Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (83 page)

In reality, more than five German corps were concentrating north of the Lys, in the path of the BEF. Falkenhayn was assembling yet another new army, the Fourth, commanded by the Duke of Württemberg, to attack on Prince Rupprecht’s right. Many of its units were composed of reservists, scantily trained and officered by ‘dug-outs’ – over-age veterans. In October, one such regiment lost its CO and all three battalion commanders to infirmity rather than wounds. Some of the middle-aged men were past campaigning, while few of their young soldiers had any understanding of it. All the formations were poorly equipped: several found themselves issued with uniforms and accoutrements dating back to 1871, while lacking spades and field kitchens. To the despair of artillerymen, few gunners had any notion about how to manage the horses in their teams. But here, nonetheless, was an enormous mass of men, bearing down upon the allies.

The new offensive in Belgium began in earnest on 18 October, when Württemberg’s army fell upon the Belgians near the Channel coast. German tactical follies matched earlier French ones. An account of one attack on the 20th described the death of Capt. Hans Graf von Wintzingerode, who advanced mounted on a charger: ‘holding his sword aloft, he urged his men forward repeatedly’. Wintzingerode suffered an almost inevitable fate, being hit by several bullets. He was then abandoned between the lines in cold, heavy rain. After six days and nights he was found and brought in, only to expire at an aid post.

On the morning of 23 October, Charles Stein and his fellow Belgian grenadiers glimpsed Germans crawling forward. The defenders silently
took up firing positions, and waited. When the attackers were three hundred yards away, ‘they all jumped up like one man and ran towards us, crying like babies that have toothache. But at the same moment our machine-guns and rifles began to sing, and we saw with great pleasure that many Germans were falling down, and the others were running away as fast as they could.’ Peter Kollwitz, the artist’s son who back in August had returned so gaily from a Norwegian holiday to serve the Fatherland, was among those killed near Dixmude that day.

But the attackers gained ground: by the 24th, they had got across the Yser. Belgian soldier Edouard Beer, a veteran of Antwerp, watched an exodus of refugees from the town of Malines, ‘the whole population fleeing before the barbarians. A tragic cortège of unhappy people carrying in their carts a few sticks of furniture – precious memories – saved from the devastation! A column of mothers clutching their babies in their arms to protect them from the cold, while their other children clung to them. A column of old people, often infirm, whom only terror of the enemy had given strength to move. And as for us, faithful soldiers of the community, we are often obliged to deny these people access to the roads on which they might pursue their journeys to Calvary! Sometimes it is very hard to do one’s duty.’

The British Army adopted towards its Belgian comrades a posture of unwavering contempt, but until the last week of October some Belgian units sustained an effective resistance: German accounts give little hint of the feebleness Sir John French’s men thought endemic among Albert’s soldiers. There were fierce close-quarter firefights amid the network of dykes and waterways, with the attackers obliged to improvise engineer bridges that were frequently destroyed. The Belgians staged repeated counter-attacks. Near the coast, the Germans suffered considerably from the fire of the Royal Navy’s shallow-draft monitors, cruising offshore. On 27 October, one German commander reported almost hysterically, ‘the attacking spirit of the battalion is completely broken’. The cold, rain and mud oppressed both sides. The pervasive theme was of slow German progress, at heavy cost.

The morale of Albert’s men declined as they retreated and their losses mounted: ‘The incessant stream of broken men came in and out,’ wrote British nursing sister Mrs Mayne, who received Belgian casualties at Furnes hospital. ‘The yards were littered with blood-soaked stretchers against which one stumbled in the dark, getting one’s hands all sticky.’ On the 27th, Pte. Stein wrote in stilted English: ‘We are feeling very tired to
stay in the trenches.’ Two days later, during bitter fighting, ‘a very gentle ladybird came and rested on my left hand. I took her and laid it in a piece of paper and so in my pocket. The ladybird that brought me luck is now in possession of my best girlfriend and I hope and wish it will always bring her heaps of luck as it did me.’ He spoke too soon. Shortly afterwards, he and his comrades laughed with relief when a shell landed in front of their trench and exploded harmlessly. Then, seconds later, they suffered a direct hit: ‘I must have been a very long time senseless because it was nearly dark when I opened my eyes; I tried to get up but I was not able to move and felt awful pain in the back.’ Stein spent months in British hospitals, undergoing a series of operations.

On 26 October, the Belgian field commander proposed another retreat, which King Albert vetoed. But it had become plain that drastic measures were needed to check the German coastal offensive. If Belgium’s soldiers could not throw back the enemy, nature must be enlisted to do so. On 27 October the lock gates at Nieuport were opened at high tide, starting a process of inundating the surrounding farmland with sea water. On the 31st, the Germans made a last assault before the rising floods obliged them to withdraw. Thereafter, the allied left flank was secured: ‘As soon as a spadeful of earth was lifted, the hole filled with water,’ wrote a German soldier ruefully. When rations belatedly reached some of his comrades in front of Dixmude, many were too ill with stomach troubles – probably caused by drinking the polluted water – to be able to eat. Belgian troops redeployed behind breastworks on the waterlogged ground west of the inundations.

Between King Albert’s men and the British, French marines fought hard to hold Dixmude. Dorothie Feilding wrote:

Our cars were going day and night, the last 2 miles into Dixmude was down a dead straight open road, raked by shell as soon as anything living showed down it. Many is the race we have had down there with our scout cars with stretchers laid on … The towns & villages & farms were burning. The glare helped you see at night but sometimes it looked like hell, with the flames curling & leaping up in the darkness & the crash as the houses fell in had something awful about it. Driving through the streets of Dixmude one night, it was so hot, with the houses on each side burning, I just had to drive through as quick as I could & hope. How the tyres didn’t get cut to blazes by glass or burnt by embers oftener than they did I cannot understand … when you had got your wounded away from the lines, there was nowhere to take them. The numbers made it possible for the hospital at Furnes only to take in the practically dying men. All the rest had to go on by trains & what trains … cattle-trucks with a little dirty straw & no light or water or any doctoring to speak of. As soon as a train was full it would be shunted out, but perhaps only to remain on the sidings for many hours. It took as a rule 3 or 4 days before the men got to a hospital at Calais some mere 40 miles back. You can imagine the poor souls by the time they reached the base. Men with fractured legs racked by the jolting, without a stretcher to lie on, or a rug to cover them & shivering with cold in their mud & rain & blood-soaked uniform.

Dixmude was lost to the Germans, but the town cost them many lives. Feilding later became the first woman to be awarded Britain’s Military Medal, as well as a French Croix de Guerre. British soldiers further south were scornfully dismissive of their allied neighbours’ showing. Grenadier Wilfrid Abel-Smith wrote: ‘The Belgians have never done any good, I am told. They will not stand the shelling – no more will any but highly trained and disciplined troops. The French and Belgians who are not far from us are most unreliable.’ This was monstrously chauvinistic: these formations had put up a better fight than their allies recognised. Many British troops would soon flinch and indeed flee in the face of persistent shelling. A German NCO wrote ruefully but respectfully about the fighting for Dixmude: ‘the Frenchman has shown himself to be a thoroughly courageous chap’.

Inland from the Belgian and French positions, on the ground where the BEF began to deploy in October, between the 6th and the 14th a mass of German cavalry swirled and eddied, seeking to shield the advance of their Fourth Army from allied scrutiny. Marwitz’s horsemen entered Ypres – the only occasion in the war that they did so – and began to look for billets. A German officer wrote: ‘The people were quite friendly towards me, but expressed neither sympathy nor antipathy towards the German advance. Their every third expression was “poor Belgium”.’ The cavalrymen were quickly obliged to quit the town, but the ensuing German onslaught became the most terrible British experience of 1914, and marked a decisive transformation of the struggle.

Sir John French’s men detrained after their journey from the Aisne in territory still unscarred by war, where civilians and soldiers were going about their business almost carelessly. A French officer was amazed to
encounter British soldiers shopping in Béthune, and local people happy to serve them. He shrugged, ‘that is the soul of France for you. I was struck by the phlegmatic attitude of the English, and the unthinking manner in which they approach danger. I watched one company dispatched to the front line moving with slow steps, pipes in their mouths and officers carrying walking sticks, as though setting off for a game of golf. We heard that shortly afterwards they suffered a direct hit and lost several men.’

Joffre would have liked his allies to display less phlegm, more urgency. During the first ten weeks of the war – and what an eternity of experience that span embraced – The British Army had suffered far less than the French. Some BEF units recalled cruel days on the Chemin des Dames, but the sight of green and uninjured Flanders countryside lifted spirits, creating a feeling of a fresh beginning. This did not, however, instill any sense of haste in the advance. Signals officer Alexander Johnston deplored its sluggishness, writing on 13 October: ‘It has been a most disappointing day: here we are, a whole Division, held up by a few Jaegers & horse artillery practically all day. As far as I can see, everyone is expecting the unit on their right or left to do the hard work. We have been doing practically nothing because we are waiting for the action of the 8th Inf Brigade on our left.’

Meanwhile the 7th Division, landed from England a fortnight earlier, had endured much frustrating footslogging, hither and thither around Belgium, with scarcely a glimpse of a German. Impatient for action and ahead of the rest of the BEF, on 14 October its regiments entered Ypres – ‘Wipers’, as men immediately dubbed the place. Wilfrid Abel-Smith, who brought his Grenadiers the same way a few days later, described it as ‘rather a nice old town with narrow, cobble-stoned streets, and some fine buildings … there seemed to be a tremendous lot of priests and nuns … It seems so odd to be fighting in this sort of country – we have always associated war with the tropics in the past.’

Henry Wilson, with his curious combination of flippancy and insight, observed some months earlier that few British soldiers paid much attention to ‘a funny little country like Belgium, though most of them may be buried there before they are much older’. The men of the BEF had no sense of impending doom. Though Sir John French knew that allied formations were in heavy action towards the sea, he assured his officers that they were pushing into empty country where they would meet few enemies. The 7th Division marched out of Ypres on 15 October to form a line a few miles to the east, anticipating a rapid further advance as soon as the rest of the BEF came up.

Gunner Charlie Burrows wrote on the 16th: ‘We are getting fed up with all this waiting and are anxious to get in action. Weather dull and cold. Heard that the enemy advance guard was falling back a few miles ahead and had set fire to a village.’ A few prisoners were taken: one Bavarian being escorted through Hazebrouck complained bitterly to a British officer that he had been abused by French civilians. ‘Allied prisoners, when they get to Germany,’ he said, ‘are given cakes and even chocolate – yet we are stoned.
Das ist unmenschlich
.’ But his captive tribe had cause to acknowledge privileges: their war was over, and they were alive.

On Sunday the 18th, 7th Division was ordered to march towards Menin, and skirmished a little with German pickets and patrols. Next morning, the RFC’s pilots reconnoitred eastward, and returned with momentous news: huge columns of Germans, vastly outnumbering the British infantry and screening cavalry, would be upon them within hours. The advance was hastily countermanded; units retraced their steps and bivouacked that night on a low ridge overlooking Ypres. Here was the beginning – there were still yawning voids on both flanks – of what became known to history as the Ypres salient, a fortuitous protrusion from the allied line where, in the years ahead, more than 200,000 British soldiers would find their graves.

That October day, of course, the men supposed themselves to be merely experiencing a halt in farmland pleasantly untouched by the war. Early on Tuesday the 20th, throngs of local civilians began hastening westwards, some driving livestock before them. The British were kept waiting, but not for long. Within hours the first big German assault, supported by intense artillery fire, fell on 7th Division. Most of the attackers were ill-trained – some even wholly untrained – reservists. They had been delivered by rail to Menin, then sent forward on foot. As one regiment advanced on the British, its commander cried to his men: ‘Throw the lying rabble back into the sea!’

Across shallow folds in the Belgian fields, then still broken by hedges, farmyards, stretches of woodland, and grazed by livestock, the Germans trudged towards the thin lines of British soldiers, who occupied shallow trenches or merely lay prone in grass, roots or stubble. These defenders, unlike the rest of the BEF, had never before seen masses of enemy infantry: they found Württemberg’s Pickelhaubed soldiers an awesome sight. As Smith-Dorrien’s men had done earlier at Mons and Le Cateau, they opened a crackling fusillade. The legend of the British ‘mad minute’ has been exaggerated. The intensity of rifle fire ebbed and surged from one period of the battle to the next: ammunition conservation was a vital consideration, and there seemed an infinite embarrassment of targets.