Sam and starving POW pals wonder what’s going on: new uniforms! money! his first shower since March! new boots! Well, clogs… But still he’s so emaciated “I would not have been recognised by my own father…”

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc 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… The Allies’ ultimately decisive Amiens Offensive (August 8-September 3), which began last week with the Battle Of Amiens (8-11) resulting in a 10-mile advance and 30,000 German prisoners taken, developed further through the continuing Battle Of Montdidier (8-15; about 24 miles southeast of Amiens, Somme department).

    The latter saw British, Canadian, French and Australian troops widen the initial Allied attack and push forward 11 miles by August 13. Meanwhile, the French advanced around Lassigny (13-15; about 38 miles southeast of Amiens) and under general Allied pressure the German Army retreated from the rivers Ancre and Oise (14-15), before holding their ground again for the more extended Second Battle Of Noyon (17-29; about 44 miles southeast of Amiens).

    In other notable Western Front moments, the British began their long-term drive in Flanders (18) and the German long-range gun targetting Paris fired its last shell (15).

    In turmoiled and confused Russia, the Bolsheviks, who had been doing rather badly in the further-flung outposts, took a town called Merv in Transcaspia (now Turkmenistan) from the regional, temporarily independent government (August 15). Otherwise, the redoubtable Czecho-Slovak Legion, spread as it was more or less the length of the Trans-Siberian railway, fought off Bolshevik counterattacks at Irkutsk (16; Siberia) and on the Ussuri river (16; Khabarovsk, far eastern Russia).

    And down in Italy, a long but small part of the campaign to get the Austria-Hungary Army out of Italy began when a surprise attack instigated the Battle Of San Matteo (August 13-September 3; Ortler Alps, northwest Italy) – the highest-altitude battle ever fought at the time – immediately ousting the garrison but then having to defend the gain.

[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)… untilofficialdom 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. Come November/December, 1917, during his final home leave, he assured his parents that he would survive (irrationally, he knew). In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras – including excursions to the Front. 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 where they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Of course, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, four months a POW now and his starving band apparently settled for a while in southern Germany, knew nothing of new developments in the war.

    Last week, he had guard Captain Kayser kick him in the crutch for scrumping and ate raw liver nicked from pigswill by his pal Wally.

    But even amid that demeaning desperation for food, the summer’s sense of things looking up – just a little and relatively – continued when Sam and pals sneaked haircuts with the horse-hospital shears and Kayser decided that was a good idea and brought in regular (rough) barbering for all. Further accommodations followed (alongside continuing starvation and brutality):

‘After that, one Sunday morning, the guards told us to take off our very soiled khaki uniforms. They handed us tunics, trousers and caps, all made of loosely woven, dark-blue material with a wide, orange stripe down each trouser-leg and round the cap. So there we were – socks and underwear unwashed for months, but brand-new uniforms. If only we could somehow have a bath…

     Everything appeared to be going our way, however. Soon, they lined up half our lot in front of an officer and gave each of us several tickets, on which were printed some German words, now only partially remembered – “Kriegsgefangenen Lager Nr. ??”, then cards of different colours printed with “Gutschein für 5 Pfennig(2)” (or 10 or 20). We needed no instruction on what these cards were all about, they were money substitutes. So where could we spend them?

     Next, they marched us off to a railway station where we entered Fourth-Class compartments with hard, wooden seats – just like the hop-pickers’ train in Kent when we were digging the outer London defences back in 1914(3). Britain and Deutschland had that much in common, I thought; the harder you worked, the harder you travelled. But I can well recall the inner pleasure I felt at this seeming return to a more normal sort of life. A clean uniform, some sort of money in my pocket, and a trip on a train to… well, I must wait and see.

     In the excitement, I almost forgot my ever-present hunger. Once more, we crossed the Rhine and this time we detrained at Mühlhausen, which we had passed through on our journey south. As we marched through its main street, I observed the townspeople taking a real interest in the spectacle of these shuffling, bent-kneed, sunken-cheeked beings. Meanwhile, I saw two civilian-dressed men moving among them, apparently answering enquiries about us. “English soldiers – look at the condition to which those people are reduced,” I heard one say. I felt sure we were the first British prisoners of war seen in those parts.

     A busy, prosperous town, Mühlhausen impressed me most with its cleanliness. Not that English towns of those days were dirty(4), but Mühlhausen had a special look in 1918, so well cared for. The housewives must have thought so too, for they, in many cases, hung feather mattresses and quilts over window sills to give them the benefit of the clean, soft air, not deterred therefrom by what the neighbours might think, as would usually be the case in England.

     We entered what appeared to be a large, public building and – more by signs than by word of mouth – were told to remove all our clothing. Ahead sat a man in a white coat to whom, in turn, we each had to present ourselves. He dipped a fairly large brush into a can and painted our scrotums and armpits with blue paste. We moved on to another white coat who shaved off the blue-painted hair.

     Finally, we entered a shower cubicle where the water, though cold, enabled us to make ourselves cleaner than we had been for many a day. Soap was not available, but long-handled brushes vigorously applied did the job. The Treaty of Geneva(5) was working at last, for which I was truly thankful.

     We had no towels so we had to dry our bodies with our trousers or tunics, but I had no complaint, feeling so refreshed by this unexpected cleansing. Unfortunately, I then had to dress myself once more in the rank vest, shirt, pants and socks. But dismay and horror hit me when I realised that my boots had vanished. A quick search of our men’s sacks and bundles failed to restore them to me, so I had to appeal to the Postens who were in charge of us. They said they knew nothing about the theft.

     However, I suspect even they couldn’t face the prospect of walking through the town in full public view with one of their prisoners bare-footed. Perhaps for that reason, they reported my loss to a senior officer at the cleansing station and one of his men handed me a pair of wooden clogs the like of which I had previously seen only in pictures of Dutch working people… at school we’d been told they wore clogs and smoked cigars, even when very young; I had no cigars, but gladly shoved my feet into these hand-carved-from-a-piece-of-wood shoes; I didn’t find them too uncomfortable, except that they cut into my insteps.

     Now I must have really looked the genuine POW in my bright, orange stripes, socks a dirty grey with trousers tucked into them, and those heavy clogs with their pointed toes. Add sunken cheeks, staring eyes and bent knees to the picture – I would not have been recognised by my own father.’

(2) Gutschein für 5 Pfennigs: voucher for 5 “pennies”.

(3) See Blog 23 December 12, 2014. Sam described the carriages conveying his first Battalion, the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers, from billets in Tonbridge to dig a trench system south of London as “Cattle trucks, pigsties, travelling chicken sheds” normally reserved for “Hop-pickers— seasonal migrants, mostly from the city, who worked hard during the few weeks of the harvest. Because they were poor people the railway company had gone to the trouble of constructing this shabby transport for them.”

(4) My father footnoted: “So many of them are in 1976, as I write” – something the older generation of every generation remarks on, no doubt.

(5) Wikipedia says a series of Geneva treaties began with Swiss businessman/social activist Henri Dunant’s reaction to the battle of Solferino, in the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, 1859, between French/Sardinian and Austrian Armies; first the Red Cross was formed in Geneva, then in 1864 came the first Geneva Convention, aka “the Red Cross Treaty”; adopted initially by 12 nations, it codified the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield during declared wars, and the neutrality of medical personnel, but said of prisoners only that they should be returned to their country; the list of original signatories varies from source to source, but Wikipedia has, from International Law: A Treatise by Ronald Roxburgh, 1920: Baden, Belgium, Denmark, France, Hesse, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Prussia, Spain, Switzerland and Wurttemberg; another web page now no longer available didn’t show the German then-independent states and added Norway (with the many later ratifiers including Britain and Turkey 1865, Russia 1867, USA 1882); a Convention covering war at sea was added in 1906, then further revisions came long after World War I, in 1929, 1949 (it removed the “declared war” limitation), 1977 and 2005; protection of POWs in World War I depended more on the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907 which the war proved deficient, leading in part to the 1929 Geneva Convention revision covering particularly “the prohibition of reprisals and collective penalties”, says http://ow.ly/cLQz30kUrfr.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam spends his Gutschein on soap and fags, then sneaks off to buy a pie on the qv from the Hügelheim Gasthaus – and even fantasise about a sweet young girl.

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoirof his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

Kindly guard “Heligoland” conducts Sam and his POW comrades on a long journey south to the Black Forest… and a new, rural POW camp with better bogs – and perhaps the possibility of snaring a rabbit…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc 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… Looking back, we know the final confrontation was being marshalled, but in early July, 1918, did they know that? From the outside, the events of this seven days seem like the movement of pawns on a chess board, any endgame strategies hardly to be guessed at.

    The striking developments all occurred east of what had been the Eastern Front, as the Russian Revolution and Germany’s invasive war entwined and threw up strange, albeit temporary outcomes. In southwest Russia, the Bolsheviks extended their reach, taking control of Sirzan and Bulgulma in Tatarstan (July 8). Yet, 330 kilometres northwest, still in Tatarstan, the marauding White-Russian-supporting Czechoslovak Legion, whose “revolt” is dated May-August, captured the Volga city of Kazan from the Bolsheviks. This was another stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway which had enabled them to run a line of substantial outposts all the way to Vladivostok – where their General Horvath now declared a provisional government and Allied protectorate (10). They also occupied Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, Siberia (8 or 13 say different sources); to put the Legion’s reach in geographic perspective, Irkutsk is 3,880 kilometres west of Vladivostok and 4,375 east of Kazan (they had numbered 100,000 at one point, but this improbable revolt must have spread them pretty thin).

    On the Western Front, the French made modest gains northwest of Longpont, Aisne department (July 8), and Courcy, Calvados (10), and the Australian Flying Corps bombed Merris, in occupied Nord department (11).

    Otherwise, in southern Albania Italian troops took Berat from the Austrians while the French advanced on both banks of the Devoli river (July 10 and 12), and in Palestine the Battle Of El Tellul (July 14; 11 kilometres north of Jericho) saw combined British, Indian and Australian forces beat back what turned out to be the final German/Ottoman attack of the war in that region (casualties: German 1,000, Allies 189).

[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)… untilofficialdom 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. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (many Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017).An interesting year ensued – weeks of it passed in various northern 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, at Wharncliffe War Hospital, Sheffield). During that summer, his Company Officer told him he’d been offered the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; either this defiance brought about his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or he actually requested it, I don’t know. Come November/December, 1917, during his final home leave, he assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras – including excursions to the front. In mid-March he found 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 OK 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.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe – taken prisoner outside Arras and then part of randomly-assembled half-starved and often battered bands of POWs wandering occupied France east of the Front – found himself on a long train journey south, as ever with no idea where he was going (the Tommy’s usual condition whether with the British Army or a POW).

    En route, an old, kindly guard nicknamed “Heligoland”, a former front-line soldier himself, befriended him in one of Sam’s usual broken English/broken German exchanges. But then came a display of some of the British POWs’ demoralisation by hunger that disgusted Sam – a terrible fight for unusually generous rations provided by the Germans on a station platform.

    But now their change of scene is starting to look promising as they travel deeper into the countryside of southwest Germany:

‘That journey, which could have been so pleasant, so different from the pauperish existence of prisoners behind bars or barbed wire, ended for me and about a dozen others when we stopped at a station – I forget where – and Heligoland told us to follow him off the train.

     Outside the station, we climbed into two low-slung wagons, each drawn by a pair of horses. Time slipped away as we trotted off along a beautiful country road; memory hauled me back to 1916, the end of that year, when I had been sent to the huge base at Harfleur(2) – leaving a Battalion much reduced in numbers and in spirit by Somme battles, but slowly being reinforced in preparation for further General Haig attempts to win the war by nibbling away (the tactics which cost so many lives to achieve so little).

     I digress – that wagon set me reminiscing simply because it had no springs and a similar one at Harfleur had shaken my innards then as this one did, making frequent micturation necessary. Which further recalls Egypt in 1915 where one of our wits nicknamed a bloke who had to pee frequently Mustapha Piss…

     When good old Heligoland gestured at the ascending forest rising to great heights on either side of the road and shouted “Schwarzwald!” I knew what the first part of the word meant, “black”, so I guessed we were in the Black Forest(3). The sun shining, the air sweet — all I then required to make life heavenly was a good meal and a return to normal strength. With neither forthcoming, the lovely surroundings nonetheless raised my hopes of better times to come.

     A certain vagueness about where we went thereafter bothers me(4), but I know we eventually left the wagons, started walking and, feeling flaked out, were allowed to rest awhile by the roadside, and observe what must have been at that time a proud monument to German success in the 19th Century — a huge, grey, stone arch above the spotlessly maintained highway along which we had marched. The massive figures in the centre of the edifice hit one right in the eyeballs: “1870”. A blow to French pride and a sort of threat that history might repeat itself in 1918 if the Americans didn’t add the necessary punch to the Allied counter-offensive.

     Grass-lined, graced by grand, towering trees on both sides, this highway at that point with that arch marked the entrance to territory known to us as Alsace-Lorraine(5), but which I later gathered the Germans regarded as two separate provinces, Elsass and Lothringen.

     A short walk from there brought us to a large, ancient fort and barracks, where we spent some time and were given a drink of the familiar ersatz coffee, memorable because sweetened, albeit with sugar substitute. Our guards permitted us to rest in the cool shelter of a paved area, fronted by arches and looking out into a large, sanded parade ground… where, unexpectedly, an American soldier appeared. Immaculately dressed, he walked up and down, presumably for exercise, without any visible supervision. He took no notice of us.

     What had secured this preferential treatment for him? Mystery indeed! If this American had been captured during a front-line battle, how come his uniform remained spotless? I had plenty of time to speculate about this point as I sprawled in the shade. Back and forth he strolled, looking neither to left nor right, so perhaps he had the same worries about survival prospects as some of us.

A further rail journey of several hours gave me a view of much attractive countryside with prosperous farms and villages and occasionally a town such as Freiburg(6) certainly a place of some architectural worth; even from the train I reckoned it the sort of town I would like to explore in time of peace.

     I always felt that inward ache when I looked at a beautiful town or village which had so far avoided damage by the opposing armies, and so carried on some sort of fairly steady existence which might, with luck, continue until a treaty relieved its people of the fears caused by war.

     A town of considerable size called, at that time, Mühlhausen(7) loomed up, but we stayed on the train. Ahead we saw a wide river and soon we crossed it by way of a bridge, which seemed endless. This, I guessed, must be the Rhine, though its width surprised me, considering how far south we had travelled.

     Soon after that, we detrained and our guards conducted us through a very pleasant country town and a little way beyond it until they marched about 40 of us into a barbed-wire enclosure containing several Army huts. This turned out to be our base for two or three months. A wooden shelf sleeping ten men, with a similar shelf below it, comprised the war-prisoner accommodation we had come to expect.

     As first priority, I had to seek out the latrine because the after-effects of dysentery made several night visits to that usually stinking place unavoidable. But in this small Gefangenenlager(8), instead of the standard pole-over-trench open-air outfit, we had an enclosed bog. This superior sanitary convenience gave me a sense of things looking up, that perhaps, in this lovely area, life might become more easily bearable — might there be even some hope of supplementing our meagre vegetable diet by catching a bird or a rabbit?’

(2) This was after he was revealed to be still underage for battlefield service.

(3) The Black Forest: wooded mountains, 159 kilometres (99 miles) long, 59 kilometres (37 miles) wide, in Baden-Württemberg state, southwestern Germany, source of the Danube.

(4) Oddly, the “vagueness” my father refers to in this paragraph seems to embrace lacking any recollection of his group of prisoners parting company with Heligoland, “the kindliest German” as Sam called him in last week’s blog.

(5) Alsace-Lorraine: annexed by the German Empire in 1871 as one of the spoils of the Franco-Prussian War; in July, 1915, the German Government banned the French language from the region; the Allies annexed Alsace back to France in December, 1918, and, in the early ’20s, deported the Germans remaining there and banned their language; Hitler re-annexed Alsace in 1940-45, then lost it again.

(6) Freiburg: in the Breisgau region of Baden-Württemberg on the western edge of the Black Forest, 611 kilometres (380 miles) southeast of Arras.

(7) Mühlhausen or Mulhouse: in Alsace, 637 kilometres (396 miles) south-east of Arras; formerly known as “the French Manchester” because of its textile industry; part of the Holy Roman Empire until it joined the Swiss Confederation, 1515-1798, then transferred to France during the Revolution, until annexed by the German Empire 1870-1918, after which it returned to France until 1940-45; hometown of Alfred Dreyfus and also of Dr Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and chief administrator of the “action T4” programme which exterminated 275,000 German and Austrian citizens deemed incurably ill.

(8) Prison camp.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and POW pals get a rude awakening from a bully with a bayonet. But their new work – tending war horses sick from the battlefield – feels worthwhile and it’s farming country so there’s always food to be scrounged, scavenged… or stolen from horses!

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoirof his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.