Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  Though the British mauled Kluck’s leading regiments, as the day wore on their own casualties rose; meanwhile, the trickle of Germans crossing the canal swelled into strong streams. Early in the afternoon, Douglas Haig crawled to the crest of a low hill three miles north of Le Bonnet and overlooking the battlefield, accompanied by a staff officer, and viewed in grim silence ‘masses of grey-clad figures advancing’ upon his neighbours of II Corps. So accurate was enemy artillery fire in some sectors that Smith-Dorrien’s soldiers, like those of every other nation that August, became morbidly convinced that spies must be spotting for the enemy’s batteries. Eventually, unit by unit II Corps began to fall back, its men scrambling in small groups towards the rear, platoons taking turns to cover each other’s withdrawal, some soldiers supporting wounded mates. The difficulty was to make retreat a disciplined manoeuvre, not a headlong flight. When Col. Hull saw one of his platoons retiring under the orders of a sergeant – its two company officers had been hit – he told his adjutant to identify the NCO. After a glance through his field glasses, Tom Wollocombe gave the name, causing Hull to say furiously, ‘if Sgt. — had not had any order to retire, he would have him shot’. In the event, the suspect proved to be on the battalion’s ‘Missing’ list that night, so escaped the threatened firing squad.

  Pte. Sid Godley took over a Royal Fusiliers machine-gun at Nimy after its crew was killed, to such effect that both he and Lt. Maurice Dease were awarded Victoria Crosses – the latter posthumously – for their defence of the rail bridge. Godley, though wounded in several places, allegedly kept firing to cover the retirement of the battalion, until that evening his position was overrun by the Germans, and he became a prisoner. Sceptics have cast doubt on the reality of this action, pointing out that no German account mentions having encountered such resistance: they suggest that the feats of Dease and Godley were chiefly attested by the latter, while the high command was eager to identify plausible heroes. But there is no dispute about the courage of Capt. Theodore Wright of the Royal Engineers, who at 3 p.m. began a brave but hopelessly belated journey along the canal, to attempt demolition of five bridges along a three-mile front. Wright’s party was under fire most of the way, and his driver was understandably alarmed by the experience of threading a path across a battlefield in a car containing eight crates of guncotton.

  Shot at from three sides, the engineer was eventually successful in destroying the crossing at Jemappes. While he was working on another at Mariette, he sent off his vehicle to take a wounded man to the rear. He was then grazed on the head by a shell fragment, and found himself without electricity to detonate his charges. He hastily ran a cable to the mains of a nearby house. Still getting no live current, he tried again and again to achieve a contact, while men of the Northumberland Fusiliers provided covering fire. Then exhaustion caused Wright to slip into the canal. An NCO, Sgt. Smith, fished his officer out, but by now it was 5 p.m., and the Germans were shooting at them from a range of thirty yards. The engineers abandoned their efforts and retired. For this gallant day’s work, and others before he was later killed, Wright received a VC. It was all in vain: only one bridge on the British front was ever blown – the necessary orders had been given far too late.

  By nightfall, the Germans held Mons. There is no reliable record of their losses, but Walter Bloem’s battalion commander of the Brandenburgers lapsed into emotional lamentations: ‘You are the only company commander left … [it is] a mere wreck, my proud, beautiful battalion!’ Their regiment had lost killed one battalion commander and his adjutant, three company and six platoon commanders; a further sixteen officers were wounded; other ranks had suffered in proportion. Bloem reflected miserably: ‘Our first battle is a heavy, an unheard-of heavy defeat, and against the English, the English we laughed at.’

  Though this remark is often quoted in celebration of the BEF’s achievement, it was a wild exaggeration, reflecting the writer’s sensitivity to losses, common to all novice warriors. Bloem’s battalion suffered much heavier casualties than any other German unit that day. The British had been unable to frustrate Kluck’s advance, merely delaying it by a day before relinquishing their positions to the enemy. Another German regimental narrative recorded triumphantly that at nightfall ‘the spirit of victory was overwhelming, and was enjoyed to the full’. I Corps and Allenby’s cavalry had scarcely been engaged. The good fortune of Mons was that enemy bungling allowed the BEF to withdraw almost intact, having lost an estimated 1,600 men, many of them taken prisoner. A former travelling salesman from Hamburg who spoke fluent English marshalled some of the latter good-humouredly: ‘Gentlemen, please, four by four!’ Almost half of the losses fell on just two battalions – 4th Middlesex with over four hundred, and 2nd Royal Irish with more than three hundred; several units were obliged to abandon their precious machine-guns. German total casualties were roughly similar, but with a much higher proportion of killed and wounded, rather than prisoners.

  The British regarded their allies with contempt. Yet it was critical to the brief stand at Mons and the subsequent escape of II Corps that a scratch force of French territorials led by Gen. Albert d’Amade covered Smith-Dorrien’s left flank. Even as the little British action was being fought, Lanrezac’s Fifth Army suffered far more heavily, at Charleroi. Further south still, in the Ardennes on the 23rd and 24th the Fourth French and Fourth German armies lost 18,000 dead between them. In woods near Bertrix, an entire French corps panicked and fled, abandoning its artillery. Elsewhere the Germans began to bombard the fortress of Namur, garrisoned by 35,000 French and Belgian troops, and took it two days later at a cost of only nine hundred casualties. Their Third Army, commanded by Gen. Max von Hausen, prepared to cross the Meuse at Dinant using pontoons and barges. Hausen had fought with the Austrian army against the Prussians in 1866. Now sixty-seven and Saxony’s war minister, he saw an opportunity for his forces to envelop Lanrezac. Franchet d’Espèrey, ablest of Fifth Army’s corps commanders, on his own initiative launched a counter-attack, which pushed back the Germans. Late that night, Hausen’s men nonetheless secured the town – and conducted a brutal massacre among its population. But Franchet d’Espèrey had won time for Fifth Army’s withdrawal, and Hausen lost over 4,000 men.

  By comparison with all these engagements, British doings at Mons receded in significance – though not in the minds of Sir John French and his senior officers. At 3 o’clock on the afternoon of the 23rd, the C-in-C returned from his trip to Valenciennes, still prey to delusions that the allies might soon renew their advance. By nightfall, however, he was forced to recognise reality, to accept Col. MacDonogh’s assessment that his army faced an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. Kluck’s men were crowding in upon II Corps’ right – now south and west of Mons – and threatened to isolate it from I Corps; finally and most disturbing, Sir John knew Lanrezac had begun to withdraw Fifth Army from the Sambre valley, heedless of Joffre’s wishes to the contrary. The BEF had started the day nine miles ahead of the French. Now, that gap was about to widen dangerously, inviting the Germans to fill it. Sir John acknowledged that his own command must pull back fast, to avert almost inevitable destruction.

  The BEF bivouacked for the night some three miles south of Mons, its men expecting to fight on their new line next morning. That evening Tom Wollocombe ‘even had time to think that a battle was a wonderfully exciting thing when it was in progress … our men, instead of being downcast, were much impressed with the superiority of their rifle fire and extended order manoeuvring, over the enemy’s fire and movements “en masse”’. But at 1 a.m. on the 24th, GHQ issued new orders for a retreat, unassisted by guidance about how this was to be carried out, which was left to the corps commanders. Here was renewed evidence of incompetence at British headquarters, especially by Murray and Wilson, who simply did not know their jobs as staff officers. The only man who did was quartermaster-general Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, who through the weeks that followed improvised a supply system for the BEF with energy and skill.


  In the space of a few hours, Sir John French had lapsed from jaunty confidence into gloom, even panic. Now, he talked at one moment of leading his force to take refuge in the old fortress of Maubeuge; at another, of withdrawing north-westwards to Amiens, severing all contact with his allies. A few days’ experience of campaigning caused the British C-in-C to leap to the hyperbolic conclusion that French soldiers were not people with whom he could do business, not ‘proper chaps’ with whom he wished to continue fighting a war. Such an attitude would merely have invited ridicule, did it not threaten grave consequences for the allied cause.

  Meanwhile in Paris that morning of the 24th, Joffre told Messimy, the war minister, that for the time being the French army had no choice save to abandon the offensive, which had failed. The nation’s strategy was discredited. The French army had almost spent itself in futile attacks; it could aspire only to a protracted defence. ‘Our object,’ the commander-in-chief told the politician, ‘must be to last out as long as possible, trying to wear out the enemy, and to resume the offensive when the time comes.’ In the face of the news from the north, Joffre’s vast illusions about German deployments and intentions were at last falling away. He understood Moltke’s purpose.

  Hitherto, the C-in-C had paid only casual attention to the left wing. Hereafter, it became the focus of all his fears – and then of his hopes. Next day, the 25th, he issued to his commanders, copied to Sir John French, his later famous Instruction Général No. 2, declaring an intention to start transferring large forces northwards, to create a new army on the left of the BEF. He was anxious to confront the peril on his flank with forces which he could rely upon to accept his orders – as the British would not. But Joffre’s immensely complex redeployment could not be completed before 2 September, an eternity away, in the circumstances of the moment. Much must necessarily happen, for good or ill, before that day came, some of it to the BEF.

  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 Vi
ckers 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.’