“I feel one can say with some conviction that no man should willingly leave his home to fight, wound, maim or kill other men about whom he knows little and whom he certainly does not hate. When all men refuse to commit such follies the foundations of a true civilisation will have only just started to be laid.”
- Sam Sutcliffe, circa 1974 (extracted from his Memoir)

Sunday 4 October 2015

Sam’s Battalion digs in at Suvla Bay – he sings the praises of unlikely heroes: the front-line sanitary men… and watches Lieut. Chalk take a hip bath on the field of battle…

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Dear all

A hundred years ago… this week, on the Western front the loos-Artois Offensive and the Battle of Champagne entered their (still deadly) petering-out phases. Although, on October 6 the French took Tahure and Butte Hill in the Marne area, all sides were reaching the already familiar conclusion that no significant advance could be made.
    While Russian and German Armies continued their struggles to and fro in Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia and Ukraine, further south German and Austro-Hungarian divisions combined to invade Serbia on October 7 and two days later, after heavy street fighting, they’d taken Belgrade. The British and French had talked of supporting Serbia, but did too little a lot too late – partly because of hesitations and leadership changes in neutral Greece which saw 20,000 Allied troops stuck in Salonika as the invasion began.
    Illustrating the breadth of the conflict, far-flung elements of the British Army took Birjand in East Persia (now Iran, October 7) and Wumbiagas in then German colony Cameroons (9th).
    Meanwhile, in Gallipoli... 12 months on from joining up, the thousand men of the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe (still underage at 17), and their pals from Edmonton, north London, had landed at Suvla Bay on September 25. Their first experience of a real battlefield: real bullets and shells, their first deaths, and the none too inspiring process of digging in.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week’s excerpt concluded with the much-vaunted RSM panicking and threatening to shoot his own men if they showed their heads above ground – thereby drawing Turkish fire in his general direction. Sam, to his regret, found himself in the next hole to this RSM and his batman – who tunnelled a passage through to the hole he shared with a fellow Signaller called Bacon. “It introduced an unwelcome intimacy,” my father drolly noted.
    Finally moving on from his fine-detailed account that first 24 hours scored on his memory (remember he wrote his memoir 50 years later, in his 70s without a note or a diary), Sam continues:

‘I still expected a sudden instruction would set us hurrying towards those hills in the “extended order”* we had been trained to use in attack. But that did not happen.
     Instead, we were told to make our holes deeper; hard work indeed for those of us with trenching tools only. Those fortunate enough to have secured picks and shovels improved their holes fairly quickly. Had we been digging in good earth, all of us would have done better, but this curious, flaky rock – grey in colour, layer upon layer of it, each about half an inch thick or less – was difficult to handle. Frustrating, irritating, productive of little but despair.
     The men who moved around collecting and filling water bottles, and others who, during the day, returned to the beach for supplies and brought them up to us, did so at great personal risk from Turk shells and bullets. Others routinely in danger because of the nature of their work were our Pioneers; back in Egypt, the Regiment had formed this section composed of men prepared to take care of sanitation. In places without water-flushed WCs, even on the front line, these men erected shelters, emptied and cleansed the waste buckets and seats housed in them, and sprinkled chloride of lime about the place.
     Now, in the battlefield, their work was of great importance. Canvas screens surrounded the bucket areas. With bullets and shells wreaking their havoc, these men exercised great self-discipline in servicing the latrines. Men needing to use them sat in real peril, their excretory movements probably accelerated by bursting shells and whining bullets. Holes appearing in the canvas screens added urgency to these operations.
     In fact, the Turks fired ever more frequently as that first day wore on. They took a steady toll on our men, in ones and twos, woundings and killings. Meanwhile, we attempted nothing, achieved nothing as far as we could see, our landing and presence apparently a sad, military waste.
     But our second night ashore brought the relief of movement: digging trenches well in advance of our initial position. When darkness fell, large parties stepped forward, armed with picks and shovels. As soon as they started digging, the noise brought shot and shell their way, and stretcher-bearers were kept busy.
     Still, they persisted, and soon established a trench system substantial enough for full occupation by half our Companies — the rest of the men and Battalion Headquarters had to stay in our original position which, despite further efforts to deepen our holes, remained lamentably exposed. Nevertheless, a tendency for some to regard that place as home became evident, although wise men realised the better organised forward trench system offered more protection.
     I had to move around constantly; as a Signaller I had no choice. When our comrades built and occupied new trenchworks, we had to run out lines and man the instruments to maintain communications from Battalion HQ to Company and from Company to Company.’

At this point, Sam encountered one of the more remarkable comic characters of his entire war:

‘Fifty yards or so from one end of that original collection of holes – where I still lodged from time to time – was a clump of trees and bushes… and one morning I was amazed to hear a voice coming from it. It said, “Devine! Devine!” The bearer of that name I knew to be an officer’s servant and the voice belonged to Lieutenant Chalk, the Battalion dandy. Crawling that way, I came upon this gent sitting naked in a hip bath and, fortunately, unaware of my presence.
     Apparently, not war nor any other damn nuisance was going to deprive this P.G. Wodehouse character of his morning cold tub. As requested, Devine took him a towel. And presumably John Turk had the Lieutenant’s permission to resume fighting soon thereafter.
     That pale pink figure squatting in that round shallow extra-large frying pan – what in heaven’s name had it got to do with war? A few slender trees and straggling bushes screened him from the eyes and rifles of an enemy who gave no quarter and was reputed to castrate and hang by his feet from a tree any infidel foolish enough to allow himself to be captured… An enemy who split lead bullets before firing so that they would spread out when striking bone and cause massive laceration.
     Reflecting on this strange apparition, my thoughts moved on from farce and risk to… water supply. We were always restricted to one pint daily per man. So where did the dear Lieutenant’s Devine procure more, much more, than this meagre ration for his master’s bath? Somebody told me several old wells had been uncovered, but they contained poison. In one, he said, they found a dead Turk. Still acceptable as bath water, I guess; perhaps the batman used that.
     I never saw Lieutenant Chalk again, nor did I learn whether he survived the war. Somehow I doubt it.’

And so, from the outset, the routines of attrition – or failure as the troops saw it from pretty early on – began to establish themselves:

‘We settled in. No more advances. And no more bacon. Most days there were only two items of “solid” food available, namely, hard biscuits and apricot jam. How come? It appeared that, for some weeks, a ship stuffed with these two eatables plus tea, sugar, and canned milk, served as our sole source of supplies. We of the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) accepted these rations without question, believing what we were told without doubt or quibble…
     At first, the weather stayed hot, very hot. Some troops, not compelled to English standards of hygiene on account of their easy-going colonial habits**, unwittingly fed and caused to multiply millions of dirty, fat flies and any foodstuff, or even hot tea, exposed, however briefly, to their attention instantly turned black with swarms of these filth carriers.
     Dysentery plagued the Army and many men existed in a weakened, dazed condition with only moderate chances of survival because they had no opportunity to replace the large loss of body fluid caused by the disease. When they finally collapsed, they had to be carried off to the beach, there to await transport to the Greek island hospital or to Egypt. This scourge spread alarmingly and one missed comrades only to learn that they had succumbed to it.
     For a very specific reason, I remained one of the few who steered clear of dysentery throughout that campaign (although I did experience its horrible effects rather later in the war). Around that time, some parcels from home were brought ashore and one of them was for me, the only parcel I received during that campaign. Beautiful goodies delighted and uplifted me from the prevailing gloom. But the package was small, of necessity, and the contents soon vanished, so intense were my hunger and their sweet appeal.
     However, there remained two medicine bottles, each containing 200 tablets. Knowing something of the front line’s risks of disease, my parents spent some hard-to-spare money on water-purifying tablets, surely one of the most useful purchases they ever made. I dropped one tablet into my daily water ration. I kept the tablets in my tunic pockets and, since one could never undress, this meant I had these life-savers on my person day and night.’
* “Extended order”: opposite of close order; troops separated as widely as the situation and terrain permit – recommended for “skirmishing”, I read.
** Apologies from the next generation, but I think he meant neighbouring Anzacs. The way soldiers talk, I expect the Anzacs were complaining about the bloody Poms attracting the flies.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Getting used to trench life – including the grind of little sleep, poor diet... and Turkish snipers. While the C-in-C swans about on a battleship!

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