New POW Sam swiftly succumbs to the necessary obsession with food and starts improvising with snaffled scraps; continuing his quest for comrades not yet degraded and broken, he comes upon an inspirational Sergeant from his own Essex Regiment…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli&Somme episodemini-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 German Western Front onslaught which began with the Operation Michael battles in March, continued in only slightly lower key through the later stages of Operation Georgette (April 7-29), aimed at pushing the British Army back to the channel ports via attacks starting further north in France and western Belgium, with the Allied railway hub at Hazebrouck a particular target.

    The week began with relatively smaller fights around Albert, Robecq and Wytschaete (April 22; the first two in France, the third in Belgium, but all three in a rough line of battle running southwest from Ypres). What turned out to be the final exchanges of the offensive ensued: the Second Battle Of Villers-Bretonneux (24-5; further south and due east of Amiens) saw the German Army use tanks for the first time – ergo the world’s first (small) tank battle – and take the village initially then yield it back to British and Australian troops (Allied casualties 15,500, German 8-10,000); the Second Battle Of Kemmelberg (25-6; in Belgium, about six miles southwest of Ypres) where the Germans successfully stormed French troops who’d relieved the British on Mount Kemmel, but achieved no major breakthrough.

    Meanwhile, British naval raids on Zeebrugge and Ostend in occupied Belgium (April 22) sank ships to block the exits for German submarines based in Bruges.

    On what had been the Eastern Front the rather wild mix of politics and military action unfolded further with the United Diets of Baltic Provinces “asking” the German Government to unify them as a monarchy under the King Of Prussia, namely Kaiser Wilhelm (April 22; inverted commas mine). A little further north the German and Finnish Armies combined, rather than fighting, 30 miles north of Helsinki (26), and down in the Ukraine German forces approached Sebastopol.

    The Turks took their chance – post Treaty Of Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Axis Powers – to pick up some pieces, occupying Bayazid, Armenia (April 23), and Kars in Georgia (April 27; that same day Georgia declared its independence).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016),had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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.An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations andprepare for more of the same (he was 19 while in hospital). During that period, 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; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, he enjoyed what proved to be the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January 1917/8, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocking about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras, on March 19… just in time, it turned out, 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, taken prisoner.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, taken POW at the end of the 2/7th Essex Battalion’s fight to the last bullet against the Operation Mars segment of the Spring Offensive, experienced the first of many makeshift prison camps he was to encounter before Armistice.

    This one, at Denain, introduced him to the “dirty, unshaven, stinking” condition of prisoners who’d been there for even just a few weeks – and the fear-cum-knowledge that he would inevitably slide into the same broken state. Here he starts to adapt and take any possible measure to hold on to his own character in a situation in which everyone tended to lurch towards the feral. But he does find one man who inspires him to believe that dignity might be possible to some degree:

‘Nourishment for that second day as a prisoner had consisted of a litre of coffee substitute (mainly roasted and crushed acorns) and a piece of sour, dark-brown rye bread, which yielded two slices. I was to become familiar with these items during the coming months. The only daily addition to this, now that we had entered some kind of makeshift war prisoner camp, was a litre of stewed root vegetables – swedes, turnips and mangoldwurzels(2) – doled out every evening. Some old horsemeat may have been cooked with them, but none came our way; the under-fed Germans saw to that.

     This diet just kept me alive. Now, even in these earliest days, I too started to become hollow-eyed, emaciated.

     First priority was to acquire an empty tin can in which to collect your liquid rations. I managed that quite soon and, with a penknife which had eluded the Germans who robbed me on the battlefield, I began shaping a spoon out of a piece of wood.

     Finding some potato peelings one day, I washed them at a stand-pipe in the ex-factory building, put them in my can and filled it with water, gathered wood shavings, straw and odd bits of floorboard for a fire, cadged a light and cooked them. Without any seasoning they tasted awful, but down they went.

Prisoners had no work to do there in Denain and laying about in that unsavoury, crowded place took its toll of morale as well as of physical fitness. I soon formed an opinion that death in the battlefield would have been preferable to this sub-human existence… But, meanwhile, I must somehow manage to survive, difficult though this was looking. Small possibility now of my dying of “gunshot wounds” (a favourite military description of damage caused to a soldier’s body by shot, shell or aerial bomb), but we faced new enemies: starvation, chronic diarrhoea, and weakness resulting from diet deficiency.

     Of the hundreds of men around me, no single one now looked worth an attempt on my part to form a friendship. Of course, I don’t know what I looked like, having no mirror, but my uniform had become soiled, my boots mud-encrusted; I seldom washed, never shaved. I guess I looked like the rest of them with their sunken cheeks, and purposeless shuffling hither and thither.

     Hope revived, though, when a Sergeant of the Essex Regiment, miraculously clean and robust compared to the rest of us, came along and quietly told those of us who wore the Essex shoulder badge – including me, although I had not known him before – to make our way to the entrance gates. Goldberg(3) had told him the Jerries were moving a certain number of men to another town and that the Sergeant could select them and go with them. Naturally, he gave preference to his own chaps; when we lined up, the count revealed a small deficiency in numbers and volunteers scrambled for the chance to join us.

     A small bunch of Liverpool men and a few from Brum, pushing types, made up the quota and so, after a nourishing meal(4) – a slice of bread and a can of so-called coffee – we shambled off.’

     Armed Germans, about six of them, walked on either side of us. By then we had passed from the hands of fighting soldiers and into the care of the more elderly Landsturm(5) – mostly sour, stern old codgers, steeped in anti-British dislike, and with a determination to make us suffer. These guards prevented any attempt to walk on the footpath in search of scraps of food such as discarded cabbage leaves or stumps, potatoes, or indeed anything at all which could be eaten.

     Even so, if a prisoner spotted any such trifle, and risked a beating by breaking ranks to pick it up, half a dozen starving blokes would pounce on him, hoping to grab it first, until one or more guards drove them back into line by prodding or bashing them with rifle butts. These pouncers were usually the northern group who had forced themselves on the Sergeant when he was getting his party together.’

(2) “Mangoldwurzels” might be unfamiliar word to some – also spelt “mangel/manglewurzel”, it’s a chunky root vegetable mainly cultivated for cattlefeed.

(3) Goldberg appeared last week as a Tommy who spoke German; he had ingratiated himself with the guards and, as translator, issued orders to the prisoners – his unpopularity not diminished by the era’s undercurrents of antisemitism.

(4) In case you’ve missed it, my father was a dead-pan sarcastic so-and-so at times, hence his “The Pisstaker” soubriquet in the Somme trenches a couple of years earlier.

(5) Landsturm: 3rd-class infantry, comprising any male aged between 17 and 42 who wasn’t in the standing Army, the Landwehr.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and comrades move into a pit village called Marchiennes; they sleep 10 to a shelf, their latrine open to the world – Sam sticks with his Essex Sergeant and Tommies in hopes of clinging to vestiges of humanity for as long as possible…

(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.

Still March 28: his final battle over, Sam starts his eight months as a POW… but it’s not official yet, so he helps a wounded British lad get to the German Red Cross; he’s mugged by a Jerry battlefield gang of thieves; and passes through a phalanx of artillery the likes of which he’s never seen before…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli&Somme episodemini-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 Spring Offensive/Kaiserschlacht reached its bloody diminuendo as Allied defences held on sufficiently to prevent the German Army gaining any of General Ludendorff’s objectives, although they recovered a lot of territory lost in 1916-17.

    The British repulsed an attack near Fampoux outside Arras (April 2; where my father became a POW on March 28; see below) and, with Australian troops, around Amiens, defended the village of Villers-Bretonneux and won the Battle Of The Avre (4; reckoned to be the first in which both sides used tanks) and the Battle Of The Ancre (5). The French successfully counterattacked southeast of Amiens at Grivesnes and Noyon (4).

    The upshot was that on April 5, Ludendorff declared Operation Michael defunct, undermined by often effective defence and their own failures in supply lines of food and equipment. Casualties were estimated as German 250,000, Allied 255,000…

    Nonetheless, the German General immediately launched a second phase of the Spring Offensive, known as Operation Georgette or the Battle Of The Lys, intended to take Ypres and push the British back through Belgium to the Channel coast. This began with an artillery bombardment on a 15-mile front between Festubert and Armentières, on the Belgian border (April 7).

    Elsewhere, far smaller actions also had the air of terminal skirmishing. Despite the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, the Germans took Ekaterinoslav in southern Russia (April 3) and landed at Hangö in Finland despite a Russian protest (3). Over in Palestine the British attack on Amman stalled in face of Turkish resistance and they withdrew to Es Salt (2). And the Turks had a further minor success in taking Sarikamish, Russian Caucasus (4).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016),had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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.An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations andprepare for more of the same (he was 19 while in hospital). During that period, 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; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, he enjoyed what proved to be the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January 1917/8, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocking about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras, on March 19… just in time, it turned out, for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, described the final minutes of his last battle – on March 28, 1918, at Fampoux, outside Arras, the British defence against the Operation Mars phase of the German Spring Offensive. His 2/7th Battalion, Essex Regiment, had moved into the front line on March 23 and taken a terrible artillery bombardment until, at midnight on the 27/8th, Sam took the coded order which meant they had to hold the line to the last man and bullet.

    The anticipated full-on infantry attack duly arrived after morning stand-to and the Battalion did did as duty-bound, despite being leaderless with its Captain withdrawn days earlier, and the three Lieutenants Sam was aware of hors de combat(two dead, one panicked and ran for it). They were reckoned to comprise 520 men at the start of the day and, when next counted, 80 remained, the rest either dead or, like Sam, taken POW. He never knew what became of his great Arras-period pal Neston, who did head rearwards when every bullet was spent and he and Sam had released the carrier pigeons with brief farewell messages attached.

    As my father related at the end of last week’s blog, he came through because when he stood exhausted and defenceless in front of the onrushing Germans, hoping for a quick, accurate bayonet thrust to end it, the two young boys facing him “smiled, swung a little aside” and were gone. “Bless the lovely lads,” he wrote…

    So now he was on the “wrong” side of the lines, although not formally “captured” as yet – and he was still in the midst of a battlefield:

‘I heard a call for help, searched a little ahead, and found a British boy lying on his back, trying to get up. “I caught a bullet through the ankle,” he gasped… With the Germans having advanced in strength between us and the British Army, we were prisoners. Glad to be still alive, I suppose, but fearful of what might now happen to us.

     “Help me to get to a German field hospital,” he said. I got him up on to his sound foot and, obeying signs from yet more advancing German troops, with arms around each other, we struggled towards the enemy lines. Soon, a man wearing an armlet of Red Cross on yellow background relieved me of my wounded mate and directed me to proceed “that way”… That way would lead me smack into a line of field guns firing non-stop – they must have been laying a terrible bombardment on our rear positions. So, the law of self-preservation still operating, I veered to the right, slid into a shell-hole and rested a while, peering over the rim to make sure no fresh danger came my way.

     As German reinforcements moved past me, up and away to support their victorious comrades, their gaze fixed straight ahead, not a glance to right or left, I learnt how we must have looked to them when we were advancing in attack. I observed in them anxiety, nervousness, ruthlessness (but rarely)… and sometimes the shifty look betokening “Not me for the chop, not if I can dodge the column”, accompanied by artful sheltering behind other men.

     But where were our captured soldiers? Assuming some had survived… I hadn’t seen a Britisher since I handed my wounded kid over to the German Red Cross man.

     The last of the German infantry vanished towards the British lines. In the following lull, I heard a few shells come over from our artillery – which surprised me, for I felt sure most of our guns had been removed some days ago to positions far in the rear, or else destroyed by the intense enemy gunfire.

     Ahead of me, I could see the German front-line trench parapet. This provided another surprise: no barbed wire lay in front of it. Both Armies usually protected their fronts with barbed-wire defences of varying density. One could only imagine the enemy command had ordered its removal to facilitate rapidity of movement for the masses of men thrown into their infantry attack.

     I tensed my muscles preparatory to scrambling out of my shell-hole, dashed across to that German trench and slid on the loose earth down its steep side. As my feet touched the bottom, three Jerries sprang towards me, one thrust a pistol at my tummy and demanded “Pay-book!” I raised my arms and let them take what they would. Vultures of the battlefield, dodgers, thieves – they cleaned me out, and when they departed my worldly goods consisted of what I stood up in, underclothes, tunic, trousers, helmet, socks and boots. I’d heard of similar types in our Army – bad Military Police in Cairo who regularly robbed drunks and would-be deserters and somehow got away with it undetected…

     Having grabbed what they wanted, the thugs indicated the direction in which I should go. Towards all the bangs and smoke puffs again… but I obeyed, realising I was being watched by people whose presence I had been unaware of until then.

     Now, when I saw German soldiers in holes or trenches they all signalled in much the same way, their thumbs pointing to the rear. As I slowly approached the field artillery position, it shocked me to realise that, unlike our deployment of batteries at intervals across country behind our front lines, here – in a wide, deep trench like a sunken road – stood guns wheel to wheel as far as I could see to right and to left.

     I had to get down into that great ditch and climb up the far side. Then I came upon 50 or so British men clustered together. Nearby, several German officers had found some concealment in a clump of trees festooned with telephones, the instruments on the ground, the headphones hanging from low tree branches.

     One obviously senior officer with a blue and red face of extreme ugliness yelled an order accompanied by hand movements indicating us. This resulted in a more junior officer forcing the British soldiers nearest to him to go down on one knee, in one row, facing our own lines. The rest of us soon complied. A strange scene, shattering from our point of view – this assembly of artillery below and in front of us, stretching endlessly into the distance. How could our Army stand up to this concentration of fire power?

     I assumed that, in making us kneel right behind his guns, the commander hoped that British artillerymen – if they could see us through the battlefield mist and smoke – would not wish to fire on their comrades. I could not but admire this officer’s devotion to his job. In that exposed position, he calmly gave orders into one phone, hung that up, then used another, receiving and sending messages, in touch with battery commanders all along the line of guns. I could discern only one group of our guns firing in response, from way back behind the original British trench positions.

     Later, a German called “Come!” and our file arose and followed him across open country much pitted with craters and cluttered with war debris.

     One sight shook me: the corpse of a horse lying by the roadside, clearly not long dead, but with its ribs and upper leg bones exposed. Its hide had been slashed and all edible parts cut away. How hungry the Germans must have been, I realised, or at least how short of meat, to have butchered the animal as soon as it fell. I had never seen that sort of thing on the British side.

     Soon we came to the remains of a village. On a wall, painted in large white capitals, was the word “Gavrelle”(2) which I assumed to be its name.’

(2) Gavrelle: six miles east-north-east of Arras, 10 miles west of Douai; the British captured it on April 23, 1917, and lost it this day, March 28, 1918, before reoccupying in August. 

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam’s first night as a POW: he and his randomly gathered comrades interrogated by a Ruritanian-uniformed but cunning German officer who just wants a few details he’s missing about the British trench system and so on; then they dine on uncooked salt fish and “bed” down in a freezing brickyard.

(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.

March 28, 1918, the Spring Offensive, outside Arras: Sam’s Company’s line to Battalion HQ goes dead, the Company CO’s in a pitiable state… their orders are to fight to the last bullet… Sam and Signaller pals join their Tommy comrades vowing “Stick together no matter what happens”…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) 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 both sides waited for the German Spring Offensive, general tit-for-tat raiding picked up, although inconclusively. The British conducted daylight air raids on the southwest German towns of Freiburg (March 13), Zweibrucken (16) and Kaiserslautern (17), while the German Army got aggressive to the north of the Western Front at Ypres and Armentieres (11) and Laventie (12) but were repulsed – in the latter instance by Portuguese troops.

    Further south, the French recovered recently lost trenches near Butte De Mesnil (March 14) and conducted major raids near Verdun at Cheppy and Malancourt (16), while German Gotha bombers raided Paris (11; four shot down).

    To the east, no longer a Front, as the Congress Of Soviets in Moscow ratified the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with the Central Powers (March 14), the German Army carried on picking up territory, landing in Finland (12), and occupying southern Russian towns Odessa (13) and Nicolaiev (17). In an odd aberration, the Battle Of Bakhmach (March 8-13) between German and Czechoslovak Legion forces in Ukraine concluded with the latter, 42,000 of them, taking advantage of a truce to hightail it home on the Trans Siberian Railway.

    Outlying straggler elements of the Russian Army also retreated from a Turkish advance on Erzerum (March 12; Anatolia) and, just because they’d become so isolated, from Hamadan, West Persia.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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. An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations and prepare for more of the same (he was 19 while in hospital). During that period, his Company Officer told him he’d been offered the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around – especially when death might be the outcome – so he refused; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, he enjoyed what turned out to be the final home leave of his military career – at the end of which he assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January 1917/8, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocking about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches on March 19…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week*, when his C Company, 2/7th Battalion Essex Regiment, began their sixth day in the front line at Fampoux, a few miles outside Arras, under a constant pre-Operation Mars artillery bombardment, at midnight on March 27/8, 1918, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe took a terrifying one-word message from Battalion HQ.

    It read “George”. As previously notified, it meant “C Company will stand firm and under no circumstances leave their present position”. Fight to the last bullet. Fight to the last man…

    The excerpt left him and his fellow Signallers, including his good pal Neston, confronted by their Company commander, a Lieutenant, lost in a raging funk.

    Now this is the first of four blogs in which Sam, digging deep into his extraordinary memory 50 years after the event, describes his own final day of battle – the day when the Spring Offensive, begun a week earlier at St Quentin, became Operation Mars, the massive onslaught designed to take Arras. This is Sam Sutcliffe’s account of Thursday, March 28…

[* These excerpts had to step away from the blog’s usual 100-years-ago-this-week sequence because my father wrote at such length about the battle at Fampoux.]

‘The monstrous roars and thumps and shudders of a great artillery bombardment continued. Regardless of normal procedures, we Signallers tried to communicate with the Battalion office, but now the line had gone quite dead. Our quiet, rather older colleague offered no suggestions, our Welsh chum talked a great deal without saying very much, so Neston and I decided to check the line down to Battalion HQ, suggesting that the other two went along the trench telling everybody about message “George” and what it meant.

    At the back of my mind, I believe, was the idea that when we informed HQ staff of the front-line situation, they would tell us to stay with them, since no further signalling was required. We wasted our journey, though, because the HQ shelters were empty; having sent that awful “George” thing, they must have packed up and moved back to some pre-arranged place. That left us feeling naked and nervous, to put it mildly.

    Back to the Company to break the news to our already shattered Company officer. His consequent rage about “them” having deserted us evoked in us something akin to pity for him.

    Neston and I knew that we, the men of Company C, were now on our own. We left the pigeons – two beautiful white fantails – in their basket at the foot of the stairway down into the dugout, there to remain till all was hopeless.

The first glimmer of dawn lightened the day. March 28th it was. We checked our rifles, the bullets in our pouches. I grabbed two spare cotton bandoliers of bullets from a trench-side store. Up on the firing-step we could find no targets so far… Nobody claimed us as part of their Platoon or any less formal group and, feeling like unwanted spare parts(2), Neston and I scuffled along the trench, for no particular reason other than self-preservation perhaps.

    We saw dead men here and there, wounded men being helped or carried on groundsheets towards communication trenches leading rearwards. Thus for each wounded man, three left the front line, though what happened to them I never heard.

    The occasional Sergeant or Corporal retained some sort of control of a cluster of men, but no cohesive command remained. We hoped to report to one of the subalterns to obtain some positive direction, but we found that Lieutenant XXXXX had just shot himself(3). We could see him, sitting slumped on the ground, his back against the trench wall.

    Dawn proper. “Stand-to” time, so up on the firing-step we climbed. Neston on my right, an oldish man I didn’t know on my left… Some mist around the uneven terrain ahead. In that dawn half-light, every feature – a bush, a heap of thrown-up earth, the occasional tree – seemed threateningly large… whereas self-destroyed Lieutenant XXXXX appeared to have shrunk a bit more each time his slumped figure caught my eye.

    What leadership, what inspiration he provided for men about to engage in face-to-face battle with an enemy superior in numbers of both personnel and artillery, men with no choice but to stay put even when they had fired all their ammunition… Anyway, where was our Company commander? Still down below, apparently, since we had not seen him around the trench.

    Shells of all calibres burst around us. I now felt sort of mentally stunned and a looker-on, as it were, at the heaving destruction, wounding and killing on both sides of me for as far as I could see. Still no targets for my bullets, no outlets for my pent-up fears… if this continued for much longer I guessed I’d explode from within, regardless of enemy shells.

    I told Neston of this feeling, putting my mouth against his ear. He may have understood but, anyway, that much physical contact achieved something, for as we looked into each other’s eyes we returned to a normal human condition in which it was possible to give some thought to the fears and wishes of someone other than oneself. The animal concentration on survival, self-preservation no matter what happened to others, was thereafter easily set aside… “Stick together no matter what happens,” was the unspoken, but well understood agreement born and confirmed when we two stopped acting mechanically amid all that din and horror and probed for something worthwhile in each other while Old Man Death waited to put his clammy hand on us.’

(2) The four Signallers had spent their five days and nights in the front line either working in the (panicky) Company commander’s dugout or out repairing broken lines in exposed sections of blown-up trench, so they hadn’t formed any attachments to Platoons manning the firing steps. Nonetheless, they had resolved to “join our comrades” and fight if the time came when their specialist skills became redundant.

(3) In his Memoir, my father used aliases or, sometimes, Xes instead of real names because he didn’t want to cause pain – for any reason – to any living survivors or their descendents (remember, he was writing in the 1970s, in his own 70s). Clearly, other Tommies told Sam and Neston that this Lieutenant had shot himself – it rings true enough in the circumstances, but of course it may be wrong.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Before he and Neston release the doves, their last resort as Signallers, to tell HQ “No ammunition left. Almost surrounded…” and “Goodbye”, Sam describes an incident he calls “Murder” – himself the perpetrator – which forces him to doubt whether there existed “any plausible excuse” for war.

(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.