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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… The
action hardly ceased in all theatres – deaths and woundings at the heart of
every movement – and yet nothing of overwhelming significance occurred. Strange,
if not uncommon, disjunction between the perspectives of individual life and
historic event…
While
America edged a little closer to entering the war (President Wilson’s move to
arm merchant ships held back by the Senate, though), on the Western Front the
British and French advanced on the Ancre (February 26-March 4 taking various
villages in the region of Bapaume, including Gommecourt where my father had
fought on July 1, 1916) and on the Somme (March 4, near Bouchavesnes), and the
Aisne and the Oise (March 4, near Mouvron).
But
offsetting this seeming triumphant progress was the growing awareness that the
German Army had begun working to a more or less orchestrated plan (February
23-April 5) to retreat to the Hindenburg Line of defences constructed since the
previous autumn, and hold their ground thereafter, having left a tract of
scorched earth behind them.
On
the Eastern Front, the faltering Russian Army responded to German advances near
Riga, Latvia, and the Narajowka river, now Ukraine (both March 2) with gas
attacks north of Lake Naroch (3), and Krevo (4), both now in Belarussia.
Further south, in Romania the Russians lost positions near Jakobeny to Germany (February
27). But another wing of the desperately scattered Russian forces recaptured
Hamadan in eastern Persia (March 2).
Italy
too proved its enduring resilience, by holding off a renewed Austrian attack on
the Asiago Plateau (February 28) and leading the Allies’ defence of hard-won
Monastir, Serbia (March 3).
Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli
veteran (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016) Corporal
Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the
Kensingtons (Blogs
dated May 15 to September 25, 2016)… Until
officialdom told him they had noticed his age – 18 on July 6, legally too young
for the battlefield – and that he could take a break from the fighting until
his 19th birthday. So he did, though not without a sense of guilt. Via Harfleur
and London, 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 training and making their own entertainment until they severally became
eligible for the trenches once more. However, for some, including Sam, all
military activity is halted by a substantial spell in a hospital isolation unit
because of a meningitis outbreak. There, his health goes from bad to worse…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, my father’s physical decline
continued – according to his veteran doctor, caused more by the hardships of war
than the meningitis bacteria and German measles viruses he was wrestling with.
He triggered a crisis himself by deliriously wandering out into the Harrogate
snow for a walk “because I was so hot”. Result: a swollen groin, boils, sores.
But,
while irrationally hiding what he’d done from the medics, he did some
self-healing with some ointment which had cured his prickly heat in Egypt(!)
plus the good food, hot baths and increasingly fond care provided by his
regular night nurse. This week, their relationship reaches a predictable – and
then rather surprising – crescendo:
‘She liked to sit by my bed early in her shift and talk or
listen – more of the latter than the former, I now suspect, since most young
men think they know it all. Then when duty demanded that she move on, she would
bestow a hearty “goodnight” kiss on me and depart till around 4am when, in
those post-Florence Nightingale days, the round of washings and bed-makings had
to begin – and, no doubt as part of her therapy, a well-delivered kiss would
rouse me and have me heading for my bath while she attended to sheets and
pillows.
While the thought
of going beyond these little embraces never reached anything pertaining to what
is today called sex, this little nurse, Flo, certainly became a very effective
part of the super treatment I received; lithe, petite, and with almost tiny,
rabbit teeth showing below her shapely upper lip. From the first, she was, in
my book, just the type my dear old mentor Frusher** would have me protect from
her own generous weaknesses. I recalled anew his instruction that a gentleman
would not permit a lady to do anything she would be reluctant to talk about
with her mother.
His influence had
to control and hold me back one morning in particular. Before any apparent activity
began in the corridors outside my room, Nurse Flo came in, kissed me even more
warmly than usual and stood looking down at me as I lay there. So I sat up in
bed, put my feet down on the floor, and looked at her, trying to read her
thoughts, fears, intentions. Her face paled, she stepped back from the bed and
threw open the doors of the large cupboard behind her. She stood there
concealed, she must have hoped, from observation, pale-faced and trembling.
“No, no, don’t,” she said, as I stepped towards her. And I had no intention of
taking advantage of her reaction to natural forces. Certainly, I had the
feeling of a needle irresistibly drawn to her magnet. I believe I got the
correct message, I believe I thought quickly around the situation, perhaps guessed
what was happening to her; I returned her kiss, grabbed my bath towel and went
for my morning splash.
The moment passed,
I had my bath, and we were good friends. So much so that she gave me her
address near Sheffield, with the hope that we might meet there sometime. With
hindsight I can see that she must have thought me a dull dog, but the very fact
that I was so safe in sometimes extremely intimate circumstances may have
offered some compensating features for her – although, now, I suspect that
repeated consummation blots out all fears during the early stages of an affair,
until the pudding-club indications appear, and then you have two really scared
people.’
** The
Vicar/choirmaster/scoutmaster/music teacher Mr Frusher was a key formative
influence on my father – as this week’s excerpt suggests, perhaps the strongest
reason for his remaining a virgin throughout the war (albeit not for long
afterwards, I gather; he did have some oats to sow). Here’s Sam’s pen-portrait
of his mentor (from the early part of the Memoir where he wrote in the third
person and called himself “Tommy”): ‘of medium height, well-built, wearing a
beard, pointed, and the then fashionable pince-nez. Most days he wore a frock
coat with a silk hat and striped trousers. Tommy used to love looking at the
boots he wore; without toecaps, of fine soft leather, kept in good condition by
his housekeeper. He was one of those cold-bath-in-the-morning men. He would
sometimes describe with relish how he had broken the ice.’ Apart from music,
religion and outdoor activities, Mr Frusher also decided to fill the vacuum
left by a total lack of sex education in school – even anatomical diagrams left
a blank where the sex organs ought to have been. Naturally, his teaching of a
teenaged boys church group came predicated with his own variant on the period’s
and the CofE’s morality: ‘“Frankness in these matters kills morbid curiosity,”
he would say… In a sensible way, he described the feelings contact between the
sexes could arouse, the actions and the results that would follow: the girls in
trouble, the unwanted babies; the worry, regret, fear; the difficulties which
beset a young man who has fathered a bastard. He drew this picture so
impressively the lads were never likely to forget. In fact, he constantly impressed
upon them that sexual intercourse before marriage was wrong, a crime, it must
never even be considered, let alone indulged in… he wished the lads to grow up
as what he called “gentlemen”. The girl being so constituted that marriage and
child-bearing were the most important things in her life, she would generally
submit to a man’s desires – after a certain amount of caressing had taken place
– in spite of any advice she may have received. Mr Frusher’s conclusion: the
man – stronger, physically and mentally – had a bounden duty to accept responsibility
and ensure that nothing occurred, when the girl was in his care, which he could
not freely reveal to her parents. The final word had a memorable simplicity to
it: chivalry.’
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam, still in
the isolation unit, resists the Siren calls of an “old” Army nurse, continues
his friendship with Flo and has a farewell talk with the sagacious doctor who’d
diagnosed him as, basically, sick from the war and decided to build him up with
some decent food and care.
* 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.
