Sam, near-starving, reflects on the coincidence between religiosity and the well-nourished look of POWs working in the camp cookhouse… Then German infantry rushing eastwards yell “Zu Österreich!” and war’s end really does seem nigh…

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

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

All proceeds to the British Red Cross - and the current running donations total at October 2 is £3,542.64 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!)

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Armistice was the word on the politicians’ lips even if plenty of soldiers had yet to feel the benefit.

    First, just about, Turkey and the Allies signed up for a ceasefire at Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos (October 30). Then the Austria-Hungary Empire struck two Armistice deals on the same day (November 3), with Italy and with the Allies. At more or less the same time, the Allies agreed to Germany’s proposal that there would be an Amnesty based on the terms advocated by US President Woodrow Wilson – but no next-day peace occurred in that case. Well, it was often more complicated than that.

    And on the Western Front, the French-American Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) proceeded with heavy fighting around Verly on the Oise and Grand Pre, northwest of Verdun (28); then after the French crossed the Aisne they won the one-day Battle Of Chesne (November 1; 45 miles northwest of Verdun), while the Americans took Buzancy (2; 37 miles west of Reims). Due north near the Belgian border, British and Canadian troops recovered Valenciennes.

    Germany was further undermined by a sequence of naval mutinies beginning at Wilhelmshaven (October 28) and spreading rapidly to Kiel and to unionised merchant seamen.

    Down in Italy, the Battle Of Vittorio Veneto (October 24-November 4), saw the Italian Army, with Allied support, complete driving the Austrian occupiers north from the Piave and east from Monte Grappa – their cavalry (and cyclists!) entered Vittorio Veneto itself (October 29) and an amphibious force took back Trieste (November 3) on their Armistice Day… before pressing on regardless into the Tyrol. The battle’s casualties totalled 40,378 Allied troops, 80,000 Austrian plus 448,000 taken POW.

    The pattern continued in almost every theatre: the Italians pushed on in Albania; the Croats took Fiume from Hungary via surrender (October 30); the Serbs recovered Belgrade (November 1; lost to Austria on October 9, 1915); British troops won the Battle Of Sharqat, Mesopotamia, forcing the surrender of the Turkish Army on the Tigris (October 28-30).

     An oddity occurred in Africa where the itinerant German force on the run from German East Africa entered Zimbabwe and attacked Fife (November 1).

    Further, amid all the political manouvering in Europe, Poland and Ukraine found reason to declare war on one another.

[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). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). That summer, his Company Officer offered him training 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 German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. For three to 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 filthy camp for the summer, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again, westwards to a village in Lorraine… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Late October/early November, 1918, occupied Lorraine: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now seven months a slowly starving POW, of late in an improvised “camp” which is actually a village hall, is observing some odd goings-on in the apparent closing weeks of the war – German guards easing off and being quite nice; a return to formal morning parades which both POWs and their captors seem to appreciate in terms of dignity restoration; encounters with newish English prisoners, conscripts from Birmingham, who ask Sam about “his war” then won’t believe him when he says he was at Gallipoli and the Somme…

     Now he observes a new religiosity running through some of his fellow prisoners and ponders its significance:

‘I only had to cope with the Brummies at night-time, but one of them stands out in memory because of his habit of kneeling on the floor by his bunk and praying for half a minute or so before turning in. He had managed to get himself employed in the cookhouse, stewing up the horse and veg and coffee substitute. Naturally, the Germans took any meat in the boiler and dished out the dregs to us, but judged by this devout son of Jesus’s well-fed appearance, he also had a dip into the fleshpots before we got our meatless portions.

     It reminded me that, in Malta(2), I had walked behind one of the Roman Catholic priests and been struck by the fatness of his neck and the immensity of his behind – whereas his skinny, scantily clothed parishioners often went barefoot. No doubt, like the priest, our mate needed extra nourishment to maintain his ability to kneel in the presence of so many sinners. Nay, I now remember he gave us even better value, for he read aloud from the Good Book before getting down to the silent prayer. I do not ridicule religious beliefs or observances(3), but feel they should be accompanied by Christ-like living. Too often the zealot has an undue regard for Number One.

     One Sunday afternoon, as I loitered optimistically by the barbed wire(4), I heard singing coming from the hall and sought the source of this unusual sound. Inside I found another producer of our superb stews(5) – his face and figure full, his voice strong, his manner confident – standing on a chair and holding forth about the virtues of the good life and humility and accepting hard times cheerfully.

     The preacher chose a repertoire of popular hymns which even the least religious would have learned at school, and one had to admit the singsong served as a tonic to the men. Actually, just raising their voices in song after all the quiet and subdued, hungry and well-nigh hopeless weeks or months since their capture could count as a creditable achievement by the cookhouse evangelist; his chapel friends would do him due honour when he rejoined them after hostilities ceased. Meanwhile, he had eased himself into the best available position to survive present, difficult conditions.

At one of the now regular morning line-ups, prisoners and guards alike were startled by the clatter of galloping horses, the rattle of metal, the clash of wheels on bumpy road, and the roar of lorry engines – a medley of all types of artillery and ancillary units on the move. Finally, some cars carrying German officers appeared, the whole caboodle heading away from the direction in which, we knew, lay the battlefield.

     “Zu Österreich!”(6) and other shouts came from the rankers as they rushed past; and such was the speed of their going that the considerable column passed out of sight before our bosses could gather the full significance of the swift departure.

     Our guesses came thick and fast until all of us shared the certainty that the enemy was cracking up. Only a matter of time, we knew. The officer in charge of us clinched our belief that the worst war ever was nearing its end by dismissing us without allotting any toil for the day.

     Assembling in the village hall(7) to discuss matters, we shared our elation and developing joy. Our feelings found some outlet in singing the marching songs we’d not dared to indulge till then, because bayonet point or boot would have silenced us. Only one Posten(8) tried to stop us – one of the old-time Prussians who regarded a prisoner as inferior and to be kept that way by all means available – but we disregarded his efforts and he gave up the attempt.

     This martinet, who wore a look of undying anger, cultivated a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, the ends pointed upwards at an angle of 90 degrees to the transverse portions. Always strictly on duty, he never allowed a smile to sully his face. On every occasion when it had been my misfortune to be accompanied by his nibs on marches to places of work, he had managed to create an atmosphere of oppressive misery, pushing a Gefangene(9) here, prodding another with his rifle butt there, unfailingly turning a sunny day into one overhung with gloom. More of this haybag(10) later.’

(2) Sam trained in Malta with his first Battalion, the 2/1 Royal Fusiliers, February-August, 1915, until they sailed for Egypt, then Suvla Bay, Gallipoli.

(3) My father remained a strong non-denominational believer until his death in 1987, aged 88.

(4)“Optimistically”? He hoped the still very French villagers (despite German occupation since the Franco-Prussian War concluded in 1871) might proffer a word of news or even some morsel of food.

(5) Sarcasm, in case you wondered.

(6)  “Zu Österreich!”: “To Austria!”

(7) The village hall, surrounded by barbed wire, had become their billet/POW camp.

(8) Posten: means “functionary”, but “guard” here.

(9) Gefangene: prisoner.

(10) Hay bag: one word or two, do people still use this as a general insult? It was quite common even through to my childhood in the 1950s. I can’t find the origin anywhere i.e. why it should have seen service as non-specific abuse on a par with, say, pillock or bugger.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam contemplates “freedom” – with “armed guards still lounging around outside the wire”! But, while wondering what next, the POWs sing their way through the night… and, thinking practically once more, Sam escapes temporarily to forage for food to share with Wally and George… 

(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.

Sam’s new Brummie POW neighbours, recent conscripts, make him feel old by refusing to believe he fought on the Somme… Meanwhile, their guards pretend nothing’s happening, act normal and maybe defeat will never come…

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

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

All proceeds to the British Red Cross - and the current running donations total at October 2 is £3,542.64 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!)

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Everywhere the fighting went the Allies’ way, though not without opposition, and several crucial moments marking inexorable movement towards Armistice occurred. 

    On the Western Front, the British renewed their attack at the Battle Of The Selle (October 17-25) and the Belgians repulsing a German response at the Canal de la Dérivation concluded the victory. The British also entered Valenciennes (22) and took Bruay (23), beating back a German counter at Maing (26; just south of Valenciennes).

    Further south, the Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) pushed on with the Americans fighting north of Verdun and taking Bois Belleu on the north bank of the Meuse (October 27) while, to their northwest, the French, supported by Czecho-Slovaks, advanced between Rethel and Sissonne (25) and within a couple of days had their opponents on the retreat.

    The Italian Army at last launched its big attack on the Austrian invaders long encamped north of the Piave river and up into the mountainous area further west. Reinforced by British, French, American and by then ubiquitous Czecho-Slovak troops, they broke the stand-off across the river near the coast in the Battle Of Vittorio Veneto (October 24-November 4; north of Venice) and also advanced from Monte Grappa.

    The political moves arising included the resignation of German Army joint commander General Von Ludendorff (October 27; freeing him to begin a career promoting Hitler’s rise through the '20s), the continuing exchange of “notes” regarding an armistice between the German Government and US President Woodrow Wilson, while the Austro-Hungarians wrote to him direct (27) suing for their own separate peace regardless of the rest and, that same day, proposed an armistice to Italy.

    Further east, peace did not immediately threaten, it seemed, but in Syria the Pursuit To Haritan (September 29-October 26) reached its destination after the multi-national Egyptian Expeditionary Force, fronted at this stage by Arab cavalry, won the Battle Of Aleppo and captured Deraa (25-7) then stalled in face of last-ditch Ottoman opposition at Haritan (seven miles due north of Aleppo) and Deir al Jamal.

    In Mesopotamia, British and Indian troops conducted an even brisker winding-up onslaught on waning Ottoman resistance in the Battle Of Sharqat (October 23-30) via twin advances along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers aimed at taking the Mosul oilfields. They regained Kirkuk (25; lost on May 24) and advanced more than 70 miles in a couple of days to the confluence of the Tigris and the Little Zab.

[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 training 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 German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. For three to 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 filthy camp for the summer, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again to a village in Lorraine… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Late October, 1918, occupied Lorraine: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now seven months a slowly starving POW… but hoping he just has to survive a few more weeks maybe – because rumours of imminent German defeat abound (the prisoners have no solid information, of course, and only a limited notion of what day it is).

    In the last month or so his grand strategy has been an extra-food-sharing alliance with fellow Tommy POWs Wally and George – be the supplement raw liver from a pig’s trough, small spuds dug up from a roadside hole or a hambone traded through the wire for wool from a Red Cross parcel. Anything “edible”, even in the most inverted-commaed sense.

    Just now POW camp life clearly feels on hold for the German guards. But 20-year-old veteran Sam finds that, even at this stage, he has a new problem to deal with - young whippersnappers!

‘Hindsight gives one a lovely sense of “I told you so” power, and I am no exception to that self-indulgent practice. What I saw happen then I see today taking place in Britain; although disruption of life as we know it threatens(2), people of necessity carry on as if all is well.

     That’s how the Germans behaved in autumn, 1918. They tried to maintain some sort of purpose to each day’s routine and sent us off under guard to do something which, really, lacked credibility from the point of view of their national interest; we worked to clean up and re-pack the sleepers on a single-track railway for which – if, as we believed, they had near enough lost the war – they would have no further use because they would soon be scuttling back to the Fatherland as fast as their legs or their few remaining road transports would take them.

     They had even had some of their wooden bunks erected in a corner of the hall in which we lived, and I found myself sleeping among men with whom I had not previously been confined, mainly from the Birmingham area as far as I could judge. Lying on the hard boards produced more wakefulness than sleep and they chatted endlessly, often mentioning the Bull Ring(3). In my ignorance, I wondered what this Bull thing was.

     Came a time when the silence on my part was not to the Brummies’ liking, although up to that point no opportunity to join in had presented itself. All the usual enquiries about where I had been captured led me to tell of earlier experiences in the war, but when I said I had been an acting Sergeant on the Somme in 1916, and that even earlier I had seen active service on that misbegotten peninsula in Turkey, they finally refused to believe me. All made-up yarns, said they, adding descriptive adjectives not worth repeating.

     This reaction saddened me, for I realised that here we had a new generation with no knowledge of the beginning of the war who cared nothing about those who had been engaged in it. Conscripts, they felt no concern with anything but their own survival. Well, didn’t we all, if it came to that?

     So, aware of this gap between these young men – the conscripts – and me, I did ask them a little about their own experiences, and added my own guesses… Apparently captured on almost their first turn in the front line… previously busy in the workshops of a manufacturing maze, making big money by the standards of those times… then suddenly called to training for war and, after a few months of NCOs shoving them around and screaming at them, they encountered the shattering horrors of artillery bombardment, then they were raked by machine-gun fire, scattered by showers of stick bombs, and finally driven from their trenches at the points of bayonets and herded into barbed-wire pens… all so rapidly they had no time to realise what was actually happening to them…

     Then what hope had I of convincing them that I had, on and off, been going through that sort of thing for some years? No point in trying to enlist their sympathy, or hope they might touch the forelock when addressing such a 20-year-old veteran as myself.

     For a while, I felt old and lonely and full of regret for the years I had wasted by volunteering for service when I might have stayed home and maybe made lots of money. But, on further reflection, I started to see these inner moans as the idle thoughts of an idiot who’d done what he’d done from none of the highfalutin’ motives which he would sometimes cite to excuse himself his silly conduct. And I knew that, later, more deflation of my ego would follow when I tried to come to terms with a mode of life to which, after four years of Army life, I had become a complete stranger(4).’

(2) I’m not sure exactly what my father was referring to, but given he was writing roughly 1972-6, my guess is he was thinking of the oil crisis in particular, possibly with a side order of the not-unrelated 1972 and ’74 miners’ strikes, see http://ow.ly/oG4m30mhtrQ.

(3) The Bull Ring: market place specialising in textiles, formally from 1154 when chartered by King Henry II; the market grew and diversified through the centuries, survived World War II bombings; redeveloped from the 1950s onwards as a shopping centre. Before he joined the Army, Sam had never travelled north of London (and, incidentally, like many of his comrades, he never travelled abroad again after World War 1 even though he lived to be 88 – the cheap package holidays which started in the ’60s came too late for him).

(4) That is, the civilian mode of life – in case you weren’t clear what Sam meant here.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam, in extremisfood-wise, reflects on the coincidence between religiosity and the well-nourished look of POWs who work in the camp cookhouse – but still he feels better for the hymn singsongs… And then even moreso when infantry rushing eastwards yell “Zu Österreich!” by way of explanation and the end really does seem nigh…

(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 and POW pals suddenly find themselves on a “Pay Parade” – of a sort. Oddly, it makes them feel more like men again. Also he sneaks some contraband through the wire, then finds a blessing in the pages of a prayer book: they make a handsome roll-up!

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

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

All proceeds to the British Red Cross - and the current running donations total at October 2 is £3,542.64 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!)

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Allies’ apparent plans for an autumn advance followed by a winter rest and triumph in 1919 were revised forward because of success on the battlefield and the evident wilting of German resistance and ability to conduct rearguard actions.

    The Battle Of Courtrai (October 14-19) picked up the Flanders Advance after a couple of weeks recovery as Belgian, British and French troops, led by King Albert 1 of Belgium (who had often appeared in the front lines during the war), attacked briskly on a line from Comines north to Dixmude capturing Menin, Roulers (15), Ostend, Lille and Douai (17; the latter two in France), Courtrai, Bruges, Zeebrugge and Marchienne (19).

    The Battle Of The Selle (October 17-25) followed failed German counterattacks (14 and 16) by following up the Allies’ Cambrai victory on a 10-mile front south of Le Cateau. British, American and French troops crossed the river (20) as the Germans retreated northeastwards.

    In the long Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11), at the Battle Of Montfaucon (14-17; later, as a “destroyed village”, the place became a monument to WW1), after a series of bloody setbacks, the Americans broke through the Hindenburg Line then pushed on along a front from Grandpré to Vouziers (18; Grandpré is about 50 miles east of Reims).

    Meanwhile, Allied, but chiefly British interventions in Russia gathered pace as forces who had landed at Vladivostok on the Pacific reached Irkutsk (October 14; a journey west of almost 2,500 miles ) and Omsk (18; almost 1.500 miles further west – which sounds as though it must have been different Battalions, surely). Other incursions, enormous distances apart, saw the British capture Dushak in Transcaspia from the Bolsheviks (17), advance to Soroka on the White Sea (18) and repel Bolshevik forces at Seletsko (18; 160 miles up the Dvina from Archangel).

    Elsewhere, Italian troops retook Durazzo, Albania, and the French Ipek, Montenegro (both October 14) from the Austrian Army, while the French also supported the Serbians’ recovery of their country from the Bulgarians, occupying Knyazhevats and Krushevats (17), the French the penetrating Bulgaria as far as Vidin on the Danube (19).

    Further south and east, the multinational Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s Pursuit To Haritan saw Homs (of current notoriety in the Syrian civil war) occupied (October 15), after which the combined cavalry, including many armoured cars by this stage, set off towards Aleppo (20, 115 miles north).

[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 training 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 German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. 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 filthy camp for the summer, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again to a village in Lorraine… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

October, 1918, occupied Lorraine: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW, is trying to survive what he hopes may be the last few weeks of war – having heard a passing German sailor tell the guards about a Navy mutiny, along with other hints and rumours.

    Part of his strategy is a food partnership with his pals Wally and George – sharing every little extra they can find, swap or snaffle, even though the arrangement comes under strain every time one of them gets hold of some tidbit in absence of the others. Last week, before conscience restrained him, Sam took a bite out of a fruit pie – covertly passed through the wire by a kind, brave village woman. Then George got a Red Cross parcel and scoffed much of the edible contents by himself before coming to Wally and Sam with a apologies and sharing the rest. They understood, forgave and resumed their vows.

    But the parcel included a few items potentially useful for trade, including a hank of wool. For now though, a striking, possibly weird development in relations between the POWs and their guards:

‘With that promising sense of change still in the air, one morning the Jerries lined us all up on a grassy area outside the barbed wire surrounding the village hall. There, they had placed a trestle table with a chair. We stood in two ranks facing the table, aware of several Soldaten(2) in position behind us, rifles at the ready, while in front stood one low-ranking NCO and an impressively immaculate Unteroffizier(3).

     Then two officers appeared – and you would have had to see them to appreciate the elaborate decorations which enhanced their well-cut uniforms. “Bla bla bla!” yelled the obvious senior gent and the UO loudly replied, ending with “Herr Offizier” or “Herr Kapitän”. Everything done at the yell, far louder than our British equivalents. They appeared to hate each other, but I guess it was only “bull”.

     “Komm!”(4) yelled the UO to our man first in line, seating himself alongside the Kapitän, placing paper and pen on the table and opening a briefcase which, I spotted, contained some more of those Gutschein(5) tickets they had given us once before. So we have a pay parade! Our lad steps forward and, from force of habit, slams his heels together and smartly salutes. “Name?” – meaning plain to all, despite the “Naamuh” pronunciation – “Vorname?” (Tom, Dick or Harry), “Regiment?” (pronounced “Raygiment” with a hard “g”). Then, the UO announced how many marks and pfennigs(6) the prisoner was due and pushed forward some of those coloured tickets. Our boy saluted and picked up the moola, about-turned and marched back to his place.

     I could see this display of correct behaviour impressed his nibs. None of us had so far ever saluted a German officer on, as we thought, good principle. But I later learned that British officer prisoners did observe such courtesies and I regretted that I had not done so on the rare occasions when I had encountered a German commissioned officer. Each man thereafter did his best to comply with this discipline, and we felt something approaching dignity emerge from this new experience.

     Some villagers had congregated at the nearby roadside and, naturally, I tried to identify the lady in black who had slipped the lovely pie through the barbed wire(7). Careful not to appear interested in any one person, I did see her standing behind the others. I tried to catch her eye and she nodded slightly, sufficient to tell me she knew we had seen one another previously. Without comment to anyone, I did not attempt any further communication, but told Wally about my friend and suggested that something might come of it. Bringing in George, it was agreed that I should try to effect a trade of, first, half the Red Cross wool for something to eat, no stipulation being made as to what the rate of exchange should be.

     Perhaps our exemplary behaviour at “pay parade” had done us some good in the Jerries’ eyes, for thereafter we paraded each morning, whether or not they had work to send us to. The villagers who happened to be around at that time of morning would stop and look and a few soon approached just a little closer. The Germans may have felt flattered by this show of interest at first for, after all, these people in Lorraine had lived under German rule for 48 years(8) and must by now have become loyal to the chosen race…

     My first transaction was carried out right under the noses of the guards, though in a straightforward manner. As I stood near the fence and displayed the hank of wool behind my back to a young lady who had come fairly close to our line of prisoners, my eyes directed hers to my offer and she smiled and nodded when I said “Essen” and then “mange”(9). She moved off, but soon returned and, behind my back, an exchange was effected so smoothly that I swear the man next to me knew nothing about it.

     At the safe moment, I slipped her package into my under-tunic sack and later we unwrapped the parcel. Though necessarily small, it contained a hambone with some nice meat still on it, a piece of rye bread, and, to us smokers who hadn’t had a drag for weeks – for me, not since the trip to the showers in Mühlhausen(10) – the boon of a large screw of home-cured tobacco leaf.

     I had, some time back, acquired a French prayer book I’d found in a damaged and discarded German tunic – former property, I gathered, of a soldier who had died, I knew not how (at the same time, I’d taken the opportunity to dump my heavy clogs(11) and put on his badly worn jackboots – in such poor condition were they that no guard questioned my possession of them). Now the prayer book, which the Jerry must have pinched off a Frenchman, supplied us with fine cigarette papers.

     So I was already returning something for George’s contributions from his parcel. I proudly disposed of the remainder of the goods to the satisfaction of my partners, without being spotted by our captors, and they elected me official dealer and Dolmetscher(12) to the organisation — an unpaid appointment, which I endeavoured to discharge effectively until events separated us.’

(2) Soldaten: soldiers.

(3) Unteroffizier: Sergeant or, I gather, sometimes more generally other non-commissioned officers.

(4) “Komm!”: come!

(5) Pfennig: in pre-Euro German currency one cent, a hundredth of a Mark.

(6) Gutschein: vouchers given to the POWs instead of money – just the twice in the case of Sam’s itinerant group. See blogs August 12 and 19 for the previous occasion.

(7) See blog September 30.

(8) Since the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1.

(9) “Essen”: to eat. in German. “Mange”: eat, in French.

(10) and (11) See the same blogs shown in (5) – Sam’s British Army boots were nicked while he was in the shower and a German guard came up with some clogs for him to wear.

(12) Dolmetscher: interpreter.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam observes the guards pretending that nothing’s happening, act normal and maybe crushing defeat will never come… And his new Brummie bunkmates, recent conscript POWs, just don’t believe Sam, a veteran at 20, could have fought on the Somme and so on: “I felt old and lonely…”

(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.

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

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.

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… It was one-way traffic on all fronts as the Allies moved towards the inevitable (though I don’t know whether it felt quite that certain at the time). And yet “easy” victories still had their costs – for example, the British/Canadian success at the Second Battle Of Cambrai (October 8-10), which concluded the main action of the Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17), is commonly described as resulting in “light casualties”, while the actual numbers listed are Allies 12,000, German 10,000.

    On October 8 alone, the Allies – the full mix of British, French, American and Australian – advanced three miles along a 20-mile line south from Cambrai to St Quentin and the British and Belgians declared the Battle Of The Flanders Peaks over and won on October 10.

    Meanwhile, the French and Americans (1.2 million troops in France by then) pressed on with their Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) taking the towns/villages of Berry-au-Bac (October 7), Cornay and Consenvoye (8), Craonne (12; lost on May 27 during the Spring Offensive), Laon and La Fère (13).

    A possibly forgotten feature of these triumphal advances in Europe is that they all took place on invaded ground, not by driving back into the various enemies’ territories. This was true in Italy, where the Italians gradually advanced against the Austrians on the Asiago Plateau (October 11), in Albania, where Italian troops took Elbasan from the Bulgarians (7; the Albanians had lost the town on February 2, 1916), and Serbia, where combinations of the revived national Army, French and British occupied Leskovats (9), Pristina (10; now capital of Kosovo), Prizren, Mitrovitsa and Nish (11).

    It was a different story in Syria where the multi-national Egyptian Expeditionary Force, abetted by the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab Army, conducted the Pursuit To Haritan (September 29-October 26), mainly a mopping-up operation as Ottoman forces retreated through Syria north of Damascus (then including modern Lebanon). The Allies took Beirut (October 7), Ba’albeck (9) and Tripoli (13).

    The week’s exception to all these Allied successes was the sinking of the Royal Mail Ship Leinster off Dublin Bay by a U-boat, with more than 500 people dying out of the 771 on board (October 10).

[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 training 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 bombardment of the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. 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, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again to a village in Lorraine (annexed by Germany in 1871)… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

October, 1918, occupied Lorraine: 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 – hopes uplifted recently by a passing sailor yacking to the guards about a German Navy mutiny… implying the end and Allied victory might be in sight.

    Meanwhile, mere survival is their priority. The food triumvirate partnership of Sam, Wally and George was last week tested by Sam falling to the temptation of a fruit pie passed through the wire by a brave local woman – he took a bite before he repented and shared it. Now another trial of conscience… for George this time:

‘Still no work for several days, so I had lots of time to think and assess my general condition; the inventory did not fill me with any sort of pleasure. Given my hope, almost belief, that the enemy was approaching his last gasp, I felt if I could stand a few more weeks of near-starvation, somehow I might at last be able to rejoin the British Forces. Physically, though, I remained in poor shape. The prisoner’s bent knees and staring eyes, and now, I noticed, my once-blue war prisoner uniform had turned greyish; a sort of nap had originally given it an appearance of fair quality, but now it looked what it was – ersatz, woven from a rubbishy yarn made of paper waste(2). Worse, my trousers had worn through at the knees revealing my grubby, long underpants, unwashed for months, and the peak of my cap was deserting the crown – I have a big bonce, 7 and 3/8ths, a size seldom obtainable in British stores and never in German paperwear outfits.

     Altogether I must have looked decrepit and far older than my 20 years(3). Diet right back down to the minimum now, every day nothing more than that, now I had no horses to rob of their few spuds. Survival seemed a dicey business and the fate which had befallen one of our older comrades might soon be mine – one day at the prison camp we’d found him sitting, resting against a wall, dead. Exhausted, starved. I resolved to avoid that by any conceivable ploy…

     No communication from home had reached any man I knew, but we had twice been given addresses – Stammlager(4) Parchim and Stammlager Friedrichsfeld, I recall – through which, they said, we could exchange letters with our families. But we didn’t know whether our people were getting our letters and nothing reached us from them.

     After several months of captivity, we should have been interned in one of the larger German prison camps where we could have been registered with the Red Cross office in Switzerland. They would have brought the British War Office files on missing men up to date and they, in turn, would have informed our families. But small bands of captives like us just kept wandering around occupied territories; nobody who cared knew whether we were alive or dead(5).

     Of course, it was common talk amongst us that the thousands of food parcels hopefully forwarded to the German authorities by our families and by the Red Cross(6) filled the enemy’s meagrely fed bellies while we became walking skeletons…

A sudden change then occurred which could only be due to one wonderful cause: that the Jerries now knew the war was lost to them and they must do what they could to convince the Allies that they were nice, kind, little Germans who observed the Geneva Convention and treated war prisoners correctly. So they allowed a few Red Cross parcels to get through to the wandering groups like ours and, hallelujah, George was one of the fortunate few recipients.

     He reacted understandably. He avoided Wally and me, took his prize into a corner, and hid it from our sight. We decided not to approach him. When he finally spoke to Wally, it was to suggest that, as they had been buddies before they became acquainted with me, it would be fair if the two of them shared the parcel’s contents. Wally, with that ever-present aching void where his tummy used to be, could well have agreed to that arrangement, but he found and kept a contents list which he discovered among the wrappings and noted carefully the items absent after George’s first uncontrolled onslaught. Then he told George he was disgusted with his dishonesty and he could stuff his parcel.

     Wally rejoined me and gave me the sad details of their conversation, so we turned the trio into a duo and ignored George forthwith. In turn, George responded by remaining his own man, standing in no need of friendship’s prop, apparently.

     So when, that night, he joined us as we sat on the floor among our paltry possessions – mine the German mess-can and one thin, dirty, grey blanket, and Wally’s equally numerous and valuable – we said nowt, just waited while George tried to describe his feelings and intentions. Weakness accounted for the tears that ran down his poor emaciated face as he told us of his dear wife and daughter whom he missed so terribly and of how important it was that he should last out until the war ended…

     Well, he really was still part of our small family at that moment, so good old Wally did the reassuring bit and our oldest member, who just then looked more like our youngest and naughtiest, spread out on the floor what remained of his parcel’s contents. Few edibles, for the interval during which we had declared the triple partnership in abeyance had enabled George to feel free to put most of the goodies under his belt. The remaining food comprised: two hard, but very attractive, biscuits; two Oxo cubes; a small tin of fish paste; and an item which I would have rejected in better times, but which seemed exquisitely delectable just then, some bully beef (corned beef to you) – George had managed to leave three-quarters of the canful.

     “You have one biscuit apiece, as I’ve had more than my share,” he said. “And we’ll share the bully if you don’t mind.” All thoughts of how he’d diddled us vanished. Wally and I carefully ate our share. At that marvellous moment, corned beef to us must have tasted as caviar to rich people.

     Thereafter, we discussed the other items. How the skein of fawn wool, the two reels of cotton – one black t’other white – a packet of needles, two khaki hankies and the half yard of Army-grey shirting could be disposed of to the best advantage. The two pairs of socks – also grey, Army – should be worn, I insisted, by the two of them, since I had procured some pieces of cotton cloth which I used as “Fusslappen”(7) (copying a German whom I had seen in Müllheim wrapping rags round his tootsies before pulling on his jackboots).

     Now came the question: could we exchange the wool etc for food and, if so, how?’

(2) See Sam’s Blog 214 August 12 for the story of the replacement of their filthy British Army uniforms with these ersatz POW jobs.

(3) Having no idea what day it was, Sam had let his 20th birthday on July 6 pass unremarked, as had his 18th on the Somme in 1916.

(4) Stammlager: prisoner of war camp, often abbreviated to “Stalag”; Parchim is a small town in the German Baltic state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; Friedrichsfeld now seems to be part of a town called Voerde in North-Rhine-Westphalia state; both are listed among the 168 “principal POW camps in Germany” at http://ow.ly/DFqc30kUzDCand Wiki says a total of 2.4 million Allied prisoners were held in Germany during World War I.

(5) Not quite true in Sam’s case, but that’s a story he reveals later – and at the time he had no idea.

(6) Ian Hook, of the Essex Regiment Museum, who kindly helped by searching the records of my father, said that he found a note of the Essex Regiment Prisoner Of War Fund sending food parcels to C Sutcliffe of Edmonton (the “C” being his first name Charles, but he was always known by his second, Sam). But, clearly, they didn’t make it.

(7) Fusslappen: foot cloth.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and pals suddenly find themselves on “Pay Parade” – albeit the currency is tokens, not real money. And, amid the squalor of POW life, the formality of the occasion brings dignity to both sides. Also Sam sneaks a food swap through the wire and finds a perhaps blasphemous use for a prayer book…

(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.