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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… While
the sinking of British hospital ship SS Salta
by a mine as it sailed into Le Havre (April 10; 51 nurses and RAMC personnel
plus 79 crew lost) was tragic, its scale was dwarfed by the full-bore reopening
of fighting on the Western Front with tens of thousands of casualties swiftly
ensuing. Following the rather haphazard pursuit of the German Army’s planned
retreat to the Hindenburg Line, the Allies tried to enact their own strategy,
framed in January, largely by the French General Nivelle, long before the
German move so changed the prospects.
After
a massive artillery bombardment, the British advanced on a 12-mile front from
southeast to north of Arras and quickly advanced 5.5 miles to take
Monchy-le-Preux (April 9-11). At the same time, the British and Canadians
attacked Vimy Ridge and took it despite a new winter blizzard descending on the
first day (9-12), and the British also made headway in the Battle Of The Scarpe
occupying many villages such as Feuchy, Givenchy-en-Gohelle and Angres (9-14).
However,
the Australian and British attack at the Battle Of Bullecourt fell victim to a
degree of chaos with a false start caused by orders to postpone for 24 hours
not reaching two Battalions and then a shortage of promised tanks undermining
their efforts (April 10-11). The Aussies suffered further in the Battle Of
Lagnicourt where the Germans launched a surprise onslaught, and they had to
retreat before recovering their ground later in the day (15).
The
French “prong” of this campaign had been scheduled to start a few days after
the British/Australian/Canadian attacks and they began to prepare their way
with heavy bombardments of the Moronvilliers hills east of Reims (April 10
onwards).
Accounts
of all these actions refer to tactical innovations by both sides calculated to
break the Western Front stalemate – creeping barrages, elastic defence,
platoon-focused advances…
Of
course, no front was ever “all quiet” really, but the only other notable
military events of the week saw the British Egyptian Army advance further along
the railway to Samarrah to Harbe (April 9).
[Memoir background: my father, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer
and Gallipoli veteran (FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated September 20, 2015, to
January 3, 2016) Lance 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’d spotted 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. He did so, not without 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 training/marking time until they severally became eligible for the trenches
once more…]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, temporarily despatched to
Cramlington, Northumberland, to train as instructors in the Army’s bee-in-the-bonnet
new super-rifle, my father and his pal Mac survived their initiation into the
nightly raid on the musketry school’s neighbouring colliery to purloin coal –
standard provision for each Nissen hut being only half what the Tommies needed
as that freezing winter’s blizzards extended well into April.
Now
Sam writes of an attempt at indoor entertainment for the troops which went
badly wrong for him:
‘Our regular evening pastime was playing cards, but on one
occasion I suggested that McIntyre might amuse us by reading our bumps –
practising the “science” of phrenology in which he had been trained**. As a
Scot, from Edinburgh at that, he surprised me by agreeing to do it even though
he knew we wouldn’t pay for the privilege of being told what marvellous blokes
we were. While his fingers moved slowly and carefully over a man’s skull he
made interesting, usually slightly flattering comments, calculated to induce
those who watched to request the next go.
Finally, Mac
turned to me, his pal… and spieled off a generally unpleasing report, the
culmination, a charge of selfishness. Later, I asked him what it was all about;
when had I acted selfishly in my dealings with him? Out came the reason for his
sourness; the matter had bothered him for some weeks, and made me feel really
sorry and actually ashamed of my thoughtlessness.
It concerned the
two girls injured in our sledge crash***. I had found the petite, brunette girl
attractive and, although I had never hugged, fondled or kissed her, I showed
preference for her company, leaving Mac to look after the other, more homely
girl most times – unaware, because of my selfishness, of Mac’s feelings of
love, no less, for the little dark one. I had not seen her for quite some time
anyway, because of the awkwardness I felt after seeing her sister walking arm
in arm with a soldier while her husband was away at the Front. And all this
time, it appeared, friend McIntyre had been grieving. He must have hated me,
and so needlessly…
Phrenology,
genuine science or quackery, had revealed myself to me and given me something
to think about, albeit ruefully.
The three lads**** we’d travelled up from Harrogate with had
that something which made me eager to know them more intimately than the casual
friendliness of Army hutmates allowed. Their fresh-from-civvy-street appearance
and tolerance of the coarse, repetitive humour, to which they were obviously
strangers, proved them prepared to make the best of a situation they had been
forced into, I assumed, by the exigencies of war.
Two of them were
18 or thereabouts, the third perhaps three years older – probably someone granted
deferment of call-up whose time had run out. Good luck or influence, both
maybe, had attached them to our home-based mob, rather than an intensive
training unit in which a matter of a few weeks only separated the draft from
the fighting zone. They’d all come from Cambridge where they had been students,
I gathered. One seldom questioned comrades about personal matters, though
information about pre-Army days, if volunteered, found a willing audience.
Depending on the nature of the storyteller, it could bring a bit of the
sweetness of family life into the tent, hut, or trench…
These three chaps
acquired all the knowledge about the rifle in double-quick time, but when their
turn came to repeat the patter, as required by the word-perfect instructors,
they used their own phraseology, which certainly sounded less like the spiel of
the market quack-doctor than did the Sergeants’ energetic rote lesson.
** At 15, just before the
war, Mac had served an apprenticeship as a phrenologist (reader of cranial
bumps, allegedly) in central London (see Blog 132, January 15, 2017).
*** All innocent and
unwitting stuff between teenagers whose main “adult” experience of the world
had come on various battlefield – my father recalled the story of the sledge
and the two girls in Blogs 133 January 22, 2017 and 134 January 29.
**** Named as Metriam,
Naylor, and Rutven in Blog 142 March 26.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: Sam and pals
move down to Mansfield to conclude the super-rifle course and all seems well… sort
of. Meanwhile, he reflects, still guiltily, on the horrors he’s missing, but
escapes into the sweet, simple kindness of the townspeople around him.
* 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.
