Blood and Thunder (4 page)

As soon as the troops arrived in France they were met with cheering crowds. Whilst the Ninth had headed for Boulogne, the majority of the BEF would be disembarking at Havre. As some Royal Fusiliers left their ship the French soldiers on the quay cheered them. They tried to show solidarity by attempting the ‘Marseillaise', but when they turned to a rendition of ‘Hold your hand out, naughty boy' they did so so seriously that the locals started whipping off their hats in reverence for what they thought must be the national anthem.

George Fletcher was overcome by the adoration. At every corner women were blowing kisses. They were showered with gifts: chocolate, fruit and flowers, and wherever they walked he found small children clustering about him and trying to grasp his hand. He would spend nearly a week waiting in the hills at Harfleur in what was, for the most part, blistering summer weather. He watched a continuous stream of regiments pour into camp and one by one move out again in the direction of the front in buoyant mood.

The wait by the coast was frustrating. Some infantry Etonians at Boulogne had been watching famous singers performing in a gymnasium to pass the time. Francis Grenfell had no time for the operatic folly enjoyed by ‘the feet'
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. He had taken to heart the words of Colonel Campbell and was not about to let his squadron put their feet up in the face of the big show. Allowing time for his beloved polo was one thing, but shoddy standards were unacceptable. He found rusty boots and spurs amongst his men and set to work, lining them up. Had they not heard the colonel's stirring words? Was not the best troop in battle nine times out of ten the one that scrubbed up best? They were the Ninth, a fact they ought to remember if they knew what was good for them. The culprits were made to march 2 miles onft and he gave ample warning for the future. Any man who turned himself out badly would have his horse taken away and be made to tramp. Another OE, Algernon Lamb, was charged with the machine gun section of the Household Cavalry contingent and had similar problems. ‘I had to speak to the men … about their general slackness and ill-discipline, which has been creeping in the last few days.'

Opportunities for loafing amongst the cavalry turned out to be limited. Their stay at the coastal camp was brief but their train ride to Amiens for concentration with the rest of the BEF was eventful. All along the route they found aged French reservists in bright red trousers asking them all sorts of questions as they guarded stations. One happy trooper of the Ninth managed to fall out of the train. Food and water could only be obtained by adventurous souls willing to struggle from wagon to wagon on floorboards laid between the two. Algernon Lamb's regiment had horses falling over during the journey. There was no method of communication with the driver so one brave NCO had to crawl bravely along the tops of the wagons to get the train stopped.

As these OEs converged on the border between Belgium and France none of the Allies, in these opening days of war, were actually in tune with what their brothers in arms were driving at. The Belgians wanted, understandably, to save their country from oblivion, whilst the French hierarchy imagined them helping to attack their common frontier with Germany. The British had haplessly headed for their original destination at Maubeuge, no matter how foolhardy it seemed to Kitchener in London who seemed to be the only relevant person who had realised that the Germans might swing down a massive force in their faces. When they arrived, to the disappointment of the French, the great offensive to avenge the Franco–Prussian War and take back Alsace and Lorraine was not at the top of their agenda. All of this confusion reigned before the enemy was even factored into the equation.

But the Germans were not superior when it came to the execution of war at this point. On the far right of their line and destined to meet the BEF was the First Army, commanded by Alexander von Kluck. The very definition of a Prussian officer, if he didn't like the orders he received he just ignored them. He was an abrasive personality and a very difficult man to deal with, but he needed this sort of temperament. His men had a monumental task on their hands: to swing down and obliterate the left flank of the allied forces to open up the war for the rest of the German armies. Unfortunately, though, he and von Bülow, commanding the Second Army on his left, hated each other, which was hardly helpful when cohesion and communication were imperative during an offensive. The German High Command had to intervene frequently to settle the verbal sniping between them.

To the south, at the River Sambre, which flows through southern Belgium and a corner of northern France near Charleroi, General Lanrezac was in dire straits at the head of France's Fifth Army. A sharp, practical leader he was also bad tempered and sarcastic with a penchant for foul language. He alone noticed that the heaviest weight of the German offensive was going to charge right into him. Von Kluck and von Bülow had more than half a million men between them. To his right, the Battle of the Frontiers was already raging, disastrously for the French. The situation to Lanrezac's left was no better. The Belgians were no longer there. Their tiny army was saved from pointless annihilation by King Albert, who saw what was coming and dropped out of the line and fell back, taking his soldiers with him. But at what cost? With nothing there envelopment was a haunting but very real possibility for Lanrezac. The British hadn't yet arrived and King Albert's men were being replaced by poor French Territorials. Still, in the face of this insanity, with German armies bearing down on him, his superiors wanted him to attack. The situation was dramatic but frighteningly clear. If he and the British, when they arrived, did not hold their ground and at least stall the impetus of the German advance, all could be lost. The remaining French forces could be encircled and destroyed; the roads to Paris would lay open. The little BEF would be overrun and Britain itself left helpless to an enormous invasion force. The war could be over in a matter of weeks and Europe at the mercy of the Central Powers.

Cavalry patrols had erroneously told von Kluck what he wanted to hear: that the British were landing to the north at Belgian ports. He had absolutely no idea that he was about to march into massed numbers of them whilst he moved in the opposite direction. Germany's first clash with the British Army was about to be centred upon a grim little Belgian mining town named Mons and it was here too, on a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon, in a haze of factories and amongst ugly slag heaps from the mines, that the first Old Etonian to be killed by the enemy was about to suffer his fate.

On 21 August patrols, including men of the 9th Lancers, became the first British troops to enter Mons. Whispers reached them of the fall of Brussels and massive numbers of German troops heading straight for them. The locals were quick to give them information and as battle approached they would give British troops food, tools to dig trenches and would even help building barricades from wagons, furniture, anything bulky that they could get their hands on. The day that the cavalry entered Mons they sighted the enemy: ambiguous, ghostly figures moving in and out of the dawn mist. Uhlans: a nightmare of a word. One minute they were there on their horses, hovering by a bridge and then they were gone. General Allenby, commanding the entire cavalry division, offered a medal to the first officer or NCO to stick an enemy patrol leader with a lance.

The strain of the heat on the men, especially the unfit reservists, who formed a large percentage of the BEF was already beginning to tell. With the Irish Guards, Aubrey Herbert and one of his fellow officers had taken to loading his horse with as many rifles and items of kit as he could to lighten the load of those walking alongside, whilst the tired men with their blistered feet clung to his stirrups. Francis, Rivy, Lennie and Douglas, riding with the Ninth, were exhausted. Since Maubeuge, like the rest of the BEF, they had been making their way in stuttering fashion north towards the first British clash of the war.

The Harvey brothers had managed to fashion a single wash out of a local stream, although it turned out to be more of a mud bath. George Fletcher was feeling quite sorry for himself too, not least because a ‘disgusting little man' of the Intelligence Corps had refused to give him a horse and sent him off to war on an unglamourous and unreliable motorcycle. ‘I have been exceedingly despondent about this business ever since we crossed the sea,' he wrote. ‘I felt that a red herring had been drawn across my path.' Had he waited he would have probably received a commission into the Special Reserve of officers but by running off and joining the Intelligence Corps he remained a Territorial. He was suffering many a sleepless night, in the main not because of conditions but because he could not bear the thought of the army fighting the Germans and he himself not being in the infantry. On 22 August, after he and his smell, which was already rapidly diminishing in his estimation had spent a backbreaking day shuttling messages, he had thrown himself into a makeshift bed at ten o'clock. Less than an hour later he was dragged out of it again to find a wandering battalion that was needed for the now imminent clash. ‘I spent four hours looking for it,' he bemoaned. ‘Being challenged by sentries every half mile, my headlight lighting up their faces and glittering bayonets pointed straight at my nose.'

It had been a trying week for all. In the seven nights since leaving Tidworth one of the Ninth's officers had slept for four of those on a table, in a pub, outdoors on an iron staircase and on the deck of a ship respectively. Their plight was still not over. Having spent 22 August lounging by the side of the road and in fields, as night fell the bulk of the cavalry had orders to switch their position from the right flank of the BEF to the vulnerable left where it would meet the worryingly weak French territorials before fighting commenced.

Mons was almost the last place in the world that a regiment of cavalry would want to end up. Gone were the ‘wide rolling downs of their dreams'. It was likened to the Black Country or London's Docklands. The canal itself, black and stinking with chemical refuse from nearby industrial sites, bisected an urban sprawl that went on for miles. The water wasn't deep, nor was it wide, but movement and visibility in the area were appalling. To the north, the Germans were hiding in dotted woods and spinneys. On the south bank, more buildings and slag heaps, pointing their ugly noses skyward as high as 100ft, blinded the troops and made it near impossible for the artillery to come up. Moving around it was trying for cavalry men too as they had to manhandle their horses around tramways and trolley rails as well as artificial waterways, which all lined the banks of the canal like a grimy spider's web.

Even Francis Grenfell, with all of his notebooks, could not begin to make sense of it all. Having covered miles on difficult paved roads on exhausted animals it was a nightmare. A thin drizzle had turned the coal dust that lay everywhere into a greasy slime. ‘Our horses, half asleep like ourselves had staggered on, stumbling over unseen cobbles and cinder heaps in the pitch dark, slipping on the endless network of tram and trolley lines.' The Ninth found their animals lumbering, sliding, even falling down. As they rode westwards Belgian men and women ‘emerged unabashed' in their nightwear to watch the cavalry as they trudged on their way. They reached their destination, south-west of Mons, just before dawn; their only reward for their troubles a wet field to lie down in. At headquarters, Lanrezac's desperate and ever so slightly cheeky request for the BEF to carry out a suicidal attack on von Bülow's army to give his own troops some relief fell on unsurprisingly deaf ears. And so it was here, where they had stopped in the most unsuitable of potential battlefields that General John French promised that the BEF would hold the British position for twenty-four hours.

Battle commenced, and by mid afternoon on 23 August. Regardless of the dogged nature of the BEF's defence, the overwhelming German numbers and the falling ranks of the British battalions involved had its effect. They began to retreat. All along the secondary front to which they retired exhausted members of the BEF attempted to snatch a few hours of sleep. The wounded were being evacuated as far away as possible and the dead lay where they had fallen. In the aftermath, bodies were buried side by side with the enemy. Today, at St Symphorien Cemetery, one of the prettiest on the Western Front, lie men believed to be both the first and last Commonwealth soldiers to fall in the Great War, the first recipients of both the Victoria Cross and Germany's Iron Cross during the conflict, and with them the first Old Etonian to fall at the hands of the enemy. Frederick Albert Forster of the 4th Royal Fusiliers was attempting to hold off the German assault on the canal at Mons when he was struck down as his battalion began falling back through the town. The first proper clash between the two nations in the Great War was over. More than four years of bloodshed on the Western Front had begun.

Notes

  1  It was here, at this time that Eton College suffered its first casualty of the Great War. Arthur Hughes-Onslow, a veteran of the Sudan and the Boer War, was 51 years old when he was called back into service to command the Remount Service for the cavalry. Before a British soldier had fired a shot in anger at the enemy, he passed away after a short illness on 17 August 1914 and was laid to rest in Havre.

  
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  Cavalry slang for infantry.