Sam’s new Brummie POW neighbours, recent conscripts, make him feel old by refusing to believe he fought on the Somme… Meanwhile, their guards pretend nothing’s happening, act normal and maybe defeat will never come…

Sam’s Memoir– 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.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme& Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

All proceeds to the British Red Cross - and the current running donations total at October 2 is £3,542.64 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!)

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Everywhere the fighting went the Allies’ way, though not without opposition, and several crucial moments marking inexorable movement towards Armistice occurred. 

    On the Western Front, the British renewed their attack at the Battle Of The Selle (October 17-25) and the Belgians repulsing a German response at the Canal de la Dérivation concluded the victory. The British also entered Valenciennes (22) and took Bruay (23), beating back a German counter at Maing (26; just south of Valenciennes).

    Further south, the Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) pushed on with the Americans fighting north of Verdun and taking Bois Belleu on the north bank of the Meuse (October 27) while, to their northwest, the French, supported by Czecho-Slovaks, advanced between Rethel and Sissonne (25) and within a couple of days had their opponents on the retreat.

    The Italian Army at last launched its big attack on the Austrian invaders long encamped north of the Piave river and up into the mountainous area further west. Reinforced by British, French, American and by then ubiquitous Czecho-Slovak troops, they broke the stand-off across the river near the coast in the Battle Of Vittorio Veneto (October 24-November 4; north of Venice) and also advanced from Monte Grappa.

    The political moves arising included the resignation of German Army joint commander General Von Ludendorff (October 27; freeing him to begin a career promoting Hitler’s rise through the '20s), the continuing exchange of “notes” regarding an armistice between the German Government and US President Woodrow Wilson, while the Austro-Hungarians wrote to him direct (27) suing for their own separate peace regardless of the rest and, that same day, proposed an armistice to Italy.

    Further east, peace did not immediately threaten, it seemed, but in Syria the Pursuit To Haritan (September 29-October 26) reached its destination after the multi-national Egyptian Expeditionary Force, fronted at this stage by Arab cavalry, won the Battle Of Aleppo and captured Deraa (25-7) then stalled in face of last-ditch Ottoman opposition at Haritan (seven miles due north of Aleppo) and Deir al Jamal.

    In Mesopotamia, British and Indian troops conducted an even brisker winding-up onslaught on waning Ottoman resistance in the Battle Of Sharqat (October 23-30) via twin advances along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers aimed at taking the Mosul oilfields. They regained Kirkuk (25; lost on May 24) and advanced more than 70 miles in a couple of days to the confluence of the Tigris and the Little Zab.

[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. So 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 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him training for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the nearby Front until, in mid-March, he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. For three to four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less filthy camp for the summer, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again to a village in Lorraine… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Late October, 1918, occupied Lorraine: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now seven months a slowly starving POW… but hoping he just has to survive a few more weeks maybe – because rumours of imminent German defeat abound (the prisoners have no solid information, of course, and only a limited notion of what day it is).

    In the last month or so his grand strategy has been an extra-food-sharing alliance with fellow Tommy POWs Wally and George – be the supplement raw liver from a pig’s trough, small spuds dug up from a roadside hole or a hambone traded through the wire for wool from a Red Cross parcel. Anything “edible”, even in the most inverted-commaed sense.

    Just now POW camp life clearly feels on hold for the German guards. But 20-year-old veteran Sam finds that, even at this stage, he has a new problem to deal with - young whippersnappers!

‘Hindsight gives one a lovely sense of “I told you so” power, and I am no exception to that self-indulgent practice. What I saw happen then I see today taking place in Britain; although disruption of life as we know it threatens(2), people of necessity carry on as if all is well.

     That’s how the Germans behaved in autumn, 1918. They tried to maintain some sort of purpose to each day’s routine and sent us off under guard to do something which, really, lacked credibility from the point of view of their national interest; we worked to clean up and re-pack the sleepers on a single-track railway for which – if, as we believed, they had near enough lost the war – they would have no further use because they would soon be scuttling back to the Fatherland as fast as their legs or their few remaining road transports would take them.

     They had even had some of their wooden bunks erected in a corner of the hall in which we lived, and I found myself sleeping among men with whom I had not previously been confined, mainly from the Birmingham area as far as I could judge. Lying on the hard boards produced more wakefulness than sleep and they chatted endlessly, often mentioning the Bull Ring(3). In my ignorance, I wondered what this Bull thing was.

     Came a time when the silence on my part was not to the Brummies’ liking, although up to that point no opportunity to join in had presented itself. All the usual enquiries about where I had been captured led me to tell of earlier experiences in the war, but when I said I had been an acting Sergeant on the Somme in 1916, and that even earlier I had seen active service on that misbegotten peninsula in Turkey, they finally refused to believe me. All made-up yarns, said they, adding descriptive adjectives not worth repeating.

     This reaction saddened me, for I realised that here we had a new generation with no knowledge of the beginning of the war who cared nothing about those who had been engaged in it. Conscripts, they felt no concern with anything but their own survival. Well, didn’t we all, if it came to that?

     So, aware of this gap between these young men – the conscripts – and me, I did ask them a little about their own experiences, and added my own guesses… Apparently captured on almost their first turn in the front line… previously busy in the workshops of a manufacturing maze, making big money by the standards of those times… then suddenly called to training for war and, after a few months of NCOs shoving them around and screaming at them, they encountered the shattering horrors of artillery bombardment, then they were raked by machine-gun fire, scattered by showers of stick bombs, and finally driven from their trenches at the points of bayonets and herded into barbed-wire pens… all so rapidly they had no time to realise what was actually happening to them…

     Then what hope had I of convincing them that I had, on and off, been going through that sort of thing for some years? No point in trying to enlist their sympathy, or hope they might touch the forelock when addressing such a 20-year-old veteran as myself.

     For a while, I felt old and lonely and full of regret for the years I had wasted by volunteering for service when I might have stayed home and maybe made lots of money. But, on further reflection, I started to see these inner moans as the idle thoughts of an idiot who’d done what he’d done from none of the highfalutin’ motives which he would sometimes cite to excuse himself his silly conduct. And I knew that, later, more deflation of my ego would follow when I tried to come to terms with a mode of life to which, after four years of Army life, I had become a complete stranger(4).’

(2) I’m not sure exactly what my father was referring to, but given he was writing roughly 1972-6, my guess is he was thinking of the oil crisis in particular, possibly with a side order of the not-unrelated 1972 and ’74 miners’ strikes, see http://ow.ly/oG4m30mhtrQ.

(3) The Bull Ring: market place specialising in textiles, formally from 1154 when chartered by King Henry II; the market grew and diversified through the centuries, survived World War II bombings; redeveloped from the 1950s onwards as a shopping centre. Before he joined the Army, Sam had never travelled north of London (and, incidentally, like many of his comrades, he never travelled abroad again after World War 1 even though he lived to be 88 – the cheap package holidays which started in the ’60s came too late for him).

(4) That is, the civilian mode of life – in case you weren’t clear what Sam meant here.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam, in extremisfood-wise, reflects on the coincidence between religiosity and the well-nourished look of POWs who work in the camp cookhouse – but still he feels better for the hymn singsongs… And then even moreso when infantry rushing eastwards yell “Zu Österreich!” by way of explanation and the end really does seem nigh…

(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, reckoning the war’s final throes are coming up, hopes he can “stand a few more weeks of near-starvation”. Then a Red Cross parcel arrives for George – who temporarily forgets the food-sharing partnership with Sam and Wally…

Sam’s Memoir – 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.

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

All proceeds to the British Red Cross - and the current running donations total at October 2 is £3,542.64 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!)

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… It was one-way traffic on all fronts as the Allies moved towards the inevitable (though I don’t know whether it felt quite that certain at the time). And yet “easy” victories still had their costs – for example, the British/Canadian success at the Second Battle Of Cambrai (October 8-10), which concluded the main action of the Battle Of The Hindenburg Line (September 18-October 17), is commonly described as resulting in “light casualties”, while the actual numbers listed are Allies 12,000, German 10,000.

    On October 8 alone, the Allies – the full mix of British, French, American and Australian – advanced three miles along a 20-mile line south from Cambrai to St Quentin and the British and Belgians declared the Battle Of The Flanders Peaks over and won on October 10.

    Meanwhile, the French and Americans (1.2 million troops in France by then) pressed on with their Meuse Argonne Offensive (September 26-November 11) taking the towns/villages of Berry-au-Bac (October 7), Cornay and Consenvoye (8), Craonne (12; lost on May 27 during the Spring Offensive), Laon and La Fère (13).

    A possibly forgotten feature of these triumphal advances in Europe is that they all took place on invaded ground, not by driving back into the various enemies’ territories. This was true in Italy, where the Italians gradually advanced against the Austrians on the Asiago Plateau (October 11), in Albania, where Italian troops took Elbasan from the Bulgarians (7; the Albanians had lost the town on February 2, 1916), and Serbia, where combinations of the revived national Army, French and British occupied Leskovats (9), Pristina (10; now capital of Kosovo), Prizren, Mitrovitsa and Nish (11).

    It was a different story in Syria where the multi-national Egyptian Expeditionary Force, abetted by the Sharif of Mecca’s Arab Army, conducted the Pursuit To Haritan (September 29-October 26), mainly a mopping-up operation as Ottoman forces retreated through Syria north of Damascus (then including modern Lebanon). The Allies took Beirut (October 7), Ba’albeck (9) and Tripoli (13).

    The week’s exception to all these Allied successes was the sinking of the Royal Mail Ship Leinster off Dublin Bay by a U-boat, with more than 500 people dying out of the 771 on board (October 10).

[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)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So 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 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him training for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the nearby Front until, in mid-March, he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time for the opening bombardment of the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28 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. For three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim. There they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, tending sick German war horses, before moving on yet again to a village in Lorraine (annexed by Germany in 1871)… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

October, 1918, occupied Lorraine: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and six months a slowly starving POW often brutalised by the guards, is still clinging on – hopes uplifted recently by a passing sailor yacking to the guards about a German Navy mutiny… implying the end and Allied victory might be in sight.

    Meanwhile, mere survival is their priority. The food triumvirate partnership of Sam, Wally and George was last week tested by Sam falling to the temptation of a fruit pie passed through the wire by a brave local woman – he took a bite before he repented and shared it. Now another trial of conscience… for George this time:

‘Still no work for several days, so I had lots of time to think and assess my general condition; the inventory did not fill me with any sort of pleasure. Given my hope, almost belief, that the enemy was approaching his last gasp, I felt if I could stand a few more weeks of near-starvation, somehow I might at last be able to rejoin the British Forces. Physically, though, I remained in poor shape. The prisoner’s bent knees and staring eyes, and now, I noticed, my once-blue war prisoner uniform had turned greyish; a sort of nap had originally given it an appearance of fair quality, but now it looked what it was – ersatz, woven from a rubbishy yarn made of paper waste(2). Worse, my trousers had worn through at the knees revealing my grubby, long underpants, unwashed for months, and the peak of my cap was deserting the crown – I have a big bonce, 7 and 3/8ths, a size seldom obtainable in British stores and never in German paperwear outfits.

     Altogether I must have looked decrepit and far older than my 20 years(3). Diet right back down to the minimum now, every day nothing more than that, now I had no horses to rob of their few spuds. Survival seemed a dicey business and the fate which had befallen one of our older comrades might soon be mine – one day at the prison camp we’d found him sitting, resting against a wall, dead. Exhausted, starved. I resolved to avoid that by any conceivable ploy…

     No communication from home had reached any man I knew, but we had twice been given addresses – Stammlager(4) Parchim and Stammlager Friedrichsfeld, I recall – through which, they said, we could exchange letters with our families. But we didn’t know whether our people were getting our letters and nothing reached us from them.

     After several months of captivity, we should have been interned in one of the larger German prison camps where we could have been registered with the Red Cross office in Switzerland. They would have brought the British War Office files on missing men up to date and they, in turn, would have informed our families. But small bands of captives like us just kept wandering around occupied territories; nobody who cared knew whether we were alive or dead(5).

     Of course, it was common talk amongst us that the thousands of food parcels hopefully forwarded to the German authorities by our families and by the Red Cross(6) filled the enemy’s meagrely fed bellies while we became walking skeletons…

A sudden change then occurred which could only be due to one wonderful cause: that the Jerries now knew the war was lost to them and they must do what they could to convince the Allies that they were nice, kind, little Germans who observed the Geneva Convention and treated war prisoners correctly. So they allowed a few Red Cross parcels to get through to the wandering groups like ours and, hallelujah, George was one of the fortunate few recipients.

     He reacted understandably. He avoided Wally and me, took his prize into a corner, and hid it from our sight. We decided not to approach him. When he finally spoke to Wally, it was to suggest that, as they had been buddies before they became acquainted with me, it would be fair if the two of them shared the parcel’s contents. Wally, with that ever-present aching void where his tummy used to be, could well have agreed to that arrangement, but he found and kept a contents list which he discovered among the wrappings and noted carefully the items absent after George’s first uncontrolled onslaught. Then he told George he was disgusted with his dishonesty and he could stuff his parcel.

     Wally rejoined me and gave me the sad details of their conversation, so we turned the trio into a duo and ignored George forthwith. In turn, George responded by remaining his own man, standing in no need of friendship’s prop, apparently.

     So when, that night, he joined us as we sat on the floor among our paltry possessions – mine the German mess-can and one thin, dirty, grey blanket, and Wally’s equally numerous and valuable – we said nowt, just waited while George tried to describe his feelings and intentions. Weakness accounted for the tears that ran down his poor emaciated face as he told us of his dear wife and daughter whom he missed so terribly and of how important it was that he should last out until the war ended…

     Well, he really was still part of our small family at that moment, so good old Wally did the reassuring bit and our oldest member, who just then looked more like our youngest and naughtiest, spread out on the floor what remained of his parcel’s contents. Few edibles, for the interval during which we had declared the triple partnership in abeyance had enabled George to feel free to put most of the goodies under his belt. The remaining food comprised: two hard, but very attractive, biscuits; two Oxo cubes; a small tin of fish paste; and an item which I would have rejected in better times, but which seemed exquisitely delectable just then, some bully beef (corned beef to you) – George had managed to leave three-quarters of the canful.

     “You have one biscuit apiece, as I’ve had more than my share,” he said. “And we’ll share the bully if you don’t mind.” All thoughts of how he’d diddled us vanished. Wally and I carefully ate our share. At that marvellous moment, corned beef to us must have tasted as caviar to rich people.

     Thereafter, we discussed the other items. How the skein of fawn wool, the two reels of cotton – one black t’other white – a packet of needles, two khaki hankies and the half yard of Army-grey shirting could be disposed of to the best advantage. The two pairs of socks – also grey, Army – should be worn, I insisted, by the two of them, since I had procured some pieces of cotton cloth which I used as “Fusslappen”(7) (copying a German whom I had seen in Müllheim wrapping rags round his tootsies before pulling on his jackboots).

     Now came the question: could we exchange the wool etc for food and, if so, how?’

(2) See Sam’s Blog 214 August 12 for the story of the replacement of their filthy British Army uniforms with these ersatz POW jobs.

(3) Having no idea what day it was, Sam had let his 20th birthday on July 6 pass unremarked, as had his 18th on the Somme in 1916.

(4) Stammlager: prisoner of war camp, often abbreviated to “Stalag”; Parchim is a small town in the German Baltic state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; Friedrichsfeld now seems to be part of a town called Voerde in North-Rhine-Westphalia state; both are listed among the 168 “principal POW camps in Germany” at http://ow.ly/DFqc30kUzDCand Wiki says a total of 2.4 million Allied prisoners were held in Germany during World War I.

(5) Not quite true in Sam’s case, but that’s a story he reveals later – and at the time he had no idea.

(6) Ian Hook, of the Essex Regiment Museum, who kindly helped by searching the records of my father, said that he found a note of the Essex Regiment Prisoner Of War Fund sending food parcels to C Sutcliffe of Edmonton (the “C” being his first name Charles, but he was always known by his second, Sam). But, clearly, they didn’t make it.

(7) Fusslappen: foot cloth.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam and pals suddenly find themselves on “Pay Parade” – albeit the currency is tokens, not real money. And, amid the squalor of POW life, the formality of the occasion brings dignity to both sides. Also Sam sneaks a food swap through the wire and finds a perhaps blasphemous use for a prayer book…

(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.

September, 1918: POW Sam runs into more surprising kindness – this time from a German soldier and his girlfriend. Over hard work and shared spuds he finds a good pal in a lad called Wally…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc 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 Battles Of The Hindenburg Line (September 12-October 12) began with the British, supported by New Zealanders, coming down off high ground to attack and take Havrincourt (September 12-16; Aisne department, southeast of Cambrai) and the Americans leading the Battle Of St Mihiel (12-13; Meuse department, 22 miles south of Verdun) under General Pershing, supported by French tanks and 1,500 Allied aircraft – catching German troops already on the retreat they took 15,000 prisoners in two days before pulling up short of their initial objective, Metz, as Pershing needed to put his force at the disposal of a French attack further north.

    The French had already won the Battle Of Savy-Dallon (September 10; Aisne department), approaching the Hindenburg Line near St Quentin as they took Hinacourt, Travecy and Savy, and then advanced again via the Battle Of Vauxaillon (14).

    No surprise then that, backstage, Austria-Hungary wrote to President Wilson (September 15) seeking an “unofficial” peace conference – whatever that might have been, the President rejected it the following day – and the German Government made a peace offer to Belgium (15) just as the Belgian Army was advancing strongly around Ypres.

    Action continued on the periphery of the European conflict. Way up north in the Murman region of Russia around the Barents Sea, Allied forces began an advance after American troops arrived in Archangel (September 11). Down in Azerbaijan, the confusing battle for Baku saw a British evacuation when an attempted collaboration with the Armenian defenders against the Turks failed. And in Serbia – territory now in Macedonia – combined Serbian, French and Greek regiments initiated the Battle Of Dobro Pole (September 15-18) against the occupying Bulgars.

[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)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. So 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 2/7th Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). He passed many weeks in various hospitals because of a meningitis scare, German Measles, and recovery from the effects of trench warfare’s privations (he spent his 19th birthday, July 6, 1917, in a Sheffield hospital). During that summer, his Company Officer offered him the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; he may have requested his subsequent “reversion” to Private, or perhaps it was a “punishment”, I don’t know. In December, probably, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and dogsbodied for Brigade HQ in Arras and at the Front. In mid-March he ran into his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras… just in time 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 “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. Then, for three or four months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups, until a train took his latest band down to a rural area between the Rhine and the Black Forest near a village called Hügelheim where they settled into a slightly less uncomfortable/filthy camp for the summer, mainly working on sick and wounded German war horses.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

August/September, 1918: my father, Signaller Sam Sutcliffe, now 20 years old and five months a slowly starving POW, is on a run of (relative) good fortune – all food-connected stories, naturally. First it was the tubby Posten (guard) buying him a Gasthaus lunch, then a few days’ hard work in a vineyard rewarded by stew and cream cheese and even wine, and now this week a further encounter with the kindness of the enemy… 

    (By the way, if my father’s food obsession seems trivial in the light of the historic events noted in the “hundred years ago this week” section of the blog, please consider that a) he hadn’t a clue what was going on at the Front and b) hunger concentrates the mind wonderfully.)

‘However, after only three days, we were all sent off on different jobs. Grievously disappointed, I found some compensation because, in a group of 10 or so, I was taken into the nearby town of Müllheim-in-Baden(2), and thence to a big farm on the outskirts. Our job was to store away a recently cut crop of hay on the second floor of a large barn. In good dry condition, the hay proved easy to handle. Like all well-planned barns – I remembered from boyhood camping days(3) – it had an open area in the middle with two spacious floors at each end and we forked the hay from ground to first floor, then up again to the top floor.

    I had no experience with a pitchfork, but had the good luck to be paired with my friend Wally. A country boy, height about 66 inches, broad of shoulder and strong of limb with admirable stamina from his former open-air life and good feeding, he had withstood the privations of these months better than most of us. And he soon showed me the knack of driving the fork in with a twist, which secured a good load, then using the handle as a lever to lift the weight in one deft movement, making easy work of it even to a weakling like me.

    Awaiting another load from the fields, we had a break. We’d been working on the top deck of the barn, and when I explored I found a small door at the back. Carefully opening it, I saw down below a narrow lane. I thought what you have just thought – about possible escape. But where to? Food? And so on… Meanwhile, I scrambled out anyway, finding grips in gaps in the woodwork and finally landing in grass and weeds…

    And there I was, alone in the lane. But only for a moment. Coming towards me were a girl and a young soldier – and that, it appeared, would be the end of my brief freedom.

    They came close, both smiled. No screams or cries of alarm. So, nothing unusual about finding a British prisoner unguarded and alone, it seemed. “Ich arbeit darein,”(4) I said and pointed hopefully at the barn. They talked a while and he said, “Bleiben sie da”. All smiles, so I trusted them completely and waited, perhaps for 20 minutes. My mate Wally’s head appeared above and I gave him a reassuring nod and grin; I felt sure he would alert me if necessary. When my young friends reappeared the soldier carried a pail which he offered to me – nearly full of hot potatoes boiled in their jackets.

    Again, a kindly girl had risked possible arrest to help an enemy prisoner. The lad had taken an even greater risk, being in the Army. I packed the spuds into my under-tunic sack and became fuller of figure and even fuller of gratitude to these lovely, young people.

    War… to hell with it — this lad who seemed so much younger than me, would probably be in the slaughter shambles on the Western Front any day now, and what might happen to his dear sister? (I had understood one word among the several he said to me, “Schwester”.)

    Sincere thanks were all I could offer. As they disappeared round a bend in the lane, I wished to heaven I could have gone with them.

    A soft whistle from me brought Wally to the door above. To help me back up, he lowered his pitchfork and lay down on the deck up there, holding it, while I hauled myself up part of the way, then I completed the rest of the climb unaided.

    We two then ate spuds until, as they say, fit to bust.’

(2) Müllheim: in Baden-Württemberg, 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometres) south of Hügelheim (and their POW camp/horse hospital), between the Black Forest and the Rhine.

(3) With the Edmonton Boy Scouts in Epping Forest or some other tract of (then) nearby countryside.

(4) “Ich arbeit darein”: “I work in there”. Then“Bleiben sie da”: “Stay there”.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam establishes “a sort of family” with POWs Wally and George as they agree to share everything – and he scores more spuds for the partnership with the help of friendly Soldaten, full of empathy for their fellow front-liners, even as enemy prisoners…

(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.