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
All proceeds to the British Red Cross
Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… From north to south of the Western Front, the now established plot line continued: the Allies advanced, sometimes just occupying ground from which the German Army had retreated, sometimes encountering ferocious rearguards and suffering terrible casualties, but always advancing.
In the Flanders Advance (September 28-October 10) element of the broad-front Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17), Belgian, French and British took Dixmude (September 30), Ledeghem (October 1), Gheluwe, Hooglede (3), Amentières (3; lost in the Spring Offensive on April 11), and the left bank of the River Lys – while withdrawing, the Germans burned Douai.
The Battle Of The St Quentin Canal (September 29-October 2 or 10 depending who’s counting) saw the town of St Quentin won by the French (October 1-2) who then pressed on northeastwards. This became the Battle Of The Beaurevoir Line (3-6; the town is 13 miles south of Cambrai – by then burnt by the Germans – and 10 miles north of St Quentin). Australian troops took nearby Montbrehain (5) and the British took Beaurevoir itself (6) to complete a breach in the Hindenburg Line.
The Franco-American Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) slowly moved forward again after German reinforcements had forced a temporary pause. The French took Challerange (October 2; 40 miles easy of Reims) and the second phase of the Offensive began (4) with costly American frontal assaults which gained ground northeast of the Argonne Forest, while the French progressed to the River Arnes.
In Russia, the Allies’ skirmishes with Bolshevik forces continued as Canadian troops joined a mixed bag of Allies at Archangel (September 30; 610 miles north of Moscow) – they then repulsed a Bolshevik attack at Seletskaya (6; 170 miles south of Archangel). Meanwhile, loyalists in the southern Urals proved that the Revolution remained incomplete by calling for the formation of a new All-Russian Constituent Assembly (3)… and the Allied Japanese contribution to the foothold in eastern Siberia reached Ruchlevo (3; name or transliteration must have changed since then, I can’t find the place).
And down in Syria the ultra-multinational Allied Egyptian Expeditionary Force, augmented of late by the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab Army, chased the Ottomans and Germans to Damascus, which they surrendered (October 1), and then onwards towards Homs and Aleppo. Syria declared independence at this point, but under whose leadership remained unclear for some time.
[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 the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, 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 artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses… ]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
September – er, well, maybe August, see below! – 1918: 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, lately somewhat uplifted by his food-scrounging partnership with fellow Tommy prisoners Wally and George. Whatever they can find, be it via digging up a few small spuds or snagging a piece of raw liver from a pigs’ trough, they share and share alike.
But now the settled, if often violent, routine of the POW camp outside Hügelheim is about to change as the Tommies are forced to move on again after their first extended period settled in one place for perhaps ten weeks. First, though, news to set hope off on an excited gallop:
‘One morning, the only German sailor I ever saw walked into the Pferde Lazerette(2) and, eavesdropping his conversation with his friends among our guards, I got the idea that he was telling them something very exciting. Later I heard the details from a friendly guard; the sailor would not return to his ship because the German Navy had mutinied and many, like him, had gone home for good.
Hardly believable, this wonderful news, but it filled us with joyful anticipation – although, next day, you would never have thought our guards knew about the mutiny for they turned us out of our huts as usual and marched us off to the stables. This must have been in August, 1918(3). Surely, I thought, the German Army must lose heart too, now that American troops had added their strength to ours on the Western Front. I knew they had been in action having seen one of their men, already a prisoner, at the historic 1870 boundary arch and barracks(4)… Still no local signs of the war coming to an end, though.
But, that day, the guards did tell a few of us – thankfully, including my mates Wally and George – to bring our odds and ends out of our hut and we set off to a railway station. After a short journey, followed by a march, we finished up in a village in Lorraine(5). There we joined about 40 Britishers, all complete strangers to us. The guards led the whole crowd of us into a village hall with no bunks.
We bedded down — if that’s the right word for lying on bare floorboards — and close together to benefit from shared warmth, as the nights always seemed cold.
With no work allotted next morning, I had time to reconnoitre… A stout barbed-wire fence enclosed the hall, with quite a wide space between building and wire. The sentries patrolling outside took long rests sitting on stools, I noted. Fortunately, they rested on the opposite side of the building to a footpath where civilians passed fairly frequently. So I stood there beside a small gap in the wire I’d spotted, hopefully surveying the scene.
When a lady dressed in black came by she neither paused nor looked at me, but I heard a whisper and caught the words “retourner” and “retour”(6), French words anyway, which made me stay put and, in addition, told me one surprising thing – namely that after all the years since the 1870 war(7), these good people, who became German citizens with France’s defeat, had still retained their mother tongue – even though, as I later discovered, officially they spoke German at all times.
In due course, the good soul walked that way again, and again without pause or any other acknowledgment of my presence, she slipped her hand through the gap in the wire and passed a small package to me. “Merci bien,”was the best I could manage to whisper by way of thanks, for she vanished so quickly.
Now came the test of my honesty, which I failed, being always so starving hungry. Before I could check my action, I had bitten a mouthful out of the piece of fruit pie I found in the paper wrapping. Remorse was hardly a strong enough word to describe the guilt I felt; Wally had been so generous with the oddments he scrounged when working at the piggeries – many a time he must have been tempted to gobble the lot on his way back after a day’s work.
I found my two pals in the village hall, confessed, handed the rest to Wally, who broke it into three small shares, returning to me a third, less one mouthful.’
(2) Pferde Lazerette: horse hospital.
(3) My father’s memory may be wrong with regard to timing here – and in the past couple of episodes he’s reckoned his narrative had reached September. Wikipedia says the first, limited, and short-lived German Navy mutiny took place at North Sea port Wilhelmshaven, October 29-30, 1918; the second and decisive one followed shortly at Kiel, on the canal linking the Baltic to the North Sea, November 3, 1918; that triggered the German Revolution which swept aside the monarchy within a few days and eventually led to Germany’s Weimar Republic period; the effects of that mutiny certainly spread rapidly down to the southern region where my father was imprisoned; I don’t know, but I’m guessing either the sailor’s visit to the Pferde Lazerette occurred some weeks later than my father reckoned when writing his Memoir, or said sailor had observed or taken part in an earlier and more minor mutiny which didn’t, at that point, embrace much of the German Navy.
(4) See blog July 8, 2018.
(5) My father didn’t recall the name of the village, but the train would have travelled west from Müllheim and Hügelheim, probably towards Mühlhausen/Mulhouse again – that city being a few miles over the border between Germany and then-German-held Lorraine. Today Müllheim to Mulhouse by train would take 23 minutes and set you back €3.90. The Hügelheim branch line seems to have closed down.
(6)“Retourner” = “come back” (verb);“retour” = “return”(noun).
(7) Alsace-Lorraine: annexed by the German Empire in 1871 as one of the spoils of the Franco-Prussian War (’70-1); in July, 1915, the German Government banned the French language from the region; the Allies annexed Alsace-Lorraine back to France in December, 1918, and, in the early ’20s, deported the Germans remaining there and banned their language; Hitler effectively re-annexed Alsace in 1940-45, then lost it again. Apologies, by a slip of the brain I said in last week’s “Next week” paragraph that this village was in Alsace but, as you see, it was definitely in Lorraine.
All the best– FSS
Next week: Sam reckons the war’s final throes are coming up and hopes he can “stand a few more weeks of near-starvation”. Then a Red Cross parcel arrives for George – who falls to temptation and temporarily forgets the food-sharing partnership with Sam and Wally…
(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.
