Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (54 page)

For all Joffre’s bulk, in those days he displayed remarkable energy. He hated the telephone as a medium of command communication. In contrast to Moltke, who never quit his headquarters until 11 September, the Frenchman drove hundreds of miles, on dusty roads clogged with troops and refugees, to meet his generals. His car was chauffeured at breakneck speeds by a former racing driver, Georges Bouillot, who had earned the appointment by winning the 1912 and 1913 French Grand Prix; the commander-in-chief’s hurtling convoy became a familiar sight in the rear areas of the armies.

The British continued to fall back roughly in step with the three French armies withdrawing on their right, which fought much fiercer and more costly rearguard actions than Mons or Le Cateau. Lanrezac still believed that the British II Corps had been effectively destroyed in the battle on the 26th, which reinforced his staff’s disdain for their Anglo-Saxon allies. Joffre was obliged to acquiesce in the continuing retreat, because the new Sixth Army which he had begun to build on the extreme left flank could not be ready to fight for a week. It was plain that the original plan outlined in his 25 August
Instruction Générale No. 2
was impracticable, because the positions he had identified for his counter-attack were already falling to the Germans. But was the concept still valid, of a great thrust in the north? The British C-in-C and his officers were uninterested, preoccupied only with salvaging their little force from what they deemed a French disaster.
By 28 August, the allies had fallen back south of the Somme. Three days later they began to cross the Aisne, and passed through the champagne country, abandoning Reims.

New mishaps further poisoned relations between the allies. On the afternoon of the 30th, Lanrezac’s staff sent a message to GHQ, asking that the British should blow an important bridge across the Oise at Bailly. Only after the lapse of several hours was a party of sappers belatedly dispatched with explosives. In darkness, their lorry blundered onto the bridge without noticing that Germans had taken possession; all the engineers were killed, and the crossing remained intact. Next day, the 31st, Fifth Army’s retreat continued under a blazing sun. The French badly needed help from Allenby’s cavalry to protect their left. Louis Spears adopted the imaginative expedient of telephoning a succession of postmistresses at likely places where British troops might be found. At last one responded positively; she fetched a gendarme who proved most helpful, and he in turn brought to the telephone an English Hussar with whom the liaison officer had once served. This officer promised to pass on the message, and to try himself to get some cavalry deployed in the gap between the two armies; not much happened, however.

GHQ, meanwhile, was almost incommunicado as it repeatedly shifted position southwards, having lapsed into a mute sulk. Sir John and his staff, as Spears saw it, now ‘showed little interest in events not directly affecting the British Army’. The 31st was chiefly important as the day on which the British C-in-C overreached himself. He dispatched to London a telegram in which he vented at length his disgust towards the French and the campaign he was obliged to share with them. ‘I do not see why I should again be called upon to run the risk of absolute disaster in order a second time to save them,’ he wrote. ‘I do not think you understand the shattered condition of the Second Army Corps, and how it paralyses my powers of offence.’

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.’