Sam and new ex-POW pals enjoy Dad’s Armying around Brighton, from promenading to What The Butler Saw on the Palace Pier to… a shock sighting of his revered Gallipoli CO, last heard of “presumed dead” at Vimy Ridge…

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/POW etc 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 February 1, 2019, is £3,979.66 (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… The Paris Peace Conference made conspicuous public progress while the negotiators felt caught up in chaos and worried about what they were doing, given lack of advance planning and the absence of German involvement in their decisions. Beyond the politicians’ formal deliberations conflict continued in many corners of Europe.

    The Conference produced the preamble to the Constitution Of The League of Nations (February 14) expressing general commitments to “international co-operation… peace and security” – proposed as a starting point towards more detailed agreements. 

    In the course of the widespread striving for post-war order, in Germany they published a provisional Constitution of their own and elected a new President, Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party (February 11), while Austria and Georgia too elected their first republican democratic assemblies and reached the same conclusion – Social Democratic governments.

    Meanwhile, Russian Bolshevik forces continued fighting the Allied invaders around Archangel (February 10), suffered a defeat in their incursion in newly independent Ukraine (12), began an attack on Estonia and lost a small skirmish with Polish troops at Bereza Kartuska (14; current Belarus) seen as a precursor of the Russo-Polish War which began months later.

    On the side, so to speak, in Ukraine Haidamaka Cossack paramilitaries massacred 1,500 Jewish villagers at Proskurov (February 15) and, in Albania, Yugoslavian troops slaughtered 432 in Rugova (16).

    The while, the US Senate rejected votes for women by a single vote (February 10).

[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 – via the ministrations of French, British and American military doctors and nurses in Nancy and Rouen. Finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before he was allowed home and reunited with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Still, civilian life continued to offer Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

February, 1919, Brighton: after January’s meetings with two old POW pals and a brief workers’-and-soldiers’-playtime party season when, in his Edmonton, north London neighbourhood anyway, “everybody was smiling at everybody else” my father Private Sam Sutcliffe got the call to return to the colours… after a fashion.

    To his surprise as 20-year-old veteran of Gallipoli, the Somme and such, the Army transferred him to the Royal Defence Corps – which Sam also called the Home Forces and regarded as a Dad’s Army. With his new comrades, he settled into elegant digs in posh Palmeira Square – albeit furnished only with mattresses on low trestles… “luxury sleeping compared to POW conditions,” as my father noted:

‘I found myself among men all new to me, but that proved no hindrance to friendly exchanges of experiences. Returned prisoners like myself, they cared little for having to join the ranks of the defenders of home and beauty. Still, the war hadn’t officially finished yet, as some of them pointed out, and our soldiers could still be sent abroad if fighting broke out on one of the Eastern Fronts – but ole-timers like us, defenders of Merry England, could sleep soundly with no fears of being thrown again into a horrid battle in which somebody would be sure to get hurt.

     A month spent by the sea with nothing to do but polish our boots and buttons, and promenade along the front, or walk out on the Palace Pier and spend pennies on “What The Butler Saw” machines(2), did me a power of good. In fact, I began to really appreciate the wisdom of the men at the War Office who decreed that some special care should be taken of chaps like us. So… I devoted quite some time to inspecting the structure of the Pier, trying to guess its age and concluding that, in 1919, it and its amusements looked very old-fashioned and would, doubtless, soon be replaced by an up-to-date structure representing the Great New World(2) promised by some of our more reckless politicians(3).

One great surprise encountered there made me extra happy; walking in the centre of Brighton, I caught sight of our revered Major, the last commander of my first Battalion before it was disbanded at Rouen in 1916. I had, some time previously, been told that he was last seen at Vimy Ridge suffering from a bullet wound in his head and presumed dead(3); but here he was, before my very eyes, driving an open car through the streets of this busy town.

     I could not safely try to attract his attention, so I watched him pass and disappear up the crowded street. (When, in later years, he became a Lord, he still preferred that we few, his “old boys”, address him as “Major”.)(4)

(2) For younger readers and older ones never exposed to the low entertainments of piers and arcades: What The Butler Saw was a film played on a hand-cranked mutoscope machine. The makers shot the original in the early 1900s, but I saw it in the early ’60s, slightly weathered but, I guess, still “erotic” as advertised. Apparently the “story” derived from a scandalous divorce case in the 1880s when a butler gave evidence that he’d looked through the dining-room keyhole and seen his mistress (in the other sense!)  “Lady Campbell in flagrante with Captain Shaw of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade”. I think you needed to know that.

(3) Although my father capitalised “Great New World”, it doesn’t seem to have been “a phrase”, so to speak. No doubt he cross-wired it with “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The title had no specific connection with WWI but Huxley did. When aged 21, Huxley volunteered to join the Army in January, 1916, but was rejected because he remained half-blind in one eye from a disease he contracted in 1911. Prime Minister Lloyd George apparently made the actual political promise which has resounded ever since when, in a General Election speech at Wolverhampton on November 23, 1918 (quoted in The Times two days later), he said, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in” – of course, this gained eternal life adjusted to “A land fit for heroes”.

(4) My father added one of his own Endnotes here: “Actually, some 57 years later, as I write in 1976, they have just removed the ‘What the butler saw’ and similar machines and sold them at fantastic profit at auction… and that old pier… is still earning money”; Palace Pier, Brighton’s third pier, opened in 1899, and remains in operation now (or as of Friday a week ago when, coincidentally, I was gazing at it from the prom).

(5) In December, 1916, at the start of Sam’s “year out” when he was found to be underage for the battlefield, i.e. still 18 – after Gallipoli and the Somme – back in London he talked with some recovering wounded soldiers from the Western Front who told him that ‘dear old Major Booth, of whom I’ve said so much – a comparatively young man really, of course – had been wounded in the head; it was assumed that he too had died’ (Chapter 42 of the Memoir, Blog December 11, 2016). “Booth” was his alias for Major Harry Nathan, just 30 in February, 1919, CO of the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers in Gallipoli and until their disbandment on the Western Front in May, 1916. 

     In Strong For Service, Nathan’s biographer, H. Montgomery Hyde, reports the Major’s own account of his wounding – in mid-July, 1916, a while after the initial Somme onslaught and massacre, a sniper shot him, his steel helmet saving his life, Nathan thought, although the bullet ‘went clean through the base of his head’. On July 24, 1916, from hospital, he dictated a letter home saying that ‘very considerable pain’ was decreasing. He convalesced – very slowly – at Palace Green Hospital For Officers, Kensington, and another hospital in Bournemouth, before being sent for additional psychiatric treatment for ‘melancholia’ at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, under the renowned trauma treatment pioneer Dr William Rivers (while there, Nathan met another Rivers patient, the war poet and decorated hero of the Somme, Siegfried Sassoon who was officially under treatment for shell shock/neurasthenia after writing a public letter to his commanding officer titled Finished With The War: A Soldier’s Declaration; Sassoon eventually returned to the Front, was promoted to Captain, then wounded near Arras in July, 1918, and returned to England; Dr Rivers is still renowned because of his portrayal in the Regenerationtrilogy of novels by Pat Barker (1991-5) and the film adaptation of the same name (1997)).

     After 18 months convalescence, Nathan was invalided out of the Army with the permanent rank of Major. Still often in pain, but – says Hyde – more personally confident because of his treatment by Rivers, he proceeded to a career in public life (although always a working solicitor to some degree). A Liberal MP for Bethnal Green North East from 1929, he switched to Labour in 1934 and returned to Parliament for Wandsworth Central in 1937, before stepping down to make way for Ernest Bevin (then General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, shortly Minister Of Labour under PM Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition) – by way of consolation, being ennobled as Lord Nathan of Churt, and serving in the post-World War II Labour Government as Under-Secretary Of State For War and Minister For Civil Aviation; a Privy Counsellor from 1946; Hansard at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/colonel-harry-nathan/ (may prove hyperlink-resistant) shows how he contributed in Parliament constantly down the years, until his death on July 31, 1963 (why he’s ranked “Colonel” in Parliamentary records I don’t know); his wife, Eleanor (née Stettauer, 1892-1972, MA economics and maths Girton College, Cambridge), was a member of London County Council for many years – initially a Liberal, like her husband she switched to Labour (and became LCC Chairman in 1947).

All the best– FSS

Next week: While Sam enjoys that “month spent by the sea with nothing to do but polish our boots and buttons”, the Blog goes Retro in a thematic vein – first, Sam on how a frontline Tommy felt and dealt with his fears…

(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.

Sam’s Signallers, blushfully dubbed “the cream”, get the jammy jobs and no “lion patrol” – but their detested RSM vows to “make the sods sweat!”...

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 British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Verdun entered its third week – meaning that the German Army’s surprise attack had already failed to quite a degree. Yet, in the Western Front mindset, that didn’t mean anyone significant stopped and thought about whether attritional slaughter of tens of thousands really was the best way to proceed.

    The “second phase” began on March 6 with the German capture of Forges, then hills 360 and 265 and Fresnes (March 7). The French recovered ground in Corbeaux wood (8), lost some of it again (10), but beat back a German attack on Fort Vaux (11). On both sides, enormous artillery barrages dominated the action and did most damage – German strategists being startled by the strength of the French response.

    Elsewhere, the German declaration of war on Portugal (9) was reciprocated (after much skirmishing in Africa), and on the Eastern Front the Russian Army held off a new wave of German attacks at Dahlen Island in the River Dvina, at Cebrow (Galicia, around current Poland/Ukraine border)… and near a place apparently called Kosloff I can’t find online (7-10).

    The Russian Army continued to prosper on a remarkable range of fronts, with the steady advance towards Trebizond in Turkey continuing via the capture of Rizeh (7) and subsequent crossing of the River Kalopotamus (9) while in Iran they took Cola (7), Sennah (8) and Kerind (11).

    The major event of the British week saw a second attempt to relieve the Ottoman siege of Kut (on the Tigris, southeast of Baghdad; the 6th (Poona) Division trapped there since December) come up short at the Battle Of Dujaila Redoubt (8; 4,000 British/Indian casualties, 1,290 Ottoman). However, in East Africa – now Kenya – a British/South African force drove German invaders back at Taveta and Latema Nek (10-12).

    Meanwhile, the 200-odd 2/1st City Of London Battalion Royal Fusiliers comrades who’d come through Gallipoli, had taken up residence in a tented town at Beni Salama, on the banks of the Nile and the edge of the Sahara 30 miles north-west of Cairo. After that terrible campaign, and given rumours of what was happening in Europe, it wasn’t such a bad life for my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), his older brother Ted (19, lately converted from foot-slogging to horse wrangling), and their mates – except that the Army would persist in interfering with their rest and relaxation…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the Battalion’s new CO, straight from London with friends in high places, ousted their trusted Gallipoli leader-cum-hero Major Booth, then did Sam’s Signallers the desperate disservice of praising them as “the cream”. So nobody liked them… and the Regimental Sergeant Major set about avenging himself for the new Colonel’s favouritism, but with particular reference to my father, a close-up witness when he disgraced himself on the battlefield at Suvla Bay:

‘The haphazard way in which we had fixed ourselves up to share living quarters with compatible mates was scrubbed right away. The new regime re-allocated tents away in the rear of the camp to officers, with separate marquees for Officers’ Mess and Sergeants’ Mess now dividing them from “other ranks”. Each diminutive Company had its own tents. We unfortunate Signallers in two tents of our own stood out like sore thumbs, being fairly close – much too close – to a tent called Battalion Headquarters in which lived the Regimental Sergeant Major.

     Do you remember him?* The man seconded earlier, on Malta, from the Royal Marines, briefly a hero with our men, but later, on the Peninsula, disliked for several good reasons and held in some contempt by the Major on account of incorrect behaviour on the front line, such as brandishing a revolver and threatening to shoot men who were already having enough trouble from Turkish guns.

     The RSM seemed to positively hate Signallers, probably because the new Colonel had praised us, and he decided to humiliate us at every opportunity – in fact, he picked on me in particular, having viewed me with disfavour since our days in two adjacent holes at Suvla Bay.

     We had laid out a system of field telephones from each Company HQ to Battalion HQ, and one of our men was on duty at each point. The work, of course, was a piece of cake so it caused some further resentment among the rest of the Battalion, doing hours of training, drill and various jobs of hard work around the growing camp.

     But their resentment was as nothing compared to that of the RSM; he pledged himself vocally, loudly, to have the Cream Of The Battalion off the jammy jobs and on to something which would make the sods sweat – he may even have had some support among our comrades, given that the usurper Colonel’s high opinion of Signallers (along with some skilful wangling on our part, I should admit) meant that we were excused certain unpopular tasks, especially “Lion Patrol”, the humourous title for a chore which took a party of men prowling about at night in the desert darkness looking for Gawd knows what. Sometimes, when I heard the jackals howling in the distance, I thought of our brave lads out there and then thanked Heaven I was part of the Cream Of The Battalion.

     One of us, of course, had to take his turn at manning the phone in the RSM’s Battalion HQ tent and that was an unpopular number, you bet. One of our lines ran from Battalion to Brigade HQ, whence all the big, dirty jobs were dished out. When one of those requests landed on the RSM’s table he would jump up and yell one name, joyfully it seemed to me: “Corporal Norcliffe!”** He knew I would then have the painful duty of detailing a man or men to do whatever scruffy chore had come along.’

* For previous stories of this blustering RSM see: Blog 64, September 27, 2015, when, under an early burst of shellfire at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, he panicked and, brandishing a revolver from his “trench”/hole (unfortunately next to Sam’s) yelled “Keep down! I’ll shoot the first man who shows himself above ground without permission!” – as my father wrote “the RSM’s queer behaviour deepened the gloom… he failed us on our first night in the line”; then during the night the RSM and his batman, digging vigourously, broke through into my father’s hole – he wrote that “It introduced an unwelcome intimacy. My feelings must have shown for this RSM never loved me.”; and in a later chapter Sam notes that Major Booth (alias for Harry Nathan) had accidentally created a catchphrase for the whole Battalion when, under fire, he spotted the RSM skulking and roared at him, “Keep your head up, Sergeant Major!”

** “Norcliffe” is the vestige of my father’s rather transparent alias in the early part of the Memoir when he wrote in the third person and referred to himself as “our boy” or “Tommy Norcliffe”, before switching to first-person autobiography mode during the Malta chapters.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Haunted by the RSM, Sam and mates discover the gentle art of “going missing” – until a keen new Signals Lieutenant leads them to explore “the heliograph’s place in modern warfare”…

Sam and the 2/1st get paid at last! But the pain-in-the-rear new Colonel just carries on giving them gyp – even when he praises them!

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli episode & Somme episode mini-e-books 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 this week… the first phase of the German Army’s Verdun onslaught, begun on February 21, petered out around Douamont, held up by snow and the French 33rd Infantry Regiment (27-9). This allowed the French to bring up 90,000 men and a lot more guns and ammunition, enabling their artillery to repulse the German second phase attack at Poivre Hill (March 4) and east of Vacherauville (5) – casualties in the tens of thousands already.

    In the North Sea, German raider Greif and British cruiser Alcantara sank each other (February 29). Of wider strategic significance, especially to America, the German Navy declared the extension of its submarine campaign – according to different sources, this was either just to include “defensively armed merchantmen” or, in fact, everything that sailed, no limits (March 1).

    Further south, the Russian Army developed its push toward Trebizond on the Ottoman Black Sea coast by landing fresh troops at Atna (March 4) and, separately, occupied Bitlis, eastern Turkey, mainly through its 1st Battalion of Armenian volunteers (avenging the 1915 genocidal attack).

    And in Africa the Allies had two successes when the German Government of Cameroon surrendered to the British and French (February 28) and the British began an advance towards Mount Kilimanjaro in German East Africa (March 5; now partly in Tanzania, plus Rwanda and Burundi).

    Meanwhile, the 200-odd 2/1st City Of London Battalion Royal Fusiliers comrades who’d come through Gallipoli, had constructed a tented town, shared with other Battalions, adjacent to a village called Beni Salama, on the banks of the Nile and the edge of the Sahara 30 miles north-west of Cairo. After that terrible campaign – for them, featuring two evacuations, Suvla Bay and then V Beach – this wasn’t such a bad life for my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), his older brother Ted (19, lately converted from foot-slogging to horse wrangling), and their mates – not for long, though…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam wrote about the general sense of comradeship the 2/1st’s remnants shared in the aftermath of Gallipoli – and the threat to it immediately perceived in the appearance, straight from London, of a new Colonel who soon elbowed aside the beloved CO who had led them through their first months of war, Major “Booth” (my father’s alias for Major Harry Nathan, see details in footnote last week).

    Now my father recalls how the Colonel turned their worries to bitterness with a series of tactless missteps:

‘We drew our first pay for a long time*, followed shortly by our first ration of fresh meat (tough, probably camel, but a step in the right direction). In fact, we had started to achieve something towards becoming cleaner and healthier… when along comes this Colonel** to take over and humiliate our guvnor.

     A parade – us, mind you, ordered to fall in, stand to attention, at ease, and all that stuff! – was ordered. Groups representing former Companies*** lined up, an officer standing in front of each. We Signallers stood together and found, for the first time, that we too had an officer, a slick, young man in light breeches, soft cap tilted a little to one side, a cane under his arm. Our gallant Major did indeed stand before us all, called us to attention and then turned and waited as, on the lovely Black Bess****, the new, unwanted Colonel rode forward.

     The final degradation came when our Major saluted the Colonel, then strode away out of our sight. All this seemed unreal… taking place on a flat, sandy waste under a hot, African sun, like a scene from a Foreign Legion yarn in one of the weeklies I’d read before I enlisted.

     Formalities over, astride the big, black horse, the Colonel addressed us. The Battalion had acquitted itself well on active service, he knew, but now the time had come for reorganisation, for training in up-to-date skills of warfare. He had been deputed to originate and carry out the new programme and felt sure that all would co-operate… And so on and on while the resentment boiling up among those glaring at him must have been almost visible like a green cloud ascending from the tops of our heads.

     He crowned his unpopularity and poisoned the minds of all except us, the Signals Section, when he turned in our direction and proclaimed, “And I expect special attention to the details of your work from you, the Signals Section. You are the cream of the Battalion and will be expected to set the pace in this new effort.”

     That blackballed our little group to the rest of the men – ensured that our name stank among them for good and always. Had the Major made such a statement we could have strutted around with haloes illuminating our bonces but, coming from the unwanted Colonel, it infected us like some dirty plague and separated us from all but the most generous among our former good friends.

     And, of course, down there in the Transport lines was my brother Ted who groomed, polished and trained the horse between the new man’s beefy thighs. Wouldn’t Ted be the popular one now it had been revealed for whom he was labouring!’

* Their first pay since before Gallipoli (September, 1915).

** Almost certainly Lieutenant Colonel A.C.H. Kennard, as detailed in a footnote to last week’s Blog (No. 85, February 21).

*** Meaning that when recruited in September, 1914, the Battalion’s eight Companies comprised around 125 men each. After Gallipoli, with numbers reduced erratically across the Companies, they averaged 31/32 men each.

**** A stallion! No, nobody ever heard an explanation for the misnomer, but no doubt Kennard got the blame and the mockery (as well as Ted).

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam’s Signallers, now officially the “cream of the Battalion” get the jammy jobs to go with it – arousing the ire of their detested RSM who vows to “make the sods sweat!”...