Returned POW Sam’s “wonderfully happy days” back home reach a climax when beloved older brother Ted returns on a week’s leave and they yarn away about the war... but inwardly Sam’s grieving already as he listens to Ted wheeze and gasp for breath…

Sam’s Memoir(1) – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

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The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… The twin plotlines of local fighting and moves towards “global” peace continued.

    In Berlin, the armed battle between Socialist-Democratic Government-led paramilitaries, the mainly ex-Army Freikorps, and civilian pro-Soviet Spartacists (January 6 onwards) saw 173 die – mostly on the revolutionary side. Martial law was declared in the city on January 9.

    In Paris, after US President Wilson’s arrival (January 7), representatives gathered for the Peace Conference from a number of countries… it’s hard to be exact about how many as sources vary and appear to mix or confuse official participants and others, such as Palestine and Tonga, who showed up regardless. They included the major Allied powers and a range of states which had supported them in one way or another – but none of their erstwhile enemies: my incomplete list of participants shows UK, France, USA, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Romania, Portugal, Greece, China, the Korean Provisional Government, Canada, Newfoundland, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Russian Provincial Council (not the Bolshevik Government), Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, the Mountainous Republic Of The Northern Caucasus, San Marino, Montenegro, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Liberia, Siam, The Hejaz.

    In fact, the conference began only a couple of days after World War I’s final(?) white flag – Fahreddin Pasha, surrendered Medina (January 10) to end a siege by Allied-supporting Arab forces which had lasted since October 1916. With a Turkish force, he had led the defence of the city and protection of its only supply route via the Hejaz railway to Damascus way beyond the October 30, 1918, Armistice Of Mudros, which purported to end hostilities between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. He wouldn’t accept it until the population of Medina reached the brink of starvation. Then 8,000 Turkish soldiers evacuated and the besieging troops went on a looting spree.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. They told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until, in mid-March, he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany near a village called Hügelheim and finally moving westwards to Lorraine where they remained until Armistice – at which his long trek towards the French Front began. He finally reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably) and then started his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – through the ministrations of French, British and American military doctors and nurses in Nancy and Rouen… despite the less well-conceived efforts of several people who nearly killed him with overfeeding. Finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before he was allowed home…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Returning from his WW1 Christmas recollections to the 100-years-ago-this-week (give or take)…

    December or January, 1918/9, at home in Edmonton, north London: in the December 23 Blog, my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, ferried back across the Channel (that was on December 10, 1918) and spent some days recovering at Lewisham Hospital before returning to his family and that “first Ma-made cuppa” for a full year… over which he learned how the German field card he’d filled in as a POW and passed through the wire to a passing Soldat, with little hope of it arriving, did actually make it and give his family hope that he might return.

    Now a joyful-sad reunion with older brother Ted:

‘Those were wonderfully happy days, and my joy reached a climax when, out of the blue, Ted walked through the open front door. After our affectionate reunion, he said he had been granted seven days special leave when the message arranged by our father had reached his Field Survey Company (then billeted in local people’s homes in Coyghem(2)).

     For hours, we sat and swapped stories about our lives in recent months. His real concern about my hard times was unexpected and soul-warming, but I found cause to feel very concerned about his health and encouraged him to tell me in detail where he had been working and how he had fared in the final German attack.

     Earlier in this book(3) I gave some account of how, after an examination to test his ability in English, simple maths, and general knowledge, he had been moved out of the infantry into a new Field Survey Company which – often from the top of metal towers they constructed themselves – pinpointed enemy artillery positions to bring accurate fire to bear on them. At times, those towers would be spotted by Jerry and attract gunfire. But, provided our chaps made correct calculations, the troublesome battery would be knocked out before it found the range for the observers’ tower.

     Hills or trees sometimes saved Ted’s group from having to build any observation post. On one occasion, he said, while working at ground level, fog obscured everybody’s vision and advancing German troops bypassed them. Training for such an emergency enabled them to act quickly. With hammer and axe, they smashed their cameras and other equipment and threw the fragments into shell-holes. Then began a slow, cautious retreat to the British lines. With some skill and a lot of luck, they avoided capture and returned to their own trenches in less than 24 hours…

     But, all the while Ted spoke of these things, I felt a growing ache in my heart. That quick, shallow breathing… So I told him about my experience of gas shells – one in five sent over by Jerry in that last big attack when I became a war prisoner – and how the poison had affected me. This lead elicited from him a tale of one very prolonged gas shelling he’d endured, shortly before his transfer to the Field Survey Company. It had knocked him out temporarily, but afterwards he’d professed himself well enough to attend the surveyors’ school way back behind the lines, and the gas trouble was forgotten, though not by Ted.

     And now, at home, there he sat, panting after each sentence, but swearing he was all right… With a pre-vision of what might happen at some future time, I was inwardly shaking. I felt as if I was the older one and ought to protect him, but neither then, nor later on, would he admit he had been seriously damaged.

     During that leave of his, we shared the back bedroom on the top floor. Often I awoke in the night and listened to his quick, light breathing, and heard his occasional, dry cough and felt the sadness of the situation. He had survived all through the Somme campaign, which had brought death or serious injury to tens of thousands of Britishers, and had exposed himself to frequent risks when earning, without knowing it, a Military Medal(4) and mention in dispatches. And now, the fighting over, he was to be killed by the delayed effects of poison gas(5).

     Perhaps our parents had similar fears, but none of us discussed them. Surely a doctor would notice his condition when he rejoined his unit. There would anyway be a medical examination before he was released from the Army…

     All too soon the seven days drew to an end. Thinking ahead, Ted said he was going to ask his pre-war employer to request his early release from the Service(6), and he certainly hoped to avoid being made to serve in the proposed Army of Occupation. So we saw him off on his journey back to Belgium, at least feeling certain he would soon and finally come back to us.’

(2) Coyghem: a small village in West-Vlaanderen province, Belgium, a few miles from the French border, 25 miles southeast of Ypres.

(3) See Blog November 27, 2016. Ted trained for his new line of work in Saint-Omer, a small canal-side town, 30 miles southeast of Calais, close to the North Sea and the Belgian border. The British Army established its “maps GHQ” there in 1915, forming three Field Survey Companies of the Royal Engineers in 1916, with more soon added. In early 1918, the Ordnance Survey, the British national mapping authority, set up an overseas branch in Saint-Omer – see http://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/regiments-and-corps/the-corps-of-royal-engineers-in-the-first-world-war/the-field-survey-companies-of-the-royal-engineers/and http://www.defencesurveyors.org.uk/Images/Historical/WWI/4th Field Survey Battalion.pdf  (NB this link works for me only if pasted into a search engine, rather than when clicked on). 

(4)The Military Medal: established in March, 1916, as the “other ranks” equivalent to the officers’ Military Cross, awarded for bravery in battle on land. I can’t imagine my father’s wonderful memory would have been wrong about his brother winning it, but I haven’t found any official record of Ted’s award. In the following passage, excerpted in Blog November 20, 2016, my father recalled hearing about an incident which might have led to an MM – this was during his stay at the British Army camp at Harfleur, after he left the Somme Front because his age had been discovered – 18, still too young for the battlefield: “I eagerly asked [a passing London Regiment Tommy] and he told me how, in a pretty sharp action, one of our Sergeants from the original Battalion, Billy Wale, had been severely wounded in a very much damaged advanced trench well ahead of the front line. This soldier had heard my brother say, ‘We can’t leave old Billy Wale out there. I’m going to get him.’ But this soldier didn’t know what happened after that, because he was already wounded himself and stretcher-bearers carried him away. So I still didn’t know what had happened to dear old Ted in that very dangerous situation… How I wished I’d been there to help him. Knowing how tough and self-reliant he was, I had good reason to hope that he and the wounded Sergeant eventually came out of it alive.” (Unfortunately, my father didn’t write down the outcome of this story, though I imagine, expressing this story as he did, he must have known that Billy Wale too did survive.)

(5) Ted died on January 26, 1922, aged 25, of TB – against which his damaged lungs stood no chance. The family nursed him at home and he died with his mother and Sam at his bedside. You may recall that “Ted” was a family nickname, his real name was Philip and my father named me for him when I was born in 1947.

(6) Pre-war, after leaving school at 14, Ted worked for a paper company for three to four years and so impressed them that the boss guaranteed he’d get his job back after the war – even though he may not have bargained on a four and a half year hiatus, he stuck to it.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam rolling in it – back-pay since March, 1918, when he was taken POW. And then he and his POW pal and food-snaffling partner Wally have a wonderful reunion, “a rejoining of threads broken” when they got separated on that long trek back from Germany… 

(1) 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 and comrades assailed by the opening salvos of the Spring Offensive realise “This is it!” – and Sam gets gassed, a “dreadful, choking-burning sensation”…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… All attention on the Eastern Front and what one German General called “the most comical war I have ever known”. It arose from Russian Foreign Commissar Leon Trotsky’s February 10 refusal to sign the draft peace treaty with the Central Powers which emerged from the Brest-Litovsk negotiations – on some point of principle about dealing with bourgeois regimes, he said Russia was no longer at war with them but… he wouldn’t put it on paper.

    So on February 17, Germany announced a resumption of hostilities which they followed up the next day with the start of Operation Faustschlag, aka the Eleven Days War. The Bolsheviks had won their revolution handily, but this serious display of military might soon brought them back to addressing the realities of international power relations. On February 19, they declared willingness to sign the peace treaty, all fine, no need to change a comma. The Germans considered their position… and meanwhile conducted this additional little war, hoovering up territory against feeble or non-existent opposition.

    A three-pronged offensive, deploying 53 Divisions, took Dvinsk, Latvia (February 18), Minsk, Belarus (21), Zhitomir, Ukraine and Dorpat, Estonia (24) and they weren’t stopping yet.

    Elsewhere, while minor actions continued on the Western Front and around the River Piave in Italy (where the Austrian invasion remained stalled), the most substantial development saw the British and New Zealand forces in Palestine take Jericho (February 19-21), the first step en route to occupation of the Jordan Valley.

[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. 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 and prepare 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 – especially when death might be the outcome – 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 turned out to be the final home leave of his military career – at the end of which he 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, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the blog moved ahead of itself into March and the preliminaries of the British defence against the German Army’s long-anticipated Spring Offensive, simply because my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, wrote so much about the nine days around that battle which had such a profound effect on him in so many ways, as you’ll see. On March 19, his Battalion, the 2/7th Essex, moved from Arras into the trenches near the village of Fampoux, about six kilometres outside town.

    We left him, probably on March 20 he reckoned, engaging in what he called “a strange prelude to a terrible battle”. The wild streak in his normally solid character broke to the surface again and, having snatched a Lewis gun from its rightful operators, he fought a duel with one of Von Richthofen’s Flying Circus which had annoyed him by zooming up and down low over the British trenches taking pictures with impunity. The upshot was he proved just as ineffective as the Lewis gun’s official proprietors in nailing the pesky Jerry – but the pilot missed him too with machine-gun fire and a hand-thrown bomb. At which, Sam, scuttled back to his own Battalion before anyone could think about disciplinary charges.

    Well, that incident could have proved deadly, but now the whole operation gets serious. On March 21, a Thursday, the Offensive began around St Quentin, about 75 kilometres southeast of Fampoux – the German plan to move their attack steadily northwards over the following week with Arras their final major objective. Of course, the “softening up” process would begin some while before each major onslaught. Sam and his Essex comrades are still in the support trench at this point:

‘One morning, shortly after my encounter with one of the “Flying Circus”, enemy artillery began to take tentative pots at scattered points in our lines. The firing gradually intensified until it became a searching bombardment by every type of enemy gun. All around us, shells of every calibre were bursting and busting up the landscape. This was to continue night and day until early on March the 28th(1).

     The initial shock, caused by the realisation that “This is it” as much as by the actual noise and destruction going on around me, soon settled into the state of high tension so familiar to me from earlier bombardments in times which seemed far away(2).

     Rare direct hits on our narrow trench brought forth the old cry, “Stretcher-bearers!”, and although these stalwart life-savers sometimes had to squeeze past us on their journeys of mercy, we gained no knowledge of the extent of our casualties – wounded or killed.

     No let-up throughout that night. We had no deep shelters, but a series of bolt-holes – each holding six or so men – provided fair cover for those whose turn it was to “rest” after doing their spells of “stand-to” duty. A direct hit by a shell would smash everything and probably everybody in the affected trench but, doubtless because of the narrowness of the support trenches, such tragedies remained infrequent at that stage.

     The perpetual roars, crashes and earth tremors became our norm, and we had to remain as alert as humanly possible in that hellish environment. Provisions arrived at long, irregular intervals, borne by very brave ration parties. All our instilled discipline was needed to enable us to stay put when every human instinct pressured one to break into a gallop in a rearward direction.

On the second day, our situation got worse; my lines being still intact, I received a message from Battalion HQ “for immediate attention of Company commander” instructing him to warn all ranks that one in five of all enemy shells now arriving contained poison gas; look-outs could identify them by the cloud of greenish-yellow vapour emitted, accompanied by only a small explosion.

     One look-out man occupied a raised position quite near to my Signal-station shelter, so I had to rely on him swinging his noisy bird-scarer rattle in good time should he spot a bursting gas shell nearby. Soon enough it happened, but instead of holding his breath, rattling, and then donning his gas mask, he protected himself first then sounded the alarm – by which time I and others had lungs full of the stuff. The dreadful, choking-burning sensation set in motion our much-practised routine; we stopped breathing, withdrew respirators from satchels, strapped them to chests, breathed out, clapped masks over faces, and resumed breathing air purified in its passage through canisters containing absorbent granules.

     Thereafter, for me, everything I ate or drank had about it a chemical foulness. Even the air I breathed smelled grossly tainted. We, of course, removed our respirators as soon as we deemed it safe; impossible, anyway, for those of us afflicted by the poisonous stuff to continue wearing the masks because our damaged lungs couldn’t suck enough oxygen through them(3).’

(1) Military Operations France And Belgium, 1918 March-April: Continuation Of The German Offensives (1937), published by IWM & Battery Press, says that, on January 21, 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, of the German High Command, decided the “Spring Offensive” should go ahead – this in anticipation of America becoming militarily active, which it did effectively during that spring (having declared war on April 6, 1917), and following Russia’s signing an armistice with Germany (on December 23, 1917, and renewed thereafter at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Kaiser having supported Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution for his own ends). The latter development freed 50 German Divisions to march from the Eastern to the Western Front; on March 21, 1918, at 4.40am Ludendorff launched Operation Michael (aka the Second Battle Of The Somme), the first of five great attacks comprising the “Spring Offensive”; http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_sommeII.html says that within five hours German artillery fired 1.1 million shells (including poison gas shells) from 6,500 guns and 3,500 mortars; their 17th Army, commanded by General Otto Von Below, veteran of successful World War I campaigns on the Eastern Front, in Macedonia and Italy, conducted the attack on the section of the Front east and south of Arras – viewed as distinct actions these included the First Battle Of Bapaume (24 kilometres south of Arras) March 24-25. A second phase of this attack, called Operation Mars, focussed on taking Arras, began on March 28.

(2) Meaning Gallipoli and the Somme.

(3) My father, tough as they come, lived to be 88, but his lungs always troubled him just from that one short inhalation of what he told me must have been mustard gas. During winters he regularly suffered bronchitis and latterly emphysema. More trivially perhaps, though it was frustrating for a music lover like him, he could never play wind instruments from then on – you may remember he took a flageolet into the Gallipoli battlefield, losing it in some Suvla Bay gully or other, and as a lad he’d always fancied taking up the trumpet. Still he did have a high old time on the piano and accordion at many a party and, during WW2, in his local north London Civil Defence concert party band.

All the best – FSS

Next week: The Spring Offensive bombardment begins; Sam’s Battalion moves into the front line; he and his Signaller pals get lucky, having a big bunker to work in – except when he’s out in blown-up trenches mending wires with “no one to witness my skilled workmanship and brave devotion to duty… or maybe my cringing, crawling and fumbling, take your choice”…

(1) 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.