Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (80 page)

Falkenhayn decreed that the nuisance of Antwerp should be snuffed out. The Germans had been bothered by two Belgian sorties from the fortress – the first at the time of Le Cateau, the second during the Aisne fighting; they were determined now to remove the lingering threat to their communications. OHL dispatched a reserve corps, reinforced with massive artillery support, to batter the city, where most of the Belgian army was concentrated. Moltke travelled there in person, cherishing threadbare hopes of recovering some fragment of his shattered prestige. Joffre rejected Belgian pleas for aid, for Antwerp had no place in his grand strategic plan – in its isolation, he judged the perimeter indefensible. He sent only a few Zouaves, territorials and marines to cover the retreat of the city’s garrison down the coast into France, an outcome the C-in-C considered inevitable.

The British, however, had more ambitious ideas. They had much emotional capital invested in King Albert’s country. John Galsworthy demanded in the
Daily Mail
: ‘What are we going to do for Belgium – for this most gallant of little countries, ground, because of sheer loyalty, under an iron heel? For this most innocent of sufferers from God’s own Armageddon?’ The novelist’s emotional outburst reflected public opinion. Though Belgium had been invaded, much of the country was still unoccupied. Surely British arms could avert its absolute enslavement? Many people, some of them ministers and generals, were instinctively attracted by the notion of fighting a battle close to home, within reach of the Royal Navy. Here was a chance to conduct independent operations without being bothered by Joffre and his fellow countrymen.

Sir John French, with unerring lack of judgement, dallied with the possibility of taking the entire BEF to Antwerp, where he had wanted to be ever since August. Had this plan been implemented, his army would almost certainly have suffered German encirclement, and perhaps destruction, before it could be evacuated. In the end, it was merely agreed with the French that the BEF should redeploy from the Aisne to the left flank.
On the night of 1 October, their divisions began the extended process of withdrawal from the Chemin des Dames. And even as this began, they launched a local adventure at Antwerp. Though the notion of taking the whole army there had been abandoned, some bold British spirits still saw scope for buccaneering.

In the Admiralty files in those days, civil servant Norman Macleod chanced upon a pre-war strategic memorandum written by the First Lord, which he described as ‘wonderful’. In 1911 Churchill had described a clash between the Entente and the Central Powers in which ‘he foresaw that [the] French wd have to remain on defensive on NE frontiers and possibly have to give ground before German advance through Belgium and possibly even Paris would be in danger – questioned whether French people cd play the waiting game necessary – Britain wd send 290,000 men to help … after 40th day tide would turn’. Macleod qualified his admiration, however: ‘this paper is almost the only evidence of real talent I have seen on Churchill’s part – the Naval Division scheme has shown his weaknesses – his mind works quickly, he is fertile in suggestions and he is a tremendous worker, but he lacks balance and consistency, does not work well in harness. I cannot imagine him conceiving a great scheme and carrying it through steadily. He begins no end of things, threatens heads of depts with dire penalties if his plans are not carried out – then falters & delays giving a decision and drops the scheme.’

These criticisms appear prescient, in the light of the bizarre enterprise which the First Lord now sponsored. The ‘Naval Division scheme’ to which Macleod referred was a characteristically piratical stroke by Churchill. He assembled a hotchpotch of Royal Marines and surplus naval personnel from which he aspired to create his own private army, having persuaded himself that Antwerp offered a chance to fulfil his dream of a British amphibious operation. On every possible count this was imprudent, indeed reckless. Antwerp was untenable as the continental beachhead he envisaged; it could have been supplied up the Scheldt only by breaching Dutch neutrality. The First Lord nonetheless had himself appointed Britain’s plenipotentiary to the beleaguered fortress, and set forth with the only British force available – his Naval Division.

The Belgian army deployed around Antwerp was hard-pressed. A month earlier, the French newspaper
Le Matin
had asserted that the city was ‘virtually impregnable’. In truth, however, nothing had been done since 1900 to modernise its protective forts, as vulnerable to modern artillery as those of Liège. Among the garrison were grenadiers Edouard and
Charles Beer, two of four sons of a prosperous Brussels family. They had hastened to the Belgian colours seven weeks earlier in expectation of glory, and were crestfallen to be sent to Antwerp, where they merely wielded spades day after day. Now, the German assault engulfed them. Their fort on the outskirts of the city came under heavy fire until one shell struck a magazine, precipitating a huge explosion. Edouard Beer wrote in his diary:

We needed all our courage. What a ghastly sight! Bodies without heads or faces, detached limbs, chests laid open, groans and shrieks agonising to the ears. Most were without their dogtags, and so unidentifiable. Thirty-seven bodies lay there, while just four survived wounded, two of them seriously.

The stretcher-bearers refused to come forward, so our commandant asked for volunteers to take the two worst cases to the farm. Charles and I and two others came forward. The commandant shook our hands and said,
‘Bon courage, mes enfants.’
As we crossed the open ground, shells fell all around us, sometimes very close. The wounded man groaned terribly at every step, and every twenty paces or so we had to stop because the blanket in which we were carrying him slipped in our muddy fingers.

At last they reached the main positions, surrendered their burdens, and made their way back to the fort, where they were greeted by comrades astonished to see them alive.

A formal siege of Antwerp’s sixty-mile perimeter began on 28 September, though the road west, running along the Dutch–Belgian frontier, remained open. Large tracts of surrounding countryside had been flooded, to deny them to the enemy, but the consequence was that defenders outside the forts could not entrench themselves in the waterlogged ground. By the night of Wednesday the 30th, the bombardment had become continuous. Edouard Beer wrote: ‘the spectacle is terrifying; in front of us as well as behind, we see the flashes of the guns; to the north, south and west alike, there are only fires. The whole centre of the village of Havre Sainte Cutheune is blazing like a torch, including the church bell tower.’ Next morning, in the face of the shelling, his unit abandoned their positions; that evening, however, they took advantage of thick fog to reoccupy them. A few days later Beer recorded: ‘Our third night without rest … Four more men died in today’s shelling, bringing to twenty the number killed in this stretch of trench … Oh! The rage of impotence. To see
comrades fall at one’s side, others wounded, and to be unable to avenge them! To see men lost to machine-gun fire who cannot even perish fighting! This period of intense bombardment is intensely dispiriting.’

The men of Churchill’s Royal Naval Division were clad in sea-going rig, scantily equipped and almost wholly untrained for land war. He had already dispatched them on brief and abortive sorties that caught his fancy, first to Ostend, then to Dunkirk and thence to Lille. Now the First Lord abandoned his post at the Admiralty and hastened to Antwerp personally to rally the defence, touring the city in an open Rolls-Royce. One of his entourage, Ordinary Seaman Henry Stevens, described the experience: ‘To me it appeared that Mr Churchill dominated the proceedings and … that he was by no means satisfied with the position … He appeared on occasions to criticise the siting and construction of trenches by the Belgian army … He put forward his ideas forcefully, waving his stick and thumping the ground with it. After obviously pungent remarks, he would walk away a few steps and stare towards the enemy’s direction. On other occasions he would stride away without another word, get into the car and wait impatiently … At one line of trenches he found the line very thinly held and asked where “the bloody men were”.’

It is hard to exaggerate the absurdity of throwing a small, scratch British force into a battle almost no one thought winnable, given the Belgians’ weakness and the city’s remoteness at the north-western extremity of allied territory. Royal Marine Captain Maurice Festing described the bitterness his men felt about abandoning Lille, whose inhabitants had hailed them as deliverers, in order to hasten to Antwerp at Churchill’s behest. He wrote in his diary on 4 October: ‘Our exodus is a very painful recollection to me, and I hope I may never again be called upon to carry out so humiliating and unpleasant a withdrawal.’

The Marines who quit the city were disconcerted, as they tramped north, to meet Belgian guns moving the other way, which suggested that the allied commitment to the defence of Antwerp was less than wholehearted. Festing and his comrades were further bewildered about what they were supposed to achieve, 2,500 strong without their own artillery or logistical support, and furthermore extremely hungry. They were astonished suddenly to encounter the First Lord in the flesh, his chubby person attired in a flowing boat cloak and naval cap. ‘He inspected our men on the march and promised them every luxury in the way of foodstuffs. He seemed excited.’ The Marines arrived in Antwerp to be joined by the other brigade of the ragtag Naval Division, and were led to
positions where they soon found themselves under shellfire, directed by German observers in captive balloons. Churchill had laid hands on some Rolls-Royce armoured cars and an armoured train, both manned by bluejackets attired for sea duty, which now saw a little action. Orders arrived to hold to the last man. Maurice Festing wrote: ‘the delivery of this message irritated me immensely, for it struck me it would be so much better not to say such a thing about holding onto a perfectly ridiculous and futile position’.

The pre-war Admiralty had earmarked the Marines exclusively for service aboard warships. Before mobilisation, ‘military training in the Corps had sunk to a very low ebb and become little more than farcical … [Now it] found itself without plans, equipment or training for such an emergency.’ More than a few men committed to the operation were relatively elderly reservists. Festing was appalled, on their first night in Antwerp, to inspect the battalion at its posts and find every man fast asleep, without sentries. Next day, 7 October, they were first ordered to withdraw, then, after marching some distance, told to reoccupy their former line. Festing was appointed brigade-major, in which role his first order was to lower a large Red Cross flag flying over British headquarters, appropriately located in a former lunatic asylum. Next day, his brigadier collapsed with a nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile, the situation on the Belgian perimeter became ever more desperate. Edouard Beer wrote on the 7th: ‘Evening soon comes, and with it new orders: we must exploit the fog to retake trenches beyond the village; they must be reoccupied “at any cost”, says the general, even if we lose half our strength on the way. The column marches forward in double file, observing absolute silence as we advance into the night. Soon, before us, looms a great red glare; it is blazing Wacherbe; only ruins are left; here and there a burning house still stands; the animals abandoned by the inhabitants wander at will, seeking sustenance; we pass on, grimly impressed, our footsteps echoing on the
pavé
, where great craters mark the detonation of shells.’

Churchill later wrote contemptuously of low-grade German reserve formations which ‘wormed and waddled their way’ into the Belgian fortress, but it was apparent that the allied line could not hold: Antwerp was doomed. The Royal Marines received their orders to withdraw from Col. Jack Seeley, the former British secretary for war who had betaken himself to the battlefield – in Festing’s exasperated words, ‘one of those wandering politician-soldiers’ – temporarily attached to the RN Divisional
staff. Chaos followed, as British units trickled piecemeal back from the line, and out of the city: ‘… I don’t think I have ever felt more angry with any man than I did with Col. Seeley at that moment. He was, I knew, a great friend of Mr Winston Churchill’s and I sincerely cursed the day when fate had placed the unfortunate brigade in the hands of two professional politicians and amateur soldiers.’

Once it was plain the British were pulling out, and that the city must fall, the brigade-major, his ailing brigadier and staff crowded aboard their only automobile, some standing on the running boards. In darkness pierced by the flames of burning buildings, they chugged falteringly out of the city with two wheels running on rims after tyre-bursts. Festing wrote: ‘the devil himself was holding high holiday in Antwerp that night of 8 October: It was a real inferno.’ It proved necessary to beg the dubious city guards to open the Malines gate, to enable the British to make their escape.

Eighty thousand Belgian troops, who also retired from Antwerp, later fought some gallant actions against overwhelming forces of Germans, as Falkenhayn tightened his grip on the country. Among the participants in the retreat was a small group of British nurses and ambulance-drivers who had attached themselves to the Belgian army. On the afternoon of 9 October one of these, ‘Elsie’ Knocker, was in the village of Melle, north of Ghent. She wrote: ‘the Germans suddenly advanced up the street with fixed bayonets & we had to scoot under heavy fire’. Then she heard that many casualties were lying in a nearby turnip field. Driven to the scene, she found scores of dead and wounded Germans lying among French
fusiliers-marins
. Knocker and Tom, her cockney driver, filled their ambulance. He then drove his passengers away to safety, leaving her to tend three Germans and a Belgian with a smashed shoulder.

She wrote in her diary: ‘Everywhere there was a deathly silence, not a sound, and I did not realise until I saw the ambulance disappear down the road how utterly alone I was. Sitting in a turnip field surrounded by 200 dead and the four sitting cases. Thoughts went through my head: “Would Tom get cut off and not be able to get back?” “Would the Germans advance over the field and try to retake Melle?” I suddenly heard a voice a little distance away say “
Schwester, sprechen sie Deutsch?
” I replied, “
Ja
.” The sitting case who had spoken then said “Take a greatcoat and cap from one of the dead and come and sit with us” … He told me the Germans were only just the other side of the field and might shoot if they saw [my] khaki uniform.’