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by Mark Rowe

  .... it must be remembered that since the beginning of the battle of Mons we knew absolutely nothing, operational orders were unknown and we were never told anything ... we were undergoing the most terrible privations and fatigue, without sleep, completely in the dark and without being permitted to turn and show fight. That the Army survived such a terrible test of morale is a marvel.

  On Friday August 28, they reached La Fere, 60 miles south of Mons as the crow flies. (Another 60 miles would take them to the River Marne, level with Paris.) “General French came around and personally addressed each unit. He told us that he had never been prouder of a British soldier and that the Army had saved the French from annihilation after having undergone the most terrible test an Army can experience.” Dent and his men cheered, ‘and everyone felt much better’.

  III

  Even assuming that a few words from the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Sir John French, made the suffering feel worthwhile, was the general right? Was anything (let alone everything) better, after days of retreat?

  Even while the going was good, the BEF seemed to be living off the land and the goodwill of the locals. Once in battle, every man and unit had to fend for themselves. True, the Germans were having as hard a time, if you believed the captured ones. At least the Germans, by going forward, might find food left behind by Belgian and French civilians, now refugees, and the British. Lieutenant R Macleod of the Royal Field Artillery began retiring on the Monday evening: “They outnumbered us about five to one,” he told a public meeting in the village of Waterbeach outside Cambridge a couple of weeks later. “On Tuesday our transport ran into the Germans and they had to burn it so we got no breakfast. The inhabitants were very kind and gave us bread and eggs and fruit. We had a 30 mile march and I don’t think any of us would have lasted it if it had not been for this.” The German captain Walter Bloem, to his mind in pursuit of a defeated enemy, likewise came across abandoned heaps of tins of Fray Bentos corned beef, burned to deny it to enemies like him. Setting it on fire merely cooked the meat in the tins, however: “It was excellent!” Bloem added.

  If you lost your unit, through exhaustion or battle, you were even more on your own. Sgt Bird and Private Woolgar of the 4th Dragoon Guards, for example, had their horses shot under them, and took shelter in a hen house, with a German sentry outside the door, because the Germans made the adjoining building into a headquarters. They joked afterwards: “So that we could say we dined with the German generals that night, the only difference being that they were inside and we were outside; they were having wines and we had swedes and no &c.” The men escaped the hen house, and travelled south-west with the sun as their guide, dodging German troops, and trusting to the kindness of Belgian people.

  Airmen were above it all. If they saw any enemy planes, they were finding it difficult to do much damage to them; even L A Strange, who had had the idea of fitting a Lewis machine-gun to his aeroplane. More danger came from his own artillery, which he noted ‘had a nasty habit of firing at every aeroplane they saw ...’

  In his diary for Friday August 28, he called the retreat ‘hasty but orderly’:

  ... many stragglers and some confusion along the line of retirement but perfect discipline and order extending back to the fighting line which is very difficult to define as so many little separate battles are going on in isolated spots, some so forlorn that they are obviously only desperate last stands.

  Here lay the reason a ‘retirement’ could lead to catastrophe, and you did not need a training manual to tell you why. In retreat, you had all the problems of an advance, of one unit not tripping over another; plus, you had to go faster than the enemy, or the enemy caught up with you and made you fight, when and where he chose, maybe before you dug a hole or even knew he was there. The more you retreated, the more men got lost and found themselves in hen houses; the more could go wrong, until the army didn’t look like one any more.

  One story that made the newspapers was of a wounded man, an unnamed sergeant in the Inniskillings, who was shot in the shoulder after an all-night march on the Tuesday, August 25. He had his wound dressed at a French farm. When he set off again, Germans were nearby, and nearly captured him. He found himself in a village with a couple of hundred men, from mixed units, which was always a bad sign of confusion. These 200 stragglers did not know that the main British force had retreated further; in ignorance likewise, the Germans thought the British had left the village:

  There was a lot of dead lying about too, men who had been carried there and had died on the way. When they were doing the charge one German shouted to us in broken English to surrender. We never spoke, but let them come on, and when they were within about ten yards we let them have it with the rifle. A few of them got up close enough to bayonet about two or three of our fellows, but they were only slight wounds. One fellow got a bayonet through the neck. Then we beat them off.

  The British, so nearly over-run, took the chance to slip out of the village: “We had to leave our transport behind us, but we filled our bandoliers with ammunition.” The soldiers were learning that ammunition was most important to carry, more important even than food; and living was most important of all, more important than burying your dead. The life of one mattered less than the lives of many. Later, when these stragglers were sheltering in a wood, the man on guard was captured by two German cavalrymen: “... we saw them taking him away, and they were prodding him with their lances.” The British officers would not let their men shoot; not, you suspect, in case they shot their captured comrade, but so they stayed hidden and safe. They kept marching by night until they found their division again. The Royal Engineer Charles Wallbank, ‘like heaps of fellows’ got lost, all the way back to Le Havre.

  Such was the BEF’s retreat; not a neat campaign, of orders given one day and carried out the next, as according to the commanders’ memoirs, and historians’ maps. The hunter chased the hunted, with never a word from a general, let alone a hot meal, or a letter from home. Every day the men became more exhausted, more likely to make mistakes. Private C E McLoughlin, ‘a fine, upstanding Irishman, and a typical Guardsman’, according to the Burton Evening Gazette, was digging trenches at Mons on the Sunday night, August 23. All Monday night, his Coldstream Guards retreated, without sleep. Time was so short, officers and men alike ate turnips from the fields.

  It may have been on the Tuesday, August 25, that McLoughlin found himself at Landrecies, an important road junction 25 miles south of Mons:

  About half past eight that evening, my company, numbering about 120, were ordered on outpost duty. It was raining dismally at the time, and shortly afterwards a thunderstorm burst. A party was seen advancing not far away, but in reply to our sentry’s challenge no reply was received. A French officer then challenged the oncomers, and the reply, ‘We are French’, came from the advancing party’s commander. The latter walked up to our sentry, his left hand extended in friendly greeting. The next instant a sword flashed in the commander’s right hand, and the unsuspecting sentry’s head was severed at a stroke. One of our men, unable to control himself, rushed madly at the treacherous German - for such he proved to be - and flooring him commenced a violent struggle on the ground. Our boys were now getting ready to fire, and the man struggling with the German was ordered back to the ranks. As he was returning, however, the officer rose to his knees and brought our man down with his revolver. I need not tell you that when we received the word to fire, more than one of us had reserved our first shots for that German traitor ... The advance guard retreated bellowing and screaming like madmen. The wounded also shrieked horribly; it was more nerve-racking to hear them than it was fighting.

  The longer the soldiers lasted, the more they learned about war. Let us assume that all of McLoughlin’s vivid story was true, and not pieced together with others’, and not (in parts at least) unknowingly altered by his mind, suffering as it was on a third night (or more) s
hort of sleep. Who or what had the German been a ‘traitor’ to, by tricking the defenders into thinking he was friendly? Was it unfair, that the German killed the sentry, to give his side the advantage of surprise? In the end, were McLoughlin and his fellow guardsmen any less fair towards their enemy, shooting them and leaving them to shriek?

  The troops were learning morally, and practically. The Germans were using what some soldiers called ‘searchlights’; a sort of shell fired at night, that lit the battlefield like day. If this German flare caught you moving, bullets or shells could follow. Soldiers on all sides were learning to be hard. They did show some feelings for suffering civilians, who did not belong on the battlefield. Bugler Tom Reeves of the 9th Lancers was yet another man hurt by a bursting shell (‘I shall probably have to lose one or two of my fingers’) who wrote from hospital: “It is a lot different to what most of us expected. Women and children leaving their homes with their belongings. Then all of a sudden their houses would be in ashes - blown to the ground.” Sgt Crockett was one of many to claim that the Germans used women and children as a shield to advance behind: “It nearly broke some of our boys’ hearts to have to keep on firing, but we had to do so to preserve ourselves.” The Germans denied the crime, and we can ask besides, how or why would the Germans have pushed Belgians (who, whether French or Flemish speaking, would not understand German) in front of them? Would that not have been more trouble than it was worth? More likely, Crockett was seeing civilians simply caught between the warring sides and running wildly, like rabbits in a harvested field with nowhere to go - except the waiting guns of sporting shooters such as Clifford Gothard.

  As soldiers on both sides were absorbing the shock of their first close combat, they learned to be indifferent to others. Lance Corporal Ball, from Walsall, stood his ground with his fellow Grenadier Guards when Germans made a bayonet charge: “I don’t know how many I accounted for, I lost count, but it was a terrible slaughter.” A day or two later, while he and the Grenadiers were in reserve, he saw a British cavalry charge:

  The spectacle of the horses thundering down on them and the men with their lances ready was too much for them. Some began to run as fast as they could go, others went down on their knees and held their hands up for mercy, and another lot made a rush for a neighbouring haystack. The way they scrambled up the side of that stack was the most comical thing of the lot. We absolutely roared with laughter.

  Men were learning to laugh at absurdity of war when they could, even during the act of killing and being killed, because of another cruelty: the man doing the killing one day could be killed the next. Were their commanders, who normally were spared all this, harder and wiser too? If they had blundered into a fight with far too large a part of the German army, were they learning from the experience, of fighting the first European enemy in their working lives? At the time, and afterwards, the closest observers thought not.

  IV

  The lesson is: don’t be too senior at the beginning of a war!

  The Path to Leadership, by Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1961)

  We can make an even more general point than Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery, as he was in 1914. It’s a risk to be the first to do anything, whether looping the loop in an aeroplane, or (as by the time Montgomery was writing in retirement) riding the first rocket into space. Other people, maybe not as good as you, learn from your mistakes and you, the one who had the harder job, never get the credit. Just as the campaign of August 1914 had echoes of 1815, so it had the seeds of the blitzkrieg, over some of the same country, of May 1940. The Germans of 1914 had the blitzkrieg spirit: to first put themselves where the enemy did not expect them, or want them to be, and then to pin the enemy, cut off his retreat, and make him give up or kill him. The Germans in August 1914 had many of the ingredients of May 1940. What Sgt Crockett, the Welsh reservist, said he went through would have sounded familiar to men of the second BEF, 26 years later:

  Their aeroplane service was also very effective. When we were lying in the trenches we were fired at from aerial craft. Almost as soon as an aeroplane hovered above us the aviator would drop a signal to let the enemy know our approximate position, and they would immediately direct their hellish artillery upon us.

  What the Germans of 1914 lacked were tanks, which were artillery moved by motor, rather than horses. Tanks made a difference not so much because of the armour protecting the men inside, because enemy tanks would have the same armour and more or less the same guns to pierce that armour, but because the engine gave the tank speed, making it ten times as fast as a man or a horse. In 1940, the second BEF retreated to the beaches of Dunkirk and barely had time to sail home. For a while, the Germans of 1914 seemed to produce a similar effect, without tanks: had J L Dent retreated not 60 miles south from Mons, but east, he would have been well on the way to Dunkirk, and well within the May 1940 rate of retreat. In 1914 as in 1940, the Germans upset their enemy not only physically, but psychologically. Both times the British did not help themselves, by being so surprised by the Germans’ tempo. Take the staff officer Sidney Clive, head of the British missions at French general headquarters, where he arrived on Tuesday August 18. He had a ‘quiet’ first couple of days, and a relaxing enough Saturday August 22, to have time to visit Rheims cathedral. After Mons and the days of retreat, his next Saturday was quite different; he met the BEF deputy chief of staff Henry Wilson at Compeigne (about two-thirds of the way from Mons to Paris, as the crow flies). Clive wrote in his diary: “Much dismayed at Hy information that we must go to Havre and home.”

  By ‘we’ Henry Wilson (‘Hy’) meant the BEF. Now it might have been natural to wish for a break in a hard fight, even though probably impossible; but to say so was foolish and would only provoke alarm. Nor was this an exception. In a telegram to Kitchener, on August 24, Sir John French suggested ‘immediate attention’ to the defence of Havre. Did the BEF commanders think that the French would lay on trains? Perhaps the French would have liked to return home, too, and let Paris defend itself? What would the Infantry Training manual-writer have made of the British army leaving a war after one week? In between the two Saturdays, besides the clash at Mons and the start of the retreat, had come the battle of Le Cateau, on the Wednesday, August 26. How the battle had to be fought was both cause and effect of the British breakdown.

  Half of the BEF, Douglas Haig’s I Corps, carried on retreating from Landrecies after the Tuesday night fight. That left Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps alone at Le Cateau. General French’s headquarters was then at Saint Quentin, a good 20 miles further south of either. As a British official document of 1933 ahead of a tour of the battlefield put it, under the title ‘lessons’ (always the polite way of saying ‘this is what went wrong’) St Quentin was too far away; the headquarters gave orders to its two corps without knowing where they were. It was only through headquarters that I and II Corps knew where each other were. HQ had told Smith-Dorrien to carry on retreating and did not know (and nor did Haig) that Smith-Dorrien had decided to stand at Le Cateau for the day. Smith-Dorrien in the middle of Tuesday night decided he had no choice as his men were, as the 1933 document put it, ‘already thoroughly exhausted’. More to the point, so were the cavalry that would have to cover any more retreat. Not that the brigades of Smith-Dorrien’s brigades heard of the decision to stand, until dawn, if they ever did (let alone the battalions, companies and the men at the very front about to do the fighting).

  One reason for the fouled communications, that meant thousands died where they did, was the impossible job of the motorcyclists carrying messages, such as J K Stevens. His equivalent at the battle of Waterloo rode a horse; but only took a few miles to go from one end of the battle to the other. The messenger of 1815 and 1914 alike was shot at, shelled, and outdoors in all weathers. Stevens told his local Cambridge Daily News: “We were soaked to the skin when we reached Le Cateau and wet as we were we were glad to get a couple of hours’ sleep on th
e top of wet corn sheaves. The worst of being a motorcyclist was that even after settling down for a sleep we were invariably called up to take a message.” Around this time - Stevens may have muddled his story by the time he told it, a few weeks later - a piece of shell had chipped his motorcycle’s petrol tank; a farrier patched it with some solder. Another time, while Stevens had to make another repair to his machine, he lost his brigade. Once he reached St Quentin, he took a message for a field ambulance, until five miles out of town he skidded and buckled his front wheel. He put his motorcycle on a passing horse-drawn wagon and rather than add himself to the load he walked alongside the convoy, ‘as the horses were done up’:

  Never shall I forget the trek along that road. There were the stragglers of the army who had fought at Mons. Men who had not shaved for a week, men footsore and weary with nothing but their uniforms. Many had lost their caps and most of them had discarded their equipment. Some had cut the heels from their shoes on account of soreness. Every few hundred yards was a dead horse while I counted no fewer than 15 motor lorries abandoned by the roadside. Boxes of ammunition, sacks of flour, tins of meat, Cardigan waistcoats, caps, rifles, broken bicycles were scattered along this long, straight road. Here and there a few men had stopped to make a fire to boil tea, others gathered apples from the gardens of deserted cottages.