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.

Sam is forced to work until he can’t do any more, a guard knocks him flat… and a strange drama of redemption plays out…

Sam’s Memoir in 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 Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme  & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here Twitter @FootSoldierSam

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Allies’ final push cranked up with the dates of the Argonne Meuse Offensive telling the story (September 26-November 11) – but it was no lap of honour with the race run and won, the fighting and casualties remained terrible all along the Western Front. This Offensive began with the Battle Of Somme-Py (September 26) where the French advanced nine miles during the day and then, with American support, took Montfaucon and Varennes (27).

    The Battle Of Canal Du Nord (September 27-October 1) saw Canadian troops lead an advance towards Cambrai, abetted by British and French Battalions. Then a combination of American, French, British and Australian forces launched the Battle Of The St Quentin Canal (September 29-October 2 or 10, say different sources) in a sector between St Quentin and Vendhuille where the German Army had adopted the waterway, in a deep cutting, as part of the Hindenburg Line. There the Americans, attempting to support Australian troops, suffered huge losses, but the British – following their biggest artillery onslaught of the war, including their first use of mustard gas shells – achieved a breakthrough and a military coup by crossing the canal using scaling ladders and anything floatable – while also benefitting from a bridge at Bellenglise.

    Further north, the Fifth Battle Of Ypres/Battle Of The Flanders Peaks (September 28-October 10) began with Belgian, French and British forces breaking German lines north, east and south of Ypres on a 23-mile front from Dixmude to Ploegsteert – on the second day, the Allies retook Passchendaele, Messines and Dixmude.

    The Allies’ successes multiplied in other theatres. In Serbia, the Bulgarian occupiers (since 1915) conducted a full-scale retreat in the face of swift advances by the French, who took Prilep (September 23) and Uskub (29), the Serbs themselves, who regained Ishtip, Veles (25) and Kochana (26), and the British who entered Strumitsa (26). As a result, the Bulgarian Government sued for Armistice and it was signed (29), although fighting did not cease immediately.

    Meanwhile, in Palestine, the ultra-multinational Allied Egyptian Expeditionary Force moved towards a conclusion of its triumph over the Ottoman Army by taking the port of Haifa plus Acre and Es Salt (September 23; British and Indian troops), winning the Battle Of Samakh (25; on the shore of the Sea Of Galilee; Australian cavalry) and the Second Battle Of Amman (25; New Zealanders and West Indians), while Arab allies defeated the Turkish garrison of Ma’an (29).

    These actions in Palestine were generally known as the Battles Of Meggido. Megiddo is the root of the Biblical coinage “Armageddon”, meaning the final battle.

[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. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe – now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards – has lately been the recipient of some remarkable acts of kindness from German soldiers home on leave… all involving gifts of food, in fact, that being more or less all that mattered to desperately hungry men (the POW ration remained one piece of bread in the morning, one cup of vegetable stew at night, and a litre of acorn “coffee”).

    But last week he formed a grub-sharing partnership with his pal Wally and George, an older man he hadn’t known previously. So Sam felt comforted by a sense of “family” engendered by the mutual obligation to provide – via scrounging and sharing.

    Now though, a further encounter with guard brutality… albeit with a startling outcome:

‘I lined up one morning with no idea as to what I should be working at that day, until Wally came over to me and said he was returning to that farm where we’d loaded hay into the barn and had permission to take me as his mate(2). Obviously, the Germans had recognised his skill with farm tools and could trust him to do a good day’s work without strict supervision. A Posten(3) had to come along with us as far as the farm, but thereafter we saw nothing of him until our working day ended.

     Our job proved similar to the previous one, except that we had to move hay only from the first floor up to the top one. Wally forked the stuff up to me, I carried it to the back of the top floor and stacked it. This kept me very busy as he was so much more used to the work, although with the instruction he had given me I could just cope.

     Because we finished well before the expected time, we witnessed a scene I had never thought to see in my time. As we sat gazing down into the barn from the upper deck, four men laid out a silk-type sheet, covering most of the ground floor. Then, they tipped a cartload of wheat straight from the fields on to the sheet and, one at each corner and each holding a flail, they started to flog the wheat. The flail poll was probably six feet long with a hinged wood flap at its head, about two feet in length. Up, down, thwack, thwack, the four flails beating out the grain. When they’d done, they removed the straw and replaced it with a fresh load. At intervals, they attached the flails to the corners of the sheet, raised it and skilfully tipped the grain into sacks.

     I remembered seeing Biblical pictures of such a scene. At a time when harvesting was already being mechanised, surely only the most primitive people would do such work by hand, not the progressive Germans… unless desperate fuel-oil shortages compelled this return to ancient practices?

     At about the same time, when working in the horse hospital, I had to put my back into another surprising example of hand-operation, this time on a chaff-cutting machine(4). In Britain, this work had for many years been powered by, at least, a steam engine, usually hired in along with an operator. But I had to turn this chaff-cutter’s large wheel unaided – terribly exhausting work, especially with a slave-driver of a Landsturm(5) Regiment old soldier in charge of our work at the farm. He had other prisoners ramming straw into the machine non-stop and constantly urged me to toil harder and harder till I reached the end of my strength and could turn it no longer.

     Some French soldier-prisoners stood nearby, well-clothed and sleek with good living, it seemed. They showed amusement at my plight, which did nothing for my share of the entente cordiale.

     “Arbeit!”(6) yelled the Jerry, but I just couldn’t oblige, I was done for. He swung a blow at me, which caught me on the jaw and put me down. Staggering up and uncaringly berserk, I told him what he was in my book and, using some of his lingo, some French, and some English including one or two swear words descriptive of his origins and nasty habits, I brought in Napoleon, Caesar and Kaiser Wilhelm as people who had always oppressed common men like him and myself, and suggested it ill-became poor fellows like us to treat each other so cruelly.

     The unexpected result: at once, by signs and words in the same sort of mixture of tongues I used, he repented of his brutality and said how sorry he was about his bad conduct. I looked in some triumph at the Froggies as he promised to share that day’s bread ration with me.

     He proved I did get his meaning because, when we stopped work and began the homeward march, I felt a tug at my elbow and found the now kindly fellow tendering a thick piece of rye bread – at least half of his day’s ration, I thought. He urged me to accept it and, as seen over my left shoulder, his ugly, but now beaming face appeared quite attractive, even though he was puffing with the exertion of catching up with us.

    Our guards took little notice of him, so I had time to thank him warmly as I tucked the welcome grub into my inner sack. I had to share it three ways, but this little contribution gave me another little bit of pride that I could do something in return for Wally’s earlier kindnesses.'

(2) See Blog September 9, 2018. This farm was on the outskirts of Müllheim, in Baden-Württemberg, 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometres) south of Hügelheim (and their POW camp/horse hospital), between the Black Forest and the Rhine.

(3) Posten: a guard or, more generally, a functionary.

(4) The manual chaff-cutter’s wheel is turned via a handle mangle-style – see http://ow.ly/gelb30kUrHP.

(5) Landsturm: 3rd-class infantry, comprising any male aged between 17 and 42 who wasn’t in the standing Army, the Landwehr – but many of the Landsturm were old, former members of the Landwehr, and my father found them the most brutal (as ever just one man’s experience/opinion).

(6)“Arbeit!”: “Work!”

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and pals take a train to a new POW compound in occupied Alsace… and a French woman slips a package through the wire. Meanwhile, spirits rise when a passing sailor says the German Navy has mutinied! 

(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.

September ’18: Sam forms “a sort of family” with POWs Wally and George. They agree to share everything – and he scores more spuds for the partnership with the help of Soldaten, friendly to their fellow front-liners, even though they’re enemy prisoners…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The Americans called a halt on their advance after winning the Battle Of St Mihiel (September 16; casualties US 7,000, German 7,500 plus 15,000 taken prisoner) in order to ready themselves for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive then being readied by Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Foch.

    But the Allies’ terminal campaign picked up again with the Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17). The first move, the Battle Of Epéhy, saw British, French and Australian troops attack on a 16-mile front and take the village that gave it a name (18; 14 miles northwest of St Quentin) – successes now being measured in POW numbers, they chalked up 11,700. Over the following days, the French did well around Moeuvres (18-20; 17 miles southeast of Arras), holding off a German counterattack, then pushing on to recapture Benay (21) and Vendeul (22); further south they took Vailly, Mont des Singes, and made progress east of Essigny le Grand (20; 65 miles south of Arras).

    In Russia, the extraordinarily widespread post-German victory/Bolshevik Revolution mayhem continued with Japanese (Allied) troops occupying Blagovyeschensk on the Pacific side of Siberia (September 18), while in northern Russia Karelian Finns defeated a German-led Finnish force at Ukhtinskaya (18), and the Czecho-Slovak legions who had scored such a strange skein of conquests along the Trans-Siberian railway at last lost out to Bolshevik and German troops at Volsk, Simbirsk and Kazan (20; from 500 to 580 miles east of Moscow).

    Elsewhere, the Allies’ emulated their dominance on the Western Front as the Serbian/Greek/French/British collaboration in the Balkans prospered; the Vardar Offensive (September 15-29) drove the Bulgarian Army to retreat on a 100-mile front from Monastir to Lake Doiran in Serbia, which they had occupied since 1915. Meanwhile, in Palestine a wonderfully diverse Allied coalition – the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, itself British, Indian, Anzac, French, Egyptian and Gurkha, augmented by South Africans and Ruwalla and Howeitat tribesmen – initiated the Battles Of Meggido (19-25) and took the Ottoman defenders apart as they crossed the Plain Of Sharon to the Esdralon Plain. 

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017).He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe – now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards – nonetheless feels his spirits lifted a little because he keeps on running into moments of kindness from his captor-enemies – as well as his new pal, Essex country boy Wally. 

    Last week, working in a hay barn outside the nearby town of Müllheim-in-Baden (two miles south of Hügelheim), Sam sort of escaped out the back and encountered a young German soldier, on leave from the Front, walking with his sister. They had a broken English-German conversation and then the two fetched him a bucket of boiled potatoes! He and Wally ate “fit to bust”. Now the story continues and gets a little complicated regarding friendship, comradeship, even partnership… and food!

‘I now had a pal to think of, a generous soul; the months of near-starvation, of frequently being robbed of bits of food he had procured with difficulty(2), these souring experiences had not removed the grin from Wally’s face nor the kindness of his nature. You can therefore appreciate the pleasure I had from being able to give something to him by way of a change.

    I still had a few potatoes hidden under my tunic when we got back to our hut, and Wally asked if I would agree to give a couple of them to George, a friend of longer standing than I was. I can’t say I felt keen on going shares with this stranger, as he was to me; but you couldn’t look into Wal’s open mug and big, blue eyes and refuse even such a costly request. Where the next bit of extra food would come from I had no notion, but old George got his spuds.

    Let me describe George as best I can: aged about 40, although he looked rather older, black-with-some-grey hair; a face which had never been full, I’d say, but, at the moment, merely skin stretched over bone; eyes brown and bloodshot; body thin and bent forward from the waist, legs bent, feet flat – the last not a result of war’s ravages, but due to long hours spent on his feet as a warehouse salesman in a well-known St Paul’s Churchyard firm of merchants. One of the few chaps who had managed to retain his issued cutthroat razor, he shaved when water was available and still cultivated a thin black moustache. A manly man, as I always considered those with enough courage to maintain facial adornments – men who, in contact with their fellows, feared no criticism of their efforts to augment Nature’s handiwork.

    At that point, we three made a pact that all extras would be split three ways, and Wally and I, at any rate, honoured that pledge. If, as I noticed, old George slipped from strict observance once or twice, no mention was made of the matter.

But something here to be surprised about: having established a sort of family, I didn’t feel so much the loner with every man’s hand against me. Though not entirely sure the triple partnership would work to my benefit, I found that its existence added purpose to each day’s beginning. To the issued piece of black bread(3) I must try to add something for all to share, no matter how small.

    On one occasion, a guard put me to work with a small gang just outside our camp’s barbed-wire fence, filling holes in the dirt track – you couldn’t call it a road. We tipped in a mixture of stones and earth and punned them down with a lump of concrete on the end of a long handle; it was so heavy it took two of us to lift the implement and let it fall. But, ever on the lookout for opportunities to secure something for our threesome, I noticed two Soldaten(4) some hundred yards away off to one side of the road. They were digging and, when they noticed me watching them, they waved.

    I decided I was being invited to join them – I felt sure it would be safe to obey soldiers in uniform. And they had a small pile of potatoes beside them… One handed me a garden fork and indicated that I should dig. Setting to with high hopes, I found the soil dry and light and, although they had clearly gone through it quite thoroughly, I still came up with some small, but acceptable, spuds.

    On leave from the Front, I discovered, those lads, who must have risked a reprimand, at least, for aiding an enemy prisoner. Once again, they demonstrated the respect many of the fighting men on both sides felt for each other in that war.

    At that late stage, most of the front-line fighters were young men. On the German side, the bitter, still-filled-with-hatred, old Kaiser-lovers had moved on to duties far behind the battlefield – such as guarding us. I encountered an occasional exception, such as the tubby Posten who succumbed to the aroma of frying bacon at Hügelheim(5)… And now I recall I later saw him standing at the door of his hut, looking quite ill, with many sores around his face – I wondered if his undoing perhaps resulted from those very days of visiting the good lady and eating rich farm produce when he should really have been making sure we didn’t escape… “Sores all over my body,” he told me, with his hands more than words, and I felt sorry for him because he was rare and fair.’

(2) Robbed by fellow POWs is what my father means, judging by previous blogs – that’s what hunger can do.

(3) One small piece per day per POW.

(4) Soldaten: soldiers.

(5) The Posten/guard had treated Sam kindly at the Hügelheim POW camp/war-horse hospital – he’d found said “good lady” by following his nose to the smell of her frying bacon.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam witnesses a Biblical display of flailing wheat by hand – and then becomes the protagonist in another primitive agricultural practice which leads to his collapse, a guard punching him… and a strange, maybe redemptive drama playing out! 

(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.