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Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

Page 42

by Max Hastings


  This display of petulance, by the soldier leading Britain’s only army in the field, stunned the War Cabinet. Sir John’s telegram reached London at a critical moment. For almost the first month of the conflict, the vast events unfolding on the continent, and their own little force’s part in them, had been shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Early news-paper reports were sparse, but unfailingly cheerful. The Times of 17 August bore the optimistic headline ‘Germans Driven from Dinant’. In a familiar tradition, many officers writing home from the BEF made light of their ordeal. Harry Dillon, a thirty-year-old-year-old captain in the Oxf & Bucks, enthused on 29 August: ‘I am very fit and everything is going top-hole. We have done a great march – it has been fearful work, 25 hours with hardly a stop once and it has been going on so far almost continuously for days. One’s feet throb so one can hardly stick it at times. We have bumped into the absolute flower of the German army and have laid them low absolutely in thousands … The swine are doing all sorts of low-down things. In one case they drove civilian women and children in front of them … On another occasion they dressed in French uniforms and came up shouting … We have had the best of them everywhere.’

  Beyond this sort of nonsense, designed to lift the spirits of families at home, even the prime minister remained blithely ignorant of the scale of the battles fought by the French, dwarfing British experiences. Asquith twice read through the telegram reporting the action at Mons before observing resignedly to Kitchener, ‘I suppose you’re doing everything that’s possible.’ He referred repeatedly to alleged French unwillingness to fight, citing the British Army’s view that its allies were in a state of ‘funk’. In cabinet on 24 August there was some brief discussion of a possible evacuation of the BEF via Dunkirk, though thereafter nerves somewhat steadied. Maurice Bonham Carter, a member of the Downing Street staff, wrote to Violet Asquith on 28 August with characteristic nationalistic complacency: ‘Our people have done wonders & have really I think saved the situation for the French.’ Asquith himself expressed similar sentiments on 29 August: ‘The Belgians … are really gallant fellows – and so far compare very favourably with the French – and are now collecting their forces.’ Britain’s leader seemed to lack any sense of the sheer scale of events, military and otherwise. The same day, he wrote casually to Venetia Stanley about the possibility that the Russians might dispatch three or four army corps to France via Archangel: ‘don’t you think this is rather a good idea?’ Two days later, he followed up with some scribbled lines which he prefaced SECRET: ‘the Russians can’t come – it wd take them about 6 weeks to get to Archangel!’

  Asquith was a man of high intelligence and sensibility, yet he wrote of vital strategic issues as if he were discussing the tiresome inability of some guests to attend a garden party. Through August, with his nation at war, he resumed his accustomed practice of weekending in the country. Driving back from one such idyll in Kent, he encountered a broken-down fellow motorist, and companionably towed his vehicle into the nearest town. On the same journey, he gave a lift to two small children returning from holiday in Margate to the shop in Lewisham where they lived, one of them sitting on the prime minister’s knee.

  There is no reason to attribute cynical motives to these trifling good deeds. Neither yielded any crowd-pleasing photo-opportunity; they simply reflected paternalistic good nature. But it is hard to imagine Winston Churchill, as national leader a conflict later, behaving in such a fashion amid the burning urgencies of a similar crisis. Almost everything Asquith said and did in 1914 reflected the conduct of a measured man responding in measured terms to the unfolding of a measureless European catastrophe. He had neither skills nor inclination to exercise control of military operations, which he left to Kitchener and the War Office. It is not to his discredit that he was no warrior. But he was no more appropriate a national leader in such a vast emergency than was Neville Chamberlain in 1940.

  The British people, meanwhile, knew even less about events on the continent. The Times asserted confidently on 18 August: ‘The one thing clear is that the German Army has not yet assumed the offensive in the wholesale and impetuous fashion we were led to expect by the military professors.’ Three days later, it became plain that this was the opposite of the truth, and the Chronicle told its readers: ‘The tremendous battle which in all likelihood will decide the fate of Europe and remodel its map has evidently begun.’ Thereafter, for ten long days the public was denied significant tidings, which fed a widespread apathy, especially among the socially and politically disaffected ‘lower orders’.

  The headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, wrote a letter to The Times, published on the 24th, expressing dismay at what he saw as the moral debility of such people: ‘the notion among many of our working men seems to be that if Germany wins they will be no worse off than they are now. If this idea is not combated, we may yet be done for.’ Following a rural weekend party, parliamentary lawyer Hugh Godley wrote to Violet Asquith, also on 24 August: ‘It is extraordinary to think how little the people in the country districts seem to know or think about all that is going on … They are really much more interested in their own affairs.’ That same day, the combination of supposed Russian success in East Prussia and Serbian victories over the Austrians prompted a spasm of wild press optimism. There were predictions that the Tsar’s forces would soon take Königsberg, then drive on towards Danzig. The charlatan Horatio Bottomley scaled heights of maudlin sentimentality, proclaiming in John Bull: ‘Let every Briton look with calm confidence and firm resolve to the Golden Eventide when the sounds of battles shall be silenced and, with the women and children, we will foregather to talk of the victory of our dear, lost comrades and the newborn world, in which the Prince of Peace shall be King.’

  But then reports of French misfortunes began to seep through Whitehall and Westminster. Admiralty civil servant Norman Macleod wrote irritably in his diary on 24 August: ‘If [the] French cannot defend their own country, it seems hopeless to help them.’ Next day The Times’s military correspondent predicted – correctly, though two days after the event had taken place – that the British army at Mons would be obliged to conform to the French retreat further south. On that same 25 August, Norman Macleod had a bleak conversation with the Fourth Sea Lord, Capt. Cecil Lambert, ‘who took a most gloomy view of the situation – French Army in his opinion wd not make a good stand: “I’m afraid they’ll let the Germans through. Well, we must make up our minds to go through with it, we’re in the same position as 120 years ago.”’ But Macleod noted that by the same afternoon, Lambert had cheered up: ‘our men had done wonderfully well and come off with little loss on the whole – situation more hopeful’.

  The Daily Mail’s news editor wrote in his diary on 26 August: ‘Published first British casualties. Over 2,000. How enormous they seem, and the war is only beginning. Everybody talks about them in horrified whispers.’ In those early weeks, until numbers overwhelmed space, The Times published brief biographies of fallen officers, for instance: ‘Lt. Claude Henry was born in 1881 and joined the Royal Worcestershire Regiment in 1903 … From 1909 until last July he was employed with the West African Frontier Force … Captain Dugald Stewart Gilkison was born in 1880 and joined the Scottish Rifles in 1899. He served under Sir Redvers Buller in the Ladysmith Relief Army.’ Such profiles were accompanied by photographs, some painfully incongruous, like that of Lt. A.F.H. Round of the Essex Regiment in his football kit. In the same vein, after the cruiser Amphion fell victim to a mine in the North Sea, The Times published a full list of the hundreds of her crew saved, a nicety of a sort that would soon have to be abandoned.

  An advertisement in the paper reflected the awesome ingenuousness about the struggle on the continent which persisted at home: ‘India’s magnificent loyalty in the Empire’s hour of need has stirred the admiration of the world. Indian princes and Indian peasants, Indian troops and Indian treasure – all are being placed at Britain’s service with touching devotion. You can do India a small service in
return – and gain by it. Use Pure Indian Tea at home, insist on getting Pure Indian Tea in public tea-rooms and restaurants.’

  The French and British policy of denying press access to the armies had many malign consequences. The public suffered anguish in the absence of any word about the fate of their soldiers. Since correspondents had no sources of news save meagre official bulletins, they set about exploring the front on their own account. Most were repulsed: there was a story, possibly not apocryphal, of a group of reporters detained en route to the battlefield, and brought before Horace Smith-Dorrien. One proclaimed himself the representative of The Times, which caused the general to respond tartly that he hoped his employer, Lord Northcliffe, would reward him handsomely for his enterprise and zeal, but for his own part he was dispatching the press group under guard to Tours, to cool their heels until the war was disposed of.

  In the absence of front-line dispatches from correspondents, pundits were thrown back on speculation and tittle-tattle from the front. Editors began to publish letters dispatched by soldiers to their loved ones at home, then forwarded to newspapers by wives and mothers enthralled by their men’s exploits. It soon emerged that many such reminiscences were embroideries or outright falsehoods. The Rifle Brigade was enraged to discover that a soldier on its ration strength named Curtis had written a letter, which received prominent press exposure, detailing his own heroics in the retreat. In reality, the man was a straggler who drifted to the rear without seeing action.

  Meanwhile the Illustrated London News of 29 August described British troops at Mons as ‘victorious’. Their retreat, Charles Lowe asserted comfortingly, resembled that of Wellington’s army from Quatre Bras in 1815: ‘it was only a question of un peu reculer pour mieux sauter, and Waterloo was the result … They gave the French a lesson then, and now – almost in the same place – they are setting them an example.’ In the face of such breathtaking condescension, it is scarcely surprising that Joffre and his subordinates succumbed to exasperation.

  Then, on 29 August, newspaper readers received a stunning shock: wholly unheralded news that the campaign on the continent was going very badly indeed. The Times published a report from a correspondent, datelined Amiens, 28 August: ‘the situation in the north appears to be very grave’. Amid the chaos of retreat, reporters had at last been able to talk to some soldiers, who painted a bleak picture. Worse followed: The Times’s reporter Arthur Moore was bicycling along a road when he met stragglers from the BEF. Having heard their tales, he withdrew to write a further detailed report on the plight of the British Army, which caused a sensation when it was published in a special edition on 31 August. It depicted the BEF as having suffered absolute defeat: ‘It is important that the nation should now realize certain things,’ Moore wrote. ‘Bitter truths, but we can face them. We have to cut our losses, to take stock of the situation, to set our teeth … I saw fear on no man’s face. It was a retreating and a broken army, but it was not an army of hunted men … Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments … To sum up, the first great German effort has succeeded. We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement.’ He concluded that the German army had also suffered heavily: ‘It is possible that its limits have been reached.’

  The Times editorialised flatulently: ‘The British Army has surpassed all the glories of its long history, and has won fresh and imperishable renown … Though forced to retire by the overwhelming strength and persistence of the foe, it preserves an unbroken if battered line.’ It is hard to exaggerate the impact of the paper’s report on public opinion. Its publication enraged the rest of the British press, which had obeyed government injunctions to sustain morale with a diet of platitudes. Asquith denounced the story, and dismissed Moore’s conclusion that the army was broken. But the storm about the Times dispatch was still raging when the commander-in-chief’s secret telegram arrived, offering much the same view of the BEF’s condition as that of the ‘sensationalist’ press correspondent. Both were wrong, and exaggerated grossly. But French’s defeatism threatened dire consequences: he informed the prime minister that he proposed to retire beyond the Seine and establish a new logistical base at the port of La Rochelle. The C-in-C no doubt thought of himself as Sir John Moore in Spain a century earlier, saving his gallant little force by retreat to Corunna.

  The wildest rumours were circulating in London, reflecting cruelly and unjustly upon the French army. Norman Macleod recorded in his diary reports of a wholesale collapse; of the British C-in-C supposedly threatening to withdraw the BEF to England; of a French cavalry division allegedly refusing to support hard-pressed British troops, ‘saying they were tired’; of the BEF fighting continuously for eleven days until ‘flesh and blood could stand no more’. The Fourth Sea Lord told Macleod wearily that it looked as if Britain would once more have to save the French in spite of themselves, as Wellington had once saved the Spanish. Next day, this dignitary confided: ‘the French have been told that they must fight or go to the devil’.

  Such, then, was the fevered climate at Westminster and in Whitehall amidst which the cabinet received Sir John French’s telegram. It was an incomparably grave matter, that the C-in-C of Britain’s army in the field should advise washing his hands of the campaign, which was what his proposal amounted to. The notion of the BEF unilaterally disowning France’s army threatened devastating consequences for the allied cause. The cabinet made a critical and by no means inevitable decision: Anglo-French solidarity must transcend all other considerations. The field marshal must be overruled. He would be given a direct order to keep the BEF alongside the armies of Joffre in the line. The secretary for war, K of K, was dispatched forthwith to Paris to ensure that Sir John did as he was told. The C-in-C must abandon his shamelessly base attempt to desert France.

  3 SEEDS OF HOPE

  On 1 September in the French capital, even as L Battery and the Guards brigade were fighting their little battles at Néry and Villers-Cotteret, a momentous meeting took place at the British embassy, Pauline Borghese’s former palace in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Kitchener, hotfoot from London, chose this rendezvous with Sir John French, summoned from Compiègne. The C-in-C later professed disgust, first at having to leave his headquarters to meet Kitchener at all, and second that his fellow field marshal, now a mere civilian war minister, attended in uniform. French denounced the visit as an unwonted political interference with his own ‘executive command and authority’, and summarily rejected Kitchener’s proposal to see for himself the BEF in the field. In truth, the C-in-C must have felt sorely inadequate in the company of a much cleverer soldier than himself, who wore the French commemorative medal for the campaign of 1870–71, belatedly presented to Kitchener the previous year. Following a tense and indeed acrimonious meeting, an uneasy compromise about operational plans was agreed: Sir John should continue the BEF’s withdrawal, but was ordered to act in close conformity with Joffre’s plans, while taking care to secure his flanks.

  In the four days that followed, French’s determination to exploit to the limit the escape clause about flanks drove Joffre and his comrades towards despair. The British C-in-C interpreted these orders as empowering him to reject repeated pleas to participate in an allied counter-offensive. French’s overriding purpose was to keep his men marching until the Seine was interposed between them and the Germans. John Terraine has written: ‘Uncertainty about British intentions, their apparent determination to do nothing but retreat while the Germans over-ran the greater part of northern France, added enormously to Joffre’s difficulties.’ These were very great. Gallieni later described the condition of the nation’s armies – admittedly with a strong partisan interest in promoting a vision of chaos until he himself took a grip – in a fashion that nonetheless carries conviction. He wrote of meeting generals behind the front who had lost their troops; troops who had lost their officers; commanders who
had no idea where they were, or where they were supposed to be going. On 2 September, Paris’s governor spoke by telephone to Joffre, who expressed his fears for the left wing of Fifth Army ‘because of the inertia of the British who don’t want to march’.

  The British Army has been accustomed in almost all its wars – including that of 1939–45 – to enjoy the luxury of months, or even years, of preparation before being obliged to fight in earnest. Such a delay was anyway usually inevitable when the nation had to muster expeditionary forces then transport them overseas, sometimes across vast distances. By contrast, the events of 1914 imposed a uniquely abrupt trauma: within three weeks of being plunged into a wholly unexpected European conflict, soldiers were translated from parade grounds, pubs, officers’ messes and polo pitches to the carnage of a battlefield. For some – commanders amongst them – the change proved too drastic to be borne. They showed themselves unable to make the necessary psychological leap to rise to their roles in a drama on which the fate of Europe hinged. On the night of 31 August, Spears heard Lanrezac murmuring to himself with an unaccustomed softness and wistfulness of tone. The general was paraphrasing Horace: ‘Oh how happy is he who remains at home, caressing the breast of his mistress, instead of waging war!’ Such capitulations to sentiment by officers who failed their countries in August 1914 merit pity, but not sympathy. No man should accept high responsibility unless he is willing to bear its burdens.

  For those on urgent business in those days, movement around Paris was rendered maddeningly slow by throngs of troops, vehicles and refugees clogging every byway behind the front. A British officer found himself forced to abandon his car and walk one night, along a road blocked by a motionless regiment of cavalry: ‘The great towering cuirassiers, clumsy and massive in helmets and breastplates, sat impassive on their horses. Not a man dismounted. In the still evening air the booming of the guns seemed very near. A gust of wind animated the horsetail plumes that hung down each man’s back, then the long steel-clad column was still again.’ An officer of Fifth Army’s staff, Commandant Lamotte, was obliged to drive repeatedly into Paris to urge the military-map printers to greater exertions. They were confronted by an insatiable demand for sheets covering France, while tens of thousands of paper representations of western Germany, carefully stockpiled in expectation of Joffre’s grand advance, mouldered in a vault through the balance of the conflict.

 

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