Sam, still in hospital, resists the Siren calls of an “old” Army nurse, then says farewell to the sagacious doctor who diagnosed him as, basically, sick from war…

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… After two years of mainly bogged-down warfare, the British Army on the Western Front experienced the strange sensation of pushing an open door as the Germans extended their strategic withdrawal – on the Ancre from March 11 they fell back to a reserve line from Le Transloy to Serre known as R. II Stellung, and further south, on the 10th, a British advance around Peronne and Irles brought the retreat to the Hindenburg line forward by a couple of weeks. Still, the French made hard-fought gains at the Butte de Mesnil/Maisons de Champagne salient (March 8).

    In the east, the Russians still raised a show of defiance despite the overstretching of their forces and food problems at home. Although their attack at Brzezany failed (March 6; Ukraine), they beat back a German advance near Mitau (8; Latvia) – and down in Romanian Moldavia they helped to recapture the Magyaros Ridge from the Germans (10).

    Fighting in Macedonia and the Dolomites proceeded inconclusively (the Allies v. Germany/Bulgaria and Italy v. Austria).

    Down in the southern Middle East, the Allies had a good week. The Russians pushed the Turks back in Kangavar (March 5), on the Hamadan road (8), and in Kirmanshah (11; all in western Persia), and also took Sinnah (9; Kurdistan). More significantly, the British Mesopotamian Campaign, having recaptured Kut on February 24, pressed on to take Baghdad (8-11) – undefended as the Ottoman Army continued their retreat along the Tigris and evacuated the city before fighting could begin.

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, then the temporary collapse of his general health (the doctor’s diagnosis: the profound effects of trench warfare)… which oddly leads him to a kind of Boy Scoutish romance.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father began his recovery from threatened meningitis, full-on German measles and a range of boils and sores which his amiable old doctor in the isolation wards at Harrogate hospital put down to the after-effects of everything he’d been through in the front line at Gallipoli and the Somme – from poor food and sanitation to the emotional upheaval caused by shot, shell and the suppression of constant fear.

    His chief support in this had been little Nurse Flo and, naturally, they started to fall for one another. But Sam, clinging to the principles of sexual conduct set out by his vicar/choirmaster/Scoutmaster back in Edmonton, resisted temptation to steal anything more than a kiss, while Flo remained both professionally attentive and friendly as ever:

‘Soon I was over the measles and able to walk freely about the hospital. One day, when I passed the door of the small ward next to mine, a voice called, “Come in and have a chat!” I stood just inside the door, in case one of the staff came along. There were three beds, a girl of perhaps 20 occupied the middle one, with two women whom I guessed to be approaching 40 on either side of her.

     I learned that the older women were both Army nursing Sisters who had contracted German measles. They were mad about that! They smoked most of the time – unusual for women back then. The girl said little; she seemed overwhelmed by the presence of a male in her bedroom. What she felt later when, just as I was deciding to leave, one of the old’uns invited me to join her in bed I never knew. It sounded like a serious request and had the support of the other ancient — as they both appeared to me.

     Adjudged non-infectious, I was transferred to a four-bed ward and looked forward to a few days in male company as a change from the solitude of the isolation block – relieved only at intervals by nurses’ visits and my own wanderings. But no one joined me there, and so the evening talks with Flo, my affectionate nurse, became the high spots of each of my remaining days in that hospital.

     Came a morning when the Pickwickian, benign, round, pince-nez-adorned face of the head man looked at me across the empty ward, and I walked over and expressed my gratitude for all the care and kindness that had come my way since he had admitted me to this fine hospital.

     Pleased to know I had benefitted from my treatment, while he examined me for the last time, he questioned me about conditions in those places where I had seen service. My remarks about widespread dysentery among our men on the Gallipoli Front gave rise to enquiries from him about food, hygiene, sanitation and water supplies, details of which – or, rather, of their absence – remained fresh in my mind. I told him about how superior were troop-care methods on the French Front when conditions allowed their application**.

     I thanked him again, particularly for treating me on a civilian footing, and he deemed me fit to return to the small Army-hut hospital and to resume treatment for the CSM** contact throat trouble.

     Right away, my scruffy old underwear was returned to me, I dressed, climbed into an ambulance, and within a few minutes I was back in the hut where the lads still underwent the daily ritual of the many-spouted, copper boiler emitting jets of formaldehyde-laden steam.’

** See Blog 65 October 4, 2015 for Sam’s detailed account of Gallipoli front-line trench sanitation and Blog 99 May 29, 2017, for the same re the Somme/Western Front.

*** CSM is cerebrospinal meningitis, then colloquially known as “spotted fever”. Outbreaks quite often assailed troops confined together in barracks or other crowded accommodations, so they were hit by the three meningitis waves of early 1915, 1916 and 1917. Harrogate was north of the worst-hit areas, but presumably some inadvertent carrier brought the bacteria to them. See recent Blogs 135 February 5 and 136 February 12 for the story of how Sam and some of his underage pals became carriers and were sent to isolation wards, though he mentions only one of them succumbing to the disease itself.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam enjoys the “unbelievably cushy existence” of the isolation ward/huts for a little longer. Then it’s back to the Battalion and its nasty CO, the “unhappy, unjust” Captain Tarquin…

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

Sam 18 as potential meningitis victim gets wonderfully archaic treatment involving formaldehyde and a boiler… before astute Doc. realises it’s really Gallipoli and the Somme that damaged his health!

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… A German submarine used torpedoes and shells to sink White Star liner SS Afric southwest of Looe, Cornwall, en route to Cape Town and Sydney (February 13; up to 22 died). No doubt more concerned with American shipping casualties already occurring, that same day President Wilson told Germany he would not negotiate anything with them until they again halted “unrestricted” submarine warfare.

    On the Western Front, the freeze continued as did (mainly) skirmish-scale actions – bearing in mind the overall death toll of the war through these “quieter” months in Europe is said to have remained around 500 day. Through the week, the British raided north of Arras, the French northwest of Compiègne and Altkirch (Alsace), while the German Army attacked the French near Loos, Ypres and Maisons de Champagne.

    The “Operations On The Ancre” proceeded with the British repelling a German counterattack around the Beaumont to Serre road (February 13; 382 British casualties). More significantly, a British advance planned for a 300-yard length of the front near Miraumont saw them encounter great difficulties with a thaw turning the ground to mud, slowing them and throwing their artillery’s “creeping barrage” out of synch so that they achieved only partial success (February 17-18; 2,500 British casualties).

    On the Eastern Front, the German Army continued to regain chunks of the ground lost to the Russians during 1916’s Brusilov Offensive with advances Zloczow and Tarnopol (February 14; now Ukraine), and southwest of Dvinsk (17; Latvia). However, in Romania, the Russians got one strike back with a surprise attack capturing high ground above the river Trotus valley (18).

    Further south, in Macedonia, where the Allies working in concert had driven the Bulgarians back and taken Monastir the previous autumn, yet another phalanx of the German Army attacked the Italian section of the front and gained ground for a couple of days, then lost it all back to an Italian counter (February 12-14). And way to the south, on the Tigris, steady British progress towards retaking Kut – eight months after the Turkish siege of the city ended victoriously – saw them take the entire right bank of the Tigris in the area (February 14).

Meanwhile, my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons from mid-May to September (FootSoldierSam’s 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 – 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…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father and his underager pals “waiting” for their 19th birthdays and a return to war, discovered they were caught up in a meningitis outbreak**. After seeing the lad a bed or two down from him in their billet (a former school) carried off to an isolation hospital, he and a few others tested positive for the bacteria (probably, though the disease can also be viral).

    So they too were carted off to an “isolation hospital”, though this one consisted only of “two or three large Army huts”. Still, they began the procedures intended to prevent them developing the disease full-on – as Sam recalls:

‘The treatment consisted of, twice a day, sitting around a large copper boiler, from the lid of which several spouts protruded. The water therein contained formaldehyde. So, heads and bodies wrapped in white sheets to keep us fairly dry, and with our eyes covered, we sat in a circle round the boiler and breathed in this very strong vapour. When that bit of treatment was over, we were free. But not to leave the hospital, of course. We were isolated from everybody. Still, they offered us books and, under the supervision of the Sister in charge, we did the cleaning, which helped to pass the time.

     After spending a short time in the isolation unit I did begin to feel ill. You can imagine the lines on which my thoughts ran. But the Sister looked at my face, told me to roll up my sleeves and undo my shirt buttons – sure enough, I had a rash across my chest. “That,” she said, “is nothing to do with germs in the throat. That’s German measles.” So I was taken to a larger hospital and installed in another isolation unit.

      I saw one or two nurses outside wearing attractive bright-red capes over the usual uniforms. Very cheery. My all-white room contained five beds, I think, but the others remained empty. During the day a nurse came in frequently. When the doctor, elderly and gentle of manner, looked me over, he asked me what I’d been doing. I told him France and Gallipoli and he said that one of the things they had to do was feed me up, particularly lots of fish and scrambled eggs on toast – which wasn’t bad either.

Good fortune did indeed walk along with me during those days, for out of the evil of contamination had come this period of clean, quiet living which should restore me to general fitness…

     Able once again to face a front-line soldier’s health-ruining existence, days and nights of nervous tension strung to the limits of human endurance, even more bedevilled by the fact that one must give no indication of what one was feeling. Ever the breezy wisecrack, the brilliant riposte, the foulest epithet, the hard laugh; it took it out of you to merely keep up with the others in maintaining these deceptive appearances while aware that, if that Jerry battery of whizz-bangs persisted in moving its aim ever nearer to your position, you and your mates would soon be surveying the site from a place way up in heaven — or shellfire might be replaced by hellfire if the judgement went against you… well, a pretty, little quip like that would have won a pale smile, even in a sticky front-line situation.

     But I wasn’t out there… Far from it, in my snug, little hospital ward, feeling full of gratitude to the benevolent physician who had correctly diagnosed that I had needs beyond the curing of German measles and the eradication of spotted-fever germs from my throat. Maybe some much-needed self-respect came to me because he had treated me as a man and not as a number in a vast collection of numbered robots. He smiled as he examined and prescribed, bless him.’

** To repeat information about the illness and its Army connection if you misses last week’s episode… They had the “germs” of cerebrospinal meningitis, CSM, or, colloquially, “spotted fever”.  It was common among troops for reasons explained by the British Medical Journal for January, 1915 (current medics might debunk any of this, of course): a) overcrowding in camps and barracks b) cold winter weather c) too much muscular exertion among new recruits – who then spread it to civilians (a personal, inexpert interjection would be that if the “too much exertion” factor was correct, it could well have been that debilitated, under-age Tommies emerging from months in the battlefield were every bit as vulnerable as “new recruits”). The same report says three meningitis waves occurred during WW1 a) early 1915 b) early ’16 c) early ’17. So, time-wise, the Harrogate outbreak among soldiers fits c) Wave III. However, in all three the main concentrations were south of a line from Wash to Severn so the outbreak experienced by my father and his comrades was an outlier.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam gets delirious and goes for a walk in the snow – until his nuts swell up! Then one health horror leads to another… but also to the kind attention of the little night nurse…

* 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.