Gallipoli: A Foot Soldier’s First Battle September 1915-January 1916 Suvla Bay and V Beach: An episode from Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier’s Memoir Of World War 1

Excerpted from Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe's Memoir of WW1, this is his personal account of the final four months of the notorious Gallipoli campaign. A poor north London boy, after enlisting under-age – at 16 – as a Royal Fusilier in September, 1914, he spent several months training in Malta and Egypt before shipping out to Suvla Bay. Under fire, comrades dying from the moment they landed on the beach, Sam's Battalion found themselves thrown into a sterile yet terrifying battle which, they sensed immediately, would lead nowhere. Events proved them right – and in the process, casualties reduced a thousand men to 200. With his formidable, near-total-recall memory – writing in his seventies – Sam details the individual stories and emotions behind the daily grind of attritional trench warfare.