Sam and POW pals take a train to a new compound in occupied Lorraine… and a French woman slips a package through the wire, which tests Sam’s conscience. Meanwhile, spirits rise when a passing sailor says the German Navy has mutinied!

Sam’s Memoir – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… From north to south of the Western Front, the now established plot line continued: the Allies advanced, sometimes just occupying ground from which the German Army had retreated, sometimes encountering ferocious rearguards and suffering terrible casualties, but always advancing.

    In the Flanders Advance (September 28-October 10) element of the broad-front Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17), Belgian, French and British took Dixmude (September 30), Ledeghem (October 1), Gheluwe, Hooglede (3), Amentières (3; lost in the Spring Offensive on April 11), and the left bank of the River Lys – while withdrawing, the Germans burned Douai.

    The Battle Of The St Quentin Canal (September 29-October 2 or 10 depending who’s counting) saw the town of St Quentin won by the French (October 1-2) who then pressed on northeastwards. This became the Battle Of The Beaurevoir Line (3-6; the town is 13 miles south of Cambrai – by then burnt by the Germans – and 10 miles north of St Quentin). Australian troops took nearby Montbrehain (5) and the British took Beaurevoir itself (6) to complete a breach in the Hindenburg Line.

    The Franco-American Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) slowly moved forward again after German reinforcements had forced a temporary pause. The French took Challerange (October 2; 40 miles easy of Reims) and the second phase of the Offensive began (4) with costly American frontal assaults which gained ground northeast of the Argonne Forest, while the French progressed to the River Arnes.

    In Russia, the Allies’ skirmishes with Bolshevik forces continued as Canadian troops joined a mixed bag of Allies at Archangel (September 30; 610 miles north of Moscow) – they then repulsed a Bolshevik attack at Seletskaya (6; 170 miles south of Archangel). Meanwhile, loyalists in the southern Urals proved that the Revolution remained incomplete by calling for the formation of a new All-Russian Constituent Assembly (3)… and the Allied Japanese contribution to the foothold in eastern Siberia reached Ruchlevo (3; name or transliteration must have changed since then, I can’t find the place).

    And down in Syria the ultra-multinational Allied Egyptian Expeditionary Force, augmented of late by the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab Army, chased the Ottomans and Germans to Damascus, which they surrendered (October 1), and then onwards towards Homs and Aleppo. Syria declared independence at this point, but under whose leadership remained unclear for some time.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the nearby Front until, in mid-March, he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

September – er, well, maybe August, see below! – 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards, is still clinging on, lately somewhat uplifted by his food-scrounging partnership with fellow Tommy prisoners Wally and George. Whatever they can find, be it via digging up a few small spuds or snagging a piece of raw liver from a pigs’ trough, they share and share alike.

    But now the settled, if often violent, routine of the POW camp outside Hügelheim is about to change as the Tommies are forced to move on again after their first extended period settled in one place for perhaps ten weeks. First, though, news to set hope off on an excited gallop:

‘One morning, the only German sailor I ever saw walked into the Pferde Lazerette(2) and, eavesdropping his conversation with his friends among our guards, I got the idea that he was telling them something very exciting. Later I heard the details from a friendly guard; the sailor would not return to his ship because the German Navy had mutinied and many, like him, had gone home for good.

     Hardly believable, this wonderful news, but it filled us with joyful anticipation – although, next day, you would never have thought our guards knew about the mutiny for they turned us out of our huts as usual and marched us off to the stables. This must have been in August, 1918(3). Surely, I thought, the German Army must lose heart too, now that American troops had added their strength to ours on the Western Front. I knew they had been in action having seen one of their men, already a prisoner, at the historic 1870 boundary arch and barracks(4)… Still no local signs of the war coming to an end, though.

     But, that day, the guards did tell a few of us – thankfully, including my mates Wally and George – to bring our odds and ends out of our hut and we set off to a railway station. After a short journey, followed by a march, we finished up in a village in Lorraine(5). There we joined about 40 Britishers, all complete strangers to us. The guards led the whole crowd of us into a village hall with no bunks.

     We bedded down — if that’s the right word for lying on bare floorboards — and close together to benefit from shared warmth, as the nights always seemed cold.

     With no work allotted next morning, I had time to reconnoitre… A stout barbed-wire fence enclosed the hall, with quite a wide space between building and wire. The sentries patrolling outside took long rests sitting on stools, I noted. Fortunately, they rested on the opposite side of the building to a footpath where civilians passed fairly frequently. So I stood there beside a small gap in the wire I’d spotted, hopefully surveying the scene.

     When a lady dressed in black came by she neither paused nor looked at me, but I heard a whisper and caught the words “retourner” and “retour”(6), French words anyway, which made me stay put and, in addition, told me one surprising thing – namely that after all the years since the 1870 war(7), these good people, who became German citizens with France’s defeat, had still retained their mother tongue – even though, as I later discovered, officially they spoke German at all times.

     In due course, the good soul walked that way again, and again without pause or any other acknowledgment of my presence, she slipped her hand through the gap in the wire and passed a small package to me. “Merci bien,”was the best I could manage to whisper by way of thanks, for she vanished so quickly.

     Now came the test of my honesty, which I failed, being always so starving hungry. Before I could check my action, I had bitten a mouthful out of the piece of fruit pie I found in the paper wrapping. Remorse was hardly a strong enough word to describe the guilt I felt; Wally had been so generous with the oddments he scrounged when working at the piggeries­ – many a time he must have been tempted to gobble the lot on his way back after a day’s work.

     I found my two pals in the village hall, confessed, handed the rest to Wally, who broke it into three small shares, returning to me a third, less one mouthful.’

(2) Pferde Lazerette: horse hospital.

(3) My father’s memory may be wrong with regard to timing here – and in the past couple of episodes he’s reckoned his narrative had reached September. Wikipedia says the first, limited, and short-lived German Navy mutiny took place at North Sea port Wilhelmshaven, October 29-30, 1918; the second and decisive one followed shortly at Kiel, on the canal linking the Baltic to the North Sea, November 3, 1918; that triggered the German Revolution which swept aside the monarchy within a few days and eventually led to Germany’s Weimar Republic period; the effects of that mutiny certainly spread rapidly down to the southern region where my father was imprisoned; I don’t know, but I’m guessing either the sailor’s visit to the Pferde Lazerette occurred some weeks later than my father reckoned when writing his Memoir, or said sailor had observed or taken part in an earlier and more minor mutiny which didn’t, at that point, embrace much of the German Navy.

(4) See blog July 8, 2018.

(5) My father didn’t recall the name of the village, but the train would have travelled west from Müllheim and Hügelheim, probably towards Mühlhausen/Mulhouse again – that city being a few miles over the border between Germany and then-German-held Lorraine. Today Müllheim to Mulhouse by train would take 23 minutes and set you back €3.90. The Hügelheim branch line seems to have closed down.

(6)“Retourner” = “come back” (verb);“retour” = “return”(noun).

(7) Alsace-Lorraine: annexed by the German Empire in 1871 as one of the spoils of the Franco-Prussian War (’70-1); in July, 1915, the German Government banned the French language from the region; the Allies annexed Alsace-Lorraine back to France in December, 1918, and, in the early ’20s, deported the Germans remaining there and banned their language; Hitler effectively re-annexed Alsace in 1940-45, then lost it again. Apologies, by a slip of the brain I said in last week’s “Next week” paragraph that this village was in Alsace but, as you see, it was definitely in Lorraine.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam reckons the war’s final throes are coming up and hopes he can “stand a few more weeks of near-starvation”. Then a Red Cross parcel arrives for George – who falls to temptation and temporarily forgets the food-sharing partnership with Sam and Wally…

(1) 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.

Sam is forced to work until he can’t do any more, a guard knocks him flat… and a strange drama of redemption plays out…

Sam’s Memoir in paperback and e-book and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme  & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here Twitter @FootSoldierSam

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Allies’ final push cranked up with the dates of the Argonne Meuse Offensive telling the story (September 26-November 11) – but it was no lap of honour with the race run and won, the fighting and casualties remained terrible all along the Western Front. This Offensive began with the Battle Of Somme-Py (September 26) where the French advanced nine miles during the day and then, with American support, took Montfaucon and Varennes (27).

    The Battle Of Canal Du Nord (September 27-October 1) saw Canadian troops lead an advance towards Cambrai, abetted by British and French Battalions. Then a combination of American, French, British and Australian forces launched the Battle Of The St Quentin Canal (September 29-October 2 or 10, say different sources) in a sector between St Quentin and Vendhuille where the German Army had adopted the waterway, in a deep cutting, as part of the Hindenburg Line. There the Americans, attempting to support Australian troops, suffered huge losses, but the British – following their biggest artillery onslaught of the war, including their first use of mustard gas shells – achieved a breakthrough and a military coup by crossing the canal using scaling ladders and anything floatable – while also benefitting from a bridge at Bellenglise.

    Further north, the Fifth Battle Of Ypres/Battle Of The Flanders Peaks (September 28-October 10) began with Belgian, French and British forces breaking German lines north, east and south of Ypres on a 23-mile front from Dixmude to Ploegsteert – on the second day, the Allies retook Passchendaele, Messines and Dixmude.

    The Allies’ successes multiplied in other theatres. In Serbia, the Bulgarian occupiers (since 1915) conducted a full-scale retreat in the face of swift advances by the French, who took Prilep (September 23) and Uskub (29), the Serbs themselves, who regained Ishtip, Veles (25) and Kochana (26), and the British who entered Strumitsa (26). As a result, the Bulgarian Government sued for Armistice and it was signed (29), although fighting did not cease immediately.

    Meanwhile, in Palestine, the ultra-multinational Allied Egyptian Expeditionary Force moved towards a conclusion of its triumph over the Ottoman Army by taking the port of Haifa plus Acre and Es Salt (September 23; British and Indian troops), winning the Battle Of Samakh (25; on the shore of the Sea Of Galilee; Australian cavalry) and the Second Battle Of Amman (25; New Zealanders and West Indians), while Arab allies defeated the Turkish garrison of Ma’an (29).

    These actions in Palestine were generally known as the Battles Of Meggido. Megiddo is the root of the Biblical coinage “Armageddon”, meaning the final battle.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe – now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards – has lately been the recipient of some remarkable acts of kindness from German soldiers home on leave… all involving gifts of food, in fact, that being more or less all that mattered to desperately hungry men (the POW ration remained one piece of bread in the morning, one cup of vegetable stew at night, and a litre of acorn “coffee”).

    But last week he formed a grub-sharing partnership with his pal Wally and George, an older man he hadn’t known previously. So Sam felt comforted by a sense of “family” engendered by the mutual obligation to provide – via scrounging and sharing.

    Now though, a further encounter with guard brutality… albeit with a startling outcome:

‘I lined up one morning with no idea as to what I should be working at that day, until Wally came over to me and said he was returning to that farm where we’d loaded hay into the barn and had permission to take me as his mate(2). Obviously, the Germans had recognised his skill with farm tools and could trust him to do a good day’s work without strict supervision. A Posten(3) had to come along with us as far as the farm, but thereafter we saw nothing of him until our working day ended.

     Our job proved similar to the previous one, except that we had to move hay only from the first floor up to the top one. Wally forked the stuff up to me, I carried it to the back of the top floor and stacked it. This kept me very busy as he was so much more used to the work, although with the instruction he had given me I could just cope.

     Because we finished well before the expected time, we witnessed a scene I had never thought to see in my time. As we sat gazing down into the barn from the upper deck, four men laid out a silk-type sheet, covering most of the ground floor. Then, they tipped a cartload of wheat straight from the fields on to the sheet and, one at each corner and each holding a flail, they started to flog the wheat. The flail poll was probably six feet long with a hinged wood flap at its head, about two feet in length. Up, down, thwack, thwack, the four flails beating out the grain. When they’d done, they removed the straw and replaced it with a fresh load. At intervals, they attached the flails to the corners of the sheet, raised it and skilfully tipped the grain into sacks.

     I remembered seeing Biblical pictures of such a scene. At a time when harvesting was already being mechanised, surely only the most primitive people would do such work by hand, not the progressive Germans… unless desperate fuel-oil shortages compelled this return to ancient practices?

     At about the same time, when working in the horse hospital, I had to put my back into another surprising example of hand-operation, this time on a chaff-cutting machine(4). In Britain, this work had for many years been powered by, at least, a steam engine, usually hired in along with an operator. But I had to turn this chaff-cutter’s large wheel unaided – terribly exhausting work, especially with a slave-driver of a Landsturm(5) Regiment old soldier in charge of our work at the farm. He had other prisoners ramming straw into the machine non-stop and constantly urged me to toil harder and harder till I reached the end of my strength and could turn it no longer.

     Some French soldier-prisoners stood nearby, well-clothed and sleek with good living, it seemed. They showed amusement at my plight, which did nothing for my share of the entente cordiale.

     “Arbeit!”(6) yelled the Jerry, but I just couldn’t oblige, I was done for. He swung a blow at me, which caught me on the jaw and put me down. Staggering up and uncaringly berserk, I told him what he was in my book and, using some of his lingo, some French, and some English including one or two swear words descriptive of his origins and nasty habits, I brought in Napoleon, Caesar and Kaiser Wilhelm as people who had always oppressed common men like him and myself, and suggested it ill-became poor fellows like us to treat each other so cruelly.

     The unexpected result: at once, by signs and words in the same sort of mixture of tongues I used, he repented of his brutality and said how sorry he was about his bad conduct. I looked in some triumph at the Froggies as he promised to share that day’s bread ration with me.

     He proved I did get his meaning because, when we stopped work and began the homeward march, I felt a tug at my elbow and found the now kindly fellow tendering a thick piece of rye bread – at least half of his day’s ration, I thought. He urged me to accept it and, as seen over my left shoulder, his ugly, but now beaming face appeared quite attractive, even though he was puffing with the exertion of catching up with us.

    Our guards took little notice of him, so I had time to thank him warmly as I tucked the welcome grub into my inner sack. I had to share it three ways, but this little contribution gave me another little bit of pride that I could do something in return for Wally’s earlier kindnesses.'

(2) See Blog September 9, 2018. This farm was on the outskirts of Müllheim, in Baden-Württemberg, 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometres) south of Hügelheim (and their POW camp/horse hospital), between the Black Forest and the Rhine.

(3) Posten: a guard or, more generally, a functionary.

(4) The manual chaff-cutter’s wheel is turned via a handle mangle-style – see http://ow.ly/gelb30kUrHP.

(5) Landsturm: 3rd-class infantry, comprising any male aged between 17 and 42 who wasn’t in the standing Army, the Landwehr – but many of the Landsturm were old, former members of the Landwehr, and my father found them the most brutal (as ever just one man’s experience/opinion).

(6)“Arbeit!”: “Work!”

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and pals take a train to a new POW compound in occupied Alsace… and a French woman slips a package through the wire. Meanwhile, spirits rise when a passing sailor says the German Navy has mutinied! 

(1) 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.

September ’18: Sam forms “a sort of family” with POWs Wally and George. They agree to share everything – and he scores more spuds for the partnership with the help of Soldaten, friendly to their fellow front-liners, even though they’re enemy prisoners…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Americans called a halt on their advance after winning the Battle Of St Mihiel (September 16; casualties US 7,000, German 7,500 plus 15,000 taken prisoner) in order to ready themselves for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive then being readied by Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Foch.

    But the Allies’ terminal campaign picked up again with the Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17). The first move, the Battle Of Epéhy, saw British, French and Australian troops attack on a 16-mile front and take the village that gave it a name (18; 14 miles northwest of St Quentin) – successes now being measured in POW numbers, they chalked up 11,700. Over the following days, the French did well around Moeuvres (18-20; 17 miles southeast of Arras), holding off a German counterattack, then pushing on to recapture Benay (21) and Vendeul (22); further south they took Vailly, Mont des Singes, and made progress east of Essigny le Grand (20; 65 miles south of Arras).

    In Russia, the extraordinarily widespread post-German victory/Bolshevik Revolution mayhem continued with Japanese (Allied) troops occupying Blagovyeschensk on the Pacific side of Siberia (September 18), while in northern Russia Karelian Finns defeated a German-led Finnish force at Ukhtinskaya (18), and the Czecho-Slovak legions who had scored such a strange skein of conquests along the Trans-Siberian railway at last lost out to Bolshevik and German troops at Volsk, Simbirsk and Kazan (20; from 500 to 580 miles east of Moscow).

    Elsewhere, the Allies’ emulated their dominance on the Western Front as the Serbian/Greek/French/British collaboration in the Balkans prospered; the Vardar Offensive (September 15-29) drove the Bulgarian Army to retreat on a 100-mile front from Monastir to Lake Doiran in Serbia, which they had occupied since 1915. Meanwhile, in Palestine a wonderfully diverse Allied coalition – the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, itself British, Indian, Anzac, French, Egyptian and Gurkha, augmented by South Africans and Ruwalla and Howeitat tribesmen – initiated the Battles Of Meggido (19-25) and took the Ottoman defenders apart as they crossed the Plain Of Sharon to the Esdralon Plain. 

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017).He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe – now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards – nonetheless feels his spirits lifted a little because he keeps on running into moments of kindness from his captor-enemies – as well as his new pal, Essex country boy Wally. 

    Last week, working in a hay barn outside the nearby town of Müllheim-in-Baden (two miles south of Hügelheim), Sam sort of escaped out the back and encountered a young German soldier, on leave from the Front, walking with his sister. They had a broken English-German conversation and then the two fetched him a bucket of boiled potatoes! He and Wally ate “fit to bust”. Now the story continues and gets a little complicated regarding friendship, comradeship, even partnership… and food!

‘I now had a pal to think of, a generous soul; the months of near-starvation, of frequently being robbed of bits of food he had procured with difficulty(2), these souring experiences had not removed the grin from Wally’s face nor the kindness of his nature. You can therefore appreciate the pleasure I had from being able to give something to him by way of a change.

    I still had a few potatoes hidden under my tunic when we got back to our hut, and Wally asked if I would agree to give a couple of them to George, a friend of longer standing than I was. I can’t say I felt keen on going shares with this stranger, as he was to me; but you couldn’t look into Wal’s open mug and big, blue eyes and refuse even such a costly request. Where the next bit of extra food would come from I had no notion, but old George got his spuds.

    Let me describe George as best I can: aged about 40, although he looked rather older, black-with-some-grey hair; a face which had never been full, I’d say, but, at the moment, merely skin stretched over bone; eyes brown and bloodshot; body thin and bent forward from the waist, legs bent, feet flat – the last not a result of war’s ravages, but due to long hours spent on his feet as a warehouse salesman in a well-known St Paul’s Churchyard firm of merchants. One of the few chaps who had managed to retain his issued cutthroat razor, he shaved when water was available and still cultivated a thin black moustache. A manly man, as I always considered those with enough courage to maintain facial adornments – men who, in contact with their fellows, feared no criticism of their efforts to augment Nature’s handiwork.

    At that point, we three made a pact that all extras would be split three ways, and Wally and I, at any rate, honoured that pledge. If, as I noticed, old George slipped from strict observance once or twice, no mention was made of the matter.

But something here to be surprised about: having established a sort of family, I didn’t feel so much the loner with every man’s hand against me. Though not entirely sure the triple partnership would work to my benefit, I found that its existence added purpose to each day’s beginning. To the issued piece of black bread(3) I must try to add something for all to share, no matter how small.

    On one occasion, a guard put me to work with a small gang just outside our camp’s barbed-wire fence, filling holes in the dirt track – you couldn’t call it a road. We tipped in a mixture of stones and earth and punned them down with a lump of concrete on the end of a long handle; it was so heavy it took two of us to lift the implement and let it fall. But, ever on the lookout for opportunities to secure something for our threesome, I noticed two Soldaten(4) some hundred yards away off to one side of the road. They were digging and, when they noticed me watching them, they waved.

    I decided I was being invited to join them – I felt sure it would be safe to obey soldiers in uniform. And they had a small pile of potatoes beside them… One handed me a garden fork and indicated that I should dig. Setting to with high hopes, I found the soil dry and light and, although they had clearly gone through it quite thoroughly, I still came up with some small, but acceptable, spuds.

    On leave from the Front, I discovered, those lads, who must have risked a reprimand, at least, for aiding an enemy prisoner. Once again, they demonstrated the respect many of the fighting men on both sides felt for each other in that war.

    At that late stage, most of the front-line fighters were young men. On the German side, the bitter, still-filled-with-hatred, old Kaiser-lovers had moved on to duties far behind the battlefield – such as guarding us. I encountered an occasional exception, such as the tubby Posten who succumbed to the aroma of frying bacon at Hügelheim(5)… And now I recall I later saw him standing at the door of his hut, looking quite ill, with many sores around his face – I wondered if his undoing perhaps resulted from those very days of visiting the good lady and eating rich farm produce when he should really have been making sure we didn’t escape… “Sores all over my body,” he told me, with his hands more than words, and I felt sorry for him because he was rare and fair.’

(2) Robbed by fellow POWs is what my father means, judging by previous blogs – that’s what hunger can do.

(3) One small piece per day per POW.

(4) Soldaten: soldiers.

(5) The Posten/guard had treated Sam kindly at the Hügelheim POW camp/war-horse hospital – he’d found said “good lady” by following his nose to the smell of her frying bacon.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam witnesses a Biblical display of flailing wheat by hand – and then becomes the protagonist in another primitive agricultural practice which leads to his collapse, a guard punching him… and a strange, maybe redemptive drama playing out! 

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoirof his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

September, 1918: POW Sam runs into more surprising kindness – this time from a German soldier and his girlfriend. Over hard work and shared spuds he finds a good pal in a lad called Wally…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Battles Of The Hindenburg Line (September 12-October 12) began with the British, supported by New Zealanders, coming down off high ground to attack and take Havrincourt (September 12-16; Aisne department, southeast of Cambrai) and the Americans leading the Battle Of St Mihiel (12-13; Meuse department, 22 miles south of Verdun) under General Pershing, supported by French tanks and 1,500 Allied aircraft – catching German troops already on the retreat they took 15,000 prisoners in two days before pulling up short of their initial objective, Metz, as Pershing needed to put his force at the disposal of a French attack further north.

    The French had already won the Battle Of Savy-Dallon (September 10; Aisne department), approaching the Hindenburg Line near St Quentin as they took Hinacourt, Travecy and Savy, and then advanced again via the Battle Of Vauxaillon (14).

    No surprise then that, backstage, Austria-Hungary wrote to President Wilson (September 15) seeking an “unofficial” peace conference – whatever that might have been, the President rejected it the following day – and the German Government made a peace offer to Belgium (15) just as the Belgian Army was advancing strongly around Ypres.

    Action continued on the periphery of the European conflict. Way up north in the Murman region of Russia around the Barents Sea, Allied forces began an advance after American troops arrived in Archangel (September 11). Down in Azerbaijan, the confusing battle for Baku saw a British evacuation when an attempted collaboration with the Armenian defenders against the Turks failed. And in Serbia – territory now in Macedonia – combined Serbian, French and Greek regiments initiated the Battle Of Dobro Pole (September 15-18) against the occupying Bulgars.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim where they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

August/September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and five months a slowly starving POW, is on a run of (relative) good fortune – all food-connected stories, naturally. First it was the tubby Posten (guard) buying him a Gasthaus lunch, then a few days’ hard work in a vineyard rewarded by stew and cream cheese and even wine, and now this week a further encounter with the kindness of the enemy… 

    (By the way, if my father’s food obsession seems trivial in the light of the historic events noted in the “hundred years ago this week” section of the blog, please consider that a) he hadn’t a clue what was going on at the Front and b) hunger concentrates the mind wonderfully.)

‘However, after only three days, we were all sent off on different jobs. Grievously disappointed, I found some compensation because, in a group of 10 or so, I was taken into the nearby town of Müllheim-in-Baden(2), and thence to a big farm on the outskirts. Our job was to store away a recently cut crop of hay on the second floor of a large barn. In good dry condition, the hay proved easy to handle. Like all well-planned barns – I remembered from boyhood camping days(3) – it had an open area in the middle with two spacious floors at each end and we forked the hay from ground to first floor, then up again to the top floor.

    I had no experience with a pitchfork, but had the good luck to be paired with my friend Wally. A country boy, height about 66 inches, broad of shoulder and strong of limb with admirable stamina from his former open-air life and good feeding, he had withstood the privations of these months better than most of us. And he soon showed me the knack of driving the fork in with a twist, which secured a good load, then using the handle as a lever to lift the weight in one deft movement, making easy work of it even to a weakling like me.

    Awaiting another load from the fields, we had a break. We’d been working on the top deck of the barn, and when I explored I found a small door at the back. Carefully opening it, I saw down below a narrow lane. I thought what you have just thought – about possible escape. But where to? Food? And so on… Meanwhile, I scrambled out anyway, finding grips in gaps in the woodwork and finally landing in grass and weeds…

    And there I was, alone in the lane. But only for a moment. Coming towards me were a girl and a young soldier – and that, it appeared, would be the end of my brief freedom.

    They came close, both smiled. No screams or cries of alarm. So, nothing unusual about finding a British prisoner unguarded and alone, it seemed. “Ich arbeit darein,”(4) I said and pointed hopefully at the barn. They talked a while and he said, “Bleiben sie da”. All smiles, so I trusted them completely and waited, perhaps for 20 minutes. My mate Wally’s head appeared above and I gave him a reassuring nod and grin; I felt sure he would alert me if necessary. When my young friends reappeared the soldier carried a pail which he offered to me – nearly full of hot potatoes boiled in their jackets.

    Again, a kindly girl had risked possible arrest to help an enemy prisoner. The lad had taken an even greater risk, being in the Army. I packed the spuds into my under-tunic sack and became fuller of figure and even fuller of gratitude to these lovely, young people.

    War… to hell with it — this lad who seemed so much younger than me, would probably be in the slaughter shambles on the Western Front any day now, and what might happen to his dear sister? (I had understood one word among the several he said to me, “Schwester”.)

    Sincere thanks were all I could offer. As they disappeared round a bend in the lane, I wished to heaven I could have gone with them.

    A soft whistle from me brought Wally to the door above. To help me back up, he lowered his pitchfork and lay down on the deck up there, holding it, while I hauled myself up part of the way, then I completed the rest of the climb unaided.

    We two then ate spuds until, as they say, fit to bust.’

(2) Müllheim: in Baden-Württemberg, 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometres) south of Hügelheim (and their POW camp/horse hospital), between the Black Forest and the Rhine.

(3) With the Edmonton Boy Scouts in Epping Forest or some other tract of (then) nearby countryside.

(4) “Ich arbeit darein”: “I work in there”. Then“Bleiben sie da”: “Stay there”.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam establishes “a sort of family” with POWs Wally and George as they agree to share everything – and he scores more spuds for the partnership with the help of friendly Soldaten, full of empathy for their fellow front-liners, even as enemy prisoners…

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoirof his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

September, 1918: Sam and starving POW pals find blessed relief through working in a vineyard… where the boss seems to be American and the main customer for the products of their (forced) labour is British!?

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… A cluster of battles in the Amiens Offensive (August 21-September 3) phase of the Allies’ conclusive summer push reached their official conclusions (although fighting continued between set pieces, of course). 

    The Allies shared their successes all around. The New Zealanders earned most of the credit for the Second Battle Of Bapaume (August 21-September 3), concluded when they saw German troops out of positions overlooking Haplincourt (September 2), then regrouped. Australians won the Battle Of San Quentin, taking Sailly-Sallisel, St Pierre-Vaast Wood and Péronne (1-2; 3,000 casualties), in what one British General described as “the greatest military achievement of the war”. The British led the Second Battles Of Arras, occupying Lens as the German Army retreated (3). Finally, the Canadians fronted the Battle Of Drocourt-Quéant (2-3), seizing the western end of the Hindenburg Line to which the Germans had initially retreated (the launch pad for the Spring Offensive six months earlier), before Ludendorff decided to make the Canal du Nord their new defensive line (it runs from Pont-l’Éveque, Oise department, to Arleux, Nord department).

    Meanwhile, the French, with American support, pushed forward north of Soisson (September 2-7; 50 miles south of St Quentin), crossing the Somme Canal to take Ham, Pithon and Dury (6-7; Somme and Aisne departments).

    Around Russia, the Battle Of Baku (August 26-September 14; Azerbaijan) stalled as Ottoman forces gathered to attack the forces of the Centrocaspian Dictatorship, abetted by the 1000-man British “Dunsterforce”. Over in Murmansk, Italian troops joined the Anglo-French Allied Expeditionary Force (2; 1200 miles north of Moscow) and at Bobzerskaya (4) the Allied troops who’d entered Archangel (765 miles north of Moscow) in early August defeated a German-led Russian force. A little more remotely, Japanese soldiers, who’d lately joined the British and Czechs in Pacific Siberia, occupied Khabarovsk (5; 5210 miles east of Moscow).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim where they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

My father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and five months a slowly starving POW, has lately had a bit of luck with less grinding work and the guards going easy on the brutality – last week a friendly Posten actually bought him a pub lunch. The unexpected trend continues now as he moves on to another new workplace:

‘I didn’t know it, but that [see last week’s blog re a day taking horses from one village to another via that Gasthaus] was to be my last day of work in Hügelheim. Next came a three-day stint of hoeing in a vineyard. How I wished it could have been much longer…

    They marched about a dozen of us up into the hills until we came to the entrance to a farm. We were handed hoes and led across fields to a vast area of rows of vines. Then our guards handed us over to a man who, although wearing military uniform, left most of his tunic buttons undone, wore his cap sort of sideways, and addressed us in fluent American. Apparently the foreman, he showed one man how he wished the work to be done while the rest of us watched and learned. When his demonstrator had done about three yards, our boss set the next man on to the row to his right, and then the next, and the next, and so on, until we were all at it, forming a diagonal line across the vineyard.

    The Yankee took the lane at the head of the operation himself. We all had to keep pace with him, preserving the diagonal line. If anyone slacked, he yelled at him in a voice which put fear into the culprit, so the weakest of us still slaved as if his life depended on it – as maybe it did. You’ve got to work under such a gaffer to know real fear; the rasping voice, the promises of agony by pitchfork, boot, or battery, the scowls convincing one of serious intent behind the threats.

    Of course, put it like that and I realise I’m not portraying a good place to work; but at mid-morning they called us all to the end of the field; we dropped our hoes, followed the Yankee and sat near a hedge, while a girl handed out pieces of black bread bearing dabs of cream cheese along with bottles of white wine – each bottle to be shared by two men. Luxurious feeding, and I could now appreciate that, in return for such generosity, our Yankee German felt entitled to extract the maximum amount of work from us because they were treating us as they would their own men.

    After some months of enforced abstinence, the wine had an exhilarating effect on me. I resumed work light of head and heart, wandering ahead of the gang, I purposely took the position in the row next to the gaffer. I wanted to know more about him and the vinery. Backs bent, he and we set to with a will; I felt no end of a fellow as the alcohol-laden blood got at my brain and I kept up with the boss without pausing, as I’d had to do earlier.

    When he straightened up for a short rest, I did likewise and asked him where he had learned his American. He’d lived in the States for some years, he said, but, when the war started, he had been on a homeland visit and was called to serve in the Army before he could return to the USA. When next he paused, he told me that an English-based firm named Margetts(2) owned the farm and vineyard – jams and preserves their main lines. I remember hoping that, if I survived, I might sample Margetts jam at the family table back home and tell them about the kindness of the company’s German employees.

    We’d started work early, of course, and at Mittag, as the gaffer called midday even when talking to us in English, we were actually taken into the farm kitchen, which served as a small canteen. The Yankee foreman’s family sat us at long tables and gave us large basins of almost black stew – on the surface floated blobs of cream! I concluded that the stew consisted of blood sausage with potatoes and swedes. Bread to mop up completed a fine meal and we returned to our toil in good spirits. The whole experience did me a lot of good.

    Work, when resumed for the afternoon, still had to be done correctly and without pause. Our Yankee watched us over his shoulder and now a bearded civilian constantly scrutinised us too. He moved from row to row between the vines, checking that our hoeing was sufficiently deep and that we laid uprooted weeds on the surface (so the sun would dry and kill them).

    Back-breaking work, especially for weakened men, but I felt – and I was sure that most of the men did too – that, if only we could remain in this job and consume the kind of food we’d had this day, strength would return and our work would better satisfy the good farm folk. It seemed so important, I remember, that their humane treatment of enemy prisoners would be paid for in the only currency we could offer – good work.’

(2) According to http://ow.ly/pzvY30kUrrd Margetts was based in Dalston, London, from 1869, its founder James Margetts of Hackney. I don’t know the ins and outs, financial and otherwise, of a British firm operating in Germany during the war. Margetts is now part of Metrow Foods, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam runs into more surprising kindness – from a German soldier and his girlfriend; over hard work and shared spuds he finds a good pal in a lad called Wally…

(1) 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.