Sam gets to know Marie-Louise and her mother thinks he’s très gentil… but she’s married and he’s keeping his mind on apples and pears.

Did a member of your family fight in WW1? Do write a guest blog contribution in Remembrance for FootSoldierSam… Please send by email Free Memoir to contributors.

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… On the Western Front the last few costly blows were struck while the strategists considered that odd business of pitched battle bedding down for winter.

    In the northern part of the Somme Front, the Battle Of Ancre Heights saw the Canadians advance (October 26) and the British attack Beaumont Hamel and Serre with teargas, phosgene and phosgene/chlorine mortar bombs (28) before bad weather (29) stopped the fighting for a couple of weeks. At The Battle Of Transloy, after a British advance (23), the German Army settled into effective defence aimed at holding their ground until winter called a halt.

    But at the First Offensive Battle Of Verdun (the French name for it translated), begun on October 20, the French Army recaptured Fort Douaumont (24), then several other key points, and by the end of the week had begun an artillery bombardment of Fort Vaux (one source notes that all this took them back to the positions they’d occupied in May).

    On the Eastern Front, the Russian Army’s loss of impetus continued as the German Army drove them back from the left bank of the river Narajowka (October 22; Galicia), and across the river Schara, near Minsk (27; now Belarus), although they showed they still had victories in them at Vatra Dornei (25; then Bukovina/Moldova, now in Romania). Similarly, their support for Romania in the Battle Of Transylvania (began August 27) wasn’t going well. The combined Bulgarian-German forces defeated the Romanian Army at the Predeal Pass (23) and Cernavoda (25), but did find themselves on the retreat in the Jiu Valley, Wallachia (27-9).

    The Allies most complicated alliance (Serbian-French-British-Italian-Russian involvement) did rather better in Macedonia as the Monastir Offensive (September 12-December 11) continued to beat back the Bulgarian invaders – who had driven the entire Serbian Army into exile earlier in the year. In the Battle Of Cerna Bend, the Bulgarians abandoned Cerna Voda (October 25), but that part of the conflict remained mainly bogged down causing heavy casualties (Bulgarian-German 26,000, Serbian-French-Russian12,000 before it ended in November).

Meanwhile**, my father, under-age volunteer Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 18 on July 6, 1916, had fought with the Kensingtons Battalion from mid-May to September, at Gommecourt on the north end of the Somme Front, then around Leuze Wood and Morval to the south. About September 30 he was told his age had been officially noticed, he was still 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. That same day, he left the Front for the British base camp at Harfleur.

     For Sam, who joined up in September 1914, this followed a ’15-’16 winter at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (200 out of 1,000 avoided the lists of shot, shell and disease casualties – Blogs dated September 13, 2015, to January 3, 2016). They’d sailed to France in late April, 1916, where – to their disgust – they were disbanded and transferred to other outfits… Sam to the Kensingtons and the Somme front line – where, on July 1, they’d suffered 59 per cent casualties (see FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated June 26 and July 3, 2016).

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam decides to go along with his crafty old Royal Fusiliers comrade and caterer Archie Barker’s lie that he had been a grocer pre-war and thus moves into a short, happy career in the Army café business – on the unofficial side as Archie’s establishment seems to be a private enterprise run for the profit of the Captain Quartermaster.

    Second morning in Harfleur, he found himself transported to nearby Le Havre as buyer for Archie’s caff – and, after struggling because of his own limited French and all-round ignorance of his new job, he has the great good luck to meet a young Frenchwoman who runs a grocery with her mother, speaks good English and is willing to help. As he wrote in his Memoir, her name was…

‘Marie-Louise Baudlet; I suppose I can mention her full name now as she was somewhat older than me – I can only estimate 21 or 22 – and she must have passed away long ago.

     She wasn’t pretty, but quite attractive, dressed in severe black with white trimmings. She probably looked older than her years, bright, smiling eyes. She made me welcome. She spoke perfect English and told me that, before the war, she had made several visits to England and stayed with relatives in Richmond, Surrey; my translator, then, ready to hand.

     Her mama was probably nearer 50 than 60. She had no English, but she did me the honour of hinting that I was très gentil and I could only guess why and be suitably flattered. Perhaps gentil represented her hope more than her opinion. Perhaps soldiers in the shop previously had not been gentil…

     I soon had a friendly working arrangement with Marie-Louise. I bought what I could – as much as possible of what they had to offer. But, as Marie said, items of which I needed a large quantity I would have to buy in the market; so, apples, other fruit and fresh vegetables, butter (selling cheaply from a counter run by a Belgian lady) – all luxuries for the soldiers.

     Each morning when we took the wagon to Le Havre, before I went anywhere else I called in at Marie-Louise’s place and asked her to tell me the French words for what we wanted and for the quantities – hence, no further buying difficulties at all! From her place to the central market, the Halles Centrales, was quite a few hundred yards. I had the driver stop the wagon outside. He made himself comfortable in his seat to wait for me.’

This photo of Les Halles market, Le Havre, probably from the 1920s, is on the wall of the present market, pictured below. My pix from when I was in France this summer (2016) to attend the Somme100 commemoration.

‘Back at the canteen, Archie taught me to make thin, very tasty sandwiches. Tinned salmon was favourite. I’d empty a can into a large bowl, beat it up adding salt, pepper and vinegar and tasting it from time to time until I got it just so, that slightly salty mouth-watering flavour to make the ideal sandwich. We sold dozens of them. He taught me to build them up in pyramids — placed out of reach of the troops, that was important, but visible and tempting. On the evenings the lads were in the money, the two of us often had difficulty coping with the great rush of trade.

     More money became available to buy fresh vegetables, and I bought apples and sometimes pears on a bigger scale too.

     The whole business reminded me very much of pre-war days when sometimes, to order a lunch for the partners at Lake & Currie, I’d go to Sweetings*** or Binns, famous restaurants, where they displayed their sandwiches stacked in pyramids and the clients ate them with a pint of beer, then threw some money down on the counter and left. Even the aroma in our canteen — the various sandwiches we served, and perhaps coffee as well as tea – could sometimes recall those grander establishments.

     I did no Army work, parades or drills. Barker and I appeared to live in a world apart from the masses there. As far as I was concerned, that could go on forever.

     I never failed to call in on Marie-Louise, first thing in the morning. I never saw her except in the shop, at the counter or the cash desk; I sat on a box and she on a stool — Mama occasionally somewhere in the background. Speaking no English, she couldn’t join in the conversation, but she kept a maternal eye on us, so nothing else could go on. Not that it was likely to because Marie-Louise seemed the absolute soul of propriety. Moreover, she had a fiancé, a French officer who was away at the Front.’

*** This fond memory of one of his more pleasant tasks as a pre-war office boy at tin-mining company Lake & Currie’s City HQ Sam evokes fully in a chapter from the childhood section of his Memoir – when he was still writing in the third person and calling himself “Tommy”. Coming from a poor family, he relished the chance to snap up the leftovers from the feats he fetched in for the bosses as follows: “The company regularly held meetings with business associates and others, and when the partners considered those attending worth entertaining fairly well, a lunch would be laid on, bought in from nearby caterers. If a small, intimate group were invited, they would gather in the senior partner’s office. A day or so beforehand, Tommy had to visit the supplier to hand over the order – often at a famous restaurant and bar over in Cheapside called Sweetings*, where he observed really prosperous City businessmen, bosses all, who wouldn’t even spare the time to sit down to have their lunch. These toffs, as Cockneys called them, clad in fine morning suits, lined the long counter, munching, and drinking their ale or whatever they favoured. The smell of all these delicious foods pleased Tommy; he loved to stand there and look and breathe it in. White-hatted waiters dressed up as chefs carved succulent slices of beef or ham… In addition to the special drinks and foods the restaurant supplied, Tommy had to buy certain cheeses and a special type of coffee. This task took him to a shop of the old style where soft cream cheeses hung from the ceiling in muslin bags… Fortunately, in due course, Tommy would get the chance to do more than look at all this enticing provender.”

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam gets a new partner on his trips into Le Havre… which leads to problems involving Cockney rhyming slang (“Wormwood Scrubs” anyone?), the local licensed prostitute and Marie-Louise heading off a minor international incident.

* 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.

** Just noting here an incident my father had no knowledge of, but which connected with his first experience of sailing abroad. On October 28, 1916, a mine wrecked the British hospital ship Galeka off Le Havre (no patients abroad, 19 RAMC personnel killed). When, earlier the war, she had served as a troopship, she conveyed my father’s 2/1st Royal Fusiliers from Southampton to Malta via an infernal storm in the Bay Of Biscay – see Sam’s Blog dated February 8, 2015.

Sam gets a room with a view – and Napoleon’s biscuits to… break his teeth on

For Details Of How To Buy Sam’s full Memoir In Paperback Or E-Book & new excerpted Gallipoli episode mini-ebook & Reader Reviews see right-hand column – All Proceeds To British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago… on March 10, after a static period on the Western Front, a reinforced British Expeditionary Force combined with the Indian Corps launched an attack at Neuve Chapelle in the Artois region, trumpeted as pioneering a new level of advance planning. But it petered out by the 13th. The attack gained two kilometers while casualties totalled 7000 British troops, 4,200 Indian and 9,600 German. The received explanations seem to be: field telephone breakdowns, a lack of decisive leadership when changing circumstances came to require improvisation, and a shortage of artillery shells. The latter initiated “the Shell Crisis” which, combined with the bloody opening to the Gallipoli campaign in April led to Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s Liberal Government yielding to demands for coalition with the Conservative Party.

      Of course, Gallipoli was to prove rather significant to the futures of Private Sam Sutcliffe’s 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, 1,000 volunteers lately arrived in Malta for further training with no clue as to where or when they might actually enter the fray – and not ungrateful to be left on the sidelines pro tem…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, we left Sam, still 16, his brother, Ted, 18, both under-age volunteers, and their friends from Edmonton, north London, as the Battalion completed a heavily-laden march in heat they’d never encountered before, from the port of Valletta to their barracks-to-be – a fortified building in “a barren, rocky area” which had young Sam’s imagination wandering to romantic tales of the Foreign Legion he’d read back home in the penny weeklies.

      It happened that, because of the order of their disembarkation on the docks, his H Company led the way. NB new readers, as ever up to this point, in his Memoir Sam wrote about himself in the third person as “Tommy”. He says:

‘H Company swung right and entered a huge barrack* square with covered pavements on either side on to which their dormitories opened; the design offered Tommy hope that these rooms would be cool in high temperatures, since the sun could never shine into them.

       Plans of the barracks must have been previously supplied to the officers for, after a brief halt in the square, each Company was soon marched off to its allotted quarters. H Company finished up on the upper floor of a two-storey block behind the main square, somewhat to Tommy’s disappointment. He’d hoped for a room by the shady sidewalks and pictured himself lounging there enjoying a long, cold drink.

       However, his platoon’s room had a covered balcony, a good view of the whole barrack area from the front, and a fine outlook seawards from the rear windows. Tommy liked it at first sight: wide and long, the ceiling and stone walls whitewashed, the stone floor scrubbed and, as they discovered, easily kept clean to a standard which satisfied the officer doing the daily inspections.

       Six iron-frame beds with mattresses stood along the sea side, five along the opposite wall, with ample space in the middle for wooden tables and forms for seating — these they also had to scrub, using stiff brushes and sand. One of the tables bore a tall, polished-steel bucket and a large, steel bowl with two ladles. Two blankets and a pillow for each man rested on wide shelves fixed to the wall above each bedhead; that left enough space to store clothing and equipment on them too.

       Home of 11 men for some time to come.

       Ginger-haired Corporal Ash – 5 foot 8, becoming quite an efficient NCO – had charge of them. He explained he would appoint two room orderlies immediately, but all would take their turn and would do this work in addition to all “parades” — which word covered all compulsory attendances for drill or general training.

       Later, he despatched two men to the cookhouse carrying the shiny bucket and bowl, and their return brought cheers from the happy men even though their burden consisted of the usual potatoes with tough, stewed meat. On this occasion, they required only quantity to fill the aching void and, indeed, there was plenty for all. They enjoyed that first meal in the barrack room in a happy mood of banter and speculation about the future.

       “Get that lot down you,” said Corporal Ash. “Then the orderlies will take the pans down to the cookhouse and, when they’ve scrubbed them out, they’ll be issued with tea and hard biscuits and that will be all the grub for today.”

Yet again, and already, in this new location Sam’s Battalion encountered the British Army’s ignorance of or, more likely, carelessness about that ancient military axiom that an army “marches on its stomach” – even though, at this point, at the end of their first day on foreign soil, they chose to take it with a pinch of satirical wit:

‘The tea was good but the biscuits presented a problem again, although they definitely came from a different source to those provided aboard the Galena**. About three inches by three and a half inches, thick, dark brown and very hard; the strongest teeth could make no impression on them. Soaking in tea failed to soften them.

       Ewart Walker, ex-journalist and very knowledgeable, spoke of a huge reserve food store maintained underground in Valletta***. It lay under a stone-paved square, he said, each of many entrances covered by a large circular stone. Over many years the food store had been maintained at a level sufficient to feed the population of Malta for the duration of a six-month siege.

       Walker reckoned that older provisions must be taken out and replaced by new ones periodically, and he estimated that these stony biscuits could well have been placed below during the Napoleonic Wars. Their hardness and their repulsive dark appearance lent weight to his theory.

       All attempts to eat them had to be abandoned, although an enterprising chap with a hammer and small chisel did chip carefully away at some of them to make what he sold as frames for photographs.’

*With his particular sense of military(?) discretion about some names – to me, both unexplained and inexplicable in examples such as this – my father never names the place, but other sources reveal it as St George’s Barracks, built 1859-62 and so named simply because they overlooked St George’s Bay (Bajja San Gorg in Maltese – apologies throughout for lack of correct accents on my computer).

** Actually SS Galeka – another wafer-thinly disguised alias! (See February 22 blog for more details.)

***The Granaries (Fosos in Maltese) lie under Publius Square/Pjazza San Publiju in the Floriana district of Valletta.

All the best – FSS

Next week: The troops settle in – and, five months after they joined up, the Army gives them actual rifles for the first time!