Sam and POW comrades as railway navvies do the full John Henry, manhandling steel rails – feeling oddly consoled by proper work and respect from their guards. But then… to Germany, the Saar, and impromptu imprisonment in a corner shop!

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All proceeds to the British Red Cross

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Another lull between major actions as the opposing sides gathered themselves for the next onslaught. No doubt, on the Western Front at least, all expected that to come from the Allies after their defensive success against four waves of German attacks from the Spring Offensive in March onwards.

    The Americans concluded their first long battle at Belleau Wood (June 1-26), successfully holding the line against the last vestiges of the German offensive, justifying their initial refusal to accept French urgings to conduct a tactical retreat. Meanwhile, the British raided at Vieux Berquin (26; west of Armentières) and northwest of Albert, Somme department, and repulsed an attack near Merris, Nord department (both 30), and the French captured Cutry Plateau, Aisne department (28), hills between Mosloy, Hauts-de-France department, and Passy-en-Valois, Aisne department (29). Air raids abounded with the British flying inside Germany to attack Saarbrucken, Offenburg and Karlsruhe (25), while the Germans bombed Paris on successive days (26-30).

    With the German Army biting into more and more territory from defeated Russia on the Eastern Front, the gathering White Russian opposition, abetted by the renegade Czechoslovak Legion who’d travelled the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway taking cities en route, declared an anti-Bolshevik provisional Government in Vladivostok on the Pacific coast (June 29) – 9,000 kilometres east of Moscow and 6,500 east of Omsk, where the White Russians had set up their first HQ. At the same time, the Allies fomented an alternative alternative by taking Murmansk in northwest Russia on the Barents Sea and persuading the regional Soviet to support them against the Bolsheviks (30).

    In Italy, the Second Battle Of The Piave June 15-24) concluded too. The Italian Army had recovered all territory lost to the Austrians, but their C-in-C General Diaz refused Allied advice to follow up and drive the Austrians northwards. He believed their resources would be stretched too thin. Even so, they pushed forward in a couple of areas with the capture of the bridgehead at Capo Sile north of Venice (June 25) and of Monte di Val Bello and Col De Rosso above the Asiago Plateau (30).

    Otherwise, the only notable action saw the Turks’ Persian Campaign continue when they beat off the Armenian siege of Khoy (June 24 onwards; in Western Azerbaijan, between the Black Sea and the Caspian).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016),had fought 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. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion.An interesting year ensued –weeks of it passed in various northern 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, at Wharncliffe War Hospital, Sheffield). During that summer, his Company Officer told him he’d been offered the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; either this defiance brought about his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or he actually requested it. Come November/December, 1917, he enjoyed the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras – including excursions to the front line, just a few miles away. In mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras, on March 19… 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 OK 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.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, taken prisoner outside Arras and then part of randomly-assembled bands of POWs – wandering from Denain to Marchiennes to Sancourt to Bapaume – moved to a country encampment where he and his comrades were set to work building a railway.

    At least the food improved temporarily, although Sam still felt hunger pangs acutely enough to throw himself off a fast-moving truck in quest of a small mushroom – by pure luck saving himself from a bloody crash which occurred moments later.

    These relatively bearable circumstances – hard labour, but better food and humane treatment – continued for a while (in early summer, I can’t work out any specific dates) until yet another move… 

‘The embankment and cutting completed, we moved on into the woods and, for a change, sampled tree-felling as an occupation. Most of us proved too physically impaired to swing an effective axe, but we could work steadily on a two-man crosscut saw. Our cheerful chief acknowledged this and procured more saws – whereas the average infantry or Landsturm officer would have driven us on with snarls and blows to swing axes until we dropped exhausted or injured ourselves.

     When a tree crashed down, we stripped off branches with hatchets and saws, trimmed the sturdier branches into useful lengths suitable for pit props etc, while the trunks would make telegraph poles or go to sawmills.

     When a path of the correct width had been cleared through the wood, we debouched on to a mainline railway and, having prepared the ground, track-laying commenced – the really heavy graft. We went back to where we’d started and began to lay a full-scale, single-line railway, replacing the light, narrow-gauge track we’d used when building up the embankment and cutting.

     Sleepers to be manhandled, laid, packed and secured – adding stone ballast to stabilise them – holes for bolts drilled, and finally the so-heavy lengths of steel rail to be carried and lowered into position. Experience taught us that the men carrying a rail must be placed in line with careful regard to height; a short man between two taller chaps would contribute nothing to the general effort – and effort it really was in our underfed condition.

     Despite that – how it happened I don’t know and I’m sure the slightly better food was only part of it – to me, the moral quality of that gang of fellow prisoners felt higher than that of most with whom I had recently lived. We responded to our engineer overseers – types superior to the Landsturm prison-camp guards – and especially to the sporty, cheerful officer in charge, by working to the best of our abilities and not scrounging; for the time being, our bearing returned to its former upright posture, the shrinking pariah stoop disappeared, and we began to feel like men again, instead of scruffy slaves behind barbed-wire fences.

     Those weeks provided a much-appreciated break from the dismal, hopeless routine of useless living endured in small, closely guarded Gefangenenlager(2)

However, something appeared to go wrong with the railway plan before we had completed it, and our next outing took us and our few miserable possessions to a station on the same main line which our single-line track would have joined.

     More British prisoners, strangers to us, had already assembled there and we all piled into railway wagons when ordered to do so. I managed to squat near a door which the guard kept open so that he could sit with his legs dangling out. Aged about 35, I reckoned, he took a keen interest in the passing views and, from time to time, drew a mouth organ from a tunic pocket and played or sang a tune.

     His face reminded me of several brothers who had lived near us in pre-war days, the Knappers – all hard-working house decorators and general handymen. Had they also been Germans I wondered, along with the Schmidts and Schulzes and others who disappeared so suddenly as war began?(3) When the musician gave a lively rendering of Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay(4), a song we in Britain had been singing around 1914, I wondered the more. He took little notice of us and never seemed to understand English when spoken to, so I may have been mistaken about him.

     German ingenuity solved a transport problem, even in those far-off days. Goods on railway wagons often had to be offloaded from lorries then, at their destination, transferred once more to a road vehicle. The Germans had means whereby they could replace a lorry’s wheels with railway wheels so that the lorry could then drive along the railway line! This I saw often in areas contiguous to the battlefield. They must have planned it pre-war, noting that their lorries fitted the width of French railway tracks too.

     Around this time, we occasionally encountered the sad sight of a train of flat railway trucks each carrying a captured British tank – on their way to the Fatherland for scrap, I guessed. On the other hand, more encouragingly we passed through Cambrai(5) which, on its eastern side, was just at that moment starting to come under fire from British long-range artillery.

     We first alighted from this train at a town called Saargemund(6). The guards led us across a great mass of railway lines and it seemed fortunate that we were not run down by a train as we lumbered and stumbled over track after track.

     With a few others, I found myself spending a couple of days “imprisoned” in an empty corner shop, from whose windows I scanned a dreary industrial scene, confirming we had entered that famous Saar manufacturing belt. A guard patrolled outside the shop and, twice each day, escorted us to another building to get our meagre rations.’

(2) Gefangenenlager: prison camps.

(3) ‘The German people so much a part of the community Sam grew up in around Edmonton, north London, all vanished around the time war was declared – they either fled or were interned, as described in the Memoir, Chapter 12.

(4) Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay: recorded by Bob Roberts on Albany Indestructible Cylinder in 1909, written by Americans Will D. Cobb (lyrics; 1876-1930, also co-wrote In The Good Old Summer Time, Goodbye Dolly Gray) and John H. Flynn (composer), but with a German-American lead character it seems: “Young Herman Von Bellow/A musical fellow/Played on a big cello each night/… And music so mellow/He sawed on his cello/She waltzed up to him and she cried,/‘Yip di ada di ay, di ay’”.

(5) Cambrai: a town I think he’d visited before, though he didn’t name it – it’s four miles south of the grim Sancourt POW camp where he spent several weeks in April-May, 1918 (Blogs 201 May 13 to 204 June 3) – but also 33 miles south-east of Arras on the road from Bapaume to Valenciennes; the First Battle Of Cambrai, November 20-December 3, 1917, saw one of the first deployments of tanks by the British Army – see Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s account at http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/cambrai_conandoyle.htm; the Second Battle Of Cambrai, October 8-10, 1918, was part of the Allies’ conclusive Hundred Days Offensive.

(6) Saargemund: now in the Moselle department of Lorraine, France; known as Sarreguemines when French (1766-1871, 1918-present); only a few words between Cambrai, above, and Saaregemund, but a long train journey – 406 kilometres southeast.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam, on a train to who-knows-where again, is shocked to encounter an affable Landsturm guard – then shamed by a mob of his fellow POWs fighting over food.

(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.

Sam and his latest travelling band of British POWs take a walk through the Hindenburg Line… then their hard labour resumes – building a railway. Which leads to the hair-raising story of how a pink mushroom saved Sam’s life…

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… After a hectic period during the previous seven days with the Central Powers aggressive on several Fronts, now the action subsided again, temporarily of course. 

    On the Western Front, while the Americans held the line in the lengthy Battle Of Belleau Wood (June 1-26; near the Marne), German attacks were repulsed by the French and British around Reims from Sillery to Trigny (18) and at Bligny (22), while the British advanced a little southwest of Meteren on the Lys in Nord-Pas-De-Calais department (23).

    Down in Italy, the Second Battle Of The Piave (June 15-24) saw the Italian Army hit back against the initial Austro-Hungarian onslaught on a very long front from north of Venice to the Asiago Plateau by taking Razea Pizzo and the heights of Sasso Asiago, gaining ground in the Grappa region and turning back the invader’s attempts to cross the Piave between Sant’Andrea and Fossalta (17), then occupying Capo Sile (18; just north of Venice). As the Austro-Hungarian push faltered, the French took mounts Betigo and Pennar on the Plateau, and the Italians mount Costalunga (19). The Austro-Hungarians called off their attack on the 20th and over the next few days the Italians regained all the ground they’d conceded (casualties 87,181 Italian with some British and French, 118,000 Austro-Hungarian). General Foch, Allied Commander-in-Chief in France urged the Italians to press on, but their General Diaz refused because his forces were too thinly spread – proven a good decision as, regardless, the Austro-Hungarian Army (and Empire) soon went into a tailspin of decline exacerbated by food riots back in Vienna.

    Aside from that, in the interesting aftermath of the Russian defeat and Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Central Powers, the Ottomans continued their advance in northern Persia and beyond – naturally with an eye on annexing some oil, but also with a degree of caution because their German allies were looking in the same direction. Still, they occupied Dilman in Azerbaijan, defeating the Armenian defenders (18).

[Memoirbackground: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016),had fought 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. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion.An interesting year ensued – many weeks of it passed in various northern hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, at Wharncliffe War Hospital, Sheffield). During that summer, his Company Officer told him he’d been offered the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; either this defiance brought about his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, 1917, he enjoyed the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocked about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – including the front line, just a few miles away. In mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras, on March 19… 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 OK 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.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Sam Sutcliffe, taken prisoner outside Arras at the tail-end of the German Spring Offensive and then part of randomly-assembled bands of POWs – wandering from Denain to Marchiennes to Sancourt, then lately, to Bapaume – had a somewhat encouraging time as he and his comrades helped fellow front-line soldiers, the wounded patients at a German field hospital. 

    Incoming “friendly” shells and bombers suggested they were quite close to advancing Allied forces, which perked them up. Then, a German newspaper brought Sam down to earth again as he read about the enemy’s successes in the battlefield and the peculiarly alarming fact that a long-range gun was bombarding Paris – “it became difficult to maintain faith in eventual victory,” he wrote.

    But soon the POWs resumed their travels – onward to a place where, in a strange incident, Sam’s aching hunger probably saved his life…

‘Soon, another move. The Germans put some of us on a train and, after a while, we alighted at an unidentifiable spot where we were quartered in a couple of huts. So well remembered, this place – especially because the evening stew had occasional chunks of meat among the stewed root vegetables; tough meat, undoubtedly horseflesh, but ranking as a luxury. And it meant the daybreak ersatz coffee with black bread could all be consumed as one meal now because we knew our bellies would be filled again later – until then most of us had tried to save a thin slice of the morning bread to avoid that horrible empty feeling throughout the night.

     The first day there provided another surprise, for the guards did not accompany us when we set off to work. Instead, alongside us walked several Germans armed with revolvers, not rifles, and wearing uniforms of a superior cut and caps with shiny black peaks and red-and-gold bands round the crown. Their chief wandered happily here and there around and among us.

     Presently, we came to an area where massive barbed-wire defences stretched right and left as far as the eye could see. They led us through a wide gap and we marched on, the barbed wire ranged on either side of us. Its great depth amazed me. I’d seen nothing so vast as this before – and the word passed quietly amongst us: “This must be the Hindenburg Line(2)”.

     The chief amused himself by shooting at the wood stakes securing the wire, or at the occasional can lying around. This kept him happy while demonstrating to us his good marksmanship and, possibly, the reason why the Jerries had dispensed with the usual guards.

We worked on railway construction, building a branch line through a wooded area to join a main line nearly a mile distant. We started on low ground, joining together pre-fabricated sections of light, narrow-gauge track and proceeding gradually uphill.

     With competent instructors, we learned quickly, levelling the ground and packing stones under cross-members. We soon completed the uphill part, then laid more track across the higher level for about a quarter of a mile, excavating earth on each side of it and shovelling the spoil into small metal tip-trucks – about 20 of them.

     When all the trucks were full, we’d begin pushing them, two men per truck, towards the downhill section. When the leading three trucks reached the start of the slope, each two-man crew mounted the small platform at the rear of their truck and applied the brakes by turning a wheel. When all appeared ready for the descent, the chief gave a signal, brakes were released, and with a push from the men waiting behind, the small train got under way. Speed increased, controlled by light touches on the brakes, and momentum carried the three trucks along a short length of level track at the bottom of the hill.

     Then we tipped the earth out of the trucks, making a ridge along one side of the track. Next train down tipped on the opposite side. While we were pushing our empty trucks back up the incline and loading at the top, others removed a short section of track, levelled out the ridges of earth we’d dumped, then replaced the track on this new, flat surface. The third train down would stop short of the raised section and start a repeat process.

     Repeating this operation day after day, we were lowering the higher ground and raising the lower, building a small embankment and a cutting. We grew familiar with our tasks so, on the loaded downhill run, we gradually increased speed by making less use of the handbrakes…

     One day, while pushing empty trucks uphill I noticed a pink mushroom growing alongside the track. On the next down run, I asked my mate to look after the brake as I was going to jump off and collect that mushroom. Although, as we approached the spot, I felt the train going much too fast I leapt off regardless, rolled over as I landed, and picked my small mushroom…

     Then I heard an awful noise down below and cries of pain. Several trucks had left the rails. Mine was at the bottom of the embankment, wheels uppermost. My mate had jumped clear as the truck ahead canted over, but several men were hurt and one badly crushed.

     The little, pink mushroom appeared to have saved me from injury or, possibly, death. I didn’t eat it after all, for that might have been tempting providence.’

(2) Hindenburg Line: or Siegfriedstellung built 1916-17 from Neuville Vitasse near Arras to Cerny En Laonnois near Reims (about 90 miles); its barbed-wire “fields” were up to 90 metres deep; the line remained intact until September, 1918, during the Allies’ Hundred Days Offensive, August 8-November 11

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and POW comrades continue their labours as railway navvies, doing the full John Henry, manhandling railway sleepers and steel rails – and feeling oddly strengthened and consoled by proper work, with respect from their guards (and the odd bit of horsemeat in the stew). But then they’re on the move again… to Germany, the Saar and impromptu temporary imprisonment in a corner shop!

(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.