Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  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.’

  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 t
roops 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.