Gentlemen, We Will Stand and Fight E-Book

Antony Bird

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

At Le Cateau on 26 August 1914, the commanders of the Second Corps of the British Expeditionary Force elected to fight the German First Army and, although outnumbered three to one, delivered such a smashing blow to the German invaders that the whole of the BEF was able to continue the Retreat to Compiegne without being seriously threatened. Although the British suffered 1,200 of their men and officers killed, and were forced to leave their dead and many of their wounded on the battlefield, as well as thirty-six of their field guns, they inflicted losses on von Kluck's army of nearly 9,000. Yet the architect of this feat of arms, Second Corps commander Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, was sacked soon afterward, while First Corps commander Sir Douglas Haig, who had performed far less impressively, took command of the whole BEF. Antony Bird describes the battle, its aftermath and he examines the men, the weapons and the tactics that made this feat of arms possible.

Leseprobe

Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyed much good.

ECCLESIASTES IX, 18

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

List of Maps

Introduction

1. To Bertry: 23–5 August

2. The Right Flank: Morning, 26 August

3. The Left Flank: Morning

4. The Right Flank: Afternoon

5. The Centre and Left

6. Late Afternoon and Night

7. Aftermath

Postscript

Appendix I: British Losses 23–7 August 1914

Appendix II: The Order of Battle

Appendix III: Notes on Some of the Veterans of Le Cateau

Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgements

Copyright

List of Maps

1 The Schlieffen Plan and Plan XVII13

2 Mons and Le Cateau, 23–26 August 191431

3 Le Cateau/Landrecies, 25 August47

4 The Right of the Line: 5th Division59

5 26 August, The Left Flank: 4th Division97

6 11th Brigade at the Quarry104

7 26 August, The Centre: 3rd Division122

Introduction

On 25 August 1914 Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had many reasons to be a worried man. At his new headquarters in St Quentin, northern France, 18 miles (30km) south of Le Cateau, he was of course aware that troops in both of his corps* had been fighting and retreating for two days since their first battle against Gen von Kluck’s 1st Army at Mons on 23 August; indeed, he had been with Gen Smith-Dorrien at the latter’s forward HQ at Sars-la-Bruyère at dawn that morning and had issued orders to retreat later that same night. The British Second Corps under Smith-Dorrien, the corps that had borne the brunt of the German attack, had without doubt suffered a defeat, but a defeat that rapidly became suffused with glory and myth. Within two weeks the legend of the Angel of Mons was current, an angel clad in white with flaming sword who barred the way to the German horde.** But there nothing mythical about British marksmanship at the battle, which had cut down the Germans who had ‘come over in mass formation’, their spiked helmets clearly visible to the British defending the canal, emerging like Birnam Wood from the dense forest to the north of the canal.*** The second wave of attacking troops had used the dead bodies of their comrades as cover.

‘Papa’ Joffre, French C-in-C.

Sir John French, BEF C-in-C, with French officers.

4th Royal Fusiliers in the Grande Place, Mons, 22 August 1914.

Sir John French was also of course uncomfortably aware that there were alarming gaps in the Allied lines, not only between his two corps, First Corps under Gen Haig and Second Corps under Gen Smith-Dorrien, but also between First Corps and the French 5th Army to their east and south, which was pulling back from Charleroi. Both the British corps were under orders to meet up at Le Cateau. The 5th Army was commanded by Gen Lanrezac, with whom French was on frosty terms to say the least. He did know, however, by the 25th that Lanrezac, by French standards of the time an almost timorous general, was about to counterattack, under pressure from Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, in what was to become known to the British as the Battle of Guise (29 August).*

Communications between his own subordinate commanders and between himself and the French commands were haphazard and often reliant on the motor car or horse. To the west of Second Corps there was a screen of French cavalry, under Gen Sordet, together with a division of French territorials under Gen D’Amade, based in Cambrai. Both these divisions were to prove themselves invaluable in the BEF’s hour of need, but of course they were not under British command. Gen Sordet was receiving reinforcements on the 25th, which were crossing from east to west across the BEF’s area of operations, causing much dislocation in their wake.

As always in war there was a mass of inconsistent intelligence reports from his own cavalry and Royal Flying Corps, as well as from the French commands, which had to be sifted and interpreted, and Sir John was hardly sophisticated in the use of intelligence. In fact it would be fair to say that he lacked the intellectual rigour needed to find what would now be called the critical path between competing data.* But the fog of war was beginning to lift. And what it was revealing was the stark fact that the BEF was in grave danger.

The war was only three weeks old and Sir John had arrived in France on the 9th. The British Army, and Sir John, a cavalryman, had come to the Franco-Belgian border fully prepared to take the offensive; no army, after all, chooses to start a campaign with a retreat. Its deployment, compared with its performance at the outset of the Boer War, was a model of efficiency. There was an optimistic assumption in both military and non-military circles that the speedy advance of the BEF to its position on the left of the Allied line would tip the balance against the German assault, although of course the Royal Navy was the ultimate guarantor of victory. Sir John, with his 110,000-strong force, was tasked by Herbert Asquith’s government, in Lord Kitchener’s Instructions, to restore Belgian neutrality by co-operating with the Allied armies. In pursuit of this aim, right up until the eve of Mons, 23 August, Sir John was intending to move north of the Mons–Conde canal, urged on by Joffre, who made reassuring noises about Lanrezac’s position and intentions, as well as enemy strength. These French reports Sir John was not in a position to disregard, even had he wished to, and in any case the BEF was obliged to conform to the movements of its much larger ally. On the left of the Allied line, facing the strong right wing of the Schlieffen-inspired German attack, the BEF made up only about 15 per cent of the Allied force.

Sir John’s outstanding achievement at this time was his decision that the BEF must retreat. By this decision alone, which on the evening of Mons was not as inevitable as it now appears,** and leaving aside whatever else might be said about his personal and military failings, Sir John passed the Iron Duke’s supreme test of generalship: to know when to retreat.*** A fighting retreat is, after all, recognized as an operation of war. The Retreat from Mons is the British equivalent of Joffre’s abandonment of the cherished Plan XVII. This plan, with the latest revision of which the French went to war, was based on an all-out assault to recapture Alsace/Lorraine, the territories lost in 1871, an offensive that they believed would simultaneously weaken the German right wing. In the event it achieved neither objective and the German right wing remained strong. Of course to a large extent Sir John had the retreat decision made for him by the pressure of events (although his sub-chief of staff, Sir Henry Wilson, was not exactly helpful, to put it mildly, even drafting orders for a Second Corps attack on the 24th) and in any case it may not have gone against the grain of his personality: his biographer, Richard Holmes, suggests that Sir John was driven by love, a genuine love for the old professional army and his horror at the thought of its destruction.

And further to his credit, French’s eventual decision to retreat south to Compiègne rather than south-west towards Amiens and his channel ports effectively hoodwinked von Kluck, who expected him to do the latter. After Le Cateau von Kluck himself shifted part of his army, II Cavalry Corps, to the south-west (Bapaume) in search of the BEF, to the consternation of von Bulow, the commander of 2nd Army to his left, who was in fact his superior.

Although Sir John could take some comfort from the fact that he was retreating into friendly territory while the Germans were extending their lines of supply, the position of the BEF north of Le Cateau for the three days of 23–5 August was now exactly one that Lord Kitchener had cautioned him against in his Instructions. The relevant passage (fourth paragraph) reads as follows:

… while every effort must be made to coincide most sympathetically with the plans and wishes of our Ally, the gravest consideration will devolve upon you as to participation in forward movements where large bodies of French troops are not engaged and where your Force may be unduly exposed to attack. Should a contingency of this sort be contemplated, I look to you to inform me fully and give me time to communicate to you any decision His Majesty’s Government may come to in the matter. In this connection I wish you distinctly to understand that your command is an entirely independent one and you will in no case come in any sense under the orders of any Allied general.

In other words Sir John had to look to his front, watch his flanks and keep in touch with his rear, accept automatically no commands from his main ally, who vastly outnumbered him, but co-operate fully with him, and guard Britain’s only field army, all the time while opposed to Europe’s most powerful armed forces. French was to discover to his chagrin (at his meeting with Kitchener on 1 September) that his status as commander of an independent force was subject to supervision and control by the Cabinet.

Sir John was also of course aware that his force was on the left of a mass of five French armies that had been fighting, together with the Belgian Army, since 20 August and that everywhere the German armies were on foreign soil. After all, Gen Sir Henry Wilson, his francophile sub-chief of staff, was the architect of the mobilization plans and was in close touch with French GQG, assisted by Col Huguet, the French liaison officer at the BEF. Indeed, Wilson bore a unique responsibility for the decision to deploy the BEF in France on the left of the line at the outbreak of hostilities, although of course he cannot be held responsible for all its doleful consequences. It could be said that without Wilson the BEF would not be here at all – and that without Count von Schlieffen neither would von Kluck. But although Sir John professed to be a serious student of military strategy, the name von Schlieffen meant little to him. What he did know by 25 August – and which he had not known on 22 August – was how formidable the German army confronting him was. It consisted of four corps, or 320,000 men, although von Kluck was diverting troops to Antwerp, where six Belgian divisions had gone into shelter. Von Kluck seemed determined to press attacks with an alarming lack of caution; he was a more audacious commander than von Bulow of the 2nd Army to his left. There were approximately 18,000 German soldiers for every mile of von Kluck’s front,* and even this density would have made von Schlieffen uneasy, for whom the right wing was all. Sir John’s force had the misfortune to be at the Schwerpunkt of the enveloping attack and von Kluck was a dedicated follower and executor of the Schlieffen plan. In the plan’s 1905 formulation von Kluck had ten days to get from Mons to Amiens.

The fact that the Germans were using their reserve divisions in their front lines was not known to Sir John at the moment; nor did he know that the German troops were sleeping by the roadsides in their efforts to press on. What he did know was that his two corps were now spread out in and around the small market town of Le Cateau Cambresis (1914 population of about 10,000), the site of his previous headquarters, along a front of more than 25 miles (40km), having lost contact with each other by their separate passing of the ancient Forest of Mormal. They had last been in close touch at Bavai, north of the forest. The two corps could only communicate with each other through GHQ and even that was haphazard, to say the least. French held a low opinion of Smith-Dorrien’s military abilities, which was not improving his peace of mind. The physical condition of the troops was already a concern, especially the reservists, who had come straight from civilian life. Many of them simply could not keep up on the march. One young subaltern, K.F.B. Tower of the 2nd Royal Fusiliers (1st Division), had one such man in his platoon, ‘a most extraordinarily ugly little man’. The man begged not to be sent back to base, saying he had won a prize in a dance marathon in Hackney; Tower relented. The man continued to fall out, but fought at Mons and ‘… gave a very fine account of himself. On the second day of the Retreat he collapsed at the side of the road and died in my arms.’ (Quoted in Gardner, seeBibliography.)

It was no longer possible, even if it ever had been, to form a common front with Gen Lanrezac’s 5th Army. French was not to know until 26 August of Marshal Joffre’s decision to form a new army, the 6th, on the French left wing. He could only know vaguely that French casualties, due largely to their frontal attacks, were mounting alarmingly and would total 300,000 by the end of what was to become known as the Battles of the Frontiers. French casualties already amounted to more than the total number of troops in the BEF, their soldiers being ‘shot down like rabbits’, dressed in their red trousers. Unknown of course to Sir John, von Kluck’s intelligence about the BEF was if anything even more patchy than French’s intelligence about 1st Army. Even after Le Cateau von Kluck was still under the impression that he taken on nine divisions, five more than he had actually engaged.

1914 recruitment poster.

On the 25th the fortress of Namur fell to the Germans, with 5,000 Belgian troops taken prisoner. Liège had surrendered on the 17th. These were bitter blows and shocked the world, both neutral and combatant, although military academies had long agreed that no fortress was immune to modern siege guns. Of some comfort to the Allies, and Sir John could only be vaguely aware of it, the rapid Russian advance into East Prussia had already upset the whole Schlieffen Plan timetable, and had brought about the simultaneous war on two fronts that it had been designed to forestall. But Sir John could not know that by the end of the month the Russian 2nd Army would be destroyed and that its commander, Samsonov, would go off into the forest and shoot himself.

On the BEF front the fortress of Mauberge, with its garrison of 40,000 troops, was left to its own devices, French admitting that for a fleeting moment it offered the promise of a safe haven for the BEF. Von Bulow left a sizeable force, in fact the whole of his IX Corps, to bottle up its troops, to the annoyance of von Kluck; three divisions were out of the line until 7 September, when Mauberge surrendered. Further south, the defences on the perimeter of Paris were being prepared; the Government fled to Bordeaux on 2 September, leaving its defence to its military governor, Gen Gallieni, who announced, ‘I have been empowered to defend Paris against the invader. This task I shall carry out to the end.’ The situation as it confronted Sir John on 25 August would have taxed the resolve of a commander of Wellington’s stamp.

Memories of the war with Prussia in 1870–71 were very real, the war that Napolean III had so ineptly declared. Anna Matisse, the mother of Henri, who had witnessed the Prussians pass through Le Cateau and St Quentin in 1871, had already buried her valuables in her cellar at Bohain by the time the Germans reached Mons. (She was to survive the occupation, with its endless requisitions and looting, but refusing to leave even when the Germans offered free passage to the old and infirm in 1918.) Andre Maurois, the author, went off to the war on the 28th and later wrote:

My father looked me over with the severity of an old soldier. ‘You must polish up your buttons.’ He was sad at my leaving but full of hope for France and happy to see a son of his taking part in the war of revenge of which he had dreamed ever since 1871.

But if Sir John had been in direct touch with his battalion officers he would have learnt much that would have given him encouragement. Everywhere the British troops had fought with a skill and gallantry that amounted on occasion to self-sacrifice. On the 24th, for example, in a desperate 5th Division rearguard action at Elouges, south-west of Mons, involving the 1st Cheshires, the 1st Norfolks, 119th Battery Royal Field Artillery and the 9th Lancers, with some 4th Dragoon Guards, von Kluck’s attempts at envelopment were successfully frustrated, albeit at great cost to the Cheshires: only 200 of them answered the roll call that night, and eleven of their officers languished in Torgau prison for the duration. If the BEF had suffered nearly 5,000 casualties by the evening of the 25th, the German 1st Army must have suffered at least three times as many.

The quick-firing skill of the professional volunteer soldier, with his new short .303 Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle and its ten-round magazine (re-filled in clips of five rounds) was devastating to massed German infantry. It was probably the best rifle issued to all the combatant forces on the Western Front in the war; the French Lebel rifle, because of poor design, would often fail to reload from the magazine. What was also proving a vital asset in the small BEF was its fieldcraft: time and again, both at Mons itself and in subsequent encounters, its ability to disengage from a numerically superior enemy saved units from annihilation. It was a skill that was going to be needed at Le Cateau. The Cheshires had fought on because orders to retire did not get through; this was to happen again to many units at Le Cateau.

The 11th Hussars choosing softer ground for the horses.

French’s beloved cavalry had performed brilliantly in dozens of engagements, almost to the point of self-destruction, with lance, sabre and firearm, as well as in its scouting role; the 9th Lancers at Elouges were stopped by a single wire fence and ‘galloped about like rabbits’. Although he would not like to admit it, it was invaluable fighting dismounted; unlike French cavalry, it carried the same rifle as the infantry and experience in the Boer War had taught it the value of cavalry shooting.* One historian of the period (Stephen Badsey) has recently claimed that the British cavalry corps was ‘massively superior’ to the equivalent German arm. He was presumably not referring to the 9th Lancers at Elouges; their charge was magnificent, but it was not an act of war. But in their dual role as intelligence-gatherers and as protectors of the moving army, the cavalry division had already in the opening moves of the war more than proved its worth.

But Sir John himself was in no sense in control of events. If what followed on 26 August was a battle that the British, in the person of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien and his division commanders, elected to fight, it was von Kluck who held the initiative. It was fought as always by the officers and men with what they had to hand. It was a soldier’s battle fought almost one hundred years after the last great British battle on continental soil, Waterloo, and on the anniversary of the battle of Crécy (1346).

Not only was it fought no more than a day’s ride away from the field of Waterloo, it was fought with weapons and tactics that would not have been unfamiliar to the Duke of Wellington: the horse-drawn field guns, often in range of the enemy infantry, the screen of cavalry (French cavalry still wore breastplates and plumed helmets, and the French infantry had a distinctly Napoleonic appearance with their red and blue), the massed infantry, the buglers calling the fire orders; none would have been out of place on 18 June 1815, which was a Sunday as was the day of the Battle of Mons. In 1914 most British infantry officers still carried their swords into battle and Highland officers their claymores, sharpened by the armourers. German and French officers also wore swords, the swords carried by German officers at Mons and Le Cateau marking them out as primary targets for the British infantry. In the heat of battle swords proved to be something of a hindrance; in the battle to come on the 26th, Lt Ian Stewart, an 18-year-old platoon commander in 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was leading a charge when he fell, claymore in hand, like his Jacobite ancestors at Culloden. His sergeant leant over him saying, ‘poor wee kid’, only to receive the caustic reply that he had tripped over the sword. A similar accident befell Lt Montgomery, with happy results, as we shall see. German regiments carried their colours into battle unfurled. Uhlans carried bugles as part of their issue as well as their lances. The headgear of Jäger infantry strongly resembled the shako of Wellington’s day, and confused British infantry at first with their un-Germanic appearance. Just as the thin red line in the Crimea had not been uniformly red, the thin line at Le Cateau was not uniformly khaki; there was many a splash of tartan amongst the men and officers of the BEF.

Both Le Cateau and Waterloo were fought after three days of intense battle and retreat. Both were preceded by thunderstorms. One difference was that at Le Cateau the field of battle had been harvested while at Waterloo the corn stood uncut. Waterloo was smaller, and hence more crowded with troops and shrouded in black gunpowder smoke. Le Cateau was wholly innocent of barbed wire, which had yet to make its baleful appearance on the Western Front, although the 2nd Royal Scots, 8th Brigade, stripped some barbed wire from the gardens of Audencourt and used in front of their trenches; the first recorded use of wire in this now-familiar role.

Even though the effective range of weapons had increased by a factor of ten to as much as 1,200yd for rifles and 9,000yd for field guns (whose gunners could now bring optical range-finders into play and whose projectiles were far more sophisticated than the roundshot of Wellington’s day), many actions at Le Cateau were fought at ranges where the two sides were in close proximity. This reflects the unchanging fact of infantry warfare: if the commander can bring superior force close up to the enemy, he can either kill him or force his surrender, although the emergence of the clip-holding magazine rifle, the range-finder and the well-sited machine gun had unquestionably favoured the defence. At Le Cateau as at Waterloo gunners needed to see their targets; there was no question of pre-registering the guns.

The number of British troops involved at Le Cateau, say 60,000, was more than Wellington had had at his disposal but less than his total command. Both battles were hastily improvised defensive affairs. In both cases the flank between the British and the sea gave commanders cause for concern. It may be fanciful but it is forgivable to regard the British infantry at Mons and Le Cateau with their .303 Lee-Enfields as the direct descendants of the Anglo-Welsh archers of Crécy and Agincourt, and of the squares at Waterloo armed with muskets. After all, one of the legends of Mons was the archers appearing in the sky to shepherd the men of 1914. Certainly one eyewitness at Le Cateau was reminded of Waterloo by the wrecked gun batteries of the right flank, and of course many of the battalions at Le Cateau had Waterloo battle honours in their regimental history. Waterloo was a more bloody battle (8,558 British losses against 7,812 at Le Cateau) if only because Wellington was not prepared to give up any ground. But Waterloo was of course crushingly decisive. Seven years of almost continuous warfare for the British had brought them to the decisive moment since their expeditionary force under Sir John Moore had been driven comprehensively out of Spain in 1808.

If Le Cateau bore similarities to nineteenth-century battles, such was the pace of technological change in the Great War that within four years battles on the Western Front were to take on a twentieth-century aspect, with hundreds of tanks and thousands of aircraft co-operating in all-arms assaults on the Kaiser’s armies. Instead of the hundreds of guns deployed at Le Cateau, guns were brought up in their thousands, so that on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) there was one gun for every twenty yards of the frontage attacked. At Cambrai in November 1917, little more than 5 miles (8km) from where the BEF now stood, 324 tanks were massed for the initial assault. Nearly six million men were to enter the ranks of the British Army before the end of hostilities. The scout planes of the Royal Flying Corps and the requisitioned motor transport of the BEF in August 1914 were but harbingers of the nature of warfare to come. The bugler, an already anachronistic figure, was to be replaced by the officer’s whistle which, with the synchronized watch, was to become another of the mournful symbols of the war. The sword soon became purely ceremonial. Even the vaunted marksmanship of the infantry, so nourished before the war, was becoming by 1917 a thing of distant memory.

The battlefield of Le Cateau on 26 August 1914 was wholly bereft of motor transport, as indeed battlefields were to remain for at least two years. Guns, ammunition wagons and all other forms of transport were horse-drawn. At the end of the day, on the Roman road, as Lt Gen Smith-Dorrien was being driven in his car, part of the long line of beaten but not defeated 5th Division troops, he heard gunfire in the west. He didn’t send a staff officer to see for whom the guns were firing; he got on his horse, which was being led alongside, and went to see for himself. It was Gen Sordet’s 75mm field guns, whose distinctive crack Sir Horace already recognized. The Frenchman had not let him down. But it was a horse that Sir Horace used to get about the field, just as it had been for Wellington or Marlborough. Its name, alas, has not been recorded.

Professional soldiers, like Capt Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, were to regret the inevitable passing, during the war years at least, of the close-knit, clannish, organic, professional Edwardian army, based as it was on regional recruiting among the working class, with officers who came almost exclusively from a social class whose right to hand down orders, by virtue of their position in the social structure, was not questioned and whose guiding principle was one of noblesse oblige. A great many of those paternalistic officers lay dead in the Flanders mud by Christmas 1914. The part-time Territorials who went to the front after the time covered in this book enjoyed a style of discipline that was based more on an easy understanding or even comradeship between officers and men, although it never got as matey as the Australian model. As Gary Sheffield has written, these two different strands of officer–men relations became intermingled in the BEF. In August 1914, however, it was the old-style regular officers who led the men, some of them crusty martinets maybe, obsessed with trivialities maybe, profoundly anti-intellectual probably, but all of them taking their duties towards their men very seriously indeed. The late Victorian officer’s credo of leading by example was still very much alive.

For the men perhaps even more than the officers the battalions that went to war in 1914 defined the boundaries of their known world, although the colonel loomed large in all aspects of an officer’s life; the colonel’s permission was required for a young officer to marry, for example, and he certainly governed the etiquette adopted in the mess. There had been a rush to marry, or at least get engaged, among many officers in the last few days before setting off to France; Lt Rory Macleod, a gunner who we will meet later, had asked his Irish sweetheart to marry him just days before the troopship sailed. For many officers the battalion was their world; officers would typically marry late in life and many were ‘wedded to the regiment’. The older officers still referred to their battalions by their numbers in the line of battle as their predecessors had at Waterloo; the 2nd Battalion the Suffolk Regiment was thus the 2nd/12th. In fact it was only in 1881 that the old battalion numbers were officially swept away and the BEF as it was in 1914 was born, with its regiments of linked battalions, one always serving overseas, based on local recruiting and its extended family of reservists.

When Capt C.A.L. Brownlow, a gunner later awarded the DSO, wrote that ‘I have no remembrance to equal in any way that of the old regiments of the BEF marching to the Battle of Mons’, he was speaking for the great majority of the 1914 regulars. Or as R.V. Dolbey RAMC, a captain in the KOSB, put it, writing after the war about the Retreat, ‘None but a regular army could have done it, and after the war we shall worship the gods of spit and polish and barrack-square again.’

In many respects the BEF of 1914 had the characteristics of an old family firm, with all the fierce loyalties, paternalism and built-in discipline that one would expect in such an organization, which were inevitably lost as the war went on and the BEF took on more and more the features of a large corporation. Such was the magnitude of change and death in the old family firm that it is somewhat inconsistent and even incongruous that the BEF that went to war in August 1914 with five divisions was still called by the same name as the army of a million men that crossed the Hindenburg Line in 1918. On 26 August 1914 the old family firm that was called the BEF was still intact, but it was the high noon of the Edwardian army, based upon Edwardian social divisions and the primary product of the first Industrial Revolution, steel, produced by coal and iron. It was on the cusp of the second Industrial Revolution, which added the internal combustion engine, based on petroleum, as a further power source. The fact that the army largely reverted to its pre-war type after the war says a lot about the permanence and conservatism of British institutions; but that is another story.

On 26 August 1914 for Lt Gen Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien there was to be no Blücher; and before Le Cateau there was certainly no ball. All Sandhurst officer cadets were (and are) required to know their military history and many would have been aware of the site of the battle of Malplaquet (1709) just south of Mons. It had been a very bloody battle by eighteenth-century standards, fought against the despotism of Louis XIV. And nobody could of course know that twenty-six years later Guderian’s Panzers would roll through this same undulating country on their way to the Channel, as had the Prussian legions in 1870 on their way to Paris, to which they laid siege. Le Cateau lay in the cockpit of European wars, but the precedents and auguries were mixed.

On 26 August 1914 Sir John French – in response to a lengthy note from Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien informing him that he intended to make a stand at Le Cateau – sent back by wire an immediate reply to Bertry, just south-west of Le Cateau, where Sir Horace had set up his battle HQ. This reply arrived at Bertry at 5.00am on the 26th. It read:

If you can hold your ground the situation appears likely to improve. 4th Division must co-operate. French troops are taking the offensive on right of 1st Corps. Although you are given a free hand as to method, this telegram is not intended to convey the impression that I am not anxious for you to carry out the retirement and you must make every effort to do so.

This communication, which to the non-military eye might appear equivocal with its double negative, Smith-Dorrien took to be approval of his earlier decision to ‘stand and fight’. Its condition, that Second Corps’ primary orders were to continue the Retreat, did not run counter to his own instincts, although he knew that that manoeuvre might have to be conducted late in the day. The reference to the French 5th Army was irrelevant to Smith-Dorrien; he would rather have had something reassuring concerning help from First Corps on his right and French troops on his left, but it was not unreasonable to assume that at least First Corps could perform a blocking or masking role on his right flank. He was given no intelligence on the enemy, but he had his own shrewd idea of what he was up against. In any case, he could now do nothing else but fight. The battle that ensued has been called by John Terraine ‘one of the most remarkable British feats of arms of the whole war’.

But the stage was also set for tragedy, farce and glory. Tragedy because more than half the British field army faced destruction from von Kluck, who had more than three times its men and guns, if he only knew it. Farce, or tragicomedy, because forever after Sir John French was obsessed with continuing his feud with his bête noir, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. Personal animosities loomed large in the psychological makeup of Sir John French. And for Sir John the feud found its focus on the events of 26 August. He was damned if he was going to go out of his way to help Sir Horace, whose orders were to get Second Corps away to the south. French was to quit St Quentin even as the exhausted troops were streaming back from Le Cateau, without informing Sir Horace of his new location. Even French’s biographer, Richard Holmes, admits that ‘from 26 August onwards he lavished the full force of his hatred upon Smith-Dorrien’. John Terraine was more charitable: he merely said that French had a grievance, possibly resulting from a guilty conscience.

The bitterness of old soldiers may be sterile and farcical in retirement, but in August 1914 it was materially to affect the help French was willing to give Smith-Dorrien’s Corps. In retirement, in fact while still in uniform, Sir John, because of his animus against Sir Horace, was to denigrate the achievement of Second Corps at Le Cateau and the heroism and sacrifice of its veterans. That is the final pathos. If Mons is to be forever remembered for the Angel, Le Cateau is remembered for the malevolent Sir John French.

And yet even though the Germans were left in possession of the field at the end of the day, the battle fought to the west and south of Le Cateau on 26 August 1914 can be considered, in the words of the historian of the Royal Artillery, ‘one of the most important delaying actions recorded in history’. And there was the glory. But to one young officer was vouchsafed a vision not of the glory of war, but of the sorrow and the pity yet to come. Lt Maurice Baring was with the men as they marched singing into Mauberge on their way up to Mons. He wrote at the end of October:

The thought of these men swinging on into horror undreamt of – the whole German Army – came to me like the stab of a sword and I had to go and hide in a shop for the people not to see the tears running down my cheeks.*

*The British had never before gone to war with a two-corps structure; it was set up to conform to French Army organization.

**Before the month was out the myth of countless Russian divisions passing through Scotland on their way to the Western Front, with the snow still on their boots (in August?) was also to take a hold on the popular imagination.

***Except that like all legends, British markmanship may have become slightly exaggerated over the years. Lt Roupell, whom we will meet again, wrote later of how he got his platoon of East Surreys on the canal to lower their aim, when he saw their bullets hitting the upper branches of the wood out of which the enemy was advancing. He got their attention by striking them with the flat of his sword.

*Bizarrely, French, who could not speak French, shared the first three letters of his name with the last three in Joffre’s name, both of which have six letters. Some thought of this as an omen of some kind.

*Lt-Col George Barrow, the intelligence officer of the cavalry, brought information of German whereabouts to GHQ by the simple expedient of telephoning Belgian post offices. Two of his subordinates were police detectives with bicycles.

**Admiral Jellicoe’s adoption of the convoy system in 1917 was another crucial decision that appears with hindsight to have been more inevitable than it was at the time. Indeed, the very decision to send the BEF to France was not a foregone conclusion.

***Field Marshal Haig was to fail the Wellington test of generalship by not shutting down the third Battle of Ypres in October 1917, before the mud made it almost impossible to move the guns forwards, an offensive that some historians consider he should never have undertaken in the first place.

*A somewhat incomprehensible statistic, giving von Kluck three men for every foot of front.

*The French cavalry carbine was derided by the British as useless; their tactics were based on the Napoleonic belief in the shock of the armoured charge.

*Maurice Baring, 1874–1945, of the banking family, educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, man of letters, Anglo-Catholic. He served on the staff of the RFC during the war and published a memoir of his war in 1920. He was a convinced practical joker.

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To Bertry: 23–5 August