1919: Sam, still a POW camp guard in lovely Sussex, suffers post-POW sickness and general war aftermath/pre-demob depression … so now he’s saying fond farewells to all his new German friends!

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 June 1, 2019, is £4,228.17 (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 Treaty Of Versailles led to widespread celebration in Europe and much anger from those who thought it sowed the seeds of future conflict by being too hard or too soft (really!) on Germany.

    In fact, French Marshall Foch opined, with apparent prescience: “This [treaty] is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years". But he said that believing it left Germany with far too much territory and power – he’d wanted the Rhineland annexed.

    One of the earliest adverse reactions to the conquering Allies’ carve-up came from Syria. Amid internal conflict, political and religious, the national congress, which had lately replaced a monarchy, rejected the French Mandate awarded under the treaty and declared they wanted full independence (July 2) – or a British or American Mandate. (The Franco-Syrian War ensued the following year.)

    In Turkish Anatolia, the developing Greco-Turkish War saw the Battle Of Aydin conclude (July 4) when the Greeks reoccupied Aydin, destroying most of what was left of the city – even though 40 per cent of the populace was Greek (and they were acting in contravention of Versailles agreements regarding Smyrna and the surrounding territory).

    Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War took a turn against the Bolsheviks as the White Russian leader in the south, General Anton Denikin, issued a directive to launch the Advance On Moscow (July 3-November 18). It began successfully because the Bolshevik Red Terror had turned the region against them.

    And in the USA, Arizona’s Bisbee Riots (July 3) forewarned of more to follow in what became known as the Red Summer. The combatants were returning black Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and that small town’s police force, following a controversial arrest.

    But the UK had more to celebrate than peace: when the R-34 airship touched down(?) in New York it became the first to cross the Atlantic. The flight took 106 hours…

[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 – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different… through the spring, Sam and others ex-POWs guard German POWs at a camp in Sussex, while making various attempts to get back to “normal” life…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Back to April-May, 1919, Sussex: we left Sam quite enjoying life as a Royal Defence Corps POW camp (but really a country house) guard in East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. He’d cast aside residual hatred from his own spell as a prisoner of the Germans, decided fraternising with the enemy was the way forward, and befriended many of his charges, mostly former front-line men themselves.

    With the war over, though waiting on the final treaties, they all worked together amiably enough as the Germans did their hard labour reinforcing the banks of the River Arun. On his days off he had one of his series of inept flings with a local woman and then ended it in confusion and embarrassment.

    But now health problems, which had assailed him from time to time because of his war’s assorted severe privations, have returned:

‘In Sussex, the fat – even a burgeoning dewlap – which happiness and good living had prematurely bestowed on me in the months after my return to England gradually disappeared. In fact, my face partially reverted to its prisoner-of-war gauntness; food had seemed so wonderful after previous deprivations, but in time my voracious appetite waned, abdominal pains returned and irked me and, despite my efforts to bear in mind all the blessings now available, a dullness settled like a blight upon me.

     I resisted it constantly, pressed it down inside me. I attempted normal conversation and persevered with laughter, but it was all difficult. The officer who regularly inspected the prisoners and premises, granted my request for an interview and was understanding when I told him about these things. He sent me to see an RAMC doctor at the local Headquarters and the results of his tests led to an appointment with a Medical Board. Doctors there probed my abdomen thoroughly and somewhat painfully, then recommended my release from the Service “having become physically impaired”.

     I told George(2) everything I knew about Lotty the hotty(3) and suggested that he might enjoy brief dalliance with her. To help things along I prepared a careful letter of introduction to her. George said he would have a go at the proposition and that concluded my mild affair.

     I had a fortnight’s leave due before demob, during which I was to attend a further Medical Board in Chelsea, for examination and assessment relating to pension rights(4). 

While the handwriting is hard to read, you can see that he was diagnosed with gastritis and, less technically, “stomach trouble” – blamed on his POW time in Germany, starting “28.3.18”. In fact, he’d had intermittent gut problems (hospitalised for a month in Sheffield in 1917) since his long stints in the trenches months of Gallipoli and the Somme – probably caused by both ill-nourishment and stress.

     So, before setting off for home, I called on my several German friends(5) to bid them farewell, starting with the Unteroffizier in his little room upstairs. The rather lonely chap was touched that I had taken the trouble and showed it; although aware that his formerly great country had fallen into horrible disarray, he spoke of his yearning to get back to the Fatherland.

     A formal handshake and heel click reflected little of our mutual understanding that uncertain futures awaited both of us. He had valuable skills, I had none. There again, he had known people of position and influence, but where were they now? Revolutions destroy such connections, and he had frankly admitted that he might need good fortune to survive what would be a period of bloody conflict between the Old Guard and those who intended to grasp control of their defeated country.

     I had described to him what I had seen around my prison camp near the Black Forest: the overnight disappearances of all commissioned officers, the substitution of black and white Iron Cross decorations and traditional Regimental cap badges with red ribbons and buttons, the red flags adorning every military vehicle(6). Like me, he doubted the turnabout was genuine. It could have been an instinctive and desperate attempt to kid the Allies that the German nation had not really wished to conquer Europe, it was just that wicked Kaiser and those terrible Prussians. Maybe, but my friend would have to find out the hard way. No “Auf wiedersehen” for us, not a chance of ever meeting again.

     Farewell to “Wie heisst du?” Hans… who, I recall, had told me I was wrong in thinking that Karl was the German equivalent of my first name, Charles(7). Farewell to smiling Willi. And farewell to short, fat, rosy-cheeked “Mitzi”, the cook, so nicknamed by me because that was his cat’s name and he was always calling out for her. Then, quick handshakes with other Jerries who had been nice to me and a general wave to our chaps who happened to be around – handshaking was not our custom, the casual touch suited us better.

     Our boozy-faced Sergeant nearly managed a smile as I made a point of calling “Goodbye” to him. So well-loved was he that I’d heard one man leave him with a promise he’d “fuckin’ do for him now I’m free”, but I had no feeling of ill will towards him. Finally a hearty handshake with George. I told him I felt I’d known him for years and waited to hear him at last remember that we had indeed known each other in pre-war days, but his very friendly smile and good wishes had to suffice.

     Forever after, Sussex remained my favourite English county, having been such a warm and pleasant place in which to resume living, after some very hard times in the Great War.’

(2) George turns up in the Blog dated April 14, 2019. Sam had known him before the war when both were teenaged juniors working as dogsbodies for tin industry companies near Liverpool Street. He roomed with Sam and never recognised him and, for his own quirky reasons, Sam never reminded him of their previous acquaintance.

(3) Lotty: the first time he’s named her, hotty or otherwise – this is the lovely lady from Littlehampton he had a walking-out with for some weeks – remaining virginal the while, despite her best efforts. She appears in Blogs dated April 14 and May 5, 2019

(4) Various documents found for me by Western Front Association Ox & Bucks stalwart (and kind researcher for passing guest speakers it turned out) Nigel Crompton include the information that Sam’s date of “Disembodiment” was May 6,1919 (see Medical History Of doc below – which doesn’t record his 1917 hospital stays; the odd term is much discussed in WW1 circles – e.g. https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/106981-discharged-or-disembodied/– but most think it meant the end of war service for a Territorial, which Sam had been in his three different Battalions). Then his final date of discharge was May 26. But… since these administrative matters seem to require their element of confusion I’ll add that the Essex Regiment Museum’s Ian Hook (who answered my queries before he left in 2017) found that my father’s full discharge from the Army came through on March 12, 1920, which suggests that, like his brother Ted, he may have been registered to Z Reserve for those final months i.e. still liable to recall in an emergency.

(5) The German POWs Sam says personal goodbyes to are introduced and described in Blogs dated March 24 and April 21, 2019. Sam gave Hans his “Wie heisst du?” nickname because that was the first thing the affable POW said to him and Sam had picked up enough German to respond “Ich heisse Sam”.

(6) See Blog November 11, 2018, for Sam’s account of the day after Armistice at his POW camp in Lorraine.

(7) Hans was wrong as far as I can tell, although my father believed him. “Karl” meant “man” in Old Norse, “peasant” in Old English, and thence became the first name “Karl/Carl” in German, then “Charles” in English says https://www.behindthename.com/name/charles.

All the best– FSS

Next week: The penultimate episode of FootSoldierSam’s blog! He goes to the “cold and impersonal” Essex Regiment HQ to conclude his discharge… reminisces about the boys of his first Battalion he loved so much… wonders what the hell he’s going to do next… and, regardless, spends some of his back-pay on a new suit and a bottle of port…

(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.

Sussex, May, 1919: Brit POWs guarding German POWs… and Sam’s first post-war romance – with the little lady from Littlehampton – reaches the crunch moment: can his despite-it-all virginal virtue survive a roll in the haystack?

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/POWetc 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 May 1, 2019, is £4,178.05 (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… Germany started to get the bad news from the Paris Peace Conference. Given no voice in the discussions, on May 7 their new Weimar government was granted its first official sight of some of the Versailles terms. In the previous days, they’d lost their Chinese colonies to Japan (to China’s chagrin – riots ensued as reported in last week’s blog), but now they learned of German East Africa’s re-assignment to Britain and France and German South West Africa’s transfer to South Africa. Four days later, after digesting, Germany protested. But only worse was to come…

    Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Orlando, concerned about any future reunion between Germany and Austria – the latter Italy’s invader foe during World War I – had negotiated in April to acquire the South Tyrol, taking in about 250,000 German speakers, Trieste, Trentino and Dalmatia. Then, when President Wilson blocked Italian acquisition of Fiume, on the Adriatic, Orlando stormed out… only to return in early May having gained nothing and lost out on his ambition to take the port of Smyrna (now Izmir) in western Turkey.

    Away from the conference table, Russia remained at war – albeit with itself. While the vestigial Allied forces up north near Archangel again beat off the Bolshevik Army (May 10), in the ‘Counteroffensive Of Eastern Front’ (April 22-July 19; definitely no definite article before the ‘Eastern’) phase of the civil war the Red Army’s southern group tried to surround their White opponents in Tatarstan (about 1,200 miles east of Moscow), but they got away to the east (May 6). Trying to build their strength out that way, the Bolshevik Government drafted 35,000 Central Asian Muslims (from May 7), but soon found them rebelling and joining the anti-Russian Basmachie fighters – Turks in Turkistan, particularly around Tashkent (2,100 miles southeast of Moscow; now in Uzbekistan).  

    In “the subcontinent”, Great Britain started a war on Afghanistan (May 6-August 8) following an Afghan incursion into India to take a town called Bagh at the western end of the Khyber Pass (May 3). British, Indian and Gurkha troops attempted to recover it on May 9 and failed, but came again and drove the Afghans back over the border (11)…

[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 – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de facto holiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different… through the spring, Sam and others ex-POWs guard German POWs at a camp in Sussex, while making various attempts to get back to “normal” life…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

April-May, 1919, Sussex: Sam continues with his final Army job, in a squad of fellow ex-POWs guarding German war prisoners still detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. Transferred to Home Guard forerunner, the Royal Defence Corps, he’s emerged from a short-lived lust for revenge and come to enjoy fraternising with (most of) the enemy – the two lots of POWs found they had quite a bit in common as fellow veterans of WW1 attritional front-line trench warfare… 

    But Sam still had business unconcluded – and mutually frustrating – with the sophisticated(?) young woman he’d been seeing in Littlehampton (a two-and-a-half-mile walk across the fields from East Preston). Thus far the virginity he’d not surrendered throughout the war, despite it all, remained intact…

‘For a brief, extremely enjoyable period, I continued to take my dozen or so Jerries along to the river to push those large lumps of chalk about(2); those we had placed in position earlier had already combined into a smooth, strong riverbank which would last for many years.

     I still walked out once or twice a week with my formerly prim, arm-swinging bird(3), but I sensed that my slow rate of progress towards something more intimate made her impatient – especially on one fine, warm summer’s evening, when she led me to the rear of a haystack where we rested among the sweet-smelling stuff, and she encouraged me to explore so far uncharted areas by telling me about her wartime goings-on.

     I learned that a coloured American soldier(4), one of many billeted in the district during the final months, had lived in her home and become very much one of the family – to such an extent that, as an accepted part of household routine, each morning he took a cup of tea up to my girlfriend in her bedroom. He stayed talking to her while she drank it and so subtly extended the length of his visits that no one noticed when a quarter of an hour, or sometimes even more, passed before he joined the others at breakfast.

     Eventually, there came a time for him to join her between the sheets. She enjoyed this morning ceremony, and tried to get me at it – even with hay for a bed and the risk of the farmer arriving at an interesting, if awkward moment.

     Difficult to put my finger on the real reason for my reluctance to co-operate… Being number two to the Alabamy bloke was one thing anti, a black man in bed; a clash of some sort there. But the teachings of my pre-war mentor, Mr Frusher(5), the vicar, piano teacher and Scoutmaster, still held much influence within me; never take advantage of a woman’s natural urge to have the egg fertilised, he would say… I also felt chagrin about being such a rotten judge, believing that what my eyes saw was necessarily the truth. The pretty little hat, the waisted, calf-length, Navy-blue coat, the white gloves the dainty step, and that swinging arm. Demure propriety personified…

     At the time, without giving too much thought to any of these matters, I decided to quit. That there might have been a piccaninny in the making may also have occurred to me. I don’t rightly remember.’

(2) See last week’s blog for the details of the work detail in the Arun valley below handsome Arundel Castle.

(3) See Blog April 14 for Sam’s gradual “courting” of the “arm-swinging bird” or the Littlehampton Lady as I dubbed her: ‘…she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…’ – she stopped this strange ritual of walking ahead of Sam (she must have spotted him entering the town across the fields and timed her walk precisely several weekends in a row, it seems), turned around and invited him to walk with her. After some platonic “walking out” – literally, to country inns – she evidently decided to hurry him along a bit by saying ‘she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt’.

(4) As Sam’s son, I remain somewhat embarrassed about this passage because of the language he uses – “coloured” and (further on) “piccaninny” now deemed racist diction – and the degree of racism he recalls feeling in the course of this episode back when he was 20. As his editor, I decided not to cut or remove these paragraphs because, like everything else about his Memoir, it was personally honest and true to his times. “Times” plural, because a) you can see here how the old Sam – in his 70s during the ’70s when he was writing – was uneasy about his younger self’s attitudes while candidly recording them, but b) in ’70s Britain, neither “coloured” nor “piccaninny” had become subject to the linguistic shifts which, in the natural course of cultural evolution, constantly move the meanings and implications of words around so that, for instance, some, like these two, become signifiers of racism. 

(5) Mr Frusher, his de facto mentor in Edmonton when he was aged about 10 to 16, had made Sam a prude or a gentleman, according to taste, with his emphasis on the male responsibility to rebuff female desires until the appropriate time – namely, after marriage. He called it “chivalry”. Sam’s Littlehampton Lady obviously thought his restraint worse than unnecessary. And young Sam no doubt persuaded himself that it was all down to rather noble virtue… so that he could overlook his shyness and fear in relationships with women. Fortunately, I can report that he got over this impediment soon after the war, thought rather later than the end of his Memoir; he told me how another bold girl visited him when he was bed-ridden with a cold, climbed in with him and gave him an experience he deemed well worth repeating quite often thereafter.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam, writing in 1972-6, didn’t foresee that I might adapt his Memoir into a weekly blog, so he didn’t write enough to about certain periods to spread evenly across the months – and May to late June is one such thin spell. So before returning to his demob and the crescendo of the grand Peace parade on July 19, I’m going to run a highlights reel, so to speak: a three-part Retro sequence from his north London childhood and teens covering The Making Of A Tommy, followed by four long collections of excerpts on the key moments of his three great campaigns/battles, Gallipoli, the Somme, the Spring Offensive and one on his POW months through to Armistice and freedom.

(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, an ex-POW Gallipoli/Somme veteran guarding German POWs in Sussex, discovers the previously hidden (romantic!) promise of Littlehampton…

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/POWetc 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 April 3, 2019, is £4,078.85 (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… While not much detail was emerging from the Paris Peace Conference, French PM Georges Clemenceau wrote to one of his generals (April 15) that everything was turning out well from his point of view: “In the last three days, we have worked well. All the great issues of concern to France are almost settled. Yesterday, as well as the two treaties giving us the military support of Britain and the United States in case of a German attack, I obtained the occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years, with partial evacuation after five years. If Germany does not fulfil the treaty, there will be no evacuation either partial or definitive. At last I am no longer anxious. I have obtained almost everything I wanted.”

    Years later, UK PM Lloyd George observed of his more-or-less ally against US President Woodrow Wilson’s more moderate approach to punishing Germany’s: “It was part of the real joy of these Conferences to observe Clemenceau's attitude towards Wilson… He listened with eyes and ears lest Wilson should by a phrase commit the Conference to some proposition which weakened the settlement from the French standpoint. If Wilson ended his allocution without doing any perceptible harm, Clemenceau's stern face temporarily relaxed, and he expressed his relief with a deep sigh. But if the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: ‘Here he is, off again!’”

    Apart from the jaw-jaw, war-war still proceeded in eastern Europe. While the Red and White Russians’ conflict in the Urals stalled for a few days, Bolshevik forces took a heavy loss in the Battle Of Lida April 16-17), part of the Polish-Soviet War (February 14, 1919-March 18, 1921). Having camped outside the town (in present-day Belarus) since mid-March, the Polish Army attacked the Russians – who’d lately taken it after German occupation – and drove them out, pursuing them eastwards with cavalry. This signalled a strategic shift by the newly independent Poles who decided to stop fighting the Ukrainians and concentrate on their Russian border.

    Much further east, in the Punjab, five days of rioting followed the Massacre Of Amritsar (April 13) – connected to World War I because the Punjab had been the main source of recruitment for the Indian Army which fought at Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the Western Front.

[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 – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different…Sam as ex-POW guards German POWs…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

April, 1919, Sussex: Sam is continuing with his final Army job, guarding German POWs detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel(2). His fellow guards, like my father, are all ex-POWs transferred from their fighting Regiments to the Royal Defence Corps. They’d been told Winston Churchill conceived this set-up in the belief that it would do them good…

    Last week, Sam ventured into a failed attempt at romance with one of the village schoolteachers – and also took to weekend walks across the fields to Littlehampton, 2.5 miles west. There he enjoyed the usually deserted YMCA – missing its departed GI clientele – for big lunches served up by the underemployed ladies in the café. 

    But now the small seaside resort offers him a different kind of attraction…

‘More than once, when I wandered into Littlehampton, I found myself walking behind a girl quietly dressed in a calf-length, Navy-blue overcoat. She usually turned right, as I did, into the High Street, at the far end of which stood the YMCA. Then, every time, she would walk straight past the building and I would climb the steps… beginning to feel curious about her and where she was going.

     Everything about her suggested a degree of respectability which would preclude interruptions to her progress from a poor soldier such as myself. As she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…

     She must have despaired of anything coming of the haughty act and this time when I followed her along the High Street – by chance as ever – she stopped in her tracks, turned round, confronted me and smiled. “You’re not going to duck into that dump again, are you?” she asked. Of course, I quickly adjusted my thinking and promised never again to do that if she was likely to be available.

     Nothing exciting came of it, but we met often, walked around the district and usually called at a country inn for a couple of drinks… Something different, then, to make the fairly long walk to Littlehampton worthwhile.

     I treated her with the respect due to one of her obviously high moral standards. But when, on one of our pub visits, she told me she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt, I wondered if I was perhaps overdoing the gallantry(3).

Resting one day on my mattress in my little room just below the roof of the old mansion, I heard a knock on the door and in came our Sergeant – a boozy-faced old twit, I thought – accompanied by a tall lad. “Hope you won’t mind sharing with this young man,” said the gaffer and, of course, I made him welcome. I said, “Come in, George, very glad to have you for a mate after all these years!” – expecting, as I did so, a sign of recognition from him… Marvelling at the strange coincidence of it all, I was staggered when he said it was great I called him by his proper name before he’d introduced himself; at which, I realised this was a stock joke of his – he thought I’d called him George because, in the Army, everyone called you George if they didn’t know your proper name.

     It shook me for, as a pre-war youngster, this lad had worked, just over Southwark Bridge from Lake & Currie’s offices, in the laboratory which assayed mineral samples sent in by our firm’s mining engineers. General dogsbody George(4) trotted over to the City with the results and took back anything that needed testing. I often chatted with him while he waited in the outer office I occupied with the old “Sergeant” commissionaire; I knew him well, even knew about a kidney complaint which caused him to become drowsy and fall asleep regardless of where he happened to be. He had told me he lived in a block of flats and had to climb several flights of stairs and sometimes sat down on a step and dozed off. Unusual for a boy of 15 or so, but that was about the only result of his complaint that bothered him.

     I knew all this, yet he didn’t appear to remember me. Feeling sure he would suddenly recall our earlier acquaintance, I waited with pleasant anticipation for his day of awakening. It never came. At meals, we often sat together and, when duties permitted, we’d withdraw to the small room up top and chat before dozing off. Most days, I tried to say things which should have made him question me. But it just didn’t happen. Quiet, kindly George would occasionally talk about his boyhood times, but I had no place in them.’

(2) Area map at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8359756,-0.5158142,13z 

(3) While Sam here seems to be struggling with the girl’s apparent propriety, I’ll note again that he’d emerged from the war still a virgin and carrying his own burden(?) of restraint inculcated by the mentor of his early teens back in Edmonton, the Rev Mr Frusher, who instructed the lads in his charge, as choir- and scoutmaster, that they “had a bounden duty to accept responsibility and ensure that nothing occurred, when the girl was in his care, which he could not freely reveal to her parents. The final word had a memorable simplicity to it: chivalry.”

(4) I can’t give you a back-reference here because George didn’t get a mention in the section about Sam’s two years working for Lake & Currie. Even allowing for my father’s appearance having changed somewhat between 1912-14 and 1919, ages 14 to 20, with added impact from his war experience, no doubt this odd episode mostly reflects my father’s extraordinary memory encountering a very bad one.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam “fraternises with the enemy” again; the mandolin-playing Unteroffizier and – while rebuilding the Arundel river bank – fellow former front-liners Willi and Hans… “too young to hate anybody who did them now harm”.

(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.

Somme veteran and ex-POW Sam now guarding German POWs decides “fraternising with the enemy” is OK with the “ruddy war” over. He befriends smiling Hans and a mandolin-playing Unteroffizier… but still a snarly Prussian hates his guts…

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 March 9, 2019, is £4,011.41 (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… at the Paris Peace Conference the hot debate among the Big Four (UK/USA/France/Italy) remained the apportioning of damages to be extracted from Germany.

    It had already come down to numbers. While Wilson emerged as the “moderate”, proposing £6 billion (= 307bn after a century of inflation) in reparations, Clemenceau talked of “justice” as if a synonym for revenge and said £44 billion (£2,253bn at today’s prices).

    Lloyd George took a highly political view – giving priority to what he could “sell” to the British people and Parliament (where his Liberal Party was a minority partner in the coalition with the Tories). His trickiest opposition came from John Maynard Keynes, financial representative of the British Treasury and soon to become a renowned economist; on March 28, he urged his PM that crushing reparations would unbalance the European economy and that the best way to head off Bolshevism would be to help Germany through its national food crisis pronto. Of course, subsequent developments didn’t make a fool of him – as promptly indicated by Russian leader Lenin approaching Germany about allying to fight with Hungary against Poland andthe Entente nations (March 30). Not a runner at the time, but still…

    On the brightish side of the mass of diplomatic work taking place in Paris, amid all the fierce disagreement the Covenant of the League Of Nations emerged (March 25).

    At the same time, bits of war proceeded or flared up in various regions. The White Russian advance against the Bolsheviks in the Urals (March 4-April) seemed to have run out of steam. But Bolshevik forces lost a battle with the Romanians on the River Dniester (24). Further south, Italy took the Turkish Mediterranean port Adalya (March 29; now Antalya), which they held for five years until Turkish independence – and Down Under, 8,000 returned troops in Brisbane took on local police protecting the Russian Workers’ Association HQ by way of an interim climax to skirmishes with red-flag-waving trade unionists.

[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 – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But now, something completely different…Sam as ex-POW guards German POWs…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

March, 1919, Sussex: recently transferred to the Royal Defence Corps (or possibly “lent” in some admin fashion) from his last Battalion, the 2/7 Essex Regiment, last week Sam and the fellow ex-POWs who comprised his group had to wrench themselves away from a month’s de facto holiday in Brighton and move into the countryside – a small village called East Preston, about five miles southeast of Arundel.

    To their considerable surprise, they were deployed to guard German POWs detained in the pleasant enough setting of Preston Place, a sometime semi-stately home. Their SM read out instructions from Winston Churchill, no less, by then Secretary Of State For War, who advised them to let this duty defuse any remaining hatred for their recent enemies and jailors.

    In truth, Sam came very close to disappointing Churchill as he staked out a gap in the fence through which, under the previous, lax Home Forces regime a young German or two had crept out into the village of an evening and got up to who knew what mischief? He reckoned he’d have shot anyone who tried it on. But then, he wrote, his hatred vanished. Near thing…

    So now he begins to make a go of the job they’d been given, and with the recommended magnanimous spirit:

‘After that, I made friends with a couple of Jerries I found to be nice chaps. One of them made himself known to me when I had taken a dozen or so prisoners to do work in a plant nursery. They had to shovel and barrow the topsoil out of one greenhouse and bring in replacement soil. I sat well back behind them as they worked with their backs to me. To a youngster, I called out “You work well” in my version of German: “Du arbeitest gut,” probably. “Wie heisst du?”(2), he asked. I told him, and he said his name was Hans.

     About my own age, he had a merry grin, so on the homeward trip I sat with him – as the Heligolander had sat by me, and been so kind to me, some months previously(3) – and perhaps gave the lad something to remember kindly, in the same way that I remembered my old German mate. Talking with him several times, I chummed up with his particular pal too, another fair-haired Jerry of about our age. In the familiar fashion, with a bit of theirs and bit of ours, we understood near enough what we wished to tell each other. The ruddy war was finished so why worry about being accused of fraternising with the enemy, which might have been the charge during the bad times?

     However, one man in that working party hated my guts and, without a word exchanged, I reciprocated. One morning, as we walked to the nursery, we came to a flooded part of the lane and, before I could give any order, this bloke – he had a Prussian type of face, which may, in part, have caused my dislike – scrambled up an embankment and through a hedge, disappearing from view. Probably, he had done this before under similar conditions, but just in case he was trying any tricks I slipped a live round into my rifle and followed him, giving the others a sign to follow me. The blighter was waiting at a point where we could go down on to the road again, though the look on his wicked mug showed that he knew what I had suspected.

     One evening, when I was off duty, I heard music coming from somewhere in the house so I followed my ears to a room on a lower floor, tapped on the door and went in. There sat a German Unteroffizier(3), spick and span in a fine-quality uniform. He played a mandolin and very well. I knew the tune, though I couldn’t name it; something from an opera I guessed. I told him that, as a boy, I had tried to play the mandolin and he offered to let me try. I managed only a very patchy effort at an old sob-song; he kindly smiled, although a groan would have been more appropriate.

     I visited him occasionally thereafter and enjoyed his music. He talked of visits to a Berlin opera house and the rather stern-looking young man smiled more frequently as we became acquainted.

     One frosty morning, when I had to go around the various buildings rousing the Jerries, my bang on one window shattered the pane and a lad whom I liked quite well staggered through the door half-enraged and half-scared, perhaps fearing that I had gone berserk. It took me some time to persuade him and his companions that the frozen state of the glass caused the breakage – I showed them pieces of it and glowering faces lapsed into grins when I pointed out that I would have been the injured party had I not been wearing thick gloves.

     On reflection, I realised that, when a prisoner myself, I would have been very disturbed had a window shattered one morning while the harsh cries of “Raus! Ausmachen!” brought us back to miserable reality. I felt rather guilty about the occurrence, although I had been as surprised as the Jerries by the crash and clatter of falling glass.’

(2)“Wie heisst du?”: “What’s your name?”

(3) For the kindness of “the Heligolander” see Blogs July 1 and 8, 2018. An old-soldier POW guard manning the trains that took Sam’s peripatetic prisoner band from occupied northern France to southern Germany, he and Sam talked broken English/broken German – in which fractured lingo the two of them put together a conclusive comment on the war: “We must never do this to each other again/Wir müssen niemals dies zu jedem anderen nochmals tun” (or something of the sort).

(4) Unteroffizier: Sergeant.

(5) “Raus!”: “Out!”“Ausmachen!” means various things including “Make up/turn off”, so I think this may be my father misremembering what the German POW guards shouted to get them out of bed in the morning – that would probably have been “Aufstehen!” i.e. “Get up!”, though possibly “Aufmachen!” i.e. “Get yourself up!”

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and pals caught up in a tragedy of war’s aftermath as British ex-POW victims of torture go berserk and start shooting…

(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 finds himself and fellow ex-POWs in charge of… German POWs. A message from Winston Churchill, no less, advises that this will help them cast aside past grievances. But Sam’s thoughts turn to deadly revenge…

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 March 9, 2019, is £4,011.41 (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… It was all politics in Paris at the Peace Conference with 58 sub-committees cudgelling their brains while the dominant Council Of Ten nations had already met 70-odd times since January and got nowhere that impressed the ultimate big cheeses from UK (Lloyd George), France (Clemenceau), Italy (Orlando) and USA (Wilson) who now formed themselves into a Council Of Four and carried on arguing about how tough they should make it for Germany. And on March 19 one decision emerged, namely, that the German Navy should be limited to 36 ships…

    Elsewhere, aside from the unrest in many countries – from strikes to street fighting – in the only substantial shooting wars still proceeding, White Russian, French and Greek troops evacuated Odessa, Ukraine, as Bolshevik forces advanced (March 17), while in Russia itself the conflict between Red and White Armies in the Urals (begun on March 4) showed no significant movements.

    Meanwhile, in Hungary, the Parliament declared a Soviet Republic (March 21) following an alliance between the Bolsheviks and the Social Democrats. This lasted two days, apparently, before Lenin ordered the Communists to purge their “partners” and they set about it with a will.

[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 – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But now, something completely different…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

March, 1919, Sussex: after the my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe’s “month by the sea with nothing to do” – whence I left him to it and compiled themed-excerpt blogs on fear/courage, sex/romance, front-line food and comradeship – we can now resume the “one-hundred-years-ago-this-week” sequencing I’ve adhered to as much as possible since July, 2014.

    We left the Gallipoli, Somme, Spring Offensive veteran and ex-POW – aged 20 – in Brighton, billeted in a Spartan dormitory near the top of a grand Palmeira Square mansion. He’d been transferred from his last Battalion, the 2/7 Essex Regiment, to the Royal Defence Corps. Sam called it the “Old Man’s Brigade”. It originally comprised men deemed “too old or medically unfit for battle field service abroad”. However, significantly as it transpired in mid-March, his group parked in Brighton were all former POWs. 

    Well, as usual in any sector of the Army, the easy life came to an end. Shaken out of his lethargy, Sam embarked on a most peculiar week, which might have been his undoing to put it mildly… and he could have held Winston Churchill responsible:

‘Soon, our small party moved on from its enjoyable sojourn in Palmeira Square to a Sussex village. Our job there at first appeared to be not really right for us: guarding about 80 German prisoners. For one thing, we thought it strange that they should still be kept away from their homeland while we had been back in England for some weeks.

     A coastal railway took us along to the village station. From there a short walk brought us to the gates of a big house(2); the outside gave no indication of its present usage. Once inside those tall wooden gates, we saw that even the extensive outhouses had been turned into living quarters.

     Strange to see the field grey uniforms and peakless caps again. As the Jerries trolled from one building to another they showed no interest in our presence. We were shown to our allocated rooms – mine, a small one high up in the old house, no doubt occupied by servants in former days. The furnishings comprised two mattresses on raised boards, but for a time I slept there alone.

     We new arrivals lined up next morning on parade and the Sergeant in charge called us to attention when a Sergeant Major approached. This Warrant Officer had a special message for us, delivery of which had been ordered by Mr Winston Churchill(3). It welcomed us on our return to the old country and said that we, with our recent experiences, should make good caretakers of ex-enemy prisoners until they could be sent back to their homes. He knew that some of us might be feeling bitter about treatment endured while in enemy hands(4), but we must put all that out of our minds and do our duty fairly and with no malice while in charge of Germans. He believed that, if we carried out this request, we would benefit personally because in “turning the other cheek” we would be doing a good thing and our characters would be the better for it.

     The SM added his hopes and the orders to back them up. We recognised the rightness of all this and I, at any rate, hoped I would be able to forgive and forget.

     Yet, later that day, a man who had been there several days told me the old Home Defence(5) men, who had previously run the place, had allowed the Germans to slip through a gap in the barbed wire on one side of the grounds and meet girls from the village – and this immediately seemed all wrong to me and I planned to put a stop to it.

     So, that evening, during my stint on guard duty, when I found the carelessly repaired breaks in the wire and disentangled them, hoping to tempt some unlucky Jerry to make his exit while I awaited him with my loaded rifle, hidden nearby among some bushes.

     I spent three nights there, from dusk until late, without sight of a would-be love-seeker, until my hatred or maybe sour-grapes mood vanished…’

(2) My father didn’t name this grand house, nor the village where it was located and it’s strangely difficult to trace places in England used as WW1 Prisoner Of War camps. For a while – and until after I’d published the third edition of the paperback – I thought the house may have been at Slindon, aka Eartham, four miles (6.4 kilometres) east of Arundel. But in autumn, 2018, my friend Paul Day, who lives in Arundel, came up with a couple of online sources I hadn’t hit on, particularly http://ow.ly/HLM130n4Kss, which carries some information and a few murky photos of what was surely the very place, a building called Preston Place (now Preston Hall), The Street, East Preston, about five miles southeast of Arundel where the POWs did their hard labour. The “village station” was Angmering, whence Sam and his Germans would have either changed for Arundel at the next stop, Ford, or walked it from there. Pardon me for geeking about such details – nuts and bolts of history, you know, and nice to (probably) get to the bottom of them.

(3) In January, 1919, the Liberal/Conservative coalition Government moved Churchill from Minister For Munitions to Secretary Of State For War And Air, so he probably composed this (evidently high-risk) message for ex-POW POW guards in the latter role.

(4) In Sam’s case, a good deal of brutality from guards and a lot of deprivation. See blogs from March 25 to November 11, 2018.

(5) Home Defence: “Home Forces” seems to have been the official title, probably just misremembered by my father. They were launched in January, 1916. A web page no longer available described them as comprising “men and boys who had not yet completed even a basic military training” – somewhat different to the Royal Defence Corps then, and replaced by the newer outfit on this job of guarding German POWs still detained in the UK.

All the best– FSS

Next week: After deciding against murder, Sam reckons “fraternising with the enemy” is all right – as intended by Churchill – and discovers they’re a mixed bunch of blokes from Hans with the merry grin to the mandolin-playing Unteroffizier… and the one who hates Sam’s guts even though the “ruddy war” is over…

(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.