Sam – still under age after Gallipoli & Somme – sent back to Blighty… and good news of brother Ted!

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… With the Western Front hibernating bar the odd raid and artillery eruption, the German air force brought British civilians into the action more than usual – though on a relatively tiny scale, of course – with Zeppelin raids on Hartlepool and Yarmouth resulting in four deaths while costing two airships shot down by British fighter planes (November 27), and a rather strange first-ever daylight raid on London by just one German plane, causing 10 injuries (28). Further, off Devon, a German U-boat attacked the Brixham fishing fleet.

    Despite the weather, the Eastern Front growled along with the Russian and German Armies battling on in Galicia and Bukovina to no conclusive effect. But the main European action occurred further south.

    The Battle Of Bucharest (November 27-December 6) focussed all the forces gathered by Romania’s entry into the war on the Allied side through the ultimately failed Battle Of Transylvania (August 27-November 26). The more peripheral participants, Russia and Bulgaria (for the Central Powers) both had their successes during the week – the Russians in the Carpathians defending the Jablonitsa Pass. But the German, Austrian and Turkish Armies closed in on the Romanian capital via the Battle Of The Argeş (December 1-3) where the troops assembled around said river totalled 325,000 and the Romanians suffered a crucial defeat – although better remembered (perhaps like on of Britain’s “glorious failures”, the Charge Of The Light Brigade) seems to be the Prunaru Charge wherein the 5,000-strong 2nd Roşiori Cavalry launched a counterattack in the Teleorman river valley only for German machine guns to mow them down so ruthlessly that just 134 survived.

    Elsewhere, steady Serbian-French-Russian-British advances continued in Macedonia (the Monastir Offensive, September 12-December 11) and yet another branch of the overstretched yet always combative Russian Army drove Turkish forces back in Persia (November 27 onwards).

Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with the Kensingtons Battalion from mid-May to September, at Hébuterne/Gommecourt then around Leuze Wood and Morval (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated May 15 to September 25, 2016). About September 30 he was told his age – he was 18 on July 6 – had been officially noticed, he was legally too young for the battlefield and he could take a break until his 19th birthday if he wished. He wished all right – though not without a sense of guilt. He left the Front for the British base camp at Harfleur and a surprise, temporary move into a Quartermaster’s catering scam. But now the Army’s next plan for him, as usual, catches him on the hop…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, a new arrival at Harfleur camp gave my father worrying news about his older brother and former 2/1st comrade Ted – last heard of somewhere on the Somme about to charge out into No Man’s Land to rescue a wounded Sergeant.

    But in other respects Sam had started to enjoy his life in the mundane, peaceful world of unofficial Army catering – his old Fusiliers comrade Archie Barker’s canteen (profits to the Captain Quartermaster) which offered tasty extras like tinned-salmon sandwiches and apple turnovers the Tommies gladly purchased for a franc or two.

    Despite comprehensive inexperience in this field, Sam had really taken to his main task as wholesale purchaser of supplies via daily horse-and-cart trips to the market and shops of nearby Le Havre – abetted and advised by grocer’s daughter Marie-Louise Bodlet, who soon became his firm friend (platonic, for she was married and my father, perhaps remarkably, remained a sexual innocent until after WW1). Now though, this new life starts to turn sour on him:

‘In the canteen, I found one new development rather disquieting. After all, I had initiated this system of buying goods in the town from the French civilian dealers in hopes that it would establish itself permanently. I have mentioned those apple fritters as one great success with the troops. Well, another baker called at the canteen when I was out, offered Barker a lower price for them, and he accepted. When I sampled one of the first delivery, I didn’t think it matched the taste or quality my friend in Le Havre supplied. I said so, but Barker didn’t like this, he was the boss and he decided, so… nothing I could do about it.

     One or two other points of friction arose, but knowing only too well the fragile nature of my job there, I didn’t press my arguments. Nevertheless, the old friendly atmosphere faded. The basic reason may have been Barker’s fears for his own position. A fit man, in his thirties, he should have been up at the Front. Naturally, he’d do everything possible to retain that job at the base, away from all the horror and agony.

     So when, one day, it was decided I should return to England – for other duties, not on leave – I was mentally prepared for another move. No doubt I was delighted too, inwardly, although in part sorry to leave this life bearing so little resemblance to that of a soldier… the congenial relationship with Marie-Louise and her mother, the market people who knew me, the chummy drivers. In England this would be exchanged for who-knew-what?

The crossing from Le Havre to Southampton took much longer than the Dover-Calais ferry**, about eight hours. Then I boarded a train to London where I had to report to the HQ of our old Royal Fusiliers Battalion at the Bloomsbury depot where I had enlisted*** – a circle nicely completed.

     In charge there, I found an officer, Lieutenant Hudson, who had been with us back then, in autumn, 1914, and a Sergeant I didn’t know, an oldish chap, soldiering on in a quiet number. I gathered the Lieutenant had not left London during all that time. That’s what the Sergeant implied, though it may have been wrong. Anyway, during the rest of my stay I saw little of the Lieutenant. “You’ll be billeted at home and report here every morning at nine,” the Sergeant told me.

     Another nice change. I couldn’t help constantly thinking back to the dirt, horror and squalor I was now avoiding. I just drifted with events and, for the time being, they treated me kindly.

     My family was delighted to have me back once more – and a letter from Ted had just arrived, the first I’d heard of him since the worryingly uncertain story the Fusilier told me at Harfleur. It turned out he had left the infantry, gone through special training at Saint-Omer, and now operated with an obscure unit known as a Field Survey Company****. They constructed observation posts from which they photographed enemy artillery firing – smoke puffs by day, flashes by night – and connections through landlines automatically registered these pictures from four observer groups onto film at Brigade HQ. Calculations allowing for their respective angles, distances and so on quickly pinpointed enemy positions; orders to our artillery in the area followed at once, and thus they destroyed many a Boche***** gun. War was indeed becoming something of a science, even in those far-distant days.’

** Which my father had taken when given a week’s home leave from the Somme in August, the first time he’d seen his family since February 1, 1915.

*** In Handel Street, London WC1. For the story of the day he enlisted see Blog posted on September 7, 2014.

**** Saint-Omer: a small canal-side town, 30 miles south-east of Calais, close to the North Sea and the Belgian border; the British Army established its “maps GHQ” there in 1915, forming three Field Survey Companies of the Royal Engineers in 1916 with more soon added; in early 1918 the Ordnance Survey, the British national mapping authority, set up an overseas branch in Saint-Omer.

***** Boche: insulting French slang for “German” not used much before World War I, nor since World War II; probably abbreviated from archaic caboche, literally a cabbage, figuratively something like “stupid head”.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam works out with some wounded Tommy convalescents, obeys orders like a good boy, still grapples with the emotional conflicts between post-front-line guilt and the joys of not being shot at for a while.

* 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's first march — London gentry tip their hats at the volunteers

Dear all

A hundred years ago this month… at 16, Sam Sutcliffe, my father, ceased to be a poor working lad from Edmonton, north London, a junior office boy at a mining company HQ near Liverpool Street station, and became a soldier. Albeit by lying about his age and with precious little idea of what that might entail although the papers had already begun reporting “heavy casualties” on the Western Front – retreats, defeats if you read between the lines.

    But, still only seven weeks in, it evidently wasn’t one-sided either way as the French-British Allies toed and froed with the germans at the Aisne, then Albert, and the Russians besieged the Austria-Hungary Empire at Przemysl (now in Poland), and a German cruiser sank a British cruiser off Zanzibar… and Sam got his first chance to observe and admire “the calm, efficient manner” in which Army men could “organise a thousand strangers into easily controlled groups”.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

After a hard evening persuading his parents that he should be allowed to stay in the Army along with his 18-year-old, ergo less-of-a-liar, brother Ted, Sam didn’t really know whether they’d agreed because if they reported him he might go to jail… or because soldier’s pay, 21/- a week, would be so useful to a poor family with four children and a toddler to feed.

    But the main thing was they’d let him stick with Ted, and their slightly older pals, Len and Harold. So, remembering that Sam, in this first part of his Memoir, wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”, here’s his story of his first day in the Army, if not yet in uniform (supply a long way short of catching up with volunteer demand at that point):

“Next morning the lads were up in good time, met as arranged, and took the tram back to Bloomsbury… When they arrived they were amazed to see the road in front of the adjacent Royal Fusiliers and Royal Field Artillery depots packed tight with men and hundreds more queuing along another road behind them — all enlisted men like themselves, they learned, and ordered to parade that morning. Harold observed that it would take a mastermind to sort this lot out. But he was soon proven too skeptical.

    Presently, a uniformed man, stout and ruddy-faced with several chins, mounted a box or chair, they couldn’t see what. In an extremely powerful voice, he called for quiet, then issued instructions. With surprising, almost professional, speed, men on the outskirts of the crowd formed into lines of four across, and the mass became a somewhat ragged column.

    The rotund Regimental Sergeant Major took his place at the head of it and, with no attempt at ceremony, started marching. Stragglers at the back attached themselves in new lines of four and followed in his wake. Within a few hundred yards, the whole of the leading formation had fallen in step to a man. That almost spherical RSM necessarily set a steady, almost slow, pace. But two streets crammed with men had to be cleared and he’d achieved that very quickly.

    Had he been dealing with conscripted men, he would undoubtedly have had a problem on his hands. These were volunteers, though. A small, but sufficient, proportion of them had seen service previously and, of the remainder, many had come through various youth organisations, Scouts, Boys Brigades, and others, companies of which trained and marched in every town throughout the land.

    No new experience for [Boy Scout] Tommy, of course, this marching in step, but the pace, the stride, felt different — longer, slower, heavier, and somehow more exhilarating.

    On this, their first rhythmic progression as an Army unit, each member carried himself as he believed a real soldier would and kept in step with the man in front of him. No one shouted, ‘Keep in step there, left, right, left!’ None of that. Crunch, crunch, rrrp, rrrp, a steady pace with arms a-swing.

    Tommy liked the rhythm — and the thrill as he saw the column of men ahead, bearing left round the far side of a London residential square. ‘We’re all in step then,’ he thought. ‘Marvelous.’ He did notice the odd one lose the step and touch the heel of the man in front or trip the man behind — no natural sense of rhythm or perhaps over-eager or anxious. But correction soon followed. Such culprits would later endure the wrath of newly appointed non-commissioned and commissioned officers who had to justify their existence. But today not a word.

    Every man wished that he should do well and that his comrades should do well… and that perhaps some famous General might be watching unseen, later to issue a full report full of praise for the volunteer soldiers… who reminded him of the Guards…

    If Tommy dreamed thus, we may assume others did too. But he did notice, at first with incredulity, that some men on the pavement — invariably smart well-dressed types — raised their hats on sighting the column. One such, coming down the steps of a large house, reached the pavement as Tommy drew level. He raised his bowler hat, and as his eyes rested momentarily on Tommy’s the boy felt himself blushing. ‘Ridiculous,’ he told himself. ‘The gentleman was saluting the volunteers, not a lad who had lied to get in. There’ll never be another march like this one.’

    The houses they passed interested him, and he resolved to take walks in this district, so redolent of London life from bygone days with which he felt he had ties somehow, he didn’t understand why — until, that evening, he concluded that gazing year after year at a picture hung in his parents’ bedroom may have caused his sense of familiarity with the area. It showed a woman, a shopping basket on one arm, descending the several steps from her front door to the street; her young daughter, with a tiny Pekingese dog on a lead, waited on the pavement. Both wore bonnets and the full-skirted costume of the Victorian era. And both, Tommy used to think, looked far too prim and prissy.

    Their house could have been almost any one of the hundreds lining these Bloomsbury streets and squares, their aspect solid and enduring. Much stone had been used in the arches that topped front doors and windows and to face ground floors. Stout iron railings prevented people from falling into the small paved areas outside the basement rooms 10 or 12 feet below street level. While many basement windows were barred, during the day the residents often left open their porch doors, adorned with brass knockers and letter boxes. Tommy reckoned such houses would all have been built with servants’ quarters and he wondered how many were still occupied…

    These wanderings as he marched relieved him, for the moment, from his constant twinges of anxiety and nervous tautness. Would someone suddenly point the finger at him and yell ‘You! Out!’? Probably most of the others had their worries, especially family men. Tommy glanced at the three men along his line, then did as they were doing, stared steadily ahead and kept in step with the thrump, thrump, of all those marching feet.

    The head of the column had disappeared now as they swung into a wide street ahead, then left through large, iron gates into a spacious sanded area with a substantial building facing them and high walls on either side bordered by roofed walkways supported by stone columns. Inside the gates, the column turned right, then left, until the RSM ordered a halt. The men lined two sides of the square.

    A separate small group stood apart from, but close to, the head of the column, one of them obviously the senior officer, the others men of various ranks, some in officer’s uniform, but several well-dressed in civilian clothes, mostly bowler-hatted and all carrying walking canes or rolled umbrellas.

    The RSM approached the senior officer. Halting two paces in front of him, the RSM saluted smartly, the right hand remaining over the right half of the forehead for three seconds before being briskly lowered to the side, thumb in line with the seam of the trousers… these details and many more were to occupy the hours and anxious efforts of Tommy and thousands like him for some time to come. But here was the first military occasion of which they had actually been a part. Really the beginning of their war.”

Thus, for Sam/Tommy and millions of recruits the road to Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras began with a left, right, left right…

All the best — FSS

Next week: Sam/Tommy gives up his day job — and a toff gives him a sovereign.