By kind permission of Phil Sutcliffe, an excerpt from
Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier’s Memoir Of World War I
By Sam Sutcliffe

Available from philsutcliffe47@gmail.com £10 + P&P.
Website:  www.footsoldiersam.co.uk
Twitter: @FootSoldierSam

A POW from March 28 (the battle near Arras) until Armistice, my father, starved and dysentery-wracked, walked back west from his POW camp near the Black Forest to the Front. French poilu and medics cared for him and gave him a uniform. Moved to a tented RAMC hospital camp, he scrounged a British uniform from a storage tent (dead man’s clothing, but Sam felt neither squeamish nor superstitious). This proved handy when, for the first time in his young life, he met real Chinese people (rather than Fu Man Chu fiction’s caricature villains) – Chinese Labour Corps workers: “Fuel was brought in by men of a nation I had previously encountered only in the pages of cheap magazines which portrayed them as rather sinister people who moved in the sleazy atmosphere of Docklands eating houses, opium dens, the cabins of mist-enshrouded ships… Nothing sinister, though, about the two Chinese men who refilled our stove so frequently. I made friends of them and we talked for a moment or two at each of their visits. No language problem; they spoke English well enough for me to learn they belonged to the Chinese Labour Corps, formed to do chores for our Army and, thus, free the maximum number of British men to fight in the front line. I never heard of a similar scheme to free Staff Officers for front-line duty… These chaps told me they did most of their work in the officers’ kitchens and mess, not far from the hospital. Although well-fed, they found living in tents in winter-time very cold. They said they needed warmer clothing as the cotton garments they wore were thin and they shivered all the time — none of them knew the English for “shivering”, they conveyed it by illustration. This reminded me of the dead men’s clothes tent and that pile of cardigans, one of which I had appropriated, lying spare. Soon we had devised a contract which resulted in a daily rendezvous near the entrance to the officers’ quarters and the swift exchange of small parcels, a cardigan for a piece of cheese or some other tasty morsel. This did not seem to me a terribly wicked trade, for my friends needed warm clothing and I, still weak and thin, could benefit from additions to the necessarily austere diet available to an ordinary soldier at the end of a long war. So, as long as the supply of cardigans lasted, I met my customers’ requirements, conscience easily salved by averring that the transfer of unused clothing from one branch of our Service to another served the purposes of all concerned. Certainly my Chinese friends agreed with my line of argument, and their smiles and thanks and reciprocal nourishing gifts did me a power of good.”

Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier’s Memoir Of World War I
By Sam Sutcliffe
ISBN O78-O-9929567-O-7
£10 + P&P, available from philsutcliffe47@gmail.com
All author/ editor proceeds to the Red Cross