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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.
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