In Malta, lookout Sam gets shot at for the first time! But Sergeant Watson sits on a thorn bush and glory remains in limited supply…

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Dear all

A hundred years ago… while the Russian Army lost ground to the Germans (July 24, Rozan and Pultusk, Poland) and the Austro-Hungarians (19, Krasnik, Galicia, 21, the left bank of the Vistula, Poland), among many to and fro actions on the Western Front one of the worst conflagrations began at Le Linge (July 20-October 15, in the Vosges west of Colmar) where 17,000 French and German soldiers were to die, with gas and flamethrowers frequently deployed.

    In Mesopotamia the British took Nasriya from the Turks and in German colony Cameroon the French occupied Lomie (both on the 25th). In Gallipoli, attrition continued, with no further major actions until August – but on the 19th the House Of Commons learned that between the April 25 landings and June 30 British forces had suffered 42,434 casualties.

    Meanwhile... the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, training interminably, it seemed, in Malta, had moved to a tented camp in a paradise of a place, Ghajn Tuffieha, on the north-west coast. Mostly London poor boys – including my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe, his older brother Ted (both underage volunteers, still 16 and 18 respectively), and their pals from Edmonton – the Battalion relished this unexpected tourist side of the war experience… while waiting for reality to bite. Given the casualties they’d seen shipped in, and subsequent funerals they’d observed at their previous encampment beside Pembroke Cemetery, they felt fairly sure reality would be called Gallipoli…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, parties of four to six Signallers – Fusiliers mixed with new arrivals from the Maori Pioneer Battalion – had begin a series of one- or two-week postings to defence points around the island. So we left Sam on top of a 17th-century Knights Of Malta lookout tower at Salina Bay, across from Ghajn Tuffieha on the north-east coast, paying close attention to the activities of a local farmer’s daughter on a nearby plantation.

    But come nightfall, the job got serious and rather exciting, Sam felt. Though also farcical as it turned out…

‘We were told of German submarines being refuelled somewhere in that area of the Mediterranean and communicating with someone ashore on Malta. So we had to spot all signals at sea or on land, read them if possible, and alert the troops waiting to take any necessary action.

     We had a phone line to a section of our men now camped back in the bay and, when I saw a flashing light coming from a place not far from their small camp, I quickly got in touch with the Sergeant in charge. Watching from my tower at the tip of a seaward finger of land, I concluded that the recipient of the signals must have been offshore beyond me. My mate wrote down the letters as I called them out, but the message, if such it was, had been encoded.

     The military operation to deal with the matter had its funny side. Sergeant Watson and his merry men hurried to the position I had indicated on the phone. They spotted a flashing at the top of a high stone wall by the road. A born leader and a man of action, the Sergeant sprang and heaved himself upwards — as I learned later for, having sent the message alerting him, I wished to participate in any excitement which might follow, so I asked a pal to take over the lookout job on top of the tower and commenced the fairly short walk from the tip of the headland back to the bay.

     In case the suspected collaborator with the enemy had helpers in the vicinity, I decided against taking a well-used track which ran along the high ground and, instead, made a rather tortuous progress among rocks low down by the sea. I soon realised the dark, moonless night was quite unsuitable for this silly choice of a route. I pressed on, but knew for certain I could not join the Sergeant’s party in time to help them. And when someone fairly close by let fly with a gun of some sort I was shaken to the very marrow. It had been a lark of sorts up to that point, but that terrific bang spoilt everything. The picture I’d had of the mettlesome young soldier voluntarily facing danger to help his comrades was phoney; the scared boy crouching low among rocks, scarcely daring to breathe in case he was spotted, was real.

     I waited some considerable time before moving, and then used great care to avoid making any noise. So, when I reached the coast road and approached the place where I guessed the light had been flashed, I found no one. The scary silence made me hurry to Sergeant Watson’s small camp, where my story of being fired on was received with some scepticism.

     There was no glory for anybody to be had out of the entire incident. Certainly, somebody had been on the wall, but after Sergeant Watson sprang upwards and straddled the top of it, apart from hearing the noise of a hasty departure he made no contact with the possible enemy. The Sergeant acted quickly, though. He jumped down on the far side – and his yell of pain brought others to the wall top, intent on saving his life if possible. But “Stay up there!” was his whispered command so they waited. They could hear him quietly moaning and cursing until he told them to move along and climb down at a point two or three yards away, whence he led his men on a search of the area. Still they caught no spies.

     However, the Sergeant was sorely wounded. Sorely being the appropriate word since his brave jump had brought his backside down on the hairy spikes of a huge cactus and he needed careful search and extraction treatment before relief from pain enabled him to write his report.

     On my return to the lookout tower, my friend who had so kindly taken on my job up top immediately asked about a shot he’d heard soon after my departure. I told him how close to me the explosion had been and how ear-shattering. We guessed that, if it had no connection with the flashing light, then the owner of one of the small plantations in the vicinity must have mistaken me for a thief in the night.’

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam gets promotion – the worst promotion of all; nobody loves a Lance Jack!

FootSoldierSam’s (rough) life on the ocean waves…

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Dear all

A hundred years ago… tomorrow (February 9) the first Canadian troops to join the battle sailed from England to France and… yesterday (the 7th), in a snowstorm, the German 8th Army launched a surprise attack on the Russians in East Prussia (now Polish territory) – the Battle Of The Masurian Lakes. They advanced 70 miles in a week, a near-massacre with 200,000 Russian casualties to 16,200 German. (A remote connection to Sam Sutcliffe, my father, is that German commander General Otto Von Below later switched Fronts and oversaw the March 28, 1918, Arras wing of the Spring Offensive, one of the micro-outcomes of which was Sam being taken POW.)

      Meanwhile, Sam, still 16, his brother, Ted, 18, both under-age volunteers, their pals Len Minns and Harold Mellow from Edmonton, north London, and a thousand other comrades in the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, sailed through a terrible storm for a destination unknown…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Hardly any of the rankers had left England before. Their introduction to the traveller’s life proved less than comfortable. Last week, Sam climbed out of H Company’s stinking chamber below to take his first look at rough seas and use the, shall we say, open-plan latrines – perched over the side. Now he tried to settle in (here, for new readers, still writing in the third-person and calling himself “Tommy”):

‘…he found that a blanket had been issued to each man. Removing his boots, he folded his greatcoat to form a pillow and arranged the blanket with a quarter of it hanging over the side to tuck around himself as he made himself comfortable. After several ungainly attempts, he succeeded in mounting the hammock and lay suspended perhaps 24 inches from the ceiling.

     One advantage to sleeping in a swinging net soon became obvious. When the ship did a sideways roll the hammock did not, it just hung there. However, when the ship’s nose dipped into a trough one could feel that all right. Head up, feet down… then vice versa, of course. A strange night, that first night at sea; half-awake for the most part, fully awake several times when the forepart of the ship seemed to receive a terrific blow. No alarm call followed… she hadn’t struck a rock… so one dozed off for a while.

     Large, two-handled urine tubs had been placed in an area where no hammocks hung and, as the night wore on and the ship’s wallowing increased, the homely sound of men pissing gradually gave way to the horrible noises of men vomiting into it.’

The voyage - not to France and the Western Front they soon realised with some relief – took ten days. So, in hopes readers aren’t feeling too queasy, we necessarily continue the alimentary theme. The soldiers could think of little else. Sam/”Tommy” found his own way through, spending as much time as possible away from that foul hold, the Company’s living quarters:

‘He clung to a rail, amazed to see and feel the forepart of the ship rise high, then plunge… at which his side of the ship would sink down, then rise up, up, while the far side almost vanished beneath the waves. These plunge-and-wallow movements increased in depth and height as the weather grew worse. And so the thing he had been fighting for several hours took possession of him and his loss was the fishes’ gain… he felt so ill that fear vanished…

     When the ship wallowed in a trough, various sideways rolls occurred, but fore and aft movements were only slight. Then, when the peak of the next huge wave rushed at the ship and looked to be about to fall on and bury her… at the last moment her bow rose about 50 degrees until, as she started to level out on top of the wave, a big bang for’ard preceded a horrible vibration shaking the whole ship as the propeller, now out of the water, raced madly before… the slide down the other side of the water mountain began and a foot or two of water scurried across the deck. Seeing this coming, Tommy raced towards the stairway leading to a higher level and just beat this on-board wave. Happily, there he found that only an occasional fine spray wafted his way…

     The weather only worsened… Tommy thought even experienced sailors must have worried that the ship would, at some time, either fail to come out of a sideways roll and capsize or continue one of those mad slides down the distal side of a huge wave and maintain that stern-up 50-degree plunge straight down to the ocean’s bottom.’

A crew member later told him the Galena* was “noted for her wallow”! Always nauseated, Sam nonetheless resolved to keep eating whenever he could – “he chewed and swallowed with determination for seasickness seemed harder to endure if the stomach was empty”. He ate dry bread and hard biscuits – no butter because what the Battalion Lieutenant Quartermaster provided proved rancid (for Sam, this man remained a hate figure all the way through to the beaches of Gallipoli). Some cheese. Stew from the communal dixie.

      And then he found a sanctuary. Wandering the upper decks – not an officer in sight for days – and then down again when he reached the stern, he entered a passageway, opened a door and stepped into… a throne room in more senses than the obvious, a place of “heavenly calm”:

‘… [it contained] a washbasin and a lavatory with hinged seat and flush tank above. Faint light came through a small fixed porthole. He bolted the door and dealt with a wave of sickness which assailed him. The weakness caused by this regular vomiting made him appreciate the warmth and privacy of this little room. He sat and dozed at first, while endeavouring to keep wakeful in case someone really entitled to use the place should come along. However, no one disturbed him and, in due course, deep sleep for an hour or two did him a lot of good.

     There was a homely touch about this little room and he had no wish to leave it. Hoping to come back, he slipped out, closing the door carefully.’

Eventually, after three days, given the respite afforded by that small sanctum – an unused crew toilet, he deduced – his stomach settled. He got talking to a couple of the sailors, a gleeful experience, Sam observes, “to make friends with civilians, already regarded as a separate race… That gap grew wider as the war grew older and bridging it demanded ever greater effort.” Officers emerged from their cabins to order a clean-up and Sam volunteered to fetch the unappetising rations for his mates, now he felt capable. He wandered some more – and ran into his brother (and hero, more or less) Ted, previously immured in G Company’s hold:

‘A reunion more demonstrative than ever before ensued. Normally, they greeted one another with the studiedly casualness befitting men of the world. But pleasure and relief at each discovering the other safe and well compelled them in that unguarded moment to throw their arms around each other and behave as humans should. Typically, Ted appeared to have remained well throughout.’

They met and wandered and talked for hours every day after that. But one more scare awaited:

‘At dusk, though, someone shouted orders for all to get below and H Company’s Sergeant West told them no lights must be shown, no matches struck. A submarine which, in darkness, could only locate them precisely if lights were exposed, was following them. So, down below with hatches covered, portholes shielded. Terrible, just terrible. And the fear that, if a torpedo struck the ship, the imprisoned crowds of men would not stand a chance of surviving. Only the really sick showed no sign of concern.’

No torpedoes came their way, though, and, finally, the old ship turned east. In the distance, land loomed.

* Actual name SS  Galeka     – another of my father’s mysteriously discreet, thin disguises of actual names, in the spirit of calling Tonbridge Bunbridge!

All the best — FSS

Next week: Gibraltar at last!