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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… After
two years of mainly bogged-down warfare, the British Army on the Western Front experienced
the strange sensation of pushing an open door as the Germans extended their
strategic withdrawal – on the Ancre from March 11 they fell back to a reserve
line from Le Transloy to Serre known as R. II Stellung, and further south, on
the 10th, a British advance around Peronne and Irles brought the retreat to the
Hindenburg line forward by a couple of weeks. Still, the French made
hard-fought gains at the Butte de Mesnil/Maisons de Champagne salient (March
8).
In
the east, the Russians still raised a show of defiance despite the
overstretching of their forces and food problems at home. Although their attack
at Brzezany failed (March 6; Ukraine), they beat back a German advance near
Mitau (8; Latvia) – and down in Romanian Moldavia they helped to recapture the
Magyaros Ridge from the Germans (10).
Fighting
in Macedonia and the Dolomites proceeded inconclusively (the Allies v.
Germany/Bulgaria and Italy v. Austria).
Down
in the southern Middle East, the Allies had a good week. The Russians pushed
the Turks back in Kangavar (March 5), on the Hamadan road (8), and in
Kirmanshah (11; all in western Persia), and also took Sinnah (9; Kurdistan).
More significantly, the British Mesopotamian Campaign, having recaptured Kut on
February 24, pressed on to take Baghdad (8-11) – undefended as the Ottoman Army
continued their retreat along the Tigris and evacuated the city before fighting
could begin.
Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli
veteran (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016) Corporal
Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the
Kensingtons (Blogs
dated May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until
officialdom told him they had noticed his age – 18 on July 6, legally too young
for the battlefield – and that he could take a break from the fighting until
his 19th birthday. So he did, though not without a sense of guilt. Via Harfleur
and London, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again,
this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age
Tommies training and making their own entertainment until they severally became
eligible for the trenches once more. However, for some, including Sam, all
military activity is halted by a substantial spell in a hospital isolation unit
because of a meningitis outbreak, then the temporary collapse of his general
health (the doctor’s diagnosis: the profound effects of trench warfare)… which
oddly leads him to a kind of Boy Scoutish romance.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, my father began his recovery from
threatened meningitis, full-on German measles and a range of boils and sores
which his amiable old doctor in the isolation wards at Harrogate hospital put
down to the after-effects of everything he’d been through in the front line at
Gallipoli and the Somme – from poor food and sanitation to the emotional
upheaval caused by shot, shell and the suppression of constant fear.
His
chief support in this had been little Nurse Flo and, naturally, they started to
fall for one another. But Sam, clinging to the principles of sexual conduct set
out by his vicar/choirmaster/Scoutmaster back in Edmonton, resisted temptation
to steal anything more than a kiss, while Flo remained both professionally
attentive and friendly as ever:
‘Soon I was over the measles and able to walk freely about
the hospital. One day, when I passed the door of the small ward next to mine, a
voice called, “Come in and have a chat!” I stood just inside the door, in case
one of the staff came along. There were three beds, a girl of perhaps 20
occupied the middle one, with two women whom I guessed to be approaching 40 on
either side of her.
I learned that the
older women were both Army nursing Sisters who had contracted German measles.
They were mad about that! They smoked most of the time – unusual for women back
then. The girl said little; she seemed overwhelmed by the presence of a male in
her bedroom. What she felt later when, just as I was deciding to leave, one of
the old’uns invited me to join her in bed I never knew. It sounded like a
serious request and had the support of the other ancient — as they both
appeared to me.
Adjudged
non-infectious, I was transferred to a four-bed ward and looked forward to a
few days in male company as a change from the solitude of the isolation block –
relieved only at intervals by nurses’ visits and my own wanderings. But no one
joined me there, and so the evening talks with Flo, my affectionate nurse,
became the high spots of each of my remaining days in that hospital.
Came a morning
when the Pickwickian, benign, round, pince-nez-adorned face of the head man
looked at me across the empty ward, and I walked over and expressed my
gratitude for all the care and kindness that had come my way since he had
admitted me to this fine hospital.
Pleased to know I
had benefitted from my treatment, while he examined me for the last time, he
questioned me about conditions in those places where I had seen service. My
remarks about widespread dysentery among our men on the Gallipoli Front gave
rise to enquiries from him about food, hygiene, sanitation and water supplies,
details of which – or, rather, of their absence – remained fresh in my mind. I
told him about how superior were troop-care methods on the French Front when
conditions allowed their application**.
I thanked him again,
particularly for treating me on a civilian footing, and he deemed me fit to
return to the small Army-hut hospital and to resume treatment for the CSM**
contact throat trouble.
Right away, my
scruffy old underwear was returned to me, I dressed, climbed into an ambulance,
and within a few minutes I was back in the hut where the lads still underwent
the daily ritual of the many-spouted, copper boiler emitting jets of
formaldehyde-laden steam.’
** See Blog 65 October 4,
2015 for Sam’s detailed account of Gallipoli front-line trench sanitation and Blog
99 May 29, 2017, for the same re the Somme/Western Front.
*** CSM is cerebrospinal
meningitis, then colloquially known as “spotted fever”. Outbreaks quite often
assailed troops confined together in barracks or other crowded accommodations,
so they were hit by the three meningitis waves of early 1915, 1916 and 1917.
Harrogate was north of the worst-hit areas, but presumably some inadvertent
carrier brought the bacteria to them. See recent Blogs 135 February 5 and 136
February 12 for the story of how Sam and some of his underage pals became
carriers and were sent to isolation wards, though he mentions only one of them
succumbing to the disease itself.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam enjoys the
“unbelievably cushy existence” of the isolation ward/huts for a little longer.
Then it’s back to the Battalion and its nasty CO, the “unhappy, unjust” Captain
Tarquin…
* 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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