Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (43 page)

All the officers present heaved a sigh of relief. After the chaos and confusion of purpose which had attended them for three days past, here was a clear decision, which they welcomed. So too, at first, did Sir John French, when informed in a message delivered to GHQ by automobile that half his army was to conduct a second battle of the campaign without benefit of the commander-in-chief’s guiding hand or assistance. French later very publicly recanted, castigating Smith-Dorrien in his memoirs. Given II Corps’ predicament, however, it is hard to see how its commander could have acted otherwise. He proposed to try to inflict ‘a stopping blow’ on the Germans, to gain a breathing space in which to resume his retirement. He expected I Corps to support him, and was given no hint by French that Haig was continuing to withdraw, leaving II Corps’ right flank in the air.

At 7 a.m. Smith-Dorrien was summoned to take a call on the railway telephone network, which proved to be from Henry Wilson. The sub-chief of staff said the C-in-C had now decided that II Corps should resume its retreat. Too late, said Smith-Dorrien; his troops were already in action, and could not disengage before dark. Wilson afterwards claimed to have said, ‘Good luck to you; yours is the first cheerful voice I have heard for three days.’ But Sir Henry also appears to have expressed extreme gloom about II Corps’ prospects. Later that day James Edmonds met Smith-Dorrien, who complained how little he knew about what was going on, and about having been obliged to make so big a decision. Edmonds replied reassuringly, ‘You needn’t bother your head about that, sir. You have done the right thing.’ The general said that GHQ appeared to differ: ‘that fellow
Wilson told me on the telephone this morning that if I stood to fight there would be another Sedan’ – referring to the disaster that befell the French there in 1870.

When Sir John French’s chief of staff received Smith-Dorrien’s message that he planned to halt and make a stand at Le Cateau, Sir Archibald Murray was convinced that it was all up with the BEF. In a manner that might be deemed tiresomely theatrical had it not been authentic, he collapsed in a dead faint. A colleague implausibly named ‘Fido’ Childs said, ‘Don’t call a doctor: I have a pint of champagne.’ James Edmonds wrote sardonically: ‘And that they poured into Murray about 5 a.m.! … “Curly” Birch, who was riding about the field in a towering rage looking for the cavalry brigades which Allenby had lost, told me that the instructions of GHQ were “to save the cavalry and horse artillery”.’ It was a time of near-madness at French’s headquarters, which enjoyed no accession of sanity as the day unfolded.

Now and for days ahead, the C-in-C and his staff were prey to defeatism and indeed panic. Joffre witnessed this for himself when he arrived at Saint-Quentin later in the morning, to confer about his new campaign plan with the British and Lanrezac of Fifth Army, even as Smith-Dorrien’s men were fighting for their lives a few miles northwards. The generals met in a gloomy, over-furnished bourgeois mansion off the main street, where Sir John French had established himself. Lanrezac was in a vile temper, and had earlier that morning abused both Joffre and French to his own staff in a fashion that dismayed and even disgusted them. He professed agreement when Joffre said that it was essential for Fifth Army to keep counter-attacking, to sustain pressure on the Germans, and promised that as soon as his retreating army had got clear of the woods around Avesnes, where artillery could not deploy effectively, he would resume the offensive in open country.

Joffre was not to know that, in reality, Lanrezac had no intention of doing anything of the sort. On the 26th, while the British fought at Le Cateau, Fifth Army continued its drifting retreat; the only French forces which saw significant action that day were Sordet’s cavalry and the scratch group of territorial divisions on Smith-Dorrien’s left. Tom Wollocombe of the Middlesex was one of the few British officers to acknowledge handsomely the contribution of their allies: ‘the French troops … under General D’Amade took a lot of pressure off us’. Meanwhile at Saint-Quentin, Joffre was shocked by the wild words of the British C-in-C, who railed at the fashion in which the BEF had been exposed to disaster since
the moment it reached the front, for lack of French support. Their conference took place in a shuttered and thus darkened room where, according to Spears, ‘everyone spoke in an undertone as if there were a corpse in the next room’. Protracted interpretation was necessary, since few of the British present spoke French, and neither Joffre nor his subordinates were fluent in English.

France’s commander-in-chief began to explain his counter-offensive plan – General Instruction No. 2. He was dismayed to learn that the BEF’s C-in-C knew nothing about this: Sir Archibald Murray, in a state of physical and mental collapse, had failed to show his chief the critical document. Joffre summarised his intention to create a new ‘mass of manoeuvre’ with the French Fourth and Fifth Armies on the right of the BEF, then bring up fresh forces on its left. He urged upon his British allies the need to stand their ground and launch a counter-attack, for which he promised French support.

Sir John was unmoved by any of this: he merely insisted that he intended to continue his own withdrawal. Spears wrote: ‘The sense of doom was as evident in that room as when a jury is about to return a verdict of guilty on a capital charge.’ When the meeting ended, Sir John French drove away southward, taking his headquarters with him, almost heedless of Smith-Dorrien’s battle further north. Spears again: ‘It was perhaps the worst day of all at GHQ. Nerves were bad, morale was low, and there was much confusion. The staff wanted heartening, and Sir John’s departure had the contrary effect.’

Joffre wrote in his memoirs: ‘I carried away with me a serious impression as to the fragility of our extreme left, and I anxiously asked myself if it could hold out long enough to enable me to effect the new grouping of our forces.’ The allies’ principal commander was confronted by the vast, looming German menace; by doubts about the nerve and competence of Lanrezac in the most gravely threatened sector; and finally by a British C-in-C alienated from his allies and visibly unmanned by the crisis. One British corps was retreating on a different axis from that which GHQ had decreed, while the other had started a critical battle on its own initiative. The Saint-Quentin conference ended in indecision, its only outcome British acquiescence in Lanrezac’s further retirement. Joffre departed without having made any attempt to impose his personality, to force Sir John French’s hand. Both the allied commanders-in-chief seemed bereft of that most vital of all battlefield qualities: grip.

In fairness to the BEF’s commander, Joffre’s assurances of Lanrezac’s cooperation proved worthless. But this scarcely justified Sir John’s growing
determination, in effect, to wash his hands of the campaign. To say that French’s headquarters was not a happy place, his staff not a united team, would be an understatement. Beyond the fact that the commander-in-chief did not enjoy the confidence of his subordinates, his chief of staff was detested by Henry Wilson, who was bitterly resentful that he did not have Murray’s job; all the more so when the latter kept his position even after suffering a nervous collapse.

Years later, Murray wrote to an old comrade: ‘to me it was a period of sorrow and humiliation … As you know, the senior members of [GHQ] entirely ignored me as far as possible, continually thwarted me, even altered my instructions … I have never before, or since, had a disloyal staff to work with … Why did I stay with this War Office clique when I knew that I was not wanted? It was my mistake … I wanted to see Sir John through. I had been so many years with him, and knew better than anyone how his health, temper and temperament rendered him unfit, in my opinion, for the crisis we had to face.’ He concluded that if Wilson had been less disloyal, ‘I should not have had to struggle with Sir John unaided’. The only sentiment shared by French, Murray and Wilson was lack of confidence in each other, an alarming state of affairs at the summit of an army in the field. Indeed, personal relationships between almost all the most senior British officers in France ranged between frigid and poisonous. They would not improve during the year ahead, and intrigue became endemic. Henry Wilson, for instance, once told French that Kitchener was as much the enemy of the BEF as Moltke or Falkenhayn. The only band of brothers to which Britain’s generals might be likened was that of Cain and Abel.

Once early-morning mist cleared on the 26th, a succession of RFC pilots landed back at their fields from scouting missions to report enemy forces clogging every approach road for miles in front of II Corps: ‘[the airmen’s] maps were black with lines showing columns of German troops’, in the words of a staff officer. A single infantry regiment of three battalions, 233 horses and seventy wagons occupied two miles of road; six of these were closing fast upon Le Cateau, celebrated as the home of Matisse. ‘A sun-baked drowsy little place it seemed,’ in the words of a British officer, ‘on the eve of being flung into history to the accompaniment of the roar of great guns … unconscious of its fate, the little town looked as if nothing could ever rouse it.’ The action Smith-Dorrien fought on 26 August, 568th anniversary of Crécy, proved much bloodier than Mons – indeed, as costly
in British lives as was D-Day in June 1944, a world war later. It was utterly unlike almost everything that happened to its survivors in the ensuing four years. This was the last significant battle the British Army would ever fight in which a man standing on the rising ground a mile or so north-west of Le Cateau might have beheld most of the day’s critical points within his own range of vision.

The little town nestled in a valley, where it was invisible to the 60,000 troops who took up positions across ten miles of green and golden fields in the open, rolling countryside above. The corn had been cut, and stood in ordered stooks on the stubble, interspersed with expanses of sugar beet and clover, together with occasional haystacks, reaching as far as the eye could see. One soldier thought the place resembled a familiar exercise ground – ‘Salisbury Plain without the trees’. Smith-Dorrien deployed his exhausted corps on unfavourable terrain, without benefit of much reconnaissance. Some units, especially those on the right nearest to Le Cateau, found themselves defending positions which were soon overlooked by the advancing Germans, who could bring up men in dead ground. Critics later argued that the British would have fared better holding a higher ridgeline half a mile further south. Smith-Dorrien would have shrugged: ‘Needs must.’

Some local townspeople came out to help the British entrench. Nearest to Le Cateau, the Yorkshires settled into shallow rifle-pits dug by Royal Engineers, with the Suffolks on their right. The Norfolks struggled to cut down a lone tree on their position, which offered a conspicuous aiming point for enemy gunners. Signals detachments cantered across the appointed battlefield, laying telephone cable from whirling drums mounted on wagons. But this was in desperately short supply, because so much had been used and lost at Mons. The most important means of communication throughout the August 1914 campaign were the superbly efficient French civilian and railway telephone networks. An official historian later wrote: ‘At the outset of the campaign we had an intercommunication system where, through favourable circumstances, the forward circuits were more numerous than was again achieved until much later in the war.’ At times in August, however, units were reduced to sending messages by lamp or semaphore flag. The most reliable method of communication remained that of thousands of years past: dispatching messengers afoot or on horseback. On the field of Le Cateau, gallopers were a familiar sight, dashing from unit to unit, delivering orders at mortal hazard.

The battle unfolded piecemeal, broadly from right to left of the British line. German artillery began firing at 6 a.m., and soon afterwards Kluck’s men entered the town of Le Cateau, which was undefended, and pushed British pickets back up the hill at its eastern edge. One of the attackers, Lt. Kuhlorn, recalled later: ‘I gave my platoon the orders “On your feet! Forward! Go!” and we advanced in short rushes. When I looked around during a pause, I found I had about eight men and some NCOs with me. The remainder had stayed where they were.’ But, a few yards at a time, he and his regiment pushed forward. By 9 a.m., Kluck’s guns were bringing down heavy fire on the Suffolks and Yorkshires and their supporting batteries, all in plain view, plunging them into an ordeal which continued for many hours thereafter. The Suffolks’ colonel was among the first to fall; before long one British artillery battery had lost all its officers, and was firing only a single gun. By mid-morning Smith-Dorrien’s right was outflanked, so that for the rest of the day the Germans were shooting at the Suffolks and Yorkshires from three sides, and had machine-guns sited to enfilade the British positions.

Some of II Corps’ units further north were still marching to their appointed places in the line after the battle started. At 7 a.m. a panting cyclist orderly pedalled up to the farmhouse where Col. Bird of the Irish Rifles had snatched an hour or two’s sleep, with orders to march at once to Bertry. Bird was at first mystified about where to find his men. He roused Capt. Dillon, the adjutant, fast asleep in an armchair. ‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,’ said Dillon. ‘I remember sitting down, then nothing more until you woke me.’ An hour later, with his companies trudging dozily behind him, Bird rode into Bertry, where outside Corps HQ he met Smith-Dorrien. ‘Will your men fight?’ demanded the general. Yes, said Bird. The lean, intense corps commander ran his eyes down the column. ‘Your men look very well … [They] just want a damned good fight and no more of this retreating.’ The Irish Rifles were dispatched two miles north-west to Caudry station, in the centre of the British line.

A staff officer later reported that once the die was cast, Smith-Dorrien wanted no interference from his C-in-C. ‘[He] was most anxious that Sir John should not come – he spoke for quite a long time on this point, after which a few casual remarks about his left and right flanks both being in the air, but that he was confident of giving the Germans a good fight even if he was running the risk of being surrounded.’ Around 10 a.m., masses of German infantry began advancing across the stubble fields west of Le Cateau. Kluck believed that he was deploying his IV Corps against six BEF
divisions, which were retreating south-westwards. In consequence of this misapprehension, his formations stumbled upon the British in a succession of uncoordinated encounters that denied the Germans the chance to throw their full weight behind the punches.