite afforded by the deep
dugouts in the ex-German trenches they manned.
But now comes a huge moment in his war-time story. The offer of a
(temporary) end to his battlefield life – could it be goodbye to all that
danger, terror, comradeship? He wrote:
‘Soon, again, we moved up front for minor action, patrol
clashes, snatch raids, nothing yet on the grand scale although we felt, or
knew, I think, that another big battle was pending…
So you may be able
to appreciate my feelings when, next time out at rest, I was ordered to report
to the Regimental Sergeant Major, the big man I’ve told you about, splendid
soldier, he who ordered me to put up a second stripe when I didn’t want to**.
I entered the room
in a half-ruined house he used as an office, stood smartly to attention,
announced my name and rank, and he told me to relax. He chatted in a very
friendly way — it really did amaze me that the top man of all the NCOs should
have any knowledge of me, trying as I always did to play it quietly, lie low
and bother nobody.
Suddenly, in the
midst of our conversation he held up a piece of paper and said: “This thing’s
come along. Ridiculous really. Don’t suppose you’ll want to have anything to do
with it. It seems that after all this time up here, you’re still under the age
at which soldiers are allowed to be on active service***. That’s what it says
here. And, moreover, it says you are to be sent back to base. You don’t have to
go. I think I can fix it so that you can stay here with the boys as I know
you’d wish to.”’
As my father’s editor,
I’m introducing an artificial pause here to consider the crosscurrents of
emotion in his 18-year-old mind, heart and soul at this point as he faced this
decision… what would you do?
‘I had to think very quickly. Then I recalled my letter home
during the period when I was feeling, not desperate, but quite bitter about not
getting a few days leave, and how my father had relayed that appeal, as his
own, to Lloyd George. I realised then that this thing had not stopped with me
being given special leave. The rest of it had gone through too and I was to be
sent back****.
No doubt, at that
time, I hated to lose face with the great RSM, but I said to him: “If that
order has come through, then it is the wish of my father that I should follow
it and, as he’s done this for me, I’ll go along with whatever the order says
must happen.”
When the RSM saw I
was set on that course, I guess he expressed his disappointment. I’m sure he’d
expected me to feel honoured by his offer to wangle it for me so I could stay
with my Battalion. Probably, my rank as Sergeant in charge of a Platoon would
then have been confirmed.
Suffice it to say
I left the Battalion*****, gathered up my belongings, made my way to a railway
station as instructed, and got on a train which didn’t stop until we approached
a part of the French coast I’d never seen before, near the port of Le Havre
where I was to transfer to the British Army camp at Harfleur — the place has
some historical significance I believe******.
* One fatality at Leuze
Wood, September 9, was Major Cedric Charles Dickens, aged 27, the great novelist’s
grandson, CO of my father’s Company A (or so I deduce from the Kensingtons’ War
Diary and Pro Patria Mori, Alan
MacDonald’s extraordinarily detailed account of July 1 at Gommecourt).
** My father further
praises this RSM in his account of July 1 on the Somme too – see Blog 103 July
26, 2016: ‘… the unshakeable RSM, who won praises from
everyone who chanced to be near him during the battle’ (and also, with other
surviving Kensingtons officers helped to organise the night-time search for the
wounded in No Man’s Land which my father took part in. He is never named in the
Memoir nor in other accounts I’ve read, including the Battalion WD as far as I
can see. It seems this period “out at
rest” would probably have been at Morlancourt, where they billeted in houses,
and then a place called The Citadel, where the accommodations were tented
(September 29-October 3).
*** Sam was 18 on July 6,
1916; conscription of males aged 19 upwards began in January, 1916, and,
although the lower limit was further dropped to 18 that May, according to http://www.1914-1918.net/recruitment.htm
the law still said a soldier could not be sent into battle overseas until he
was 19.
**** See Blog 108 July
17, 1916 – Sam’s father wrote to War Minister Lloyd George both asking that he
be granted his first home leave for 18 months (which included Gallipoli and
July 1 on the Somme) and pointing our that he was still under-age for combat.
Sam promptly got a week’s home leave, in August, and now, he presumed, the
Minister’s office was sorting out the age issue too.
***** Unsurprisingly, the
Kensingtons’ War Diary makes no mention of my father’s departure and clues to
the date are sparse. But, given that his sabbatical from the front line came
through just before that “big battle” he mentions a few paragraphs earlier, I
think it would have been late September/early October. Because from October
3-9, on the stretch of Front they’d occupied for more than a month, the
Battalion took part in an ill-fated action around Billon Farm and then Trônes
Wood (October 5-9, the “big battle pending” my father refers to, I deduce),
their casualties totalling four officers and 179 ORs (Other Ranks). Battalion
CO Lieutenant Colonel HWH Young had made himself unpopular in the hierarchy
throughout this campaign (as at Hébuterne, where he was thrust into command of
the Kensingtons on June 28!) by complaining to his Brigade superiors about
their rearward location, ignorance of the realities of the British trenches,
and poor tactical judgement in using the intelligence they gathered from aerial
photos and reports. He noted that “about this time [late
September] I received a typewritten letter asking me if any of the men would
care to submit designs for a Divisional Christmas card”; he saw this as the
sort of thing Bruce Bairnsfather might “invent” for a cartoon. He left his post
on October 27, his departure as unremarked by the Battalion WD as, probably a
few days later, Sam Sutcliffe’s would be.
******
Harfleur: a
small port on the banks of the Rivers Seine and Lézarde – back then, three
miles from Le Havre, now a suburb; scene of the 1415 Anglo-French battle which
inspired the “Once more unto the breach, dear friends…” speech in Shakespeare’s
Henry V.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam arrives in
Harfleur feeling “not very proud of myself”, but trying to concentrate on the
present – which immediately provides him with a mysterious new opportunity…
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