Sam’s Memoir(1) – 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 the Memoir or Gallipoli & Somme & Arras 1918/POWetc mini-e-books click here plus see reader reviews here and here and reviews from the Western Front Association and the Gallipoli Association here. For AUDIO excerpts click Here Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here
The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…
All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of May 1, 2019, is £4,178.05 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!).
Dear all
A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… Germany started to get the bad news from the Paris Peace Conference. Given no voice in the discussions, on May 7 their new Weimar government was granted its first official sight of some of the Versailles terms. In the previous days, they’d lost their Chinese colonies to Japan (to China’s chagrin – riots ensued as reported in last week’s blog), but now they learned of German East Africa’s re-assignment to Britain and France and German South West Africa’s transfer to South Africa. Four days later, after digesting, Germany protested. But only worse was to come…
Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Orlando, concerned about any future reunion between Germany and Austria – the latter Italy’s invader foe during World War I – had negotiated in April to acquire the South Tyrol, taking in about 250,000 German speakers, Trieste, Trentino and Dalmatia. Then, when President Wilson blocked Italian acquisition of Fiume, on the Adriatic, Orlando stormed out… only to return in early May having gained nothing and lost out on his ambition to take the port of Smyrna (now Izmir) in western Turkey.
Away from the conference table, Russia remained at war – albeit with itself. While the vestigial Allied forces up north near Archangel again beat off the Bolshevik Army (May 10), in the ‘Counteroffensive Of Eastern Front’ (April 22-July 19; definitely no definite article before the ‘Eastern’) phase of the civil war the Red Army’s southern group tried to surround their White opponents in Tatarstan (about 1,200 miles east of Moscow), but they got away to the east (May 6). Trying to build their strength out that way, the Bolshevik Government drafted 35,000 Central Asian Muslims (from May 7), but soon found them rebelling and joining the anti-Russian Basmachie fighters – Turks in Turkistan, particularly around Tashkent (2,100 miles southeast of Moscow; now in Uzbekistan).
In “the subcontinent”, Great Britain started a war on Afghanistan (May 6-August 8) following an Afghan incursion into India to take a town called Bagh at the western end of the Khyber Pass (May 3). British, Indian and Gurkha troops attempted to recover it on May 9 and failed, but came again and drove the Afghans back over the border (11)…
[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. 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 Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until mid-March when he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, 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 (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany and finally moving westwards to Lorraine – whence, the day after Armistice, his long trek towards the French Front began. He reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably). Then began his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de facto holiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different… through the spring, Sam and others ex-POWs guard German POWs at a camp in Sussex, while making various attempts to get back to “normal” life…]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
April-May, 1919, Sussex: Sam continues with his final Army job, in a squad of fellow ex-POWs guarding German war prisoners still detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. Transferred to Home Guard forerunner, the Royal Defence Corps, he’s emerged from a short-lived lust for revenge and come to enjoy fraternising with (most of) the enemy – the two lots of POWs found they had quite a bit in common as fellow veterans of WW1 attritional front-line trench warfare…
But Sam still had business unconcluded – and mutually frustrating – with the sophisticated(?) young woman he’d been seeing in Littlehampton (a two-and-a-half-mile walk across the fields from East Preston). Thus far the virginity he’d not surrendered throughout the war, despite it all, remained intact…
‘For a brief, extremely enjoyable period, I continued to take my dozen or so Jerries along to the river to push those large lumps of chalk about(2); those we had placed in position earlier had already combined into a smooth, strong riverbank which would last for many years.
I still walked out once or twice a week with my formerly prim, arm-swinging bird(3), but I sensed that my slow rate of progress towards something more intimate made her impatient – especially on one fine, warm summer’s evening, when she led me to the rear of a haystack where we rested among the sweet-smelling stuff, and she encouraged me to explore so far uncharted areas by telling me about her wartime goings-on.
I learned that a coloured American soldier(4), one of many billeted in the district during the final months, had lived in her home and become very much one of the family – to such an extent that, as an accepted part of household routine, each morning he took a cup of tea up to my girlfriend in her bedroom. He stayed talking to her while she drank it and so subtly extended the length of his visits that no one noticed when a quarter of an hour, or sometimes even more, passed before he joined the others at breakfast.
Eventually, there came a time for him to join her between the sheets. She enjoyed this morning ceremony, and tried to get me at it – even with hay for a bed and the risk of the farmer arriving at an interesting, if awkward moment.
Difficult to put my finger on the real reason for my reluctance to co-operate… Being number two to the Alabamy bloke was one thing anti, a black man in bed; a clash of some sort there. But the teachings of my pre-war mentor, Mr Frusher(5), the vicar, piano teacher and Scoutmaster, still held much influence within me; never take advantage of a woman’s natural urge to have the egg fertilised, he would say… I also felt chagrin about being such a rotten judge, believing that what my eyes saw was necessarily the truth. The pretty little hat, the waisted, calf-length, Navy-blue coat, the white gloves the dainty step, and that swinging arm. Demure propriety personified…
At the time, without giving too much thought to any of these matters, I decided to quit. That there might have been a piccaninny in the making may also have occurred to me. I don’t rightly remember.’
(2) See last week’s blog for the details of the work detail in the Arun valley below handsome Arundel Castle.
(3) See Blog April 14 for Sam’s gradual “courting” of the “arm-swinging bird” or the Littlehampton Lady as I dubbed her: ‘…she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…’ – she stopped this strange ritual of walking ahead of Sam (she must have spotted him entering the town across the fields and timed her walk precisely several weekends in a row, it seems), turned around and invited him to walk with her. After some platonic “walking out” – literally, to country inns – she evidently decided to hurry him along a bit by saying ‘she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt’.
(4) As Sam’s son, I remain somewhat embarrassed about this passage because of the language he uses – “coloured” and (further on) “piccaninny” now deemed racist diction – and the degree of racism he recalls feeling in the course of this episode back when he was 20. As his editor, I decided not to cut or remove these paragraphs because, like everything else about his Memoir, it was personally honest and true to his times. “Times” plural, because a) you can see here how the old Sam – in his 70s during the ’70s when he was writing – was uneasy about his younger self’s attitudes while candidly recording them, but b) in ’70s Britain, neither “coloured” nor “piccaninny” had become subject to the linguistic shifts which, in the natural course of cultural evolution, constantly move the meanings and implications of words around so that, for instance, some, like these two, become signifiers of racism.
(5) Mr Frusher, his de facto mentor in Edmonton when he was aged about 10 to 16, had made Sam a prude or a gentleman, according to taste, with his emphasis on the male responsibility to rebuff female desires until the appropriate time – namely, after marriage. He called it “chivalry”. Sam’s Littlehampton Lady obviously thought his restraint worse than unnecessary. And young Sam no doubt persuaded himself that it was all down to rather noble virtue… so that he could overlook his shyness and fear in relationships with women. Fortunately, I can report that he got over this impediment soon after the war, thought rather later than the end of his Memoir; he told me how another bold girl visited him when he was bed-ridden with a cold, climbed in with him and gave him an experience he deemed well worth repeating quite often thereafter.
All the best– FSS
Next week: Sam, writing in 1972-6, didn’t foresee that I might adapt his Memoir into a weekly blog, so he didn’t write enough to about certain periods to spread evenly across the months – and May to late June is one such thin spell. So before returning to his demob and the crescendo of the grand Peace parade on July 19, I’m going to run a highlights reel, so to speak: a three-part Retro sequence from his north London childhood and teens covering The Making Of A Tommy, followed by four long collections of excerpts on the key moments of his three great campaigns/battles, Gallipoli, the Somme, the Spring Offensive and one on his POW months through to Armistice and freedom.
(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.
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