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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!
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