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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… the
British launched their third substantial attack of the Ypres campaign, now
deploying new strategies conceived by General Herbert Plumer – he concentrated
on achieving limited objectives with a first wave of attackers, and moving on
to the next one with a second wave after that, which seems to have become
colloquially known as “leapfrogging”, though it sounds like common sense too.
He
applied this to The Battle Of The Menin Road Bridge (September 20-25), taking
the Gheluvelt Plateau by stages and largely succeeding though most of the gains
occurred on the first day: Inverness Copse, Glencorse Wood, Veldhoek and part
of Polygon Wood.
While
Russia still held a line east of Riga in Latvia, the German Army did attack
much further east, potentially outflanking the Russians at Lemburg (September
19), and Jacobstadt (21-22; held by the Russians for 18 months previously).
But
the Allies progressed steadily in southern Europe with the Italians
successfully attacking the Austro-Hungarians at Carzano, near Trentino
(September 18), the German attack in the Susitza Valley, Moldavia repulsed by
the Romanian Army (20), and combined French and Albanian forces pushing the
Austrian invaders back in the Skumbi Valley (20).
[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)…
until
officialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for
the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until
he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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, along with a bunch of other under-age
Tommies until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches again… An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a
meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then,
just after his 19th birthday on July 6, a few summer weeks stomping around
Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course leads him to hospital again, to
recover from some lurking effects of trench warfare and prepare him for more.
However, now I have to break off from the this-week-100-years-ago excerpts from
his Memoir because my father didn’t write enough about his year “out” to
provide 52 blog excerpts. So, for the next 10 weeks until November, before he
returns to France and the Front from December onwards, I’m revisiting his
previous accounts of historic battles as seen by an ordinary front-line Tommy –
the Somme and, first, Sam’s Gallipoli, his initiation into the realities of war.
He was a 17-year-old
Lance Corporal Signaller by the time his Battalion approached Suvla Bay,
Gallipoli, on the night of September 25, 1915.]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
In the first three weeks
of these episodes from Gallipoli, my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam
Sutcliffe went through all the novice soldier’s fundamental “firsts” – coming
under fire, losing comrades to shot and shell, poor food, frustration at lack
of any apparent purpose, anger at Generals lurking well away from danger (out
at sea in this case). But he also encountered some Suvla1915 specials like
crapping under fire, an excess of apricot jam and dearth of every other
nourishing comestible, near-death from a centipede bite and, to more people’s
astonishment than his own, having bombs dropped on him from a plane! None of them had ever heard of such a thing…
But we left him in the hilltop hole where, as a Signaller, he
spent much of his “tour”, on 24/7 rotation with an assistant/hole-mate, their
neighbours in adjacent trenches being a group of older, resourceful and very
comradely machine gunners, members of the Essex Regiment (to which,
coincidentally, Sam was transferred a year later).
Two months in, his current and least favourite companion was “a
sad little man called Harry Green”. But Harry’s tenure was about to be
concluded by the meteorological freak which assailed both sides as winter
approached…
‘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.’
** The Gallipoli blizzard
began on November 27, 1915; H Montgomery Hyde’s Strong For Service, the biography of Major Harry Nathan, by then
2/1st CO, notes 12,000 cases of frostbite and exposure arising on the British
and Commonwealth side in Gallipoli – in a letter home, Nathan wrote of “15
degrees of frost” (meaning a temperature of 17° Fahrenheit); he also
reports 280 men “drowned” in the mud produced by thawing snow and/or rain.
***
This suggests that, in reality, the arrangement, mentioned last week, 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.
Sam struggled back
towards his hill, hauling his feet out of the ice holes that constantly grabbed
at him, seriously worried that this climb could finish him. But then he had a lucky,
somewhat mysterious encounter when he peered into a short, covered side trench
and followed his nose:
‘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.’
****
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.
Finally he got back to
his glum assistant, Harry, only to find he’d done something really daft:
‘[He was] 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.’
Over the next few days
the weather eased. Stories passed around about men drowning in flooded trenches
or freezing to death. Sam felt cheerier when an old friend from the Battalion’s
early days, Peter Nieter, arrived in his hilltop hole to serve as his
assistant. However, he was about to become the unwitting cause of a tragedy he
regretted to the marrow:
‘Attached once more to the regular Essex boys for rations,
we fared well. And I had my disused trench for water – it remained several feet
deep for some time. However, fetching it became risky because a sniper had
spotted my movements as I darted hither and thither to fox his aim.
I carried a can to
which I had tied a length of string to lower it into the trench. I would climb
out of our trench and dash several yards, freeze there for a moment while I
pictured John Turk taking aim at me, then make another short dash while the
bullet smacked somewhere behind me. One more pause, then run to the trench,
lower and raise the can, and return via another pause or two before a final,
fearful charge back to and into our trench, having retained as much water in
the can as possible. The bullets always seemed to arrive at the spot near where
I had last paused. But I was careful to operate in poor light, morning and
evening, because I had rightly assumed that the sniper was a good shot…
So you can imagine
my sorrow when two Essex men laid a boy on a firing step just opposite my hole,
pointed to a wound in his chest, and told me the lad had attempted to copy my
water-getting dash in broad daylight. Probably he didn’t bother about foxing
the sniper either. He belonged to the Hampshire Regiment, but an Essex man had
watched his progress, seen him wounded, and with a pal had risked death to drag
him in.
I phoned Brigade
HQ for stretcher-bearers, but doubted if the lad would live – the bullet had
pierced a lung. We fixed his field dressing over the entry wound, but I dared
not move him to search for the exit, which may well have been a gaping hole. As
I tried to keep him warm and give him support such as I could in response to
those frightened eyes, I felt quite old in spite of my mere 17 years. He – the
first wounded man I’d had to deal with – was even younger than I.
The
stretcher-bearers were gentle with him; I knew only too well they would have to
climb out of trenches in several places where a stretcher could not be
accommodated; in full view of the Turk, they would have to rely on his
clemency.
Thereafter, I
stayed away from the watery trench and made do with such water as the machine
gunners could spare for me.’
As ever, he knuckled down
to the gruelling work of getting through the next day and the next… until a
surprise move offered him a taste of Brigade HQ luxury – luxury Gallipoli-style
anyway; it still involved getting shot at quite a lot.
‘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.’
****** See blog September
3, Gallipoli Rewind 2 – Turkish snipers would set up a series of rifles on
tripods in different locations, aim fixed at one spot, and fire them in
sequence.
While at HQ, he got a
further perspective on the suffering of comrades in his Battalion and others:
‘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 frostbitten 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.’
But then, “well into
December”, his replacement on the hilltop got a fever and Sam was the only
suitable replacement, so he rejoined Nieter – bringing with him the persistent
rumour at least that, finally, evacuation was on the cards. Nothing official
though. In fact, Sam and Nieter soon encountered a General on the front line
for the first, and probably only time, in their humble military careers:
‘… one
day, as I squatted in a trench and chatted with one of the Essex men, a sort of
apparition appeared; it was a large man, somewhat florid of countenance,
wearing much red braid on collar, epaulettes and around his cap.
As he approached we stood up – not wishing to be trodden on –
and our action unexpectedly put the cat among the pigeons. “Why the devil are
these men standing to attention?” he roared. “If this happens again I’ll have
everybody put on fatigue duty out on top collecting cans and rubbish in broad
daylight!” He squeezed past us, quite a beefy gentleman, followed by a retinue,
the first few of whom also carried much red tape on their uniforms. Several
ordinary officers followed, looking almost shabby compared with the top brass.
An Essex Sergeant brought up the rear and, in answer to my
questioning look, he said, “General De Lisle******, General Officer Commanding
this Army”.
I considered the incident and the strange logic it suggested.
The General bellowed at us for standing to attention – although that was what
we were supposed to do when an officer approached – because it might expose our
heads to enemy snipers. His loud voice was calculated to scare all within
earshot, including, I guessed, his escorting officers. Yet he must have known
that his own head, with its red-braided cap, would regularly bob up above the
lip of the trench as he proceeded with his inspection. And apparently that
didn’t matter. A fine bravado perhaps. Except that he was the General Officer
Commanding wilfully risking death…
Thereafter, I assumed that General Ian Hamilton had at last
packed it in*******. When I told witty Nieter of my assumption, he pointed out
that this change at the top would not necessarily mean rapid promotion for me.’
****** General Sir Henry Beauvoir De Lisle (1864-1955),
commissioned 1883, fought in the Second Boer War, then on the Western Front in
1914, until his transfer to Gallipoli; returned to the Western Front, including
the Somme, 1916-18; www.firstworldwar.com/bio/delisle.htm suggests De Lisle
wasn’t popular among the troops – and did not seek to be so
– and that his commander in Gallipoli, Sir William Birdwood,
referred to him as “a brute“; but he did at least go ashore, in the noisily
eccentric manner my father encountered, to see “every corner of Suvla” for
himself.
******* General
Sir Ian Hamilton had actually departed some while earlier, on October 16 (replaced by Lieutenant General
Sir Charles Monro); but, clearly,
nobody told the Poor Bloody Infantry who commanded them at any given moment.
In due course, frightfully
hush-hush preparations for evacuation became apparent:
‘Christmas
Day coming up… All we were missing was the Christmas tree, the holly, the
oranges, Christmas puddings, iced cakes and booze. We did have ample bully
beef, hard biscuits, tea, tinned milk, sugar and, because of our Army’s reduced
numbers, two or three pints of water each day…
No one talked about the fuses and detonators so carefully
installed by the engineers all along the front trench, but we hoped they would
bang off at regular intervals and kid the Turks that our positions were still
manned for a long while after the last soldier had put to sea on a lighter.
That was one of our really fervent hopes – another, that perhaps the Turks knew
we were lighting out and would be up on their hill laughing fit to bust.
At the same time, we did know that, when the time came for us to
slip away and leave John Turk once again in possession of his strip of
territory, halfway through the operation hordes of screaming enemy soldiery
might suddenly descend from the high hills which formed a sort of semi-circle
around the area held by the British, Australian and New Zealand armies…
Impatient and excited, under a partial moon, I waited one night
for a code word over the headphones. When it came I passed the word “Now” along
the line and machine guns were dismantled, our signal lines disconnected,
container satchels hung over our shoulders, and rifles and all equipment taken
with us, as we all very quietly moved beachwards in a single line. By then, all
troops in forward positions had already departed********.
I took whispered farewells of our kindly Essex pals, left the
file, and joined the remnant of our own Battalion assembled there, awaiting the
order to move beachwards.
This was when we heard about an unfortunate young man who had
just been killed, a member of H Company from when we first enlisted… Most unexpectedly on this quiet night, a
bullet had struck him in the upper arm. The man with him applied the first
field dressing, which every soldier carried in a special pocket. But, in the
dark, nobody saw the blood welling from a severed artery, or perhaps something
better could have been done to control the bleeding. By the time they were able
to get him into skilled hands he had bled to death…
With no undue hurry, we got aboard those all-metal lighters once
more and chug-chugged away. On a calm sea we transferred without any real
accident to a smallish steamboat — it
accommodated all who were left of our big Battalion; many had died, but more
had gone away sick, some wounded*********…
Soon, out of sight of the
explosions, some singing started up, our first for many a day. And then we
really gave vent to the joy and relief we felt. A youngster who had obliged at
concerts back in Malta climbed to a position by the bridge and sang a quickly improvised
parody of that popular song, Moonlight Bay: “We were sailing away from Suvla
Bay/We can hear the Turks a-singing/‘Please don’t go away/You are breaking our
hearts/So please do stay’/‘Not bloody likely, boys/Goodbye to Suvla Bay’”. All
joined in, inventing their own versions as we sang along time after time.’
******** Hyde’s Nathan biography notes the Battalion’s
evacuation taking place on December 18-19, Saturday to Sunday overnight.
********* I think I remember my father saying
that 147 came out “unscathed”, although in the text a little earlier he refers
to around 200 being still active immediately after the late-November blizzard
and, soon, he mentions that figure again; I couldn’t find any official figures.
The relief from danger,
the reunion with what was left of his Battalion, the singing… for some hours
and days to come, Sam basked in hopes for the future…
‘… soiled and unbathed, skinny almost to the point of
emaciation, I was yet full of hope and joy because life once more offered
prospects, changes of scene, sound and smell, and the luxury of sleeping with a
roof of some sort over one’s head – a happy spell of rest and re-adjustment.
So optimism and
smiles all round were the order of the day. It would take time to build us up
to general fitness and the Battalion to its full numerical strength, time in
which we hoped to live a better sort of life than had been our lot recently.’
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Gallipoli Rewind 5 (the last): Sam experiences more mixed
emotions: the wretchedness of the collective sense of failure mitigated by the
joy of a reunion with his brother Ted whom he’d last seen in Egypt, letters
from home, free beer and Christmas cheer… but then on Boxing Day, their worst
nightmare, they’re ordered to return to Gallipoli!
* 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.
