Sam and pal Peter’s final onslaught on the Turks – through the medium of song; then, after month of lousy food, Sam’s summoned to Brigade HQ and finds himself luxuriating on steak and onions!

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… apart from a big artillery exchange along the Western Front on November 30 (to no particular purpose it seems), lower levels of attrition took over for the winter. Likewise on the Eastern, although in Latvia the Russian Army had further success at Illuskt (November 29), but they were “repulsed” by the Germans at Dvinsk and Lake Babit (December 5).

    Further south, two costly conflicts ceased. The 4th Battle Of The Isonzo ended inconclusively (December 2), exhausted by the severity of both casualties and the weather after a climactic battle at Tolmin (now in Slovenia) – since November 10 Italian casualties had totalled 49,500, Austro-Hungarian 32,100. And the relentless invasion of Serbia by German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces concluded (December 4) with the Serbian Army driven out through Albania, the survivors shipped across to Corfu (they suffered 30,000 casualties, their foes’ being described as “light”).

    Accordingly, the French Army supporting the Serbs pulled back into Greek Salonika (December 2) where fresh British troops joined them (December 4).

    Meanwhile, in Gallipoli, at Suvla Bay, the remnants of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), gradually recovered from their sufferings in the November blizzard…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father was still in that Suvla hilltop Signalling post/hole, working his two-man, 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week rotation of duty and sleep. In the wake of the Gallipoli blizzard/floods, with no water available from HQ, he revealed the blasé bravado which, in the battlefield, can overcome the cautious inhibitions of the most circumspect character – which he had generally been through childhood and early teens – when he dodged sniper bullets to fetch buckets of snow from a neighbouring trench.

    Then he experienced the horror of realising he had, inadvertently, led a lad even younger than himself to his death; the boy dashed for water without emulating Sam’s stop-start tricks and took an almost certainly fatal shot through a lung.

    Still, battlefield realities and comradeship did not encourage dwelling or brooding, especially in the company of his old Malta-days friend Peter Nieter (who’d replaced poor, frostbitten Harry Green):

‘Returning confidence due to better feeding, certainty that the campaign was fizzling out, and the buoyant nature of my newly arrived mate, resulted in moments I could only describe as merry.

     When the Navy suddenly opened up a noisy bombardment of Turk positions one day, Nieter and I actually cheered and sang A Life On The Ocean Waves. Another time, we two idiots decided to serenade the enemy by tum-te-tumming a tune favoured by brass bands at that time entitled The Turkish Patrol. The barmy thing about this effort was our pretended assumption that the Turks would recognise the tune because of its title.

     I had been feeling that the small number of people of my Battalion who still remained after the blizzard* must have forgotten my existence, but a week or so after Nieter’s arrival I had pleasant proof that this was not so. A replacement for me suddenly appeared at our hole on the hilltop and I received instructions to join the Signals Section at 88th Brigade Headquarters until further orders.

     Sorry to leave Nieter, but flattered and excited, I made my way to the ravine which sheltered HQ. There, they had built small but comfortable offices for administration and communication. Low, wooden buildings with earth-covered roofs on which the local weeds and grasses grew. Hopes that I would live in one of them quickly died the death when I was conducted to a nearby hole covered by a groundsheet roof, and told I could set up house there.

     Thankfully, it was dry, but it was sited beside the junction of two footpaths, and I quickly discovered that the position had been honoured by an enemy sniper. He had one of those tripod-rifles fixed on the point where the paths met; at intervals, a bullet smacked into the ground about a foot from one end of my hole**. As the new boy, the privilege of avoiding sudden death by a sniper’s bullet automatically became mine. But the pleasure of working in a warm, covered structure, properly seated, with cooked food and big helpings of hot tea, more than compensated for the sniper targeting my sleeping quarters.

     Some days we had steak and onions for dinner; it seemed incredible after the hard tack and occasional bully beef which had usually been my lot. Bacon for breakfast was not unknown, cheese and bread in the evening common. If the pecking order worked that way, the lucky devils at Divisional HQ probably got breakfast, a meat lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner in the evening. It all passed through too many hands before the ranker’s turn came, God help him.

     Meanwhile, I felt the benefit of this luxury, my spirits rose again, I smiled, even laughed occasionally. Fully occupied on duty, when not working I hung about in one or other of the small HQ buildings as long as possible. Then, in my hole, I could sometimes remove my tunic, shirt and vest and destroy all the body lice I could find, replace these garments then take off my trousers. With candle ends scrounged from the office, I could burn off the filthy things infesting the inside seams of my trousers, crush the devils in my long pants and have a couple of days free of the continual biting.’

Given a few days of “luxury” in his new hole, my father heard more and more stories of what had befallen the rest of the Battalion, down at beach level, during the blizzard:

‘Well into December, the weather generally remained pleasant. That awful blizzard now seemed like a sad dream although I had my funny-feeling feet and brown toenails to remind me – as did the stories recounted by survivors who had fared much worse than I.

     A sight I’d missed in my rather isolated position on the machine-gun hill was large numbers of men in various stages of illness, many with layers of socks and rags over their frost-bitten feet, heading hopefully for the beach. How could such a suffering multitude be dealt with properly?

     The beach people must also have been rained on, then snowed on, then frozen and tortured by that Siberian blast if they dared to venture into the open. Then the sorry throng, with their frostbitten feet and hands, some already gangrenous, all of them short of food, descended on them and they just had to cope. What a commandeering of lighters and small steamboats there must have been. I, with my two biscuits and a handful of tea***, had seen almost nothing of these larger events.

     Suddenly, my brief, beautiful life at HQ ended with an order to rejoin Nieter on the hill; his helper – my substitute – had gone down with a high temperature and no one else could be found to replace him. Before I left the kindly men at 88th Brigade Signals, they gave me bread, some cold meat, bacon and a useful bag of tea.

     This eased my return to the more Spartan existence up above and ensured a warm welcome from my sturdy Swiss Cockney. I found anyway that he had not fared too badly, having been authorised to draw rations from the resourceful regulars of the 2nd Battalion Essex Regiment.

     I also took back to Nieter a rumour, whispered to me as I left Brigade HQ, suggesting that our days on that foreign shore were numbered. The promise of release from our deprivation and danger, so useless, so purposeless, cheered us up considerably.

     Messages of instruction to various Companies around us passed through our hands and these confirmed our opinion that the end of the failed campaign drew near. Groups of men quietly withdrew, and those remaining had instructions to appear busy and show themselves more – but with reasonable care – to enemy observers. I heard that members of the Engineers Corps were working in the forward trenches, fixing fuses connected to detonators along the parapets.

     The Turks still lobbed over the occasional shell, their lazy snipers with their apparently fixed rifles still squeezed their triggers, perhaps from force of habit, but the earlier war-like spirit had departed.’

* One list of casualties for the original 1000-strong Battalion at the end of November shows 22 killed, 57 wounded, 445 sick (mainly dysentery, jaundice and frostbite). My father several times wrote that by the time they finally evacuated from Gallipoli they were down to 200 men or fewer.

** For a fuller explanation of the Turkish tripod snipers methods see Blog 66 11/10/15.

*** See Blog 71 15/11/15 for the story of how he’d had to beg these provisions “to feed two men for an indefinite period”.

All the best – FSS

Next week: A General visits Sam’s “hole”! And bellows at him for standing to attention! But to their great relief the Battalion is told to get ready for evacuation – in time for Christmas...

The terrible Gallipoli blizzard – Sam goes begging for food from Battalion HQ; Fusiliers shelter like penguins in the Antarctic; the “Bishop of Croydon” lifts his spirits; Sam's Signaller mate Harry goes delirious with frostbite…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir in paperback or e-book & new excerpted Gallipoli episode mini-e-book & reader reviews

All proceeds to British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… the focus of fighting was actually Serbia, where the invasion from different compass points by Bulgarian and German/Austro-Hungarian forces numbering 400,000 in all proceeded steadily. The Serbs lost at Ovche Pole (November 15), Babuna Pass and Prilep (16), Novi Pazar (20) and Krivolak (21) – but the French defeated the Bulgarians by the Cherna river in the south of the country (16) to continue heading off any move on Greece.

    While the Russian Army complained of lacking guns and uniforms on the Eastern Front, in Persia their advance neared its objective, Teheran.

    Elsewhere, the Canadian Army raided the Germans at Messines, Belgium (November 18), the bloody 4th Battle Of The Isonzo between Italy and Austria-Hungary continued, a mine sank British hospital ship SS Anglia off Folkestone (17, losses diversely recorded as 85 and 175, wounded soldiers and crew), and the Allies occupied Tibati in German Cameroons (21).

    Meanwhile, in Gallipoli Lord Kitchener visit on November 10 was to result in the British Cabinet agreeing an evacuation to start in December. But the troops knew nothing of it. At Suvla Bay, the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17) continued their by then attritional struggle with the Turks… their original 1,000 much reduced by the effects of poor food, water shortage, disease, fatigue, and the emotional wear and tear of fear and the constant effort to keep it in check…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father took a brief break from his 24-hour, seven-days-a-week hilltop Signals station – and his dispiriting comrade Harry Green – and wandered down to the Battalion’s main trenches in Essex Ravine, en route dodging snipers, strange new black-smoking shells, the first warplanes he ever saw (a pair of Taubes) – and being deeply moved by a passing encounter with the indefatigable professionalism of a standing-Army Royal Scots Company.

    But now came one of the campaign’s most desperate trials for both sides (the spread of material my father wrote means I have to begin the story of the great blizzard one blog earlier than the attempted “100-years-ago-this-week” schedule would dictate):

‘Late in November, a sudden change of weather made our Army’s already depressing situation almost unbearable. The heat, and consequent plague of filthy flies carrying germs of disease, began to abate, and then came freezing winds with sleet and ice-cold rain.

     After several days, some trenches were deep in water. Still heavier rain fell non-stop throughout one day and night, snow followed on, then the whole wretched lot froze solid*. Our Essex Regiment friends had no food to spare for us and, having no protection from the terrible cold, Green and I looked like dying quite soon** – even though, fortunately, our trench on the hilltop remained dry. I decided to attempt the journey down to Battalion Headquarters to beg for food and tea – no shortage of water now, surrounded as we were by ice and snow. Do you remember the woollen tube with sewn-up ends, described as a “cap comforter” in Army equipment lists? If you stuffed one half of it into the other half, you had a sort of pixie hat. Being unable to face the blast unprotected, I made small openings for eyes and mouth and pulled the thing down over my face, so heaven only knows what I looked like to the few men who saw me.

     Descending the hill, I had to risk being sniped and proceed on top, for most of the trench system lay deep in ice and snow. I assumed the enemy would be similarly afflicted and uninterested in slaughtering infidels, but at one point a couple of bullets came very close and I dropped into a trench and tried slithering on the ice, but soon had to climb out again.

     A dreadful sight confronted me when I reached low-lying Essex Ravine. Rising water had forced our men to quit their trenches and, already very chilled and wet, stand exposed to the biting cold wind and sleet with nowhere to rest. Their resourceful officer told them to form circles and bend forwards with arms around each other’s shoulders. He and others then covered each circular group with their rubberised groundsheets tucked in here and there to prevent them being blown away. Thus they stood all night, pressed close for warmth, and most of them were still in that situation when I arrived.

     I eventually met a Sergeant who had assumed responsibility for acting as Quartermaster to our much diminished Battalion – not many more than 200 of us remained on active duty by then, the rest sick, wounded or dead from illness or enemy action. I told him of our predicament, our lack of food. At first he disowned us, saying the machine gunners whose communications we maintained ought to feed us. But, relenting, he gave me a handful of tea and two hard square biscuits, this to feed two men for an indefinite period.’

With no better offer forthcoming, Sam set off back to his hilltop Signals post and poor Harry Green:

‘On my journey back, the going was tough, especially when I slid down into a trench with ice at the bottom. Each step forward broke the ice and I was continually delayed by struggles to free my boots.

     Exhausted and in despair I had a great piece of luck, for I discovered an entrance to another of those short, covered trenches. This was on higher ground, so not flooded. I went in. I was greeted by a tall man, who treated me with Christian kindness; he let me warm myself by some sort of stove, and gave me a large mug of hot cocoa and a chunk of buttered bread. I suppose I was too overcome by this luxurious fare and lovely treatment to ask questions, but thanked him sincerely. I could see he was a chaplain, but to whom I did not know.

     One chap I questioned later reckoned my benefactor was the Bishop Of Croydon, but I’d never heard of such a Bishop***. I guess I never will know, but the memory of the good man who revived my strength and enabled me to continue remains always.

     I found Green, my mate on the hilltop, in no condition to be interested in the biscuit I offered him for, in my absence, the thoughtless man had removed his boots because his feet were so painful. Now, swollen considerably, they could not be forced back into the boots, so he was in a right mess. Cold, wet, without footwear, and exposed to weather which, I suspect, was coming to us direct from Siberia.

     To make tea, I had to find clean ice, put it in my mess tin, and melt it over the small methylated spirit heater. This Harry could drink and, meanwhile, I phoned Brigade HQ for a man to replace him. Throughout that night he moaned and groaned and sobbed, being in awful pain. I wore the headphones continuously, cat-napping at intervals.

     Next day, I spotted a disused trench more than half-full of ice and snow on the hillside facing the Turks. So I risked becoming a sniper’s target, got out into the open, dashed across, filled my can and hurried back. Using tea repeatedly and carefully, I was able to supply Green and myself with warm fluid.

     Moving around, I maintained some bodily warmth too. Harry was now delirious and, I hoped, past feeling much pain, but one more day passed before men from HQ were able to reach us, lay Harry in a blanket, and carry him, groaning and shouting, away to the beach.’

* The Gallipoli blizzard began on November 27, 1915; in Strong For Service, his biography of Lord Nathan (at this point Major Harry Nathan, commanding officer of the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers, aliased by my father as “Booth”) H. Montgomery Hyde notes 12,000 cases of frostbite and exposure arising; he reports that, in a letter home, Nathan wrote of “15 degrees of frost” (meaning a temperature of 17° Fahrenheit).

** This suggests that, in reality, the arrangement, mentioned in Blog 70 8/11/15, that the two Signallers on the hill should come under the Essex Regiment Quartermaster didn’t work, although my father doesn’t specifically mention any such problem.

*** The Bishop of Croydon did exist and his name at that time was Henry Pereira, but he would have been aged 70 in late 1915, so my father probably presumed correctly that his benefactor was some other cleric. Any further information on the Bishop welcome!

All the best – FSS

Next week: A thaw reveals the blizzard’s outcome in full – and Sam’s sniper-dodging tricks lead to tragedy when an even younger boy tries to copy him…