The Making Of The British Army (47 page)

THE FOREIGN SECRETARY, SIR EDWARD GREY, NOT A MAN FAMOUS FOR
his hard work, was nevertheless working late in August 1914 as the nation headed inescapably for war with the ‘Central Powers’ – Prussia (or ‘Germany’), Austria-Hungary (or simply ‘Austria’), the Ottoman Empire (or ‘Turkey’) and, eventually, Bulgaria. As he stood at the window of his office watching the lights being lit in the street below, he made his memorable remark: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Politically, his words would prove all too prophetic. Militarily, they implied something that neither his cabinet colleagues nor the army and navy chiefs had believed, and therefore something they had not prepared for: that the war would be a long one.

‘Over by Christmas’ was the prevailing opinion – so much so that the Staff College practically shut up shop so that its staff and students could join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to see action. Two men besides Grey, who perhaps did not himself see the military implications of his gloomy prediction, believed it would be otherwise. One was Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Haig, though as a corps commander in the BEF his opinion was as yet inconsequential. The other was the new secretary of state at the War Office, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, whom Asquith appointed the day after declaring war on 3 August.

Kitchener predicted a costly war lasting three years at least. Crucially, he calculated that Britain’s full military potential could not be reached until 1917, but that its weight would then be decisive. He set aside a dozen years’ strategic thinking in a mere few hours, but his was nevertheless a clear strategic analysis on which to plan; and, of course, it was proved right. Although the cabinet was not yet ready to introduce conscription, within two days Kitchener got parliamentary approval for an initial increase in the army’s strength of half a million men. And up went his famous
Your Country Needs You!
posters for the first 100,000 recruits, to be enlisted ‘for the duration’.

The scheme was controversially different from anything the War Office had hitherto conceived. No one had thought in terms of such a colossal expansion of the army, only of getting the Territorial Force (TF) ready for overseas service if that proved necessary – though legally it was still liable for home service only. Kitchener did not even plan to expand the army through the county Territorial associations: his half a million, when they were all eventually recruited, would be regulars, not Territorials, and they would serve in formed units – fourth, fifth, sixth battalions and so on of existing regiments rather than as individual reinforcements for the BEF. Indeed, his intention was simply to raise a series of ‘New Armies’, each mirroring the BEF, complete in all its branches (though the yeomanry would provide the cavalry). He both mistrusted the quality of the Territorials as a basis for expansion and feared the complications of the legal position. If Territorial battalions volunteered en bloc to serve overseas their offers would be accepted, although he saw their role primarily as ‘backfilling’ – relieving regular units at home and in overseas garrisons for service in France. In fact the Territorials soon had battalions in action in France and began their own expansion programme alongside that of the ‘New Armies’.

How large an army Britain would need eventually, Kitchener was unsure. By mid-September he was speaking of fifty divisions in the field; by July 1915 he had upped the figure to seventy. This phenomenal expansion raised two further questions on top of how so many men were to be recruited: how were they to be trained and commanded, and how were competent divisional and corps staff to be found? At the outbreak of war the regular army stood at some 247,000 (about a third of them in India), while the Special Reserve (the old militia) and the TF together could muster roughly twice this number. By November 1918 in France alone there were a million and a half British soldiers, not
including colonial troops, a further half a million in other theatres overseas, and getting on for a million and a half at home (including Ireland) in training or garrison duties. (The population of Britain and Ireland in 1914 was estimated at 46 million.) A fourteenfold increase in its size, and in so short a period, inevitably redefined both the character of the army and therefore the nature of the operations it could undertake. But it might not have been so traumatic a process – so steep a learning curve for the New Armies in particular – had not the old regular army been effectively destroyed by the first year’s fighting.

In August 1914 the Kaiser had mocked the BEF as a ‘contemptible little army’, a jibe which its members were soon wearing as a badge of pride, calling themselves ‘the Old Contemptibles’ (the Kaiser’s chief of staff, Colonel-General Helmuth von Moltke, is supposed to have been more circumspect in ascribing weakness to its small size, however, describing the BEF as ‘that perfect thing apart’). As soon as war was declared, the cabinet met to decide where the BEF would be used. The German strategy was one of rapid offensive in the west to knock out France while the Russian army was still mobilizing, after which troops would be transferred from the western to the eastern front via the excellent Prussian railway system to deal with the second great power of the ‘Triple Entente’. Britain, the third member of this informal alliance, hardly figured in the German war plans, as the Kaiser’s assessment of the BEF suggested (although he knew that relative naval strength would not be to Germany’s advantage in a long war).

To overcome the formidable defences on the Franco-German border, in the early years of the century the Grosser Generalstab under Count Alfred von Schlieffen had devised a plan to make a broad outflanking march through neutral Belgium (it was the violation of Belgian neutrality that tipped Britain into the conflict), enveloping Paris from the west and thence threatening the French armies from the rear. It was compared with a revolving door swinging through Belgium with its pivot on Metz in Lorraine. The French counter-plan – ‘Plan XVII’ – was for an immediate offensive in Lorraine to throw the German army off balance and to threaten the rear and lines of communication of the German right flank swinging towards Paris. The revolving-door effect would have been completed by the German armies in turn taking the French in the rear.

Both plans were ludicrous. French belief in the power of
l’offensive à
l’outrance
¹⁴⁶
took little account of the effects of modern weapons; and the Schlieffen Plan required more troops than were available, as well as prodigious rates of advance, even against light opposition, and feats of logistics, command and control that were only realistic on a map. The plan had been devised in the early 1900s and worked up in subsequent years by Schlieffen’s successor, Moltke, who as commander-in-chief in the west put his own final version into action at the beginning of August. Schlieffen’s ‘dying words’ to Moltke had reportedly been ‘only make the right wing strong!’, for he knew that whatever else was to be changed, the plan could work only if there were enough troops on the extreme right wing to ‘brush the coast with its sleeve’ and continue the swing west of Paris. But Moltke could not bring himself to take the risk of weakening the ‘revolving door’ elsewhere, particularly that inner part against which the French counter-offensive was expected. Nor dare he leave East Prussia too weak, for the Russian railway system was improving with every year, and with it therefore the speed of Russian mobilization.

A young subaltern in Britain’s newly formed Intelligence Corps, Rollestone West, writing in his diary as the BEF moved to its prearranged positions in France, marvelled at ‘the astonishing completeness of it all’. That was, indeed, the reaction of many who observed the British army’s arrangements for mobilization. Two complete army corps had been assembled (though initially the BEF would consist of four divisions, not five as originally planned, plus the cavalry division), reservists had been called up, equipped and despatched to their units, and many thousands of horses had been requisitioned from private owners, their whereabouts recorded in the Army Horse Register compiled annually by the district remount officers. And the BEF’s move by rail and sea to the Continent was an undertaking so unprecedentedly large and executed so smoothly that many could scarcely believe the transformation from the old days of hasty improvisation and muddle. On 5 August, the first full day of mobilization, commanding officers received files of documents marked ‘Top Secret’ detailing their regiments’ movements to their unnamed ports of embarkation. They were not over-wordy: ‘Train No. 287Y will arrive at siding D at 12.35 am
August 15th. You will complete loading by 3.40 am. This train will leave siding E at 9.45 am, August 15th. You will march onto the platform at 9.30 am and complete your entraining by 9.40 am.’ Many officers thought it decidedly un-British.

But the BEF’s deployment plan had never been politically endorsed by formal treaty with the French. Driven in large part by the personal determination of the director of military operations, Major-General Henry Wilson, the army staff had worked on the assumption that the BEF would operate on the left flank of the French army to counter the expected Schlieffen swing through Belgium. At the war cabinet’s first meeting, other ideas had been put forward – such as reinforcing Antwerp (the Scheldt estuary still loomed large in British minds, as it had at the Congress of Vienna a hundred years earlier), and even landing on the German coast. But in the end, it was the complexity of the deployment plans – not least the slots for troop trains on French railways – as much as anything else that determined the BEF’s role. And so, just as Austria, Germany, Russia and France had stumbled into war because of the inflexibility of their mobilization and deployment plans, each depending on a movement schedule that could be cancelled but not modified, the BEF entrained for its place in what that great populist historian A. J. P. Taylor called ‘war by railway timetable’.

When the 18th Hussars’ transport came into Calais harbour the troopers burst into song with a rendition of ‘Here We Are Again’ – much to the puzzlement of their officers, for the regiment had not set foot on the Continent since Waterloo. But a hundred years is nothing in the mind of a British soldier: the regiment had been here once before, and that was enough. More to the point, they had won their battle the last time. After unshipping their horses the regiment boarded their trains for Maubeuge, where later in the day they detrained and marched north, finally coming to a halt at Mons, 10 miles beyond the Franco-Belgian border. Indeed, had they continued another twenty-five miles they would have reached the field of Waterloo; and when the 18th’s bugles blew ‘ceasefire’ on 11 November four years later, they would find themselves in almost exactly the same spot on which they first heard the sound of the German guns. That the French were on their right, rather than in front of them as at Waterloo, and the Germans in front of them instead of on their left was of no matter. The BEF were regulars, professionals: they did not yet hate ‘the Hun’.
They were here to do a job, as they had trained to do, and do it they would.

But allied relations had not got off to the best of starts. Unlike Wellington, Field Marshal Sir John French – brought out from under the Curragh cloud to command the BEF – spoke little of the language, and attempts to liaise with the commander of the flanking 5th Army, the brilliant but acerbic General Charles Lanrezac, did not bode well. Did
le Général
think the Germans (who were reported to be moving to their north) proposed to cross the Meuse at Huy? asked Sir John through his interpreter. ‘Tell the Marshal,’ snapped Lanrezac, ‘that in my opinion the Germans have merely gone to the Meuse to fish.’

Given that French’s orders from Kitchener stressed that the BEF must not be hazarded in any offensive action unless the French themselves were making the greatest commitment, the exchange was hardly conducive to heroic British efforts. In Lanrezac’s disdain there was almost an echo of the Kaiser’s contempt for the BEF’s small size, both of them failing to make due allowance for quality, what today would be called the ‘force multiplier’.

Sir John French’s liaison officer at Lanrezac’s headquarters was a subaltern of the 11th Hussars, Edward Spears (who in 1940 as a major-general would again play a major role in Anglo-French liaison). On 21 August, as French continued to advance in spite of Lanrezac’s
hauteur
, Spears drove into the British sector and got his first glimpse of the BEF: ‘The first I saw were a small detachment of Irish Guards, enormous, solid, in perfect step.’ Next came a column of artillery: