Sam and POW comrades move to another makeshift camp; they sleep 10 to a wooden shelf, their latrine open to the world – Sam sticks with his Essex Sergeant and Tommies and carves a Regimental scroll on the wall listing all his fellows in case a victorious British Army ever passed that way…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli&Somme episodemini-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… The scope of the war declared itself again at a point when the Western Front concluded one vast, slaughterous action sequence and took a momentary quietish break.

    The Battle Of The Scherpenburg (April 29; in Belgium, southwest of Ypres) saw a German attack capture this hill from the French, but get no further. Thus, it brought the second phase of the Spring Offensive, dubbed Operation Georgette or the Battle Of The Lys, to a close as the Germans acknowledged failure to achieve any of their major objectives, especially driving the British back to the Channel ports and taking the railway hub at Hazebrouck.

    Not that deadly scrapping ceased altogether – other action during the week included a substantial German attack between Meteren and Voormezelle repulsed by the British (April 29; Flanders, southwest of Ypres), the French retaking and defending Locre (29; also Flanders), fighting around Noyon (30; Oise department, southeast of Amiens), and French gains in the Avre valley between Hailles and Castel (May 2; also southeast of Amiens, Somme department).

    On the former Eastern Front, German enforcement manoeuvres continued: with the Finnish White Guards (anti-socialist Civil Guard), they captured Viborg (April 30; 250 miles east of Helsinki – then Finland’s second city, now in Russia) and defeated the Red Guards in the southwest (May 3); they took Sevastopol on the Black Sea, seized part of the Russian fleet there, occupied Odessa too (also on the coast, 550 miles northwest of Sevastopol), and quashed Ukraine’s independence ambitions by establishing a German military dictatorship (all on May 1 according to various timelines!).

    Meanwhile, down in Palestine, the British/Indian/Anzac Second Attack On Transjordan failed much like the first, in early April, as Ottoman troops under German command beat back their early advances at Shumet Nimrin and Es Salt, intended as staging posts to take Amman (April 30-May 4; Allied casualties 1,700, Ottoman 2,000). And in Iraq, steady British progress continued with the taking of Tuz Khurmati (April 30; 55 miles south of Kirkuk).

    Finally, in East Africa, the long conflict saw another heavy defeat for the German colonial power as British forces beat them at Nanungu (May 5; now in Tanzania, about 440 miles southwest of Dar es Salaam) and drove them northeast.

[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 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.An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations andprepare for more of the same (he was 19 while in hospital). During that period, 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; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, he enjoyed what proved to be the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January 1917/8, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocking about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by 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, it turned out, 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, taken prisoner.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Sam Sutcliffe, a 2/7th Essex Regiment Signaller taken prisoner at Fampoux outside Arras at the tail-end of the German Spring Offensive on March 28, wrote mostly about food – lack of, every POW’s obsession towards the end of WW1.

    He’d been shuffled into a POW group for whom the Germans planned no fixed abode, just endless shifting from one place to another where manual work needed doing (because their labour force had been conscripted, of course), so the succession of POW “camps” were all makeshift. At Denain, his first, for an unspecified few weeks, they lodged in an abandoned factory with nothing to do bar watch their self-respect drain away via hunger and general neglect.

    His consolation was that he attached himself to a remarkably spick-and-span Sergeant of his own Regiment and a group of Essex men around him. And when a squad was assembled to move elsewhere, they stuck together – though mingled with some northerners who became their instant rivals for every scraping of nourishment.

    Now they arrive and examine their new lodgings:

‘We stopped in a village which looked remarkably like one I’d known in Northumberland(2) – several rows of small, terrace houses near a coal pithead. Called Marchiennes(3), it looked a poor sort of place. A row of terrace dwellings on one side of the main street had been enclosed behind barbed-wire fencing. Through a gate we entered the enclosure and found there were no gardens behind the houses, just a long, open space inside the wire fence. There stood the primitive sanitation, comprising a long pole suspended over a trench by means of a crude tripod at each end. So, in full view of all, you and others squatted on the pole and got rid of your always-watery faeces.

     Everything calculated to reduce a man to the lowest level of self-respect was provided.

     About 60 of us were allotted to each dwelling: two rooms upstairs, two down, all small and furnished with two shelves, six feet wide and running wall to wall, one a foot off the floor, the other three feet higher. On each of these wooden shelves eight or ten men must lie and sleep – so, 16 or more prisoners in a space normally occupied by two people at most.

     Unfortunately, I found myself in a room mainly occupied by strangers. I soon got into the habit of leaving it and them quite early in the morning to call on the Sergeant and others of the Essex Regiment. Then I stayed among them as long as I possibly could.

     I eventually justified myself in spending several hours daily in the Sergeant’s room by starting to carve into one of the plaster walls a large-scale copy of the Regimental badge. Below this, with a pencil lent by the Sergeant, I drew a sort of scroll. Having collected the names and numbers of all Essex men in the prison, I spent hours writing them into the scroll – my idea being that, as the British beat back the Germans when the tide of war changed in our favour, British troops could note our names and numbers and tell the War Office and relatives we were alive, though prisoners in enemy hands.

     Up to that point, our captors had made no attempt to record our names and details, so our people would not know what had become of us. Correct procedure would have ensured that this information was passed on through the Red Cross organisation in a neutral country but, in my case and in many others, this did not happen(4).

     Discomfort caused by lack of nourishment spoilt all our waking hours. The morning piece of black bread and the evening can of stewed vegetables hardly filled the belly and the can of hot water with coffee substitute was warming but lacked milk and sugar. The only dietary variant at Marchiennes I recall: for several days, Sauerkraut replaced stew as our main meal – nothing with it, no meat, just sour cabbage. Shitting being one of our main occupations, much discussion concerned which meal made you go oftenest, the stew or the sauerkraut, but we had no measurable means of deciding the question.

     The mental effect of such deficient nutrition depended on the individual; I concluded that the men who had lived rough, hard lives before enlisting fought the hardest to grab anything which could possibly be eaten – such as cabbage stumps or potato peelings which the Landsturm(5)or their cooks might throw on the ground outside their kitchen.

     Despite the guards’ vigilance, I heard that a woman passing outside the barbed wire at one end of the enclosure exchanged some food for a piece of cloth a Scotsman tore from his kilt. I also learned that he might as well have kept his uniform intact for little of the food passed his lips after the ravenous ones had pounced; lucky for the Scotsman they didn’t devour him too, although some of them had begun to display animal looks and tendencies.

     No one smiled any more; the effort required was just too much, even for the nicest fellows.’

(2) Cramlington, probably, winter 1916-17; see Blogs 142-3 March 26 and April 2, 2017.

(3) Marchiennes: in the Nord department, 32.5 miles east of Arras, known for it’s 7th-century Benedictine abbey; over the centuries it passed back and forth between Flanders, France and Holland; the town and the mine feature extensively, aliased, in Émile Zola’s Germinal.

(4) I’ve got one Red Cross document facsimile suggesting they were informed, but certainly no aid parcel ever reached my father – quite possibly because of the peripatetic nature of the mixed bands of POWs he passed through until Armistice.

(5) 3rd-class infantry employed on the lowlier military tasks such as guarding POWs, comprising any male aged between 17 and 42 who wasn’t in the standing Army, the Landwehr.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam’s brought down by bunk mate’s singing, but still inspired by the Sergeant… until a sudden separation from all the Essex POWs sees him on a long march to somewhere… and seeing POW guard brutality at its murderous worst.

(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’s first night as a POW: a Ruritanian-uniformed, but cunning German officer interrogates him and his randomly gathered comrades – just a few details about the British trench system… the POWs dine on uncooked salt fish, then “bed down” in a freezing brickyard.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli&Somme episodemini-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… With the Spring Offensive derailed by terrain, stubborn Allied defence and stretched German supply lines, General Ludendorff refused to back down and launched a follow-up with Operation Georgette which led to the Battle Of The Lys (April 7-29).

    Aiming to drive the British back to the Channel and cut off the Ypres salient, it became a freewheeling sequence of battles. Initially, in Flanders, the British had to fall back beyond Messines and Wyteschaete (April 10) and they withdrew a few kilometres from hard-won Passchendaele (12), but at the Battle Of Estaires British and Portuguese troops held the Germans (9-11; southwest of Armentières in France), the British and Australians did the same at the Battle Of Hazebrouck (12-15; northwest of Armentières).

    Meanwhile, the French had to yield ground at the Forest Of Coucy and Landricourt (April 8; 48 kilometres south of St Quentin), but they held the line between Hangard and Noyon (9; southeast of Amiens), and, with the Americans, at Apremont Forest (12; 47 kilometres south of Verdun).

    Elsewhere, action remained sporadic and inconclusive apart from the Turkish advance into the Transcaucasia region (in the absence of the Russian Army), taking Batum (April 13; in Georgia).

[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 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.An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations andprepare for more of the same (he was 19 while in hospital). During that period, 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; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, he enjoyed what proved to be the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January 1917/8, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocking about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by 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, it turned out, for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, continued his account of, I guess, the longest day of his life – he wrote so much about it I’ve run it over several weeks of the blog.

    On March 28, 1918, he and his 2/7th Essex Regiment comrades at Fampoux, outside Arras, fought to the last bullet, as ordered, against their bit of the German Spring Offensive. Officially, at the start of the day the Battalion comprised 520 men, at the end, 80. Of course, the 440 included dead, wounded and those, like my father, taken POW.

    At first, that new experience comprised wandering the battlefield in the general direction of the German artillery, helping a wounded Tommy to a Red Cross medic and getting robbed of his pay book and other minor valuables by a gang of German muggers (he knew of Brits doing similar – war…) until he found a bunch of randomly gathered fellow prisoners. Shortly, they were marched to a nearby town, Gavrelle, 11 kilometres northeast of Arras, and recaptured from the British by the German advance that very day – it’s still March 28!

‘A hundred or so British prisoners joined us there, then we straggled on along the country road in no particular formation. I found myself walking between two fairly hefty chaps and we chatted about our recent experiences. I remember telling them about my little store of canned baked beans and pork, lost beyond recall now… perhaps being eaten by appreciative Jerries(2).

     Although these men wore uniforms of rough, khaki cloth similar to mine, the cut struck me as unusual – larger side pockets, for instance. Looking at their epaulettes for some sign of their Regiment I saw officer’s pips, and, though now wondering how protocol worked under prisoner-of-war conditions, I asked about their rank. Without reticence or demanding officer standing, they talked freely, explaining that, at the battlefront – although not in my Battalion – it had become accepted practice for officers to conceal conspicuous indications of their status because the Germans knocked off those in command as quickly as possible to create confusion among the other ranks.

     We turned on to one of those absolutely straight, cobbled roads bordered by tall poplar trees which connected French country towns in those days. A signpost indicated it led to Douai. But, after a few kilometres, our guards led us into a brickworks surrounded by a high, barbed-wire fence. Kilns, rows of unfired clay-coloured bricks, stacks of finished ones — a scene familiar to me in boyhood when a similar site had been a favourite playground and setting for the mock warfare I described earlier(3) cowboys versus Red Indians and so on…

     Not having eaten for a day or more, I felt weary and worn, and more so because of reaction to the nervous strain of the battle. So when a German officer suddenly joined a small group of us, it provided me with a kind of relief from personal suffering. His beautiful uniform looked Ruritanian when compared with the simple dress of a British officer. We, dirty and soiled from the battlefield, felt like scruffy old tramps beside this military Brummel.

     His personal cleanliness, healthy complexion, friendly blue eyes behind large spectacles, perfect English speech – and enthusiasm for a little war game he proposed to play – seemed ideal distractions to help us forget our discomforts. Some chaps may even have felt that a response to his wish to complete the few details at present missing from his sketch-map of the trench system we had recently vacated might gain them some advantage, such as much-needed grub. Anyway, if their wits were still sufficiently bright, they had only to give him inaccurate information. Even if he detected a falsehood, what the heck would it matter?

     I was amazed at the detail he had already, displayed on a large sheet of paper secured to a board. Built up from aerial photos and, in parts, skilful drawings, it even named some of our trenches. He just needed to identify some Regiments, he said, oddments of that sort, perhaps the number of men at some given point… I found myself in no difficulty because I just didn’t know any of these things(4).

     The only food they gave us that day was a piece of uncooked salt fish and that induced us to fill our bellies with lots of the water they did make available.

     Our sleeping quarters that night? We had two choices — to lie on grass completely exposed to the March weather, or to bed down on brick dust. If you could lie on one side with your back against a brick stack you were lucky. If you found space in the open centre of a pile of bricks you had four walls around you, but no roof overhead – yet, in the circumstances, you were very fortunate. No blankets, no overcoats and March nights are chilly.

     Thinking back to my relatively secure quarters in the British front line and, again, with regret, to the canned food I had stored in the niches of that dugout – and abandoned only hours earlier – I spent the first of many horribly uncomfortable nights as a prisoner of war. One slept, no doubt, but seemed, as day dawned, to remember every minute of the long night.’

(2) Sam’s food cache comprised tins he’d swapped for tots of rum – which he’d never liked – and stored among the rafters of the Company’s front-line dugout (his base as a Signaller). See Blog 190 February 2, 2018: “As I surveyed my little hoard, I felt secure against the probable non-delivery of rations which must soon occur as the bombardment intensified”.

(3) The brickfields in Edmonton, north London, served as adventure playgrounds, 1900s style, as described in the Memoir’s childhood section, Chapters 3-6 and 9. Douai is 16 kilometres east of Gavrelle.

(4) It may be that this officer, or a more lowly assistant, gathered the bare details of the men taken POW listed on the German document, sourced from the Red Cross, shown in the “pictures” section of The Survivore-book (which includes the Arras/Fampoux battle). I’ll copy the page below – sorry size makes it hard to read; magnifying glasses still have their uses! – my father is listed as number 75, the last named on this page. Of course, he’s listed as Charles, his first name, although everyone called him Sam. Another illustration of how war might produce a documentary fog is the coincidence that three places above him is a Samuel Sutcliffe of the 2nd King’s Fusiliers, aged 24, from Todmorden, also detained at Gavrelle on the night of March 28.

All the best– FSS

My father is listed as Charles Suttcliffe (sic), 2nd Essex, taken at (well, near) Gavrelle 28/3/1918, and "Nicht Verw." means "not wounded" (Nicht verwundet).

Next week: Sam’s first full day as a POW: on the move again to a derelict factory converted to a camp of sorts; looking around Sam sees how being a prisoner demoralises and dehumanises good men and starts to take steps to hold on to himself for as long as possible…

(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.

Gallipoli Rewind 4: The great Gallipoli snowstorm; Sam risks snipers to beg HQ for food. But then an interlude of plenty… and the best gift of all, the evacuation of Suvla Bay for Christmas!

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir* in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode 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… 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.