Sam on the receiving end of a crushing personal attack after he suggests his pal Mac entertains the troops with his phrenology skills…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir* in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode 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… While the sinking of British hospital ship SS Salta by a mine as it sailed into Le Havre (April 10; 51 nurses and RAMC personnel plus 79 crew lost) was tragic, its scale was dwarfed by the full-bore reopening of fighting on the Western Front with tens of thousands of casualties swiftly ensuing. Following the rather haphazard pursuit of the German Army’s planned retreat to the Hindenburg Line, the Allies tried to enact their own strategy, framed in January, largely by the French General Nivelle, long before the German move so changed the prospects.

    After a massive artillery bombardment, the British advanced on a 12-mile front from southeast to north of Arras and quickly advanced 5.5 miles to take Monchy-le-Preux (April 9-11). At the same time, the British and Canadians attacked Vimy Ridge and took it despite a new winter blizzard descending on the first day (9-12), and the British also made headway in the Battle Of The Scarpe occupying many villages such as Feuchy, Givenchy-en-Gohelle and Angres (9-14).

    However, the Australian and British attack at the Battle Of Bullecourt fell victim to a degree of chaos with a false start caused by orders to postpone for 24 hours not reaching two Battalions and then a shortage of promised tanks undermining their efforts (April 10-11). The Aussies suffered further in the Battle Of Lagnicourt where the Germans launched a surprise onslaught, and they had to retreat before recovering their ground later in the day (15).

    The French “prong” of this campaign had been scheduled to start a few days after the British/Australian/Canadian attacks and they began to prepare their way with heavy bombardments of the Moronvilliers hills east of Reims (April 10 onwards).

    Accounts of all these actions refer to tactical innovations by both sides calculated to break the Western Front stalemate – creeping barrages, elastic defence, platoon-focused advances…

    Of course, no front was ever “all quiet” really, but the only other notable military events of the week saw the British Egyptian Army advance further along the railway to Samarrah to Harbe (April 9).

[Memoir background: my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016) Lance Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs dated May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom told him they’d spotted his age – 18 on July 6, legally too young for the battlefield – and that he could take a break from the fighting until his 19th birthday. He did so, not without an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking time until they severally became eligible for the trenches once more…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, temporarily despatched to Cramlington, Northumberland, to train as instructors in the Army’s bee-in-the-bonnet new super-rifle, my father and his pal Mac survived their initiation into the nightly raid on the musketry school’s neighbouring colliery to purloin coal – standard provision for each Nissen hut being only half what the Tommies needed as that freezing winter’s blizzards extended well into April.

    Now Sam writes of an attempt at indoor entertainment for the troops which went badly wrong for him:

‘Our regular evening pastime was playing cards, but on one occasion I suggested that McIntyre might amuse us by reading our bumps – practising the “science” of phrenology in which he had been trained**. As a Scot, from Edinburgh at that, he surprised me by agreeing to do it even though he knew we wouldn’t pay for the privilege of being told what marvellous blokes we were. While his fingers moved slowly and carefully over a man’s skull he made interesting, usually slightly flattering comments, calculated to induce those who watched to request the next go.

     Finally, Mac turned to me, his pal… and spieled off a generally unpleasing report, the culmination, a charge of selfishness. Later, I asked him what it was all about; when had I acted selfishly in my dealings with him? Out came the reason for his sourness; the matter had bothered him for some weeks, and made me feel really sorry and actually ashamed of my thoughtlessness.

     It concerned the two girls injured in our sledge crash***. I had found the petite, brunette girl attractive and, although I had never hugged, fondled or kissed her, I showed preference for her company, leaving Mac to look after the other, more homely girl most times – unaware, because of my selfishness, of Mac’s feelings of love, no less, for the little dark one. I had not seen her for quite some time anyway, because of the awkwardness I felt after seeing her sister walking arm in arm with a soldier while her husband was away at the Front. And all this time, it appeared, friend McIntyre had been grieving. He must have hated me, and so needlessly…

     Phrenology, genuine science or quackery, had revealed myself to me and given me something to think about, albeit ruefully.

The three lads**** we’d travelled up from Harrogate with had that something which made me eager to know them more intimately than the casual friendliness of Army hutmates allowed. Their fresh-from-civvy-street appearance and tolerance of the coarse, repetitive humour, to which they were obviously strangers, proved them prepared to make the best of a situation they had been forced into, I assumed, by the exigencies of war.

     Two of them were 18 or thereabouts, the third perhaps three years older – probably someone granted deferment of call-up whose time had run out. Good luck or influence, both maybe, had attached them to our home-based mob, rather than an intensive training unit in which a matter of a few weeks only separated the draft from the fighting zone. They’d all come from Cambridge where they had been students, I gathered. One seldom questioned comrades about personal matters, though information about pre-Army days, if volunteered, found a willing audience. Depending on the nature of the storyteller, it could bring a bit of the sweetness of family life into the tent, hut, or trench…

     These three chaps acquired all the knowledge about the rifle in double-quick time, but when their turn came to repeat the patter, as required by the word-perfect instructors, they used their own phraseology, which certainly sounded less like the spiel of the market quack-doctor than did the Sergeants’ energetic rote lesson.

** At 15, just before the war, Mac had served an apprenticeship as a phrenologist (reader of cranial bumps, allegedly) in central London (see Blog 132, January 15, 2017).

*** All innocent and unwitting stuff between teenagers whose main “adult” experience of the world had come on various battlefield – my father recalled the story of the sledge and the two girls in Blogs 133 January 22, 2017 and 134 January 29.

**** Named as Metriam, Naylor, and Rutven in Blog 142 March 26.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam and pals move down to Mansfield to conclude the super-rifle course and all seems well… sort of. Meanwhile, he reflects, still guiltily, on the horrors he’s missing, but escapes into the sweet, simple kindness of the townspeople around him.

* 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 Mac, training on that new “super” rifle, acquire a rather different skill – stealing coal from the pithead via hazardous snow-and-icy night-time forays.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir* in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode 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… No doubt, its importance can be exaggerated, but even so there was no bigger news than the USA’s declaration of war on Germany on April 6, following an address to Congress four days earlier in which he deployed the now-familiar phrases “war to end all wars” and “make the world safe for democracy”. Probably much swayed by the recent German switch to all-out submarine war and the dubious machinations around the Zimmermann Telegram, Senate and Representatives voted in favour by huge margins. In fact, “boots on the ground” US involvement barely registered until 1918.

    On the Western Front, the unusual passage of fighting provoked by the German Army’s planned retreat to the Hindenburg Line, which had begun on February 23, reached it’s conclusion on April 5 with the pursuing British and French (and Australians at Noreuil) experiencing their last few days of somewhat unreal progress by taking 20 or more of the “outpost” villages the Germans defended to the last to cover their general retreat. In the early days of settling into a new status quo, the French began a bombardment of German positions around Vauxaillon (April 6; Aisne department; the nearby city of Reims was evacuated on the 8th).

    In other “theatres”, little crucial action occurred on the eastern Front, nor down in northern Italy and Salonika, while April also saw the start of the six-month Stalemate In Southern Palestine (following the British/Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s double failure during March to take Gaza from the Ottoman Army). Russia, at the extreme of its southern reach, continued its odd success in Mesopotamia, using cavalry to take Kasr-i-Shirin and Khanquin, northeast of Baghdad, from Ottoman forces while the British Army’s steady Samarrah Offensive, driving north out of Baghdad, captured Belad station, about 20 miles from Samarrah (April 8).

Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016) Lance Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs dated May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom told him they’d noticed his age – 18 on July 6, legally too young for the battlefield – and that he could take a break from the fighting until his 19th birthday. So he did, though not without an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking time until they severally became eligible for the trenches once more…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the Army despatched my father, his pal “Mac” McIntyre and three others from Harrogate to (probably) Cramlington**, Northumberland – their mission, to become instructors in the mechanics and use of the Army’s upcoming new super-rifle which would sweep aside the old Lee Enfield.

    An enthusiastic and persuasive trainer swept aside Sam’s doubts about the whole enterprise – why not an automatic pistol, which he knew the front-line Tommies would much prefer? Like corporate salespeople doing a presentation today, they even learnt set jokes and timed pauses for laughter.

    But here Sam and Mac break off from their studies to attend to more mundane matters. The winter of 1917 was one of the longest and bleakest on record in Western Europe with the snow falling and laying from January onwards and that April still the coldest ever in the British Isles***, starting with a blizzard April 1-3 on the Cheviots, 30-40 miles northwest of Cramlington.

    As my father mentioned in the last blog, the Army supplied the musketry school’s Nissen huts with only half the anthracite their stoves demanded to maintain modest comfort in these conditions. So…

‘During our training course, freezing-cold nights kept us in our huts most of the time. But, during the hours of darkness, two men from each hut had to procure coal, a zinc bathful of it, from… somewhere. Naturally, McIntyre and I worked together when our turn arrived to rob the slag heap (as we called this chore, in order to mislead any civilian who might chance to hear of our unlawful activities).

     No thrills on the route described to us, until we came to a narrow path along the rim of a deep excavation, partly water-filled. Slipping on the frozen ground was a risk; we moved slowly, carefully. At the pithead, we took care to avoid being seen by the workers, and to fill our bath and get away quickly.

     I saw no coal lying around, but a train of loaded wagons stood there. I climbed up on top of one and handed down large lumps to Mac. He placed them in the bath noiselessly. Nevertheless, for some reason, men carrying lanterns appeared and we feared they would search, so we left the bath on the track under the buffers, climbed up on to the wagon again and lay flat on top of the coal. A period of thumping hearts until the miners, as I suppose they were, moved on, we got away – and the really trying job commenced. The terribly heavy load necessitated frequent rests, and the narrow path along the rim of the big, dark-blue hole was nerve-wracking. But when we completed the job, elation followed, and good friends rewarded us with hot tea and listened to our hair-raising tale of near-discovery.

     Of course, others had similar experiences every night. The camp’s longer-term inmates had devised the system of sending out pairs of men from each hut in turn to avoid having too many of us at the pithead at once. We became thieves, no doubt, but without this extra fuel we would have endured some freezing, sleepless nights.

     Probably the original intention had been that we should all spend the day training in the big assembly cum dining cum entertainment hall, then return to cold huts at night and use our ration of coal for warmth while we slept. But plans had changed and a more individual course of instruction developed, requiring the use of our huts during daytime. The resultant foraging for coal must have been known to the officers in charge and a blind eye turned to our nocturnal operations. Perhaps, if they had approached the pit owners, they would have given us the coal, but authority has its pride.

** In his Memoir he never mentioned the village’s name, but I’m pretty sure he told me it was Cramlington.

*** A record April low temperature of -15C was recorded at Newton Rigg, Cumbria, on the 2nd. The blizzard produced drifts up to 3 metres deep, steady falls continued until the 19th – and then even more snow fell towards the end of the month.

All the best – FSS

Next week: A tangled web unravels… Sam enjoys Mac entertaining the troops with the skills he acquired as an apprentice phrenologist (“character delineator” via bump reading!) – until suddenly Mac turns on him with a crushing personal attack. Of course, it’s all about a girl…

* 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.