Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (42 page)

It is hard for an army exchanging fire with an advancing adversary to break off contact and retreat in good order. At first light on the 24th, the Germans began once more to press II Corps. Many units that day experienced skirmishes, though with slight loss, before falling back to bivouacs a few miles further southwards. A notorious incident took place when the 9th Lancers and Dragoon Guards charged German guns at Audregnies across a mile of open ground, an extraordinary piece of folly even by the standards of British cavalry. They were led by Lt. Col. David Campbell, a famous horseman who had once won a Grand National steeplechase riding his own horse, The Soarer. Tom Bridges was one of many men at Audregnies astride heavyweight hunters which a few months earlier had been jumping fences in the Shires, before being purchased by the army. An unexpected sunken road caused many fallers; German guns unhorsed more men, who sought cover behind corn stooks, from which they returned fire. Bridges’ mount Umslopoogas was killed.

Eventually the British withdrew, having suffered eighty human casualties – fewer than they deserved – and rather more equine ones. Fourteen-year-old German schoolboy Heinrich Himmler wrote exultantly in his
diary: ‘Our troops advance to the west of the Meuse towards Maubeuge. An English cavalry brigade is there and is beaten, really beaten! Hurray!’ That day Maj. ‘Ma’ Jeffreys of the Grenadiers – in Haig’s corps – described ‘a long and trying march … in great heat and over very bad and dusty roads. The men very tired and rather puzzled as to what we are at.’ Jeffreys was disgusted by a large number of Coldstream stragglers whom he encountered on the road, and insisted that his own men should be denied opportunities to lag behind: the only concession to the most exhausted was to place their packs and rifles on the battalion’s baggage carts.

Bernard Gordon-Lennox deplored the supposed secrecy which kept officers in ignorance of GHQ’s plans and intentions: ‘most disheartening. No one knows what one is driving at, where anyone is, what we have got against us, or anything at all, and what is told us generally turns out to be entirely wrong.’ In truth, of course, this mystification derived not from GHQ’s sense of discretion, but rather from its incompetence and indecision. Failure to brief subordinates about the purpose and context of their activities proved a chronic British command weakness throughout the campaign.

The same pattern was repeated on 25 August. Beside the ruins of the old Roman forum in Bavay, southward paths divided. A single road could not possibly carry the entire BEF and a mob of civilian fugitives. It was decided to dispatch I Corps by the route which ran east of the great forest of Mormal, while II Corps took an almost parallel line on its west side. All day, a traffic jam persisted in Bavay, as French’s jumbled formations struggled through. ‘I have never been so tired,’ wrote Capt. Guy Blewitt of the Oxf & Bucks, ‘as in the last 46 hours I had no sleep, covered 40 miles besides having the anxiety of a rearguard. At nearing Bavay it was evident that things were serious, the road being packed – cavalry with their horses, cavalrymen who had lost their horses, ambulance wagons, refugees, bicycles, perambulators, guns, infantry in fours, infantrymen who had lost their units and infantrymen whose units didn’t know where they were required and were sleeping by the side of the road. The cobbles of Bavay made one’s feet sorer and we were very glad to be turned into a stubble field to bivouac; here fires were soon burning and we got some food to eat and straw to sleep on.’

Traffic control throughout the retreat was poor, and in those innocent first days the British lacked the ruthlessness necessary to clear their road of fleeing civilians and vehicles. Guy Blewitt saw a very old Belgian, obviously at his last gasp, being wheeled past on a cart. The Englishman winced
at the irony when the old man summoned just enough strength to cry in a high, fluty voice, ‘
Vive l’Angleterre!
’ By contrast, some units which had been cheered when they advanced now found themselves booed as they retired: local people divined the price they would pay for allied defeat when the Germans arrived. Lt. Rose of the Wiltshires described the night of 25 August: ‘The whole way back there were two lines of vehicles, guns, ambulances etc, going the same way along one not very broad road, the infantry in no sort of formation … It was dark except for the fitful flashes of lightning and glow of burning houses in the various villages which had been set alight by shellfire … The rain came down in torrents. The men were very tired; they had had no rations for two days, but they were not demoralised in the least.’

On that same day of the 25th, 2nd Grenadiers marched almost fifteen miles, oppressed by the heat, troubled by blistered feet and impeded by refugees pushing barrows and handcarts. A British officer gazed with pity upon an old woman torn between her urge to seek safety, and a deep peasant instinct against abandoning her farm. ‘But who will feed the pigs if I go?’ she cried. Sixty miles northwards, in Ghent, Belgian housewife Jeanne van Bleyenberghe wrote to a friend: ‘It makes you cry to see all those poor people with numerous children, who left behind their cow, their pig and all that they earned by hard work … We have only had three weeks of war and already it seems years to me.’

The Grenadiers finally halted just south of the Sambre in the town of Landrecies, where Haig had established a new corps headquarters. Guardsmen had gratefully thrown off their kit and made themselves comfortable in billets, when around 5 p.m. an alarm was given. The inhabitants retired to their cellars as panicky troopers of the Irish Horse ran down the main street shouting, ‘The Germans are on us!’ It transpired that an enemy cavalry patrol had appeared at the outskirts of the town, then hastily retired. Men of the Coldstream were deployed to guard the Sambre bridge approach, taking up position around a farm on rising ground five hundred yards north of the river. Their first intimation of activity came when they heard the sound of voices which they later claimed were lustily singing the
Marseillaise
.

Instead of French soldiers, however, a German officer advanced to the barricade of furniture erected by the Guards. In a notable stroke of initiative, matched by equally striking British negligence – Haig wrote crossly in his diary, ‘their guard does not seem to have been very alert’ – the German was able to seize an unattended Vickers gun, and retire clutching
it. Thereafter, there was a general mêlée as darkness descended, during which a Guardsman named George Wyatt won a VC by running out under heavy fire to extinguish a blaze in stacked cornsacks which threatened the British position. His regiment, however, scarcely distinguished itself at Landrecies.

The British were aggrieved by the perfidy of their enemies supposedly singing French songs to mask their approach, but the Germans were expecting to find billets, and not enemies, in Landrecies. Their column was led by a field-kitchen wagon; if indeed they were singing France’s national anthem it is likely they chose the tune because it sounded well, rather than as a
ruse de guerre
. Neither side displayed much tactical skill. A senior officer thought the Guards were ‘very sleepy and the measures taken were rather half-hearted’. But a few enemy shells fell in the town and Grenadiers sallied forth to support the Coldstream. An officer wrote: ‘they seem pushing devils, these Germans’, but then added, ‘the moment the Dutchmen’ – a corruption of
Deutscher Mann
– ‘tried to advance a deadly rapid fire was poured into them. They charged pluckily three or four times, but each time they were mown down.’

The scrimmage at Landrecies – for it was no more – cost each side around 120 casualties. The British stood to until dawn, dozing and shivering in the darkness: the harsh night chill was among the unwelcome surprises of the campaign. They then withdrew from the town, relieved that the enemy allowed them to decamp unscathed. Most of the Grenadiers lost their kits, because the battalion baggage carts had been incorporated in street barricades. ‘Ma’ Jeffreys wrote: ‘I like most others kept falling asleep as I marched along … We still know nothing about the general course of the war.’

The most important consequence of the brush at Landrecies was that it caused Haig, the corps commander, temporarily to succumb to panic. The British regarded the German assault on them as far more serious than it was, initially claiming that the enemy had lost eight hundred dead. Haig was feeling desperately unwell, weakened by an outbreak of ‘the runs’ and a heroic dose of bicarbonate of soda. During the night’s exchange of fire and confusion in the streets he persuaded himself – and Sir John French – that his force was threatened with disaster. Corps commander and headquarters fled away southwards. Through at least the next five days, Haig manifested a defeatism which few of his subordinates afterwards forgot. He focused his energies upon saving his own corps, almost heedless of the fate of Smith-Dorrien’s. Col. James Edmonds, a divisional chief of staff
who later became British official historian of the war, wrote brutally of this episode in a 1930 private letter to an old comrade: ‘D.H. had … been thoroughly shaken by the business at Landrecies, had drawn his revolver and spoken of “selling our lives dearly”. Undoubtedly he also thought Smith-D[orrien] was in a bad way. In any case, he played a selfish game, marched off leaving Smith-D in the lurch, although the firing at Le Cateau and march of the Germans across the front of his rearguard was reported [to Haig].’

When Sir John French should have been worrying about Smith-Dorrien’s formations, which were gravely exposed as the Germans continued to press relentlessly upon them, instead he chafed about a non-existent threat to Haig’s formations. These continued on their weary way southwards, scarcely troubled by the enemy, while their comrades fought the bloodiest action of the retreat.

2 LE CATEAU: ‘WHERE THE FUN COMES IN, I DON’T KNOW’

Brilliant late-August sunshine, warming and lighting the French countryside, mocked the condition of the warring armies, milling in a fog of misapprehensions and uncertainties. On the 25th the British II Corps suffered many frustrations: dense masses of refugee traffic enforced halts on its retreating columns; units fell behind amid local difficulties – the Royal Irish Rifles were delayed by a long train of artillery crossing the battalion’s line of march. That evening their colonel, Wilkinson Bird, reported to his brigadier that the men were too exhausted both to march and to fight through the night, if they had to continue serving as rearguard. At 10 p.m. the battalion entered Le Cateau, twenty-five miles south of Mons. Bird went to the post office and telephoned Corps HQ, who told him to keep marching to the village of Bertry, three miles west.

He emerged into the brightly-lit town square, thronged with wagons, stragglers, soldiers eating and drinking in restaurants. One of his officers asked, ‘Are you going to halt, sir?’ Bird answered tersely, ‘No – damned sight too dangerous.’ He knew that once his men fell out, it would take hours to herd them onto the move again. The battalion trudged up the hill out of the town into rustic darkness – and became lost. At 2 a.m. they blundered into Reumont, a mile short of Bertry, where they found 3rd Division’s headquarters. Bird asked for a meal for his men. A staff officer said, ‘You won’t get it, because we are retreating again at four, and
yesterday it took five hours to get under weigh.’ The riflemen collapsed into sleep in a nearby cluster of farm buildings. Some officers procured a meal at a little café in nearby Maurois.

The previous evening, II Corps had issued Operation Order No. 6, which began: ‘The Army will continue its retirement tomorrow.’ In the small hours of the 26th, however, Smith-Dorrien felt compelled to reconsider. Many of his units were in the same exhausted and hungry condition as the Irish Rifles, and some were still tramping through the darkness towards Le Cateau. He reckoned that if the corps tried to move on southwards that day, its cohesion must collapse; lagging units would be overrun by Germans hard on their heels.

Generals’ personalities sometimes lack colour, but this could not be said of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. Twelfth in a family of sixteen children, as a young transport officer in Zululand he was one of the few survivors of the 1879 disaster at Isandlwana, following which he was nominated for a VC for his efforts to save other fugitives. Thereafter he gained extensive experience of colonial wars, and fought at Omdurman – he became a lifelong friend of Kitchener. He emerged from the Boer War with an enhanced reputation, and thereafter held a succession of commands. A committed army reformer, he especially promoted musketry and was an evangelist for machine-guns. In July 1914, Smith-Dorrien was sent to address several thousand public-school cadets at their summer camp, where he astonished an almost uniformly jingoistic audience by asserting that ‘war should be avoided at almost any cost; war would solve nothing; the whole of Europe and more besides would be reduced to ruin; the loss of life would be so large that whole populations would be decimated’. At the time most of his cadet listeners recoiled from such heresy, but those fortunate enough to survive until 1918 came to look back with respect on Smith-Dorrien’s frankness and independence of thought.

He took command of II Corps unexpectedly, after the sudden expiry from a heart attack of Lt. Gen. Sir James Grierson. A self-indulgent lifestyle and excessive girth had ill prepared Grierson for the stresses of active service, but his death was a loss because, as a former military attaché in Berlin, he knew the German army intimately. Kitchener imposed Smith-Dorrien as a replacement against the bitter opposition of French, who detested him. Though generally calm and robust, the new corps commander was prone to outbursts of extreme temper which caused subordinates to quail, and had indeed provoked his chief of staff to try to resign his post after Mons.

This, then, was the man in charge at Le Cateau on 26 August. Early in the small hours, Smith-Dorrien consulted such senior officers as he could convene. Allenby, commanding the cavalry, reported that both his men and his horses were ‘pretty well played out’. He said that unless II Corps began to withdraw before dawn, the enemy was so close that a battle at daybreak would be unavoidable. Hubert Hamilton, commanding 3rd Division, said his men could not possibly move before 9 a.m. The 5th Division was even more scattered, and 4th Division – which had detrained from the Channel ports only on the night of the 24th, and still lacked most of its support units – was entangled in a rearguard action. Smith-Dorrien asked Allenby if he would accept his orders. Yes, said the cavalryman. ‘Very well, gentlemen, we will fight,’ said the corps commander in a manner that would read well to history, ‘and I will ask General Snow [commanding 4 Div] to act under me as well.’