Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (63 page)

The newcomers dug in on the lip of the ridge. They were overlooked by strong German positions higher up the hill, but at least they were on the right side of the river. The British official history comments tartly: ‘Had other divisions been equally enterprising – and their marches on the 12th been shorter – the fighting on the 13th might have had a different result.’ In other words, the rest of the BEF approached the Aisne in the same leisurely fashion with which it had advanced from the Marne, failing to make serious attempts to cross the river until daylight on the 13th, when clashes took place at a dozen crossing points. The Germans had positioned
a formidable array of heavy guns and mortars beyond the ridge line. From the heights, their observers could watch every movement, and pour down fire on the valley. A British gunner officer wrote ruefully: ‘The advance proceeded with insufficient momentum, which permitted the Germans to prepare a strong defensive position … from which we failed to dislodge them.’

At Bourg-et-Comin, a machine-gun ravaged the crossing of British cavalry: Lord Gerald Fitzgerald of the 4th Dragoons, just thirty-three days married, took a bullet between the eyes. Infantry reached the north bank of the Aisne by traversing an aqueduct the Germans had failed to destroy, but a deluge of shells fell upon the village of Bourg as soon as the British occupied it. Engineers struggling to build a pontoon bridge suffered severely from artillery and snipers. One raft took a direct hit, blowing a dozen sappers into the water, most of them dead. Three bold men, stark naked, swam out from the shore to retrieve the raft as bullets whipped the water around them. One was shot, but the other two hoisted themselves aboard and steered the clumsy craft to the bank, saving the lives of five wounded engineers stranded upon it.

Below the village of Paissy, the West Surreys lost a hundred men crossing the river under fire. At Pontarcy, thousands of infantry reached the east bank across another half-demolished bridge, but German shelling continued relentlessly, as did heavy rain. At Vailly, scores of French’s men were hit while running the gauntlet of enemy fire as they crossed a plank bridge. At Missy, engineers struggled in darkness through the early hours of 14 September to ferry horses over the river on rafts. ‘We had an awful time … as the banks were very steep and the current pretty strong,’ wrote Lt. Jimmy Davenport of the Bedfords. A fellow officer, Maj. Singer, slipped and fell in the water as he was pushing off a raft, and found himself clinging precariously to the edge with his head within inches of a horse’s hooves. Halfway across the animal started kicking out, and the hapless major was obliged to twist and wriggle frantically to avoid a killing blow. Several horses leapt overboard into the current, and were recovered only hours later.

By the morning of 14 September, thousands of British troops were established on the northern bank of the Aisne – but in a wretched predicament. Soaking wet, exhausted and mostly unfed for many hours, they clung to positions just above the woods that ran the length of the Chemin des Dames. At every point they were overlooked by Germans on the open farmland eastward, which rose gently uphill. Through the days that
followed, the British struggled to breast the crest, while the Germans made repeated attempts to drive them back to the river. Both sides failed, with heavy loss. In the dismal weather, spirits sagged. They would have sunk further had either army known that, though much more dying would take place there, the front on the Chemin des Dames would remain almost unchanged through the next four years.

Pte. Charles Mackenzie of the Cameron Highlanders wrote after being wounded in both legs on 14 September: ‘It is a terrible place out yonder – nothing but heaps of bodies and plenty of blood. We lost a lot of men … there are only 300 left out of 1400’. The Coldstream and Scots Guards also suffered heavily. The Connaught Rangers crossed the Aisne at Pont d’Arcy during the night of 13 September and found themselves in the village of Soupir, dominated by a splendid château which had belonged to Gaston Calmette, the editor of
Le Figaro
sensationally murdered by Madame Caillaux. They had no orders to go further that night, but their commander Maj. William Sarsfield, in a notable display of initiative, decided that since they must seize the high ground some time, the sooner the better. He led his men up a winding track through woods from the village that eventually emerged onto open ground at a big farm named ‘La Cour de Soupir’. There, they established themselves and waited for dawn. At 9.45 a.m., in the usual torrential rain, the 2nd Grenadiers arrived, with no inkling that the Irish soldiers were ahead of them. Simultaneously the Germans launched a powerful infantry attack on the farm, obliging both regiments to make the best shift they could to hold them off amid a crackle of musketry, with no maps and scant idea of who was where. The subsequent messy, confused, costly little battle surged to and fro around the farms and surrounding woods.

Grenadier Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘We stop a lot of Connaught Rangers who are “retiring” rather in disorder & hear that their regt has been cut up in an ambush and their major has told them to retire. We take possession of them all & fall them in with us. We meet crowds of little detachments like ours … Can see that if anyone gets funky, everyone will be firing into everyone else. That’s the worst of these wood fights, you can’t see & there is no one directing. Hear firing on my right & halt to let the men get up to me; they have straggled appallingly. Suddenly see grey uniforms in front, poop off & almost immediately am hit.’ Harcourt-Vernon was shot in the groin, briefly captured, then freed and dispatched to hospital an hour later, when the Germans were forced back.

It became a day of desperate local actions in a dozen places, of attack and counter-attack, a steady drain of losses to German riflemen who sniped from vantage points in tree branches. The Coldstream and then the Irish Guards arrived to give support. Men of four battalions fought sporadically through the day, bewildered about everything save the need to shoot at the enemy wherever he appeared. At one point, just as the Grenadiers started an attack some two hundred Germans lying in a root field north of the farm suddenly rose to their feet, put up their hands, and advanced waving a white flag. British soldiers were marshalling these dejected figures as prisoners when another enemy infantry unit began firing on the mingled men without discrimination. George Jeffreys of the Grenadiers wrote: ‘I don’t believe there was any intentional treachery on the part of the Germans. Their leading line had had enough and meant to surrender. Incidentally they had hardly any ammunition left. Their supports in rear, however, had no intention of surrendering and opened fire when they got a good target. I had no idea what good cover a root field could give to men lying down; they were as invisible in it as partridges.’

No general directed the Soupir battle – battalions and companies simply fought as best they could. Officer losses were crippling. In the Guards regiments which boasted so many aristocrats, blue blood flowed freely: as Lord Guernsey spoke to Lord Arthur Hay, both fell dead to bullets fired by a single skilful German rifleman. The Connaught Rangers suffered 250 casualties, the Grenadiers 120, the Coldstream 178. A young Grenadier private named Parsons collected twelve stragglers of another battalion lacking an officer or NCO, and commanded them all day with notable efficiency, a performance which won him promotion and a mention in dispatches. But Parsons, like so many others, would be dead within weeks.

That evening the Guards dug in, while shells fell on British billets behind the front, half a mile down the hill in Soupir village. Of that night Jeffreys wrote: ‘I tried to sleep, but it was too cold, and a row of German wounded … continuously calling out “
Kamerad
” also kept me awake – I had never before realized the meaning of “My wounds stink and are corrupt.” These undressed wounds did stink and were corrupt!’ When a Connaught Ranger offered Jeffreys a mug of tea, the major was so disgusted by recollections of the Connaughts’ alleged poor showing during the retreat that he was tempted to decline, but eventually succumbed to temptation.

The fighting at Cour de Soupir continued through the days that followed, as did the losses. The Germans launched big attacks and made
small gains, from which they had to be dislodged. Each clash cost lives, and the British in their turn achieved no important advance. On the afternoon of 16 September, a German shell landed in a quarry on the lip of which a Grenadier company was deployed; all the British wounded lay inside. More than half the Grenadiers, fifty-nine men, were killed immediately, along with eleven men of other units and the only medical officer on the position – Dr Huggan, a celebrated Scottish international rugby player. Class distinction prevailed even in death. The Grenadiers’ George Jeffreys read the burial service by torchlight over the British and German other ranks, who were committed to large pits dug by a crossroads. Meanwhile the bodies of the fallen British officers were dispatched down the hill, to be interred in Soupir churchyard.

Capt. Lionel Thurston of the Oxf & Bucks, which joined the Soupir battle, wrote to his family on 20 September: ‘A week ago … we came up against the Germans in a prepared position and since then we have not budged an inch, it has been HELL … The place here is a regular cockpit; 150 oxen were roasted to death two days ago, and all the cows have been shot and yesterday, out of the remaining five pigs only two escaped.’ Capt. Rosslyn Evelegh was killed by a shell when he rashly exposed himself to put a wounded pig out of its misery. Thurston concluded fastidiously: ‘There are about 500 dead Germans lying about 800 yards from our trenches and I really think something should be done about it as they have been there for four days.’

Bernard Gordon-Lennox wrote: ‘We were subject to a hell of a bombardment all day … We could from the trenches see a good deal of the German position and could see them digging like blazes too, but their guns are awful hard to find. Throughout the day shrapnel was bursting right over and on us. Ma [Jeffreys] and Doctor Howell, short and fat, came round. Howell says he is giving up “going for strolls”.’ Some British gunners made a bourgeois little calculation that the afternoon’s bombardment of their sector had cost the Germans £35,000 in shells. The new CO of the Grenadiers, Wilfrid Abel-Smith, wrote to his wife: ‘The men are splendid and I think their bravery in disregarding danger is largely due to British stupidity. I don’t think they realize their danger, which is a great blessing, and makes them stand like rocks, when the highly-strung foreigners can’t stick it. But the men are tired, I can see that.’

Though Soupir became especially notorious as a scene of British frustration and blood-letting, the BEF suffered similar experiences along the length of the Chemin des Dames, as did the French on their right. The
sugar factory at Cerny became a place of special ill-repute. Casualties bore notably heavily on a handful of regiments. Between 15 and 17 September, the Loyal North Lancashires attacking Troyon lost nine officers killed and five wounded, together with five hundred other ranks. One company, which crossed the Aisne two hundred strong, found itself reduced to two officers and twenty-five men. On the 20th the West Yorkshires were outflanked in a disastrous little action which caused most of the battalion to surrender. The Germans suffered in like measure. Warrant Officer Ernst Nopper recorded on 23 September that his company had shrunk from two hundred men to seventy-four: ‘Major Zeppelin wanted to shoot himself when he heard of these losses.’

The men who fought on the Aisne found the experience far worse than anything that had happened to them at Mons or Le Cateau, because the battle was so protracted. On the Chemin des Dames, they began to explore the new nature of warfare, in which operations were continuous and battles went on for weeks on end without respite or decision. Barrages sometimes persisted for hours, with shells landing around a given position at intervals of seconds. A German officer wounded in September said presciently, ‘in this war the last word will be spoken by the artillery’. The occupants of the trenches appeared men of mud: baths were a distant memory; few even among the officers contrived to shave; much of the BEF had been wearing the same clothing since Mons.

The character of the struggle was changing, as men grasped a simple message: those who wished to survive must make themselves invisible. Soldiers newly arrived on the Aisne battlefield were struck by its apparent emptiness, at all times save when an attack was in progress. Only the crack and whizz of bullets, the crump of shells, showed that a war was being carried on. At night, they learned to curse the single jumpy soldier, on one side or the other, who fired a shot which provoked a storm of musketry and shelling along the front. Haig asserted on 14 September that ‘it was impossible to rely on some of the regiments in the 3rd Division which had been so severely handled at Mons and Le Cateau’. On the 20th he described how the West Yorkshires ‘ran away’ and had to be forcibly restrained and herded forward again by dragoons.

Back in Britain on 22 September
The Times
wrote: ‘“Are the Germans giving way?” is the question on all lips.’ No, they were not. When Julian Grenfell scowled at a German officer and some men whom they took prisoner, thinking of his own men killed by them, the German looked him in the face and saluted. Grenfell repented of his own anger: ‘I have never seen
a man look so proud and resolute and smart and confident, in his hour of bitterness. It made me feel terribly ashamed of myself.’ Capt. John Macready of the Bedfords wrote:

Had we but known it, this was the beginning of trench warfare … There was, of course, no wire, and trenches were far apart, the intervening ground being covered with fire. Patrolling went on nightly, through the Boche’s lines and back again. We lost many men through sniping, so much so that in one of Allason’s forward platoons, no movement whatsoever could be made in daylight. The morale of this post was definitely down … The weather became hot and the smell of dead bodies in the woods was dreadful, both Germans and our own had fallen in odd places and not been discovered. Carcasses of horses and cattle were even worse. Bit by bit we got them buried, but it takes some doing to bury a cow which has swollen to three times its normal size.