Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (40 page)

The first British shots of the war were fired early on the morning of the 22nd. Cavalry from C Squadron of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards were deployed at the top of a gentle slope about three miles north of the Mons–Condé canal. They saw approaching from a dip ahead of them a German lancer patrol, including an officer smoking a cigar. Capt. Charles Hornby led two troops cantering down the road, sparks flying from the cobbles, in pursuit of the enemy, who took flight. There was a mêlée a mile
on, in which the British took five prisoners from the startled Germans, hampered by their lances. Cpl. Ted Thomas used his rifle: after years on the ranges, where one waited several seconds for a paper target to be marked, he was amazed by the promptness with which a German horseman dropped from his saddle – the first enemy to fall to a British bullet. Hornby returned exultant, reporting that his own victim had died like a gentleman, at the point of a sword. He gave his weapon to the regimental armourer to be sharpened, expressing idiot regret at the necessity to have the blood wiped off. His brigadier had promised a DSO to the first officer to kill a German with the new pattern cavalry sword, and Hornby duly received this decoration.

That evening of 22 August, a message arrived from Lanrezac suggesting to Sir John French that the entire BEF should wheel to the right, and attack the flank of Bülow’s advance. Open flanks are where armies lose battles, and even wars, if an enemy can contrive to strike at them. But such a British manoeuvre would have been madness in the circumstances: Kluck’s six corps, close at hand beyond Bülow’s formations, could have engulfed them, facing the wrong way. The C-in-C refused, almost his last wise decision of the campaign, and retired to bed with no sense of impending doom or even of bad trouble.

The two divisions of Gen. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps spent the night of the 22nd bivouacked along the Mons–Condé canal, with the cavalry covering their left, commanded by Allenby. Haig’s I Corps deployed in a quarter-circle on the right, reaching back towards Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. The BEF’s positions were anything but ideal for meeting an attack: the sixteen-mile canal was neither wide nor deep enough to constitute a major obstacle, averaging barely twenty yards of breadth. On some stretches of the overall twenty-six-mile British front the ground on the north bank sloped down to the water amid either woodland or clusters of buildings, both offering cover to an approaching enemy.

Smith-Dorrien’s corps was given a much longer front than Haig’s. The British were too few to man a continuous line – some battalions were responsible for 2,000 yards – and thus they concentrated around the bridges, leaving wide gaps that an attacker could exploit, especially with the aid of the barges moored at intervals along the towpath. North-east of Mons the canal bent back into a half-loop, creating a dangerous salient for the companies of Royal Fusiliers and Middlesex holding that sector. As the light began to fade on the 22nd, Lt. Col. Charles Hull of the Middlesex, whose rigid notions of discipline inspired both respect and fear, rode
around the battalion’s positions with his adjutant, Tom Wollocombe. Hull exploded into anger when he heard a company commander urge his men to blaze away at a German aeroplane: the colonel said they would soon need every round of ammunition they carried. As darkness fell, the British heard a distant, unexplained rattle of musketry, which helped to preserve the watchfulness of pickets.

Partly because they expected soon to advance again, but chiefly because they had not yet been galvanised by the ruthless imperatives of war, the defenders failed to use their hours of grace before the Germans’ arrival to prepare the canal’s eighteen bridges for demolition. They merely erected some half-hearted barricades, and covered the approaches with machine-guns. Engineers laid a few precautionary charges; a sapper at one bridge set off on a bicycle to find some detonators, with which he was unprovided. Just before dawn on 23 August, Sir John French conferred briefly with his two corps commanders at Smith-Dorrien’s headquarters in the Château de Sars. He seemed in ebullient form, asserting against all evidence that only one or at most two German corps were at hand. He told his generals to be prepared alternatively to advance, hold their line or pull back. Then he rattled away in his motor car to visit an infantry brigade at Valenciennes, playing no further part in the battle which now developed. Here was extraordinary behaviour by a commander-in-chief responsible for Britain’s only field army, starting its first continental campaign for a century, with the enemy known to be at hand. French seemed to lack any sense of the gravity of the moment. His subordinates, down to platoon level, were given no clear briefings whatsoever, save that they should expect to defend their positions for a day or so.

In the small hours, an order reached units in the line: ‘you will stand to arms at 4.30 a.m. today. Transport to be loaded up and horses saddled. Acknowledge.’ At 6 a.m., a further instruction arrived, to dispatch battalion baggage carts to the rear. Men were later grateful for this – their kits could never have been got away under fire, once battle was joined. During the tense hour or two while they lay on their weapons awaiting the enemy, the Middlesex received a superbly inconsequential message from division, complaining that one of their officers had ridden away from a Belgian blacksmith’s forge at Taisnières without paying for his horse’s reshoeing. Most men used the pause to improve their positions under the friendly eyes of local people, clad in their Sunday best. Neither soldiers nor civilians displayed much sense of peril, which only devastation and death would provide. Officers pored over maps which were unhelpful, because
lacking detail. The first brushes with German patrols took place in a light drizzle, but soon afterwards the sun broke through. Cavalry pickets cantered back into the lines. Enemy artillery began to drop shells on Smith-Dorrien’s units, rudely interrupting some men at breakfast.

These were soldiers of an army which, for half a century past, had known only colonial campaigns, most often against natives armed with spears, though the Boers had shown them what modern small arms could do. The average age of the BEF was twenty-five, and many younger soldiers had never shot to kill. But there were also present old sweats who had fought Dervishes and Pathans: when a Guards sergeant-major set about forming his battalion’s baggage carts into a defensive circle outside a Belgian village, he dubbed it – echo of Kitchener’s Sudan – a ‘zareba’.

The BEF was small but its soldiers, thanks largely to Richard Haldane, were the best-equipped Britain had ever sent to war. They had the superb .303 short-magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and the Vickers machine-gun. Some men wore leather personal accoutrements, while others had already been issued with the canvas webbing and ammunition pouches which were becoming standard. Both were well-designed, as was the British pack. Men valued their puttees, despite the pernickety bother of winding the long cotton wrappings around their legs. Puttees were warm, and provided ankle support on rough ground and long marches, or in muddy trenches. The BEF’s most serious deficiencies were of numbers, heavy artillery and motor transport. In the autumn of 1914, French countryfolk grew accustomed to the sight of requisitioned lorries still bearing the names of their London store owners – Harrods, Maples, Whiteleys – and motor bicycles ridden by eager young civilians who had volunteered their services as dispatch riders. Vans belonging to the caterers J. Lyons soon bore wounded men from London stations to hospitals.

This was an army many of whose officers appeared physically indistinguishable from each other, their features adorned with uniform tightly-clipped moustaches. They took it for granted that – with the exceptions of the Army Service Corps, Pioneers and suchlike – they were gentlemen who regarded horses rather than motors as their natural means of personal transport; members of the same club, many of whom knew each other. When Tom Bridges found himself unhorsed in the path of the enemy, he was rescued by a passing staff officer in a Rolls-Royce, who proved to have been at school with him. After peacetime years in which promotion proceeded at a tortoise pace, more than a few captains aged thirty-six or -seven served at Mons, along with many majors in their forties. Their men were overwhelmingly drawn from the industrial underclass or rural peasantry. Charles Edward Russell, a prominent American socialist visiting Britain during the summer of 1914, deplored manifestations of the class system in uniform. Watching recruits being drilled, he noted the disparity between the heights of officers and men – the former were on average five inches taller – and the poor appearance of the latter: ‘the dull eyes, the open mouths that seem ready to drool, the vacant expression, the stigmata of the slum – terrible spectacle’.

Yet some, though by no means all, such victims of privation made resolute soldiers. It was rash to expect them to think much for themselves, but the same limitation afflicted most of their officers. Few would have been wearing khaki serge that day had they been capable of scraping a meal ticket by any other means. ‘There was no hatred of Germany,’ wrote Tom Bridges, a veteran of the Boer War. ‘In the true mercenary spirit we would equally readily have fought the French.’ Beside the canal, they smashed the windows of homes and warehouses to create firing positions, some with a vestigial guilt about injuring property.

The first of Kluck’s infantry began to push downhill towards the water, shielded along most of its unlovely length by drab houses, mine pitheads and industrial installations. Though the German army was a mighty instrument of war, at this critical moment it displayed weaknesses, foremost among which was intelligence. In August, all the belligerents’ commanders vied with each other in misjudgements of their opponents’ strengths and intentions. Kluck’s was the largest of the Kaiser’s seven armies in the west. Men of its leading regiments approached Mons aware that British soldiers were in the vicinity, but ignorant of their strength or deployments – German aircraft played no useful reconnaissance role on the 23rd. Kluck himself was esteemed by his peers, but revealed no genius in this, his first battle of 1914.

Pte. Sid Godley was enjoying coffee and rolls brought to him by two Belgian children, with whom he made clumsy efforts at conversation, when their little party was interrupted by an incoming German shell. He recalled later: ‘I said to this little boy and girl, “You’d better sling your ’ooks now, otherwise you may get hurt.” Well, they packed their basket up and left.’ Godley settled down behind his rifle. As the first Germans showed themselves, thousands of British soldiers opened fire, the rippling crackle of their musketry soon overborne by the crump of artillery. The Germans began crowding around the dangerous salient north-east of Mons, at
Nimy, where the bridges were defended by the Royal Fusiliers, who had the 4th Middlesex to their right behind Obourg: legend has it that the Fusiliers were warned of the enemy’s approach by the stationmaster’s daughter. Col. Hull, commanding the Middlesex, was a small-arms enthusiast who had taken pains to ensure that his men could shoot straight, and that day they did him proud. Successive German rushes were checked by murderous rifle-fire. Huddled grey-green corpses, surmounted by Pickelhaube helmets, soon littered the north bank. But Kluck’s men, in their turn, took up firing positions and were soon inflicting casualties on the ill-concealed British.

One of Hull’s men, Pte. Jack, said later: ‘When the firing began, I was frightened by the noise. I’d never heard anything like it. Most of the shells were bursting well behind us, but there was also a strange whistling sound as the bullets came over. There were four of us in a rifle-pit and our officer walked over to us and I remember thinking, “Get down, you silly bugger.” Later on I heard the poor man was killed. Then the man next to me was hit. I was firing away and suddenly he gave a sort of grunt and lay still. I’d never seen a dead man before.’ Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘Funny to notice how everyone ducks at the sound of a bullet. You know it is past you, but down goes your head every time.’ Soon, too many bullets and shells were passing for any man to have time to duck. Most concentrated upon ramming clip after five-round clip into their hot weapons, though too much has been made of the rifleman’s notional fifteen-rounds-a-minute capability. Any unit which sustained such a rate of fire would speedily have exhausted its ammunition.

Most of the Germans surging forward were as new to war as the British. Some experienced brief euphoria, such as was later described by Walter Bloem, a captain in the Brandenburg Grenadiers. As he advanced, ‘a shout of triumph, a wild, unearthly singing surged within me, uplifting and inspiring me, filling all my senses. I had overcome fear; I had conquered my mortal bodily self.’ At first, Kluck’s men advanced in masses, direct from their line of march, and suffered in consequence. A British NCO wrote: ‘They were in solid, square blocks, standing out sharply against the skyline, and you couldn’t help hitting them … They crept nearer and nearer, and then our officers gave the word … They seemed to stagger like a drunk man hit suddenly between the eyes, after which they made a run for us, shouting some outlandish cry that we couldn’t make out.’