Sam, 17, sailing away from Malta for, he presumes, actual war, gets nostalgic about sugar melons, swordfish, a shady nook… and a roller-skating rink…

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

All proceeds to British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago… today, August 16, a Monday then, a German U-boat shelled two villages near Whitehaven, Cumbria. And the sea featured heavily in the week’s diverse action including the first “authenticated” instance of a German submarine firing on a ship’s crew in open boats (21st, one dead; part of a series of abuses/rewritings of rules of engagement by both sides), and a major battle between German and Russian squadrons in the Gulf of Riga (19th; with British submarines present, one of which torpedoed and severely damaged the German cruiser Moltke).

    On land, while the French made some modest advances on the Western Front amid the general bloody attrition, the Russian Army’s extraordinary reach/stretched resources is evident from assorted timeline reports of their continuing retreat on the Eastern Front (in Poland 19th/20th losing Novo-Georgevsk, 22nd Osovyets), alongside successes against the Ottoman Empire in taking Kep in north Persia and Olti in east Turkey (both 16th).

    In Gallipoli, though, after the previous week’s terrible defeats in the Battles of Krithia Vineyard, Sari Bair and Chunuk Bair, the Allies – under a new commander Major-General Beauvoir De Lisle, after Lieut-Gen Frederick Stopford’s August 15 dismissal for ineptitude (and never stepping ashore) – tried one last (tragic) heave. The Battles Of Scimitar Hill and Hill 60, begun on the 21st, sought to finally link the beachheads at Anzac and Suvla Bay. But Turkish troops beat back attacks which cost 5,300 British casualties, Anzac/Gurkha 1,100, and an unknown number of Turks. Next week, a century ago, saw the very last Allied attempt at progress in Gallipoli…

    Meanwhile... after months training in Malta the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, are coming to the end of this extended phase of training while feeling guilty/thanking their stars about still being remote from the hazards of any front line so long after they volunteered in September, 1914. Among them, my father, lately promoted to Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, his brother Ted (still secretly underage at 17 and 18), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, have boarded the SS Ivernia in Valletta’s Grand Harbour/Marsamxett. To sail where? they wonder… They’ve seen the Gallipoli casualties arriving at the military hospitals on Malta… and watched the funerals (see FSS blog 50, June 21, 2015)…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, we left Sam gazing from ship to harbour, recalling how he’d loved Malta and lived all his homesickness in his sleep via dreams of home – a perfect balance, rather than anything upsetting.

    Since the Battalion’s arrival on the island in early February, the experience of his first ever foreign country had leapt and bounded his youth onwards apace. The lad whose previous experience comprised suburban poverty consoled by the fellowships of school, Boy Scouts, church choir and then, from the age of 14, a couple of years as an office dogsbody in the City suddenly encountered… dark-skinned people, a language he didn’t understand, blazing heat, agricultural peasants, the knockabout life of barracks and tents, military discipline and learning how to kill with bullet and bayonet… and sweeter exotica the poor boys on soldier’s pay could suddenly afford such as beer, wine and horse-drawn buggy/karozzin rides, gratis joys like swimming naked in warm sea… and embarrassed visits to the Strada della Fontana Red Light District (where Sam kept his innocence, though many didn’t, or had none to preserve).

    Well, he’d loved it, nearly all of it, and he wanted to relish whathe’d seen and what he’d learned one more time:

‘Looking across the water at the familiar scene as the Ivernia moved slowly away from the quay, I felt reluctant to take my eyes off the place I loved; while I could still gaze shoreward, I wanted to remember everything…

     Bunches of oval green grapes, sugar melons whose dark-green skins contrasted with the sweet, pink flesh inside…

     Lying on the quayside at St Paul’s all afternoon, watching baby swordfishes swimming about, then walking back through the village and people on their steps saying “Buona sera” and me saying it back to them – I felt a different person, a man, when I got away from the Army like that, not a number any more…

     That poor man who stood in an upended barrel and let people throw heavy sticks of wood at him, three goes a penny, in beautiful San Antonio Gardens, near Valletta; not as terrible as it sounds, because he just ducked down into the barrel to the accompaniment of much laughter and I never saw him hit, nor did I even see a nasty type with a strong arm really trying to catch him out and hurt him…

     Night hours of training, during a break, resting in a plantation, back against a cool, dry stone wall, sometimes reaching up to pull a green fig from the tree above…

     The pleasure of sitting shaded inside a stone structure over a well from which water was constantly drawn by means of a bucket-chain contrivance; inside, beautiful coolth enhanced by the sound of dripping water, outside, in a temperature of about 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a mule trudged round and round to work the gadget which brought up the water – resting in there was one of my ideas of heaven…

     And the battered roller-skating rink I’d come across on one of my outings with Hayson*… Beside the sea, on a headland just off the coast road near the barracks the Battalion occupied for our first few weeks in Malta; nobody in attendance, it seemed. We opened a gate by the ticket kiosk and walked in. The floor of the rink was in poor condition, patched and filled by someone who obviously didn’t know how to do the job. After a while, a smallish man approached and told us that, since the war started, hardly a soul used the rink, but for sixpence we could hire skates and stay as long as we wished. Although we had little money, this bargain was too tempting to turn down. As we inexpertly teetered, laughing and joking, or, when fortune favoured, glided between those lumpy patches – paying for our carelessness if we didn’t – a recurring thought entered my mind and wouldn’t go away: “There’s a war on”… A scruffy old roller-skating rink it might be, deserted by all except for two boys larking about, but what a setting. A blue, cloudless sky, sea on this side, sea on that, all to be enjoyed indefinitely, whereas a year ago a cheap, Sunday excursion by rail would have yielded perhaps three hours on some English beach or promenade, the weather would have been uncertain, likely as not wet, grey, chilly…

     But perish memories like that and above all appreciate this present loveliness. And I did, I really did. Every moment of every day men are being mutilated, shot to the point of collapse, killed, buried when found. I joined the Army to join them. But wise men have decided that a reprieve shall be mine for a while, so be grateful. I did not share these thoughts with others, perhaps fearing ridicule. On the other hand, of course, I never knew what the other chaps were thinking, did I? Hayson and I skated on…’

* Sam’s pal Hayson was introduced in FSS Blogs 41 (April 19, 2015) and 42 (April 26, 2015).

All the best – FSS

Next week: (Temporary) destination: Egypt – Sam horrified to see Alexandria dock workers treated like slaves… then the British Army loads the Battalion into open railway trucks under the scorching sun...

Sam’s Battalion say goodbye to their Malta paradise – and he realises that, strangely enough, he’s only been homesick in his dreams…

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

All proceeds to British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago… on the static Western Front the Allies advanced a little at Hooge (Flanders, August 10) and repulsed a German attack in Argonne (north-west France, 13), while on the Eastern, the Russian Army continued its massive retreat across Poland throughout the week, evacuating Sokolov, Syedlets, Lukow…

    Further south, the Second Battle Of the Isonzo ended inconclusively when both sides ran out of ammunition – though not until the Italians had suffered 43,000 casualties, the Austro-Hungarians 45,000.

    And down in Gallipoli the Allies’ August Offensive reached its conclusion. The so-called diversionary Krithia Vineyard attack in the Helles sector got nowhere and ended (August 13) with 4,100 British casualties, 1,500 Ottoman. At Lone Pine, the Australian forces breaking out of the Anzac Cove area, achieved their objective, taking and defending Turkish trenches until counterattacks ceased (10), at a cost of 2,277 Australian casualties, 5-7,000 Ottoman. The parallel Anzac and Gurkha attacks at Sari Bair and Chunuk Bair similarly lacked overall direction and any advances achieved came at terrible cost (to both sides).

    At Suvla Bay, where British troops had landed (6) to establish a new beachhead, plans and battlefield command went so wrong that war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wrote that “no firm hand appeared to control this mass of men suddenly dumped on an unknown shore”; the chaos enabled heavily outnumbered Turkish troops to be reinforced and the status quo which was to last until the end of the campaign soon set in (15; casualty figures for Chunuk Bair, Sari Bair and Suvla Bay differ widely and I couldn’t guess which are correct).

    Meanwhile... in Malta, the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, among them, my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, his brother Ted (17 and 18 then, underage volunteers), had no idea that Suvla Bay would quite soon introduce them to war’s realities…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam and Ted, poor boys from Edmonton, north London, feeling rather well-heeled on their respective 8/9 (44p) and 7/- (35p) a week (the difference because of Sam’s loathed promotion to Lance Corporal) – availed themselves of a scheme to each send 2/6 a week home to their mother, which the Government would more than double. They still had enough to spare for beer and fags.

    But the bad news was their realisation that the Fusiliers’ idyll camping at the paradise beach of Ghajn Tuffieha must shortly come to an end – which could surely mean only that they would soon find themselves on a battlefield. No more target practice at the butts by the sea. Instead… whatever the real thing turned out to be.

    Sam had just said goodbye to “Mossy” Mossgrove, a good Signaller friend transferred to the Navy…

‘Subsequently, blows to my hopes of spending the rest of the war by that heavenly beach at Ghajn Tuffieha fell thick and fast.

     One day, I spent much time lining up outside the Medical Officer’s hut with hundreds of others, being dismissed when meal-times came, then resuming my place in the long line until I eventually got inside. “Shirt off!” said somebody. Right. A medical orderly wiped my left upper arm with spirit, and a Corporal held a very thin sort of blade in the flame of a Bunsen burner, withdrew it and made scratches on my arm. Then, the Medical Officer painted the scratches with fluid from a bottle. Those three men did that hour after hour, to hundreds of men.

     Next morning, I knew that I had been well and truly vaccinated and was glad to rest whenever possible. Urgent activity everywhere now, though, much packing of stores and, finally, down came the little homes we had become so used to. Headed by our now very proficient drum and fife band, our long procession headed for Valletta where we spent a couple of days confined in a children’s school — no passes to leave the building were issued. Medics examined our vaccinations and applied new dressings. The old, long rifles were withdrawn and, once more, we became weaponless warriors. We Signallers had to hand in all our instruments and, thank goodness, those weird, clumsy, oil signal lamps — surely the Quartermaster placed them back in the museum from which they had been borrowed…

     A short march from the school, there we were again at the Grand Harbour and I was one of a line of men moving up a gangway to embark on, this time, a fine, big liner turned troopship, the Ivernia* – spacious enough to accommodate our thousand or so men without looking crowded.’

The Battalion left Malta on August 27, 1915 so we’re moving a little ahead of the story in terms of the 100-years-on centenary paralleling I try to adhere to on the FootSoldierSam blog. However, my father’s about to move into a passage of restrospection about his some ways glorious, all ways formative months in Malta – so, as he moves on in the general direction of the battlefield consider time and chronology on pause for a week or so…

‘Excitement concerning future events did not smother my sadness at leaving an island which, though small, still had many features I had not been able to view. I recalled that, oddly, my natural boy’s homesickness had shown itself only during sleep, in the form of dreams wherein I once again lived my daily routine from the time before I enlisted. This occurred frequently and, discussing the subject with young pals, I summed it up by saying that, by day, I lived in Malta and by night in dear old England, all quite happily.’

* SS Ivernia was a Cunard liner, launched in 1899, her 60-foot funnel the tallest ever fitted to a ship, says Wikipedia (but there are other contenders!); she was sunk by a German submarine south of Greece, on January 1, 1917, with the loss of 120 troops and crew, when under the command of Captain William Turner, previously skipper of the Cunard liner Lusitania when it was torpedoed and sunk off southern Ireland in May, 1915, with the loss of 1,195 lives. Captain Turner suffered much criticism over the circumstances of the Lusitania sinking, not least for not being the last person to leave the ship – although, surviving by clinging to an oar, he averred he believed he had been; in the case of the Ivernia he was definitely the last person to leave, swimming off as the ship sank. Cunard retired him to a desk job after the Ivernia sinking.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam, 17, looks back ashore and fondly reminisces about his blessed six months in Malta, the sweetest place he was ever to experience in a long lifetime…