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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… It
was as if the war on the Western Front shook the snow off its boots and
stretched a bit to see if conditions were propitious for the slaughter to be
resumed.
On
the Ancre – where the “Operations” are listed as running from January 11-March
13 – the British conducted the odd raid and “sapped forward” (digging advance
trenches at night, though that got more difficult as the freeze deepened
towards the end of the month). Further south on the Somme, a British attack
across the Frégicourt-Le Transloy road with heavy artillery support gained 400
yards (27; British casualties 382). Northwest of Verdun, German troops took a
mile of French trenches at Hill 304 and lost it again the next day (25-6).
At
sea, similar tit for tat occurred with a naval battle in the North Sea
resulting in one destroyer sunk on each side (January 22) and although two
German destroyers shelled Southwold and Wangford on the Sussex coast, no
casualties resulted (25).
On
the Eastern Front, the Russian Army lost all its early January gains between
Lake Babit and the Tirul Marsh back to the Germans (January 23-4; Latvia). But
further south they showed they still supported failing ally Romania full-on by
taking German positions in the northwest between Campulung and Jocobeny (27).
But the Central Powers continued their advance with the Bulgarians crossing the
Danube in the Dobruja region (22).
And
then, much further south where snow never troubled the strategists, the Allies
chalked up clear victories at Wejh – captured by Arab allies (January 24; Saudi
Arabia) – and Kut – the British attempt to capture the key city on the Tigris
continuing despite opposition from Ottoman forces (25-8; Mesopotamia, now Iraq)
– and Likuju – a German garrison of 289 surrendering to the British Army (24;
German East Africa, now Tanzania).
Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli
veteran Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his new outfit the Kensingtons
from mid-May to September (FootSoldierSam’s
Blogs dated May 15 to September 25, 2016). About
September 30 he was told his age – 18 on July 6 – had been officially noticed,
he was legally too young for the battlefield, and he could take a break until
his 19th birthday if he wished. He certainly did – though not without a sense
of guilt. Via the Harfleur British base camp and some desultory “training” in London
(living at home for a couple of weeks), he ended up posted to Harrogate,
Yorkshire, and reallocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th
Battalion along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies variously making their
own entertainment until they severally turned 19…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, after the fizzling of their initial
rebellion against joining the alleged “Lost Division” – accused by Horatio
Bottomley’s yellow press of having somehow dodged all combat thus far – the
underagers settled into quite enjoying a life that, pro tem, didn’t involve
shot and shell, fear and death.
They
joined their new comrades in digging Harrogate’s streets out of that terrible
winter’s first blizzard (around January 16, 1917), thereby scoring PR points
with the townsfolk. The while, Sam struck up a new friendship with one of his
fellow under-19s, a lad from Edinburgh called “Mac” McIntyre who, when living
in London, had served an unusual pre-war apprenticeship – to a phrenologist, a
so-called reader of the bumps on people’s heads, a then fashionable and
pseudo-scientific variant on a theme of character-reading and fortune-telling.
Together
they explored whatever distractions still snowy Harrogate might have to offer:
‘Completely free agents almost every evening, we soon
exhausted the obvious delights of the town – one cinema, the odd concert – and
so Mac and I took to exploring the area. Despite the snow, we walked many of
the outer streets bordering on open country, really just to kill time because
the dark, still, winter evenings offered no great excitement – at least not
until one moonlight night when we encountered quite a crowd of people at the
top of a hill.
They laughed and
chattered, passed around little bottles of reviver, even cakes – and, from time
to time, parties would take off on large, home-made toboggans and sledges and
race off down the hill at great speed.
Naturally, when we
saw two girls standing by a rather big, but strange-looking contraption made of
wood, Mac and I chatted with them and asked them about this unusual means of
transport. They were friends, they told us, living in different parts of the
town. The father of one of them, an employee at the local gasworks, had built
this sledge some years previously.
It looked extremely
strong, the wood probably three-quarters of an inch thick, but he had fashioned
it in two parts. The front rider travelled astride and steered via ropes, held
in each hand – these were attached to a movable section below on which his or
her feet rested; to run right, they explained, press with the left foot and
pull with the right rope and vice versa. One passenger could sit behind the
steersman, with two others in a side-by-side seat at the back.
Unfortunately, the
girls had never taken this thing out on their own before. Woe was me, then. As
volunteer or pressed man, I can’t remember, I sat in the steersman’s position.
We loaded up, Mac behind me, the girls on the back seat. We pushed off with our
feet and gained a head of speed very quickly. The craft veered somewhat
leftwards. Trees lined that side of the track. I tried to move the steering to
the right, pressed with my left foot, pulled on the right rope, but nothing
happened.
At terrific speed
we hit a tree.
I came to, lying
on my back, spread-eagled. I saw the moon shining above. I could only have been
out for a second or two for, apart from myself, and Mac beginning to raise
himself a couple of yards away, there seemed nobody else around. Then I heard
sobs and groans. He and I looked around and found the two girls, both with leg
injuries.
Now people
appeared, having raced up from the bottom of the hill. After dressing the cuts
on the girls’ shins with handkerchiefs, we put them back on the sledge and the
crowd helped us push the thing back to the top of the hill. Then Mac and I
pressed on through the streets to one girl’s home. The awful explanations. She
lived with her sister. We left her, having taken the address.
Then our party
shoved off to another area of town and the sad duty of explaining to the gas
worker and his wife how his daughter’s accident had come about. With remarkable
kindness, they laid no blame on me. In fact, Mac and I arranged to visit the
next day.’
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: For Sam, Mac
and the toboggan girls very proper 1910s romances blossom – until Sam’s enduring
innocence/Boy Scout morality bumps into an embarrassment he can’t face…
* In his 70s, Sam
Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance,
a Memoir of his life from childhood
through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919
Peace parade.
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