1919: As Sam’s military career concludes at the “cold and impersonal” Essex Regiment HQ he fondly recalls the boys of his first Battalion… and wonders what the hell he’s going to do next… The penultimate episode of FootSoldierSam’s five-year WW1 blog epic!

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 (next week!)  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 July 2, 2019, is £4,329.44 (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 finally ratified the Treaty Of Versailles (July 8), but only after new Chancellor Gustav Bauer, President Friedrich Ebert and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg seriously discussed resuming hostilities. That is, they believed the Allies’ threat of immediate invasion if they didn’t accept the Treaty and the politicians asked Hindenburg whether the Army could mount effective resistance. Reluctantly, he said no.

    So they recommended acceptance to the Weimar National Assembly who agreed 237-138, then wired acceptance to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau in time to beat the Allies’ deadline, before bringing it back to the Assembly for ratification. Thus, by common consent, the seeds of WW2 were sown, fed and watered… although the Allies did at last lift the Navy blockade on Germany (July 12) which had brought the population to the brink of starvation.

    In the USA, however, when President Woodrow Wilson personally presented the Treaty to the Senate he met unbending and enduring resistance from those who opposed the Treaty entirely and others who wanted amendments. His pet Treaty project, the League Of Nations did become reality six months later, but his own country never joined it…

    Elsewhere, the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) proceeded from its small beginning in Anatolia; General Kemal, later Atatürk, had been mustering forces there, but then found himself dismissed by Sultan Mohammed VI (July 8). In Russia, Bolshevik counterattacks interrupted the southern White Army of General Denikin’s Advance On Moscow (July 3-November 18) and the northern White forces’ Siberian leader Admiral Kolchak involved American troops in a minor sequence of actions on the east coast fighting Bolsheviks in the Suchan Valley Campaign, defending the railway (throughout July).

    Otherwise, an array of uproars continued internationally, triggered by WWI’s end to varying degrees, including the demobilisation of millions of servicemen. The Moroccan Insurrection against Spanish rule began (July 11) – marking the start of an Arab resistance movement against colonial powers. In America, the latest in a “Red Summer” of race riots flared up in Longview, Texas (July 10-12). Whites attacked the black part of town in the wake of lynching a black man for having an affair with a white woman. After a lot of shooting and one further black fatality, National Guard troops and Texas Rangers restored order. Many from both sides were charged and nobody prosecuted. The (all-white) local enquiry into the whole event reached one interesting conclusion – that black people should not be allowed to write about white people in the newspapers (a story had appeared in the northern black newspaper The Chicago Defender).

    Also, among a sequence of post-war travel breakthroughs the US Army sent a convoy from Washington D.C. westwards to see if they could drive all the way to the Pacific – it took months, but instigated the massive highway-building programme of the 1920s which featured Route 66, established on November 11(?), 1926… whether or not with commemorative intent I don’t know.

[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… and now it’s really here: demob!]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

May, 1919, Essex and home to Edmonton: my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe – formerly Lance Corporal Signaller, but reverted to the rank he signed up to on September 10, 1914 – has spent the spring quite enjoying life as a Royal Defence Corps POW camp guard in East Preston, near Arundel, Sussex. He cast aside hatred and made friends with the former enemies, fellow frontline veterans…

    But come April health problems assailed him: a resurgence of the gastric uproar and pain he’d experienced in the aftermath of Gallipoli and the Somme, then again as a malnourished POW in France and Germany for eight months of 1918 – until he apparently recovered in various hospitals post-Armistice.

    Last week, a doctor recommended his release from the Army “having become physically impaired”…

‘I had to go to Warley in Essex to get my discharge from the Essex Regiment, that being the last one of the several in which I had served(2). The place was cold and impersonal, the people too – particularly the signing-off officer, who might well have had his mind on his post-war problems. So many officers had briefly enjoyed a degree of power which would not be theirs in the keenly competitive civilian market…

     In truth, the only feelings of comradeship still remaining with me after all those seemingly endless years of war were for the brotherly boys of my first volunteer Battalion(3). Months of hard, slogging training in the Mediterranean sunshine(4), living under canvas before and after the inglorious campaign on that scruffy Turkish peninsula… Our total effort, both in Egypt and later in France(5), near Rouen, to so build up our efficiency that the authorities must augment our numbers and restore our depleted strength to that of a Battalion… One knew affection and friendly consideration for one’s mates in that mob, but not in any other(6).

     Still, my discharge yielded quite a bit of money from back-pay, the war gratuity, Corporal’s pay credited to me but never paid over more than two years(7), and a ten shillings a week pension, plus a book of coupons, each worth 29 shillings, which I could cash at the rate of one per week until I started doing some sort of work.

     So I dressed in a fine, new, wool, grey suit. I felt cool and prosperous. Not a clue, at that moment, as to what I might do for a living, but free and able to pay for my keep, and even for the occasional bottle of port wine which some of us favoured in those far-off days – a large bottle, of good quality, cost about three shillings.’

(2) Warley: a military town since the 18th century and HQ barracks to the Essex Regiment from its founding in 1881 until 1960 http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/unit-info/253/ (may prove hyperlink-resistant; if so, copy and paste into a search engine and it will work!).

Amid the host of scrawled info on this page including various ‘Warley’ references, look at the lower left half under ‘[Dis]embodied on demobilisation” where it records the date he appeared at Essex Regiment HQ in Warley ‘6.5.19’. To the right of that is the official reckoning of his war’s landmark dates – as regular readers will know, not all of them correct by my reckoning, having correlated my father’s account, war diaries and other sources.

(3) The 2/1 Royal Fusiliers, London Regiment.

(4) From February to August in Malta, a place Sam loved the moment he saw it, despite the marches with 90 pounds on his back (normal pack plus Signaller’s gear) – see Blogs February 22, 2015 to August 16, 2015.

(5) From January to late April in Egypt, then maybe three weeks in Rouen before their CO told them they would be disbanded rather than reinforced and restored – see Blogs January 10, 2016, to May 1, 2016.

(6) As editor, I would just add here that my father generalised this overall feeling he had, resulting from the bitter grief of his Battalion’s demise at the hands of remote Army decision-makers in France. But, despite that, everywhere he served, he did form good, trusting relationships with comrades, notably with Neston at Arras with the 2/7th Essex Regiment – see Blogs December 17, 2017 and then January 1 to March 25, 1918.

(7) The story of my father’s rank during WW1 gets confusing. Here’s a quick zigzag through it. I think of him as “Lance Corporal Signaller Sutcliffe”, which he was from spring, 1915, in Malta – until promoted to Corporal in June 1916, while his new outfit, the Kensingtons were in and out of the front line at Gommecourt on the Somme. Thereafter, ups and downs ensued. During the subsequent battle, through to September, he often served as Acting Sergeant too. But when the Army noticed he was still under-age and sent him back to Blighty. Because he detested holding any rank, en route to his new posting in Harrogate he took one stripe off his arm. So when, in Yorkshire, he was transferred to the Essex he appeared to be a Lance Corporal again… although he wasn’t according to the records. Then, strangely, in mid-summer 1917 his Company CO – whom he loathed – offered him training for a commission (the upper- and middle-classes being drained of officer material by then) – see Blog June 30, 1917. Sam refused and, either as punishment or by (genuine) choice, “reverted” to Private for the duration. Regarding the back pay for his period as a Corporal, I presume that, with it happening on the Somme front, the formal notifications didn’t reach the appropriate clerk. 

All the best– FSS

Next week: Good heavens… five years on it’s Sam’s last blog. He and older brother Ted, a fellow Somme survivor but bearing the gas damage that would kill him, see the war off by attending the July 19 Peace Parade, happy onlookers applauding “the men who won the war”…

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

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.

Returned POW Sam’s “wonderfully happy days” back home reach a climax when beloved older brother Ted returns on a week’s leave and they yarn away about the war... but inwardly Sam’s grieving already as he listens to Ted wheeze and gasp for breath…

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 Memoirwill always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of January 2, 2019, is £3,841.91 (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 twin plotlines of local fighting and moves towards “global” peace continued.

    In Berlin, the armed battle between Socialist-Democratic Government-led paramilitaries, the mainly ex-Army Freikorps, and civilian pro-Soviet Spartacists (January 6 onwards) saw 173 die – mostly on the revolutionary side. Martial law was declared in the city on January 9.

    In Paris, after US President Wilson’s arrival (January 7), representatives gathered for the Peace Conference from a number of countries… it’s hard to be exact about how many as sources vary and appear to mix or confuse official participants and others, such as Palestine and Tonga, who showed up regardless. They included the major Allied powers and a range of states which had supported them in one way or another – but none of their erstwhile enemies: my incomplete list of participants shows UK, France, USA, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Romania, Portugal, Greece, China, the Korean Provisional Government, Canada, Newfoundland, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Russian Provincial Council (not the Bolshevik Government), Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, the Mountainous Republic Of The Northern Caucasus, San Marino, Montenegro, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Liberia, Siam, The Hejaz.

    In fact, the conference began only a couple of days after World War I’s final(?) white flag – Fahreddin Pasha, surrendered Medina (January 10) to end a siege by Allied-supporting Arab forces which had lasted since October 1916. With a Turkish force, he had led the defence of the city and protection of its only supply route via the Hejaz railway to Damascus way beyond the October 30, 1918, Armistice Of Mudros, which purported to end hostilities between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. He wouldn’t accept it until the population of Medina reached the brink of starvation. Then 8,000 Turkish soldiers evacuated and the besieging troops went on a looting spree.

[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, in mid-March, 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 near a village called Hügelheim and finally moving westwards to Lorraine where they remained until Armistice – at which his long trek towards the French Front began. He finally reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably) and then started his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – through the ministrations of French, British and American military doctors and nurses in Nancy and Rouen… despite the less well-conceived efforts of several people who nearly killed him with overfeeding. Finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before he was allowed home…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Returning from his WW1 Christmas recollections to the 100-years-ago-this-week (give or take)…

    December or January, 1918/9, at home in Edmonton, north London: in the December 23 Blog, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, ferried back across the Channel (that was on December 10, 1918) and spent some days recovering at Lewisham Hospital before returning to his family and that “first Ma-made cuppa” for a full year… over which he learned how the German field card he’d filled in as a POW and passed through the wire to a passing Soldat, with little hope of it arriving, did actually make it and give his family hope that he might return.

    Now a joyful-sad reunion with older brother Ted:

‘Those were wonderfully happy days, and my joy reached a climax when, out of the blue, Ted walked through the open front door. After our affectionate reunion, he said he had been granted seven days special leave when the message arranged by our father had reached his Field Survey Company (then billeted in local people’s homes in Coyghem(2)).

     For hours, we sat and swapped stories about our lives in recent months. His real concern about my hard times was unexpected and soul-warming, but I found cause to feel very concerned about his health and encouraged him to tell me in detail where he had been working and how he had fared in the final German attack.

     Earlier in this book(3) I gave some account of how, after an examination to test his ability in English, simple maths, and general knowledge, he had been moved out of the infantry into a new Field Survey Company which – often from the top of metal towers they constructed themselves – pinpointed enemy artillery positions to bring accurate fire to bear on them. At times, those towers would be spotted by Jerry and attract gunfire. But, provided our chaps made correct calculations, the troublesome battery would be knocked out before it found the range for the observers’ tower.

     Hills or trees sometimes saved Ted’s group from having to build any observation post. On one occasion, he said, while working at ground level, fog obscured everybody’s vision and advancing German troops bypassed them. Training for such an emergency enabled them to act quickly. With hammer and axe, they smashed their cameras and other equipment and threw the fragments into shell-holes. Then began a slow, cautious retreat to the British lines. With some skill and a lot of luck, they avoided capture and returned to their own trenches in less than 24 hours…

     But, all the while Ted spoke of these things, I felt a growing ache in my heart. That quick, shallow breathing… So I told him about my experience of gas shells – one in five sent over by Jerry in that last big attack when I became a war prisoner – and how the poison had affected me. This lead elicited from him a tale of one very prolonged gas shelling he’d endured, shortly before his transfer to the Field Survey Company. It had knocked him out temporarily, but afterwards he’d professed himself well enough to attend the surveyors’ school way back behind the lines, and the gas trouble was forgotten, though not by Ted.

     And now, at home, there he sat, panting after each sentence, but swearing he was all right… With a pre-vision of what might happen at some future time, I was inwardly shaking. I felt as if I was the older one and ought to protect him, but neither then, nor later on, would he admit he had been seriously damaged.

     During that leave of his, we shared the back bedroom on the top floor. Often I awoke in the night and listened to his quick, light breathing, and heard his occasional, dry cough and felt the sadness of the situation. He had survived all through the Somme campaign, which had brought death or serious injury to tens of thousands of Britishers, and had exposed himself to frequent risks when earning, without knowing it, a Military Medal(4) and mention in dispatches. And now, the fighting over, he was to be killed by the delayed effects of poison gas(5).

     Perhaps our parents had similar fears, but none of us discussed them. Surely a doctor would notice his condition when he rejoined his unit. There would anyway be a medical examination before he was released from the Army…

     All too soon the seven days drew to an end. Thinking ahead, Ted said he was going to ask his pre-war employer to request his early release from the Service(6), and he certainly hoped to avoid being made to serve in the proposed Army of Occupation. So we saw him off on his journey back to Belgium, at least feeling certain he would soon and finally come back to us.’

(2) Coyghem: a small village in West-Vlaanderen province, Belgium, a few miles from the French border, 25 miles southeast of Ypres.

(3) See Blog November 27, 2016. Ted trained for his new line of work in Saint-Omer, a small canal-side town, 30 miles southeast of Calais, close to the North Sea and the Belgian border. The British Army established its “maps GHQ” there in 1915, forming three Field Survey Companies of the Royal Engineers in 1916, with more soon added. In early 1918, the Ordnance Survey, the British national mapping authority, set up an overseas branch in Saint-Omer – see http://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/regiments-and-corps/the-corps-of-royal-engineers-in-the-first-world-war/the-field-survey-companies-of-the-royal-engineers/and http://www.defencesurveyors.org.uk/Images/Historical/WWI/4th Field Survey Battalion.pdf  (NB this link works for me only if pasted into a search engine, rather than when clicked on). 

(4)The Military Medal: established in March, 1916, as the “other ranks” equivalent to the officers’ Military Cross, awarded for bravery in battle on land. I can’t imagine my father’s wonderful memory would have been wrong about his brother winning it, but I haven’t found any official record of Ted’s award. In the following passage, excerpted in Blog November 20, 2016, my father recalled hearing about an incident which might have led to an MM – this was during his stay at the British Army camp at Harfleur, after he left the Somme Front because his age had been discovered – 18, still too young for the battlefield: “I eagerly asked [a passing London Regiment Tommy] and he told me how, in a pretty sharp action, one of our Sergeants from the original Battalion, Billy Wale, had been severely wounded in a very much damaged advanced trench well ahead of the front line. This soldier had heard my brother say, ‘We can’t leave old Billy Wale out there. I’m going to get him.’ But this soldier didn’t know what happened after that, because he was already wounded himself and stretcher-bearers carried him away. So I still didn’t know what had happened to dear old Ted in that very dangerous situation… How I wished I’d been there to help him. Knowing how tough and self-reliant he was, I had good reason to hope that he and the wounded Sergeant eventually came out of it alive.” (Unfortunately, my father didn’t write down the outcome of this story, though I imagine, expressing this story as he did, he must have known that Billy Wale too did survive.)

(5) Ted died on January 26, 1922, aged 25, of TB – against which his damaged lungs stood no chance. The family nursed him at home and he died with his mother and Sam at his bedside. You may recall that “Ted” was a family nickname, his real name was Philip and my father named me for him when I was born in 1947.

(6) Pre-war, after leaving school at 14, Ted worked for a paper company for three to four years and so impressed them that the boss guaranteed he’d get his job back after the war – even though he may not have bargained on a four and a half year hiatus, he stuck to it.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam rolling in it – back-pay since March, 1918, when he was taken POW. And then he and his POW pal and food-snaffling partner Wally have a wonderful reunion, “a rejoining of threads broken” when they got separated on that long trek back from Germany… 

(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 and POW pals take a train to a new compound in occupied Lorraine… and a French woman slips a package through the wire, which tests Sam’s conscience. Meanwhile, spirits rise when a passing sailor says the German Navy has mutinied!

Sam’s Memoir – 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.

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… From north to south of the Western Front, the now established plot line continued: the Allies advanced, sometimes just occupying ground from which the German Army had retreated, sometimes encountering ferocious rearguards and suffering terrible casualties, but always advancing.

    In the Flanders Advance (September 28-October 10) element of the broad-front Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17), Belgian, French and British took Dixmude (September 30), Ledeghem (October 1), Gheluwe, Hooglede (3), Amentières (3; lost in the Spring Offensive on April 11), and the left bank of the River Lys – while withdrawing, the Germans burned Douai.

    The Battle Of The St Quentin Canal (September 29-October 2 or 10 depending who’s counting) saw the town of St Quentin won by the French (October 1-2) who then pressed on northeastwards. This became the Battle Of The Beaurevoir Line (3-6; the town is 13 miles south of Cambrai – by then burnt by the Germans – and 10 miles north of St Quentin). Australian troops took nearby Montbrehain (5) and the British took Beaurevoir itself (6) to complete a breach in the Hindenburg Line.

    The Franco-American Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) slowly moved forward again after German reinforcements had forced a temporary pause. The French took Challerange (October 2; 40 miles easy of Reims) and the second phase of the Offensive began (4) with costly American frontal assaults which gained ground northeast of the Argonne Forest, while the French progressed to the River Arnes.

    In Russia, the Allies’ skirmishes with Bolshevik forces continued as Canadian troops joined a mixed bag of Allies at Archangel (September 30; 610 miles north of Moscow) – they then repulsed a Bolshevik attack at Seletskaya (6; 170 miles south of Archangel). Meanwhile, loyalists in the southern Urals proved that the Revolution remained incomplete by calling for the formation of a new All-Russian Constituent Assembly (3)… and the Allied Japanese contribution to the foothold in eastern Siberia reached Ruchlevo (3; name or transliteration must have changed since then, I can’t find the place).

    And down in Syria the ultra-multinational Allied Egyptian Expeditionary Force, augmented of late by the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab Army, chased the Ottomans and Germans to Damascus, which they surrendered (October 1), and then onwards towards Homs and Aleppo. Syria declared independence at this point, but under whose leadership remained unclear for some time.

[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, solo, he returned to France and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the nearby Front until, 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 – er, well, maybe August, see below! – 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards, is still clinging on, lately somewhat uplifted by his food-scrounging partnership with fellow Tommy prisoners Wally and George. Whatever they can find, be it via digging up a few small spuds or snagging a piece of raw liver from a pigs’ trough, they share and share alike.

    But now the settled, if often violent, routine of the POW camp outside Hügelheim is about to change as the Tommies are forced to move on again after their first extended period settled in one place for perhaps ten weeks. First, though, news to set hope off on an excited gallop:

‘One morning, the only German sailor I ever saw walked into the Pferde Lazerette(2) and, eavesdropping his conversation with his friends among our guards, I got the idea that he was telling them something very exciting. Later I heard the details from a friendly guard; the sailor would not return to his ship because the German Navy had mutinied and many, like him, had gone home for good.

     Hardly believable, this wonderful news, but it filled us with joyful anticipation – although, next day, you would never have thought our guards knew about the mutiny for they turned us out of our huts as usual and marched us off to the stables. This must have been in August, 1918(3). Surely, I thought, the German Army must lose heart too, now that American troops had added their strength to ours on the Western Front. I knew they had been in action having seen one of their men, already a prisoner, at the historic 1870 boundary arch and barracks(4)… Still no local signs of the war coming to an end, though.

     But, that day, the guards did tell a few of us – thankfully, including my mates Wally and George – to bring our odds and ends out of our hut and we set off to a railway station. After a short journey, followed by a march, we finished up in a village in Lorraine(5). There we joined about 40 Britishers, all complete strangers to us. The guards led the whole crowd of us into a village hall with no bunks.

     We bedded down — if that’s the right word for lying on bare floorboards — and close together to benefit from shared warmth, as the nights always seemed cold.

     With no work allotted next morning, I had time to reconnoitre… A stout barbed-wire fence enclosed the hall, with quite a wide space between building and wire. The sentries patrolling outside took long rests sitting on stools, I noted. Fortunately, they rested on the opposite side of the building to a footpath where civilians passed fairly frequently. So I stood there beside a small gap in the wire I’d spotted, hopefully surveying the scene.

     When a lady dressed in black came by she neither paused nor looked at me, but I heard a whisper and caught the words “retourner” and “retour”(6), French words anyway, which made me stay put and, in addition, told me one surprising thing – namely that after all the years since the 1870 war(7), these good people, who became German citizens with France’s defeat, had still retained their mother tongue – even though, as I later discovered, officially they spoke German at all times.

     In due course, the good soul walked that way again, and again without pause or any other acknowledgment of my presence, she slipped her hand through the gap in the wire and passed a small package to me. “Merci bien,”was the best I could manage to whisper by way of thanks, for she vanished so quickly.

     Now came the test of my honesty, which I failed, being always so starving hungry. Before I could check my action, I had bitten a mouthful out of the piece of fruit pie I found in the paper wrapping. Remorse was hardly a strong enough word to describe the guilt I felt; Wally had been so generous with the oddments he scrounged when working at the piggeries­ – many a time he must have been tempted to gobble the lot on his way back after a day’s work.

     I found my two pals in the village hall, confessed, handed the rest to Wally, who broke it into three small shares, returning to me a third, less one mouthful.’

(2) Pferde Lazerette: horse hospital.

(3) My father’s memory may be wrong with regard to timing here – and in the past couple of episodes he’s reckoned his narrative had reached September. Wikipedia says the first, limited, and short-lived German Navy mutiny took place at North Sea port Wilhelmshaven, October 29-30, 1918; the second and decisive one followed shortly at Kiel, on the canal linking the Baltic to the North Sea, November 3, 1918; that triggered the German Revolution which swept aside the monarchy within a few days and eventually led to Germany’s Weimar Republic period; the effects of that mutiny certainly spread rapidly down to the southern region where my father was imprisoned; I don’t know, but I’m guessing either the sailor’s visit to the Pferde Lazerette occurred some weeks later than my father reckoned when writing his Memoir, or said sailor had observed or taken part in an earlier and more minor mutiny which didn’t, at that point, embrace much of the German Navy.

(4) See blog July 8, 2018.

(5) My father didn’t recall the name of the village, but the train would have travelled west from Müllheim and Hügelheim, probably towards Mühlhausen/Mulhouse again – that city being a few miles over the border between Germany and then-German-held Lorraine. Today Müllheim to Mulhouse by train would take 23 minutes and set you back €3.90. The Hügelheim branch line seems to have closed down.

(6)“Retourner” = “come back” (verb);“retour” = “return”(noun).

(7) Alsace-Lorraine: annexed by the German Empire in 1871 as one of the spoils of the Franco-Prussian War (’70-1); in July, 1915, the German Government banned the French language from the region; the Allies annexed Alsace-Lorraine back to France in December, 1918, and, in the early ’20s, deported the Germans remaining there and banned their language; Hitler effectively re-annexed Alsace in 1940-45, then lost it again. Apologies, by a slip of the brain I said in last week’s “Next week” paragraph that this village was in Alsace but, as you see, it was definitely in Lorraine.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam reckons the war’s final throes are coming up and hopes he can “stand a few more weeks of near-starvation”. Then a Red Cross parcel arrives for George – who falls to temptation and temporarily forgets the food-sharing partnership with Sam and Wally…

(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.