Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  The fighting at Mons that day was intense but brief. The men of the 4th Middlesex Regiment and neighbouring battalions defending the canal inflicted heinous casualties on the enemy. ‘My sensations during this baptism were too numerous and confused to analyse,’ wrote Vivian. ‘I clearly remember being reduced to a profuse state of perspiration, the sweat pouring down my face and into my eyes in such volume as to render me temporarily blind. Gradually I became cooler, and the only sensation then noticeable was one of grim and increasing interest in the business of slaughter.’

  The horror at such butchery was suspended if not dispelled. ‘We had, in fact, become transformed into killers,’ Vivian grimly accepted; the fields in front became littered with enemy dead. Only when the fighting died down and the audible cries and groans of the wounded reached the men of the Middlesex Regiment did humanity return. Yet just as the men were about to venture forward to offer help, the Germans attacked again. Once more they were cut down.

  Parties of enemy stretcher-bearers made their appearance, greatly to our relief, and entirely without interference, and were permitted to carry out their errands of mercy . . . It was necessary for some of these to come within thirty yards of the hedge behind which we were entrenched and they interested us tremendously, especially when one or two of them hailed us in our own language. This resulted in a great deal of chaffing, which was given and received by all with great good humour.

  One of our wags, very unfeelingly, with an immense lack of tact, implored them to inform him ‘how they liked their eggs fried’, which drew the extremely rueful reply that we were inclined to season them with a little too much pepper. As they were retiring on the completion of their job, one German, with a great grin, shouted ‘Next time you will make the visits to us!’

  The weight of attacks at Mons, and the risk of being outflanked by the numerically superior Germans, made the British positions increasingly untenable. To the astonishment of those who could see no more than the results of their marksmanship, a retirement was ordered, and the men fell back through Mons and on to the hot and dusty roads leading south.

  Captain William Morritt was serving with his battalion, 1st East Surrey Regiment, on the German side of the Mons-Condé Canal, around three miles west of Mons. His battalion was deployed on the forward side of the canal, defending a railway bridge. During the engagement, he went to see some men on his right flank, returning to discover that those he had just left were falling back from their positions towards the canal. Morritt shouted to them to stop but was told that Germans were behind them and that they were in danger of being cut off. The enemy had managed to reach a rising embankment that led up to the bridge. If there had been an order to his company to retire, Morritt had not received it and he took the only course of action that seemed open: he ordered those men still under his command to fix bayonets and charge the Germans between him and the canal.

  I got my revolver out to load. I had just done this when I was hit in the right wrist which knocked it out of my hand. I could not then draw my sword as I had no strength in my right hand, when I rushed forward I got a bullet in my calf and another just above the right knee which brought me down. I then had the satisfaction of seeing a German 20 yards off aiming carefully at me. I was saved by a miracle; the shot hit the solid hilt of my sword, square in the middle, bent it and broke it in halves, the bullet which otherwise would have gone through me was turned off. The shock of the bullet shook my body, and the German seeing that he had hit me, left me for dead.

  Morritt remained where he lay for the rest of the day and night. ‘Luckily I had fallen on my wounded arm and the arm being slightly twisted, I think the weight of my body stopped the flow of blood and saved me.’ Morritt, and seven of those who survived, were picked up not by the Germans but by civilians who took them to a Franciscan convent for treatment.

  A retirement became a retreat. Two days after the Dragoons demonstrated their ‘superiority’ over enemy cavalry, the same men, along with Lancers and Hussars, took part in a wild charge against German machine guns and artillery. It was a frantic attempt to stop enemy infantry from enveloping the left flank of the BEF. Success this time was measured in hours bought for hard-pressed British infantry but at the cost of De Lisle’s 2nd Cavalry Brigade, which was temporarily scattered to the winds. On this occasion, they had been no match for such a blizzard of shells and bullets.

  Lieutenant Alexander Gallaher of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards was brought down in this charge. His horse fell, pinning him to the ground until, in pain, he struggled free and crawled into a cowshed where three men were already sheltering. In no position to escape, they waited for the enemy to arrive.

  A German officer and two German soldiers with bayonet on rifles, came through the doorway. In the officer’s hand was a tiny pop-gun of a pistol, which he pointed at each of the four of us as he went from one to the other. Reaching my corner he stooped and relieved me of my revolver and my map-case, the later containing a notebook in which were an entry or two that I knew would hold his big, round blue eyes.

  Running through my pockets he came to a purse with seven sovereigns in it. This he tucked back in the pocket of my tunic, then stepped out of the door to examine my notebook in the fading light. Other wounded men were brought in with those slightly injured taken away to help collect the dead and injured, both friend and foe, who still lay on the battlefield.

  The more serious cases were taken to a convent in the village. A sergeant and myself were the last two to be moved. I was carried on the shed door. Before I was taken away the German officer, who spoke no English, came over to where I lay and gave me first a drink of water, then a drink of milk. Stiffly and awkwardly, he reached down and shook me by the hand as he departed. I never saw him again. Not a bad sort, I suppose. Meant well, probably.

  A few hundred yards from where Gallaher was captured, a burial party was being assembled. Two men were being interred: one was Captain Ernest Jones, the other a drummer, Edward Hogan. The pair belonged to the 1st Cheshire Regiment, one of the battalions directly aided by the cavalry charge. Some of the infantry had got away; many had not, including a young private named Corporal Walter Crookes and his sergeant, Arthur Raynor. They had been caught in the same burst of fire that killed their two comrades, Jones and Hogan. Crookes, lightly wounded, had passed out, waking to find someone pouring wine down his throat. He looked around to find German soldiers everywhere, noting in a dazed way the numerals on their uniforms. Then he saw Sergeant Raynor talking calmly with the enemy.

  The German Commander was interested in the Sergeant’s ribbons. ‘What ribbons are they?’ he enquired. ‘South Africa,’ replied the Sergeant.

  He became a person of great interest and respect to all the Germans. They had seen him make his bold dash for freedom from under their rifles; had seen him turn back under their fire to help a comrade, and had accepted his grudging surrender, when without ammunition he had been obliged to capitulate to their tremendous superiority in numbers. Now they recognised him as an old and seasoned soldier. He went round with a few Germans and collected his party, reporting all accounted for although the Platoon scout was lying behind a cornstook waiting for darkness and escape.

  The Germans dug a shallow grave on the bank by the side of the road and prepared to bury the two men.

  There was a sudden order and the Germans commenced to assemble the infantry in the road, the cavalry in the field behind them. The Sergeant saluted the German Commander and came over to me and a lance corporal. ‘Fall in,’ he ordered. I got up and fell in beside the Sergeant. In the trench lay the Captain and the Drummer. I watched the proceedings in a listless, apathetic manner. The German Commander took up his position on the other side of the grave, opposite the Platoon Sergeant. Behind him stood the Squadron Commander and another German officer. I stood next to the Platoon Sergeant, on his right the Lance Corporal. The Sergeant read some parts of the Service.

  A command rang out in German. The Battalion and Squa
dron saluted, the German Commander and the two Officers behind him with drawn swords, at the Salute. Clear and decisive came the response from the British side of the grave, as if it were the changing of a guard. I admired the drill of the Germans, so smart. I looked at my Platoon Sergeant, straight and erect, smart, soldier-like, facing the Germans with all the pride and effrontery of an equal, not a prisoner. I straightened myself up and copied my Sergeant, facing the Germans squarely. ‘Cheshires, Right Hand Salute!’

  On this side of the grave stood the representatives of The Regiment and The British Army. Another German word of command and three volleys crashed into the air. The day was over, our first and last action had been fought and finished. The grave was filled in and the Sergeant, myself, and the Lance Corporal were taken to join a few other prisoners who were held at the other side of the road.

  A grave marker was fashioned with the men’s names and the words ‘Faithful unto death’ painted at the bottom. Later, perhaps after the war, the two bodies were moved to Witheries Cemetery where Jones’s wooden cross was replaced by a Commonwealth War Graves headstone and, carved at the base, his family’s paid-for inscription, ‘For his bravery he was given a military funeral by the Germans’.

  During these days of mobile warfare, contact between opposing sides was constant but not prolonged. As the British retreated, so the Germans, exhausted but jubilant at their success, pushed on, mopping up British stragglers. The equally shattered British infantry fought when called upon and then withdrew to be protected by a fast-moving screen of cavalry that came into repeated action, normally at short notice.

  In the confusion, men became separated from their units. Overtaken by advancing Germans, a small number of British troops chose to go into hiding rather than surrender, secreting themselves in woods and barns and in the homes of courageous civilians. They hid, hoping that the tide of the war would turn and release them.

  Because of his wounds, the Germans temporarily ignored Captain William Morritt. Along with the seven men from his regiment, he was treated in the nearby Franciscan convent. Three weeks later all the men were still there. ‘Unfortunately there are Germans all around here,’ wrote Morritt in a letter he hoped would be smuggled to his mother, ‘and they know we are here. I hope I shall be able to escape them in a week’s time . . . I cannot wait until the Germans call for me.’

  Three photographs of Morritt survive, taken at the convent. In one he holds the sword cut in two by an enemy bullet. He appears well and wears the uniform in which he was wounded although, according to Morritt, civilian clothes were being made available to him to aid an escape. Unfortunately for Morritt, the Germans came knocking before he had fully recovered and he was removed to Germany and a POW camp.

  Badly wounded men had little chance of escape during the Retreat from Mons and were left in the hands of Royal Army Medical Corps personnel who tended them in certain knowledge that their own capture was unavoidable. During the Retreat, Corporal Samuel Fielding of the 8th Field Ambulance crawled along ditches and through hedges in order to get away before he was commanded to remain with wounded men near a church. Within an hour they were spotted by a German patrol, the Commanding Officer making a visual inspection of the group, before letting them carry on. Then, later that day, staff officers appeared and Fielding was beckoned to speak to a German officer.

  I must say he seemed to be quite a decent chap, and spoke good English. He said he had spent some years in England, and what a terrible thing it was that England and Germany were at war when they should have been friends. I told him that the Germans always hated the English. He said the reason for that was we were a volunteer army and had volunteered to fight against Germany . . .

  While we were talking I saw one of the German troops lift his rifle and take aim at me. I said, ‘What does that chap reckon he is doing? Is he going to fire at me?’ The officer turned round and saw him still taking aim. He shouted to him and told him to come over. He then seemed to give him a good lecture and then showed him the Red Cross on the church and on my arm. He then slashed him across his face and head with his whip. While he was hitting him he was shouting at him. Then the soldier turned to me and started talking in German. Of course I had no idea what he was saying. He had some nasty weals across his face and neck and tears were running down his cheeks. The officer said, ‘I have made him apologise to you and say he was wrong’.

  Fielding and his comrades were left to continue their work with the wounded, waiting for the enemy to return at their convenience; in Fielding’s case two weeks passed before they came back.

  Coming across stragglers was the first opportunity for most Germans to see their enemy alive and in the flesh. Walter Bloem, a German officer who wrote in detail about the fighting near Mons, recalled how the cavalry rounded up ‘whole squads of them out of farm buildings and houses’. These British soldiers were ‘fine, smart young fellows, excellently equipped, but almost insolent in their cool off-handedness’. Bloem was introduced to two ‘dishevelled but most gallant-looking’ officers, one a colonel, the other a major. ‘Putting on my finest manners I greeted them in my best English and told them I had the honour to consider them as my prisoners – a turn in their career to which they appeared to resign themselves in a most cool and matter of fact manner.’

  One of those captured was a Gordon Highlander whose uniform, and in particular his kilt, intrigued the German soldiers. They assumed that the trousers must have been stolen by this Scotsman’s own men, a misconception that greatly amused Bloem. The Gordon Highlander was an elderly man who had suffered a bullet wound to his right shoulder and a ricochet knock to the knee that made him limp. As he stood there passively, Bloem offered him his arm and the two of them returned to the German company who stood and gazed in blank amazement. ‘I requisitioned a horse and cart, and a farm-hand to drive it, from a farmhouse nearby, and asked the colonel to get up into it, and I placed my third horse at the disposal of the major; so kind and thoughtful we still were in those days to the English.’

  2

  Best of Bad Friends

  After the Battle of Mons, the Germans established a cemetery near the village of St Symphorien as a joint resting place for their own dead and those of the British. In this cemetery, now under the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, there are three memorials erected by the Germans: one dedicated to the dead of both armies, one to casualties of the Royal Fusiliers, and, lastly, one to the ‘Royal’ Middlesex Regiment, probably in the mistaken belief that all British regiments were given the same prefix.

  Respect shown to fallen comrades in arms is demonstrated well in this shared cemetery. In his memoirs, Walter Bloem implies that in these early engagements fighting, while hard, was honourable and detached: Colonel Mullens’s order to turn away prisoners, once searched, is illustrative of this apparent lack of rancour. It could not last, and rough treatment was meted out by both sides soon enough. Lieutenant Gallaher, captured after the cavalry charge at Elouges on 24 August, recalled that the arms of his sergeant were black and blue from being beaten with a rifle butt ‘delivered by a Hun for no better reason than that Hynes was the only one of a handful of wounded who had sufficient strength to sit up’. Even so, ill treatment during or shortly after action, when stress of combat had yet to abate, was understood by fighting soldiers though not necessarily condoned.

  It was the incidence of ‘dirty tricks’ that hardened battlefield attitudes. Lance Corporal Alfred Vivian’s description of German stretcher-bearers at work, and the comradely banter between themselves and the enemy, preceded an episode in which British stretcher-bearers were fired upon while on an ‘obvious errand of mercy’. A corporal was killed. ‘Many were the curses and oaths to avenge the unfortunate corporal that filled the air,’ he wrote, the chance for which came with the Germans’ next attack. When enemy stretcher-bearers reappeared this time they were shot at, not ‘actually at them, but close enough to induce them to hop back to cover’. Whether the Germans had deliberately op
ened fire on British stretcher-bearers is a moot point. Bitterness towards the enemy quickly inveigled itself into soldiers’ hearts and minds if they chose to believe what they thought they saw or, more often, if they chose to believe rumours that quickly spread among them.

  Given the vast stakes wagered by Britain and Germany in going to war, it was only a matter of time before accusations of foul play were levelled against troops of both sides. One of the first and the most persistent was the allegation that dum-dum bullets were being used, Lotte’s ‘anti-social shots’, which she had mentioned in her letter. The dum-dum bullet, so called after its invention by the British at the Dum Dum arsenal near Calcutta, was a soft-pointed bullet that expanded on hitting the target, causing fearsome internal injuries. The Germans first protested against its use during the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1901. These Conventions hosted the first international attempt to formalise laws of war and of war crimes, during which use of the dum-dum in warfare was banned.

  In 1914, not everyone was clear as to what exactly constituted a dum-dum bullet. Lieutenant Aubrey Herbert of the 1st Irish Guards, surrounded by Germans in woods during the Retreat from Mons, was in possession of flat-nosed rounds he believed were not dum-dums, but appreciated that they would ‘naturally not make as pleasant a wound as the sharp-nosed ones’. Moments before capture he flung them away, as did others; he understood the wisdom of this when he heard ‘Germans speaking angrily about flat-nosed bullets picked up in the woods, and how they would deal with anyone in whose possession they were found’.