An Anzac soldier gives water to a wounded Turk. Photograph taken circa 1916. Wikicommons Gallipoli file. Some rights reserved.
December 7 – 9,1917, exactly 100 years ago, were portentous days for my family. My maternal grandfather Sidney was seriously wounded and badly gassed at the battle of Cambrai. According to my grandmother, it was the “last day of the battle", so it would have been December 8. Not surprisingly, some days later he had a heart attack. The incident is missing from the military archives, but it is recorded at the military hospital in Eastbourne where he arrived on December 28, 1917.
This was not the first time he had been wounded. He had been shot in the right-leg thigh during the battle of the Somme, some time between September 26 – 30,1916, and had also suffered a gunshot wound (GSW) in late August or early September 1915 at Gallipoli. He was shot by a Turkish sniper. The soldier was either a very good marksman or a very bad one, because he shot my grandfather in the wrist. It was not life-threatening, but he would not be able to hold a gun for some time, and was evacuated to hospital in Malta, arriving there aboard HS Guildford Castle on September 12,1915. The Turkish sniper probably saved his life – the endgame at Gallipoli was of course horrendous.
