Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (48 page)

On the morning of 1 September, for the first time since Le Cateau excepting skirmishes, the Germans caught up with elements of the BEF. Kluck was not looking for the British, in whose affairs he had lost interest; he was pushing south-eastwards towards Lanrezac. But in consequence his leading elements crossed the British sector as they headed towards Château-Thierry and bridges across the Marne. The first encounter with French’s units came thirty-five miles north of Paris, at Néry. A British cavalry brigade which occupied the village during the night took the best billets, and quartered many of their mounts in a big farmyard beside the church. L Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery, last to arrive, was forced to make such shift as it could for the night in an orchard immediately south of the village, just short of a big sugar factory. Néry stood beside a deep, narrow valley thick with brushwood on the east side. Beyond, some six hundred yards from the village lay more high ground. 1 September dawned in thick
mist. L Battery was assembled ready to march. Then a delay was ordered; limber poles were let down, and some teams were led away to water at the sugar factory.

A succession of shocks followed. First, a Hussars’ picket dashed into the village to report German horse at hand. The mist suddenly lifted, and at 5.40 a.m. a dozen enemy field pieces from Marwitz’s cavalry division began to fire on the British at point-blank range, less than a thousand yards, from the hill across the narrow valley. The Bays’ mounts bolted in panic down the village street. Many of the British cavalry were invisible to the Germans among the houses, but L Battery’s orchard was in plain sight – a perfect, unmissable target. Salvo after salvo landed with devastating effect. Horses reared, broke free and stampeded, men scuttled for cover, seized equipment, strove to harness teams.

Most of L Battery was limbered up, drivers and gunners preparing to mount and move. German fire fell upon them with stunning effect, bringing down whole teams in a chaos of mingled animal and human flesh. Capt. Edward Bradbury, the second-in-command, shouted, ‘Come on – who’s for the guns?’ and led a handful of men in a dash through the shellfire to respond. They contrived to get three pieces into action, but two were quickly silenced. The last gun kept firing under the barrage until only Bradbury, Sgt. Nelson and Battery-Sgt.-Maj. Dorrell remained alive to work it, surrounded by dead and dying horses and gunners.

Bradbury, a keen steeplechase rider just turned thirty-three, had a leg blown off as he shifted ammunition, but continued giving fire orders until he collapsed from loss of blood. As he was carried dying to the rear, he passed the commanding officer of the Bays and called out, ‘Halloa, colonel, they have been giving us a warm time, haven’t they?’ Bradbury’s other two gunners kept their piece in action as long as they had rounds. L Battery’s destruction was a miniature disaster involving the loss of five officers and forty-nine men. It is reasonable to doubt whether its single gun achieved much in the desperate circumstances of that morning; but it is characteristic of military iconography that the actions of Bradbury and his two comrades were rewarded with VCs and passed into legend, celebrated by a superbly heroic painting, while the retribution the British immediately afterwards inflicted on the Germans is almost forgotten.

The Hussars’ machine-guns were deployed in Néry to fire across the valley, inflicting terrible casualties on the enemy gunners and horses. Lt. Algy Lunn then brought the Bays’ Vickers into action also. Soon barrels were white hot, steam was hissing from condensers. Lunn and his men
frantically refilled ammunition belts to sustain the fire. Infantry of the Middlesex and Royal Fusiliers, billeted in a neighbouring village, doubled to the scene, and began skirmishing forward on the northern side of Néry, while two squadrons of the 5th Dragoon Guards circled southward and opened dismounted fire on the Germans from the other flank. I Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery joined in at 8 a.m., to important effect, around the time the last of L Battery’s pieces fell silent.

Marwitz’s cavalry fell back in disarray, abandoning eight of their twelve guns and seventy-eight prisoners. A German doctor who was among them protested vigorously about the confiscation of his binoculars and his grey horse, which he insisted were private property – he waved a French-language edition of the Geneva Convention to support his argument. The victorious cavalry took both anyway. The British disputed fiercely among themselves about who deserved credit for giving the Germans a belated comeuppance. What was for sure is that it was a costly day for both sides, and especially for their horses: between three and four hundred perished around Néry. ‘It is one of the worst things in the war,’ wrote Harry Dillon of the Oxf & Bucks, ‘dead horses everywhere and the stink is fearful. The corpses of men get moved or disposed of somehow, but there is no time to deal with the horses.’

There was debate about who, if anybody, deserved VCs. Sgt.-Maj. Dorrell was widely thought to have been decorated partly because he was a ‘good chap’: he had enlisted underage at sixteen, served in the Boer War and risen the hard way to warrant officer’s rank. It is no slur upon the courage of some of those who received Britain’s highest decoration in the first weeks of the war to observe that a few months later, amid relentless carnage, the bar for the award was raised: for the rest of the war men had to achieve and suffer more to receive it. A British memorial at the scene of L Battery’s destruction asserts with shameless nationalistic immodesty: ‘The Battle of the Marne was won at Néry.’ This claim reflects the fact that the German cavalry were roughly handled on 1 September. In truth, however, what took place was no more than a minor incident in the vast epic of the retreat of two million men.

Further east, between 10.45 a.m. and 2 p.m. on the same day, there was another such encounter. A rearguard of Haig’s corps, retiring along one of the few tracks through the huge forest of Villers-Cotterêts, became entangled in confused fighting which proved the Guards brigade’s costliest action of the month. The forest runs along the spine of a ridge. Its dense summer foliage made it impossible for formed bodies of men to move
except on rides, and hard to spot targets to shoot. The British were acutely sensitive to the threat of being outflanked and cut off by Germans infiltrating between the trees. The Grenadiers’ No. 4 company lost heavily delivering a counter-attack with the bayonet. Maj. ‘Ma’ Jeffreys met the brigade-major leading a horse on which sat slumped his brigadier, ‘badly wounded and obviously in great pain’. The staff officer shouted to Jeffreys that the enemy was being held, but the battalion would soon have to withdraw. Then a hard-hit Coldstream, Stephen Burton, staggered towards Jeffreys. He said, ‘For God’s sake get me out of this or I shall be captured – I can’t get much further.’ With difficulty, the Grenadier hoisted Burton onto a pack horse, and detailed a transport man to lead him towards the rear.

One Guardsman was bending down to offer his mate a piece of sausage when a bullet struck his boot, ricocheted into his mouth and out of the top of his head. The Grenadiers had two platoons cut off and destroyed, fighting almost to the last man. In all, they lost four officers and 160 other ranks; the huge, adolescent figure of nineteen-year-old Lt. George Cecil was last seen leading a bayonet charge, sword in hand. Soon afterwards Jeffreys found himself in temporary command of his battalion, and supervised its withdrawal by bounds. ‘The Germans did not press us at all,’ he wrote. ‘They had evidently not only lost heavily but got very mixed up in the thick forest, and we could hear them shouting orders and blowing little horns, apparently to rally their men.’

Lord Castlerosse of the Irish Guards was among the casualties left behind. He was shepherding some stragglers under machine-gun fire when he put up his hand to brush off a wasp. A bullet struck his arm, inflicting shocking damage and causing him to collapse unconscious. He awoke to find a column of German troops marching past. The commanding officer of one battalion, noticing the British officer, stopped to remark conversationally, ‘Do you know that the Duke of Connaught is the colonel of this regiment? Why do you make war on your cousins?’ Some hours later Castlerosse, in agony and untended, found himself the object of unwelcome attention from a German soldier prodding him with a bayonet. An officer in the uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars stopped, rebuked the prisoner’s tormentor, and summoned a medical orderly to tend his wound. He then wrote his own name – von Cramm, father of a later three-time Wimbledon tennis finalist – in Castlerosse’s field notebook, saying, ‘If ever a German should fall into your hands be kind to him as I have been to you.’

The Guards suffered three hundred casualties at Villers-Cotterêts, and another brigade covering their withdrawal lost 160. On the credit side, by evening on 1 September the gap between the two British corps, which had caused such dismay and apprehension since they split at Bavay on 25 August, was at last closed. But small parties of German cavalry continued to infiltrate here and there, causing moments of confusion. Maj. Gen. Charles Monro, commanding 2nd Division, glimpsed distant horsemen and shouted to Jeffreys, ‘They’ve got their cavalry round! Quick! Get these men to change front and open fire!’ The Grenadier, mercifully calmer than his superior, saw that the horses were white and said, ‘But it’s the Scots Greys, sir,’ to which the ‘tired and overwrought’ Monro responded, ‘Thank God! Thank God!’ The Royal Welch had a similar experience, opening fire on the 19th Hussars under orders from an over-excited general.

Sir John French was in a worse muddle. That day his headquarters abandoned with unseemly haste the château at Dammartin in which it had been housed. Maj. Christopher Baker-Carr wrote: ‘The departure was a panic-stricken flight. Rumours of thousands of Uhlans in the woods nearby arrived every moment. Typewriters and office equipment were flung into waiting lorries, drawn up in serried ranks in front of the château. It was a pitch-black night, lit up by a hundred dazzling headlights. With much difficulty I collected my quota of passengers and got clear of the seething mass of vehicles.’ Nearby, ‘Wully’ Robertson was just sitting down to eat roast mutton when the alarm came; his dinner was hastily wrapped in newspaper and tossed on the floor of a lorry, to be eaten cold next day. Nobody remembered to tell the adjutant-general, Sir Nevil Macready, dining with his staff in their quarters, that the C-in-C had decamped; on learning the news, he scrambled crossly after the fugitives. Baker-Carr, however, returned to Dammartin later that night, to collect some washing he could ill afford to lose. Finding the little town quiet, he enjoyed a good night’s sleep there.

Bob Barnard was one of many British soldiers by now utterly exhausted, as well as bewildered that they continued to retreat while seeing so few Germans. He wrote: ‘We didn’t know where we were going no more than fly, but I remember the day was September 1st when we saw the first signpost which said “Paris”. I was quite pleased at that, as I had never been to Paris.’ Barnard was not going there now, however: the path of the British retreat lay southwards. Many of those who followed it would perish without ever glimpsing the French capital’s delights.

Just at the moment when Moltke’s unease about his armies’ strategic predicament began to precipitate the decisive moral crisis of his career, the Kaiser’s subjects were rejoicing at the prospect of imminent triumph. On 1 September
Vossische Zeitung
editorialised: ‘The mind is scarcely able to grasp the news being given to the German people about their victories in both east and west. It represents a divine judgement, as it were, branding our antagonists as the criminal originators of this fearful war.’ Half a century earlier, industrialist and banker Gustav Mavissen wrote wonderingly amid the euphoria after Prussia’s 1866 victory over Austria: ‘I am no devotee of Mars … but the trophies of war exercise a magic charm on the child of peace. One’s eyes are involuntarily riveted on, and one’s spirit goes along with, the unending rows of men who acclaim the god of the moment – success.’ So it was again in Germany during the first days of September 1914.

Its foes did not dissent from such triumphalism: in the British ranks there was profound pessimism, if not quite despair. Many of the BEF’s officers felt ready to wash their hands of their allies – figuratively, and almost literally, to take to the boats. James Harper, a staff captain, wrote bitterly: ‘the damned French Army never appears at all. There has been a bad strategy somewhere … The men are losing their confidence, I’m afraid.’ News that the French government was evacuating Paris swept through the BEF, causing gunner NCO William Edgington to write, ‘which all seems to point to disaster, and all that we get from the allies is that mythical French cavalry corps’.

Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘personally, I don’t believe the French have properly mobilised, & that we are being used to keep back the whole German army to give them time. Whatever happens the British Army has done its duty … for the last week we have been fighting alone.’ He added a week later: ‘I can’t feel really cheerful about this war, I simply can’t believe in these Frenchmen. Time after time, we have been told that there are French Corps on either side of us & we are going to take up a position, but every day it is the same & back we go … Can you wonder that we are feeling worn & weary & disheartened?’ No British senior officer made the smallest attempt to persuade his subordinates that the French were doing their own part manfully – or, if he had no accurate intelligence to that effect, at least to pretend to it. The institutional chauvinism of the British Army had a deplorable effect in rendering unattainable, at a critical time, the mutual respect indispensable to every successful alliance.

The retreat from Mons cost the BEF 15,000 men killed, wounded and captured, together with forty-two guns lost, most of these losses being in
II Corps. They were only a tiny fraction of French casualties, but profoundly shocking to their commanders. It seemed to them, as well as to the Kaiser’s generals, entirely plausible that German victory was at hand. It was fortunate for the allied cause that the spirit of France, far from being extinguished, was soon to achieve a historic redemption.