The Regiment

by Christopher Nicole

  The regiment disembarked on the morning of 14 August, having spent a couple of bumpy days in the Western Approaches and then the English Channel, but without seeing a single German submarine. The transports had been surrounded by siren-sounding torpedo boat destroyers, which rushed to and fro at great speed with huge cascades of water falling away from their bows, and overseen by the huge, menacing, grey shape of a battlecruiser hovering on the horizon.

  In Le Havre, where they were greeted by cheering crowds and a French brass band, their ammunition and remounts were waiting for them; General Wilson had done his logistical job well. Yet it was difficult to believe there was actually a war going on, because very little had happened in the ten days since the Germans had, as predicted, ignored the British ultimatum to withdraw from Belgium. Their invasion of that little country had apparently ground to a halt before the fortress of Liège, described as one of the strongest positions in Europe, and a French thrust into the Saar had also been checked, to leave the armies approximately where they had begun.

  ‘These Europeans don’t seem to know how to fight,’ Ramage remarked.

  But in France they were also greeted with stories of German atrocities in Belgium.

  ‘Do you believe any of this stuff?’ Walters asked Murdoch, handing him the newspaper.

  ‘Not entirely. Maybe there have been one or two cases of rape. There usually are, when men get over-excited and manage to find a bottle. But wholesale shooting of Belgian civilians...the Germans are a civilised people.’

  The rank and file certainly believed it. ‘They are Huns,’ RSM Yeald declared. ‘By God, sir, Major Mackinder, I look forward to getting one of those bastards in my sights.’

  The morale of the regiment was higher than Murdoch had known it since the day they began their railway journey north from Cape Town to fight the Boers. It was not merely the desire of professional soldiers to take the field after so long, or the euphoria of leaving Ireland and going on foreign service again—even if their foreign service left them closer to England than at the Curragh—they seemed genuinely imbued with a remarkable hatred of the German soldier, and indeed all things German, which had appeared virtually overnight. This would undoubtedly make them better fighting soldiers, he knew—but supposing the German soldiers felt the same way about the British?

  The dragoons were the first cavalry regiment to arrive, and they found General Allenby and Brigadier-General Gough waiting for them, both impatiently anxious.

  Allenby inspected the regiment as soon as it was disembarked. ‘Good men, famous regiment,’ he remarked tersely, shaking hands with Walters and Murdoch when the parade was completed. ‘Now, gentlemen, I must ask you to move up to Le Cateau as rapidly as possible. That is the area of concentration determined upon for the British Expeditionary Force. Sir John French is already there with some advanced units. I’m afraid you will have to march it; the railways are entirely occupied with transporting French reservists to the colours.’

  ‘I shall accompany you,’ Gough said, ‘if you don’t mind, Colonel Walters?’

  ‘We shall be honoured, sir,’ Walters replied.

  ‘The lancers should be here this afternoon, and they can follow on as quickly as possible.’

  ‘I will see to that,’ Allenby assured him. ‘I may even come up with them myself. Better a brigade than nothing at all.’

  ‘Are we going to move into Belgium itself, sir?’ Murdoch asked. He had been studying the map, and Le Cateau was just inside the French border.

  ‘I’m afraid you will have to ask Sir John that, Mackinder,’ Allenby replied with a brief smile. ‘He is presently coordinating our place in the scheme of things with General Joffre. Ah, here is Captain Desmils.’ He greeted the red-trousered and blue-tuniced officer who had just arrived; his moustache was as bristling as any in the British Army, and his red kepi was laden with gold braid. ‘Captain Desmils speaks perfect English, and will be your liaison officer with the local inhabitants. He also knows the route you are to follow.’

  ‘Messieurs.’ The French officer saluted. ‘Shall we go and find the Boche?’

  *

  The regiment moved out that very afternoon, taking the road to Neuchâtel crossroads, where they would turn east to Amiens, Cambrai and then Le Cateau. ‘That is Agincourt and Crecy country,’ Murdoch reminded the junior officers. ‘The British have been campaigning here for six hundred years.’

  It was a magnificent march in the bright August sunshine. Huge crowds lined the streets, and even the country roads were filled with pink-cheeked women and girls, gnarled old men, barking dogs and warlike young boys waving Union Jacks and cheering the English. Free wine was offered at every halt, together with apples and walnuts; bouquets of flowers were presented by pretty girls, who insisted upon being kissed. It became increasingly difficult to keep the men’s minds on the tasks ahead of them, much less sober.

  ‘Beats Somalia,’ Ramage commented.

  ‘Not even Cape Town was like this,’ Reynolds remarked.

  ‘Ah, but they know you have come to fight the Boche,’ Captain Desmils explained.

  It was, indeed a pleasure to be in such a welcoming country, after the scowls they had experienced for so much of their time in Ireland, or the boos which were their last memory of England. The only unpleasant aspect of the march was the sudden deterioration of the news from the north.

  The regiment marched about twenty miles a day, and thus it took them a week to reach Le Cateau, and it seemed that with every step the situation took a turn for the worse. On the evening of the sixteenth, when they camped outside St Saens, news arrived that the Germans had at last forced the surrender of Liège and were now set to burst into the remainder of Belgium—and then carry out the invasion of France. The Belgian army, under the personal command of King Albert, promptly fell back from the line of the Meuse, which it had been defending for as long as the fortresses held, to the area around the fortified seaport of Antwerp, leaving only holding forces to keep the Germans out of Brussels for as long as possible. This did not prove to be very long, however. The regiment marched by way of Poix on the seventeenth, through Amiens—and hysterical crowds—to Querneu on the eighteenth, and through Albert to the village of Bapaume on the nineteenth, when news came in of the Battle of Tirlemont, where the Belgians, although fighting desperately, were again defeated. Next day, 20 August, as the regiment arrived at Carnieres, within a day’s march of Le Cateau, they heard that Brussels had been occupied by the Germans.

  Nor was the news from the east any better, for it appeared that even the French armies were in retreat. It was easy to see that there was a great wave of uneasiness sweeping across northern France. People were openly packing up and saying that the Boches were coming, and there did not appear to be any way of stopping them; no one was offering free wine or bouquets of flowers now. The country east of Cambrai was full of British units, all marching on Le Cateau, but that evening a staff officer rode into the dragoons’ encampment, to tell General Gough that the situation was changing far too rapidly for them to be able to wait until the entire BEF had disembarked and come up.

  The regiment was commanded to advance immediately, in conjunction with all the available infantry, straight up and across the frontier into Belgium to take their places between the French 4th and 5th armies in holding the line of the Mons-Conde Canal. It was hoped that this left wing of the Allied armies would check any German flanking movement which might spread down through Belgium while the main French strength met their enemies in the Ardennes, where it was now supposed the Germans were about to launch their major offensive. That this possibility had been dismissed as most unlikely in pre-war staff talks no longer seemed relevant, nor the probability that the Germans would put their greatest effort into the swing through Belgium, not only because of the open country to be found in Flanders, but because, having decided to violate Belgian neutrality at all, not to use the terrain to their fullest advantage made nonsense of the action in the first place.


  In any event, the word was now haste. It was a double march to Mons, their new assembly point, and it had to be done in twenty-four hours. The British Army, such of it as had arrived, streamed over the roads leading north from Le Cateau, through Denain and Valenciennes to Jemappes, marching all night, and arriving on the evening of the twenty-first, when they discovered themselves surrounded by pitheads and slagheaps; Mons was a mining town.

  ‘Holy Jesus Christ!’ RSM Yeald commented. ‘Here we go again—shovelling coal.’

  The good news was that the lancers were immediately behind the dragoons, and indeed they arrived at dusk, to provide at least the semblance of a brigade of cavalry.

  ‘Now this,’ Murdoch told the juniors, ‘is Waterloo country.’ For indeed the famous battlefield lay only just over twenty miles to the north-east, with Brussels only a few miles beyond that—and Brussels, they knew, was already in German hands.

  Actually, there could be at last no doubt that they were in a war zone. The Belgian crowds who turned out to welcome them in Mons were enthusiastic but totally confused and indeed distraught at the way their country had yet again been turned into a cockpit. From the east there came a continual low growl which none of them had heard before, like an unending thunderstorm. The Boers had fired their Long Toms one at a time, and often with considerable time lags between each shot, as they had carefully chosen their target so as not to waste ammunition. This was non-stop firing, it seemed, as the French and German armies were locked in battle some sixty miles away.

  The regiment arrived in the midst of the inevitable confusion which ensues when an army is thrust forward at great speed and sudden notice. Indeed, only a quarter of the BEF had actually come up by nightfall; the rest were still struggling along the roads from Le Havre. Gough’s cavalry brigade was almost intact, but was given an encampment about half a mile back from the canal itself and protected from the north by a low ridge of land.

  ‘They’ll move us up to charge the Boche when the fighting actually starts,’ Prendergast observed optimistically. ‘Just as long as they do,’ Ramage growled.

  Late as it was, and exhausted as they were, there was still a good deal to be done. Murdoch and Hobbs appointed fatigue parties to dig latrines, the rest of the troopers got to work to pitch tents, and the farriers inspected the horses, which had suffered somewhat on the long walk up from the coast. Poor old Buccaneer was especially exhausted, and Murdoch realised that his favourite might have seen his last campaign.

  It was after midnight before they finally turned in, and reveille was at dawn, only three hours later. But it appeared there were no orders, and no immediate sign of the enemy, so Murdoch rode up to the brow of the rise to discover what was going on.

  He didn’t much like what he saw. Before him the ground sloped very gently down to the canal itself, but the canal was neither very wide nor very deep, so far as he could make out. To their right there was a village, where from the flags flying, he assumed Sir John French had made his headquarters—those flags would be visible at a distance of several miles.

  Beside the canal a road ran east and west, lined with elms, and these did provide an element of cover. The infantry was already deployed down there, having advanced from the encampments—like the cavalry behind the brow of the hill—to line the canal and face north. A wide extent of meadow gently sloped up again to another rise, where there were some more trees, and beyond the trees were the roofs of another hamlet, dominated by the church spire.

  He walked his horse—a remount named Trajan, which he had more or less decided to adopt as a replacement for Buccaneer—down the slope to the nearest infantry company. ‘How much water do you reckon there is, sergeant-major?’ he asked the commanding NCO.

  ‘Maybe five feet, sir.’

  ‘You reckon the average German is more than five feet tall?’

  The sergeant-major grinned. ‘I do, sir. We’ll have to hope he catches cold.’

  There were also an inordinate number of bridges across the canal, which no one seemed to have thought of blowing up—they might not stop foot soldiers or cavalry from crossing, but should at least hold up wheeled transport, Murdoch thought, and then mentally kicked himself for a defensive mentality. If they repulsed the Germans, they would need those bridges for their own transport when they undertook the pursuit.

  If they. repulsed the Germans.

  ‘At least that meadow gives us a good field of fire,’ the sergeant-major observed. ‘We’ll be able to see what we’re shooting at. Not like the bloody Boers, eh, sir?’ He might never have seen Murdoch before in his life, but he recognised the South African ribbon, as well of course as the VC, and was proud to be seen talking to such a distinguished, and experienced, officer.

  There was a toot on a horn, and an open car came along the road from the village, filled with red tabs and gold braid. Murdoch and the sergeant-major came to attention and saluted, and the car stopped to allow Sir John French to step down.

  ‘Carry on, sergeant-major. Murdoch!’ He shook hands. ‘Good to see you. All well with the Regiment?’

  ‘Looking forward to a fight, sir,’ Murdoch told him.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we get one. Reconnaissance indicates von Kluck isn’t all that far away. And there’s not a lot to stop him doing exactly what he wants. I’ve just come back from French HQ, and I’ll tell you frankly, I don’t like the situation one little bit. I suppose it would help if the froggies would learn to speak English. Half the time I simply have no idea what the bloody people are talking about. But I can tell you this: they’re taking a mauling over there in the Ardennes, and are having to fall back from their advanced positions. So our job is to hold the enemy up while the froggies form a fresh line along with us and General Lanzerac over there on our left. What do you suppose that fellow is up to?’

  He pointed with his swagger stick, and Murdoch gazed up at the lone biplane circling a few hundred feet above them, its engine making a noise like an angry bee.

  One of the staff officers had levelled his binoculars. ‘It’s a Jerry, all right, sir. I can see the black crosses.’

  ‘Having a look at what we’re doing,’ French grumbled. ‘I don’t suppose one of your people could drive him away, Manton?’

  The colonel of the infantry battalion had arrived. ‘Oh, indeed, sir. We’ll let him know he’s not welcome.’

  Orders were given, and several marksmen were brought up from the canal bank to aim at the aeroplane and fire. It was impossible to say if they hit it, but they must have come pretty close because after a few rounds the machine buzzed away to the north-east.

  ‘Whatever is warfare coming to,’ French remarked, ‘when they can look down on us like that?’

  ‘Not like the old-fashioned sort,’ remarked another staff officer, pointing across the meadow beyond the canal, where several horsemen by the copse were obviously inspecting the British position through binoculars. Even at a distance they could be seen to be wearing coal scuttle helmets.

  ‘Uhlans!’ Murdoch snapped.

  French commented. ‘Well, we can’t just let them count heads. Send a message to Colonel Bradstreet, Major Hopton, and ask him to dispatch a squadron of lancers to drive those fellows away.’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ Murdoch protested. ‘The dragoons can do that.’

  French grinned at him. ‘I’m keeping your people up my sleeve as infantry replacements, Murdoch. God knows when the rest of the army is going to get here. And we could have a battle on our hands at any moment.’

  *

  It was a disappointment, but Murdoch returned to the hillock above the Westerns’ encampments, and with the other officers stood and watched the lancers wading their horses across the canal and then setting off with cheers after the Uhlans—who allowed them to approach for a while, and then turned and cantered off. The lancers disappeared behind the copse and the next rise, there was a shot or two, and then they came back in some haste. It was not until dusk that news of what they ha
d found filtered back to the dragoons; on topping the rise beyond the copse they had seen an enormous mass of German troops moving towards them: the captain commanding the squadron estimated not less than an army corps.

  ‘How many men are there in a German army corps, Murdoch?’ Billy Hobbs asked, as they ate their supper while the sun slowly sank into the west.

  ‘About ninety thousand.’

  ‘And how many men does French have here?’

  ‘Well, there’s one infantry division, certainly, and the better part of another, and one brigade of cavalry...say thirty thousand.’

  ‘Long odds.’

  Murdoch grinned at him. ‘But we have the canal. All five feet of it.’

  It was an eerie feeling to know that only a few miles away there was a huge enemy army—in fact, it was even more eerie to realise that this was the first time he had ever been about to engage a superior force, in real terms. The Boers had always been outnumbered, and if the Somalis had mustered ten to one against his squadron in the Togdheer, that discrepancy had been amply made up for by the dragoons’ modern weapons.

  Of course, the British force, small as it was for a modern army, was but a part of the huge French force to either side of them.

  Indeed, red-trousered and blue-coated staff officers kept arriving at the British headquarters in a steady stream all evening, attempting to coordinate whatever strategy the Allies had decided to follow. They looked splendid when seen against the drab khaki-clad British—one of them was even a curassier, in burnished helmet and breastplate—but they would be visible for miles: a Boer sharpshooter would have been licking his lips.

  There was also the sombre thought that these gaudily dressed but undoubtedly brave and competent Frenchmen had not managed as yet to check the German advance.

  Martin Walters joined Murdoch for an after-dinner pipe. ‘You’ve never smoked, have you, Murdoch?’ he asked, stretching out his booted feet; they were sitting on camp chairs in front of their tents, while Reynolds and the colonel’s batman, Harper, poured brandies.