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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… The
twin campaigns of Arras (led by the British) and the Aisne (led by the French)
proceeded towards unsatisfactory conclusions for the Allies.
The
British had to call off their attack at the Third Battle Of The Scarpe (May
3-4) because of heavy casualties although, supporting Australian troops, they
did make early headway in the Battle Of Bullecourt (May 3-17), breaking through
the Hindenburg Line at Quéant. The French did take Craonne (4) and Chemin Des
Dames, Moisy Farm and Laffaux Mill (5), then repulsed German counterattacks
(6/7). But the cost of this plan set out by General Robert Nivelle continued to
prove so high that the mutinies begun the previous week carried on spreading
through their forces.
Hectic
action in other theatres saw: artillery battles on the Trentino and Julian
fronts (May 6); an Allied Spring Offensive in Salonika (5-15) including a
French/Italian artillery bombardment of Bulgarian and German positions in the
Second Battle Of Cerna Bend (5-9; Macedonia), and French/Greek troops taking
Bulgarian trenches on the Lyumnitsa river (5); the Turkish Army recapture of
Mush from the faltering Russians (April 30; Armenia); a British victory over
the Turks at the Gorge of Shatt-el-Adhaim (April 30; north of Baghdad, then
Mesopotamia).
At
sea German mines and submarines continued to take their toll of naval and other
ships, one major casualty being the SS Transylvania,
sunk by two torpedoes in the Gulf of Genoa en route from Marseille to
Alexandria with the loss of more than 400 soldiers and crew (my father had a
connection with this ship: from April 17-25ish, 1916, she carried the
post-Gallipoli remnants of his 2/1st Battalion Royal Fusiliers to Marseille and
the Western Front after four months of rest and training in Egypt).
[Memoir background: my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer
and Gallipoli veteran [Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016) Lance Corporal
Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the
Kensingtons (Blogs May
15 to September 25, 2016)…
until officialdom
spotted his age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield –
and told him he could take a break from the fighting until he was 19. He did so,
though with an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, 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/marking
time – and In Sam’s case dicing with meningitis and other battle-fatigue
enhanced ailments – until they severally became eligible for the trenches once
more…]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, Sam had the interesting experience
of getting to know his three Cambridge University student comrades a lot
better. Although he was only 18 and left school at 14, he found an equilibrium
in their relationship because he could tell these highly educated and monied novice
officer types a good deal about the battlefield realities he’d learned at Gallipoli
and the Somme, especially what the Tommies needed from their leaders in times
of extreme stress.
Now he
enjoys another of those sweet diversions from the war world which he loved so
much, when civilian civility offered him the chance to set aside everything he’d
been through – and would certainly return to at some unspecified time after his
19th birthday…
‘There followed a short period during which I spent less of
my spare time with McIntyre and more with a bloke called Hackerman. Different
in many ways to dear old Mac, this fellow waxed enthusiastic about quite small
ventures; completely self-confident it seemed, he walked with a bit of a
swagger, his feet somewhat splayed – sort of thrown upwards and smacked down as
he energetically advanced. He had a true, egg-shaped head with small chin and
mouth, large, bulging eyes, and wide forehead. He attracted my interest when
one day he insisted on showing me a note an aunt had enclosed with her regular
letter to him. It comprised an introduction to a Miss Frost, one of auntie’s
friends, who lived in Harrogate.
For some reason
unknown to me, Hackerman thought that, if I accompanied him when he called with
his letter of introduction, the preliminaries would be accomplished more
easily. Much would depend, I guessed, on the age and temperament of Miss Frost
— one was conditioned by romantic stories for a meeting with a ravishing
beauty, owner of an immense fortune…
Reality produced
an old maid with a modest job, but some remarkably convivial friends. Prepared
by the aunt for Hackerman’s call, Miss Frost conducted us to a basement room
where a group of men and women much younger than she, though certainly no more
vivacious, had gathered to bid welcome to this soldier sponsored by a London
friend.
A complete stranger
myself, I was invited to join in the drinks and getting-to-know-each-other
routine, and found this surprisingly easy among young women bent on giving two
young soldiers a good time (in the most innocent sense of the phrase). One
young woman, with whom I found myself particularly at ease, told me she was
married; her husband was abroad in the Forces and she found these meetings with
her friends helpful and enjoyable.
This basement
room, comfortably if plainly furnished, seemed to gain something in degrees of
informality merely by being below ground level. A touch of the nightclubs
maybe. Looking upwards through its one window, one could see part of a large
building on the opposite side of the street. “That,” said my new acquaintance,
“belongs to Alexandrina’s family. She’s that lovely girl over there.” She
pointed to a gorgeous brunette. The building, it transpired, was a hotel, its
clientele very much upper-crust, for the Tsarina of Russia** had stayed there
and, at Alexandrina’s christening, had agreed to become one of the child’s
godparents.
This faint link
with royalty caused no reserve or restraint and Alexandrina proved to be a
happy soul – and generous with the several wines and spirits obviously donated
by her dad..’
** Alexandra Feodorovna, 1872-1918,
Empress Consort of Nicholas II, the last Emperor Of Russia; the “Tsaritsa”, not
“Tsarina” as the British usually called her, it seems, was Queen Victoria’s
granddaughter and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cousin; the hotel my father refers to was
the Cathcart House, then owned by the Allen family, and still standing today,
but converted into flats. It bears a plaque saying Empress Alexandra stayed
there in 1894 – she travelled alias Baroness Startenburg, seeking a cure for
her sciatica from Harrogate’s famous spa. She became godmother to the owners’
twin children (because she took their birth during her visit as a lucky omen) —
she further asked their parents, Christopher and Emma Allen, that they be named
after herself and Nicholas, the then Tsarevich (heir to the Imperial throne),
to whom she was engaged. She stayed in touch with the children – the girl seems to have been spelt
“Alix”, because the Tsaritsa was still Princess Alix of Hesse at the time – and
regularly sent them gifts, right up to their 21st birthdays in 1915. The
Tsaritsa was Rasputin’s chief supporter at court. A combination of Army
personnel demoralised by military failure on the Eastern Front (and starvation)
plus civilian revolutionaries forcedd her husband to abdicate on March 15,
1917. Her cousin King George V refused her permission to flee to Great Britain
and, after a period of imprisonment, in July, 1918, she, her husband and her
family were murdered, probably on the orders of Lenin.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam’s lovely
evening continues – a nice girl for company, fish and chips… what more could an
18-year-old Gallipoli/Somme veteran on a break from the Front ask for? But then
comes the order to muster and the Battalion hits the road once more.
* 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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