Casualties on this scale were something the men of the 1st Battalion Hampshire Regiment (1/Hampshire) had only recently been introduced to. Having missed the clash at Mons the battalion had arrived in France with the 4th Division on 22 August in time to join II Corps in its stand at Le Cateau. Deployed to a position southeast of Cattenières the battalion found itself digging in under fire astride the railway line and in the ensuing battle the battalion lost 10 of their officers killed, wounded or missing and nearly 180 other ranks killed and wounded. Although these were regular soldiers it had still been a bloody and shocking introduction to war and one which had had a profound effect upon Private George Pattenden. In his considered opinion, ‘we marvellously escaped annihilation, we had to retire and they caught us with shrapnel, it was nearly a wholesale rout and slaughter.’ Prone to outbursts of pessimism, Pattenden was a reservist who had served his time with the colours and had been called up in August 1914. Like so many of the reservists serving with BEF during those fraught days of the retreat he suffered badly, ‘my feet are very painful, I can just manage to shuffle along now’, he wrote on 1 September, ‘it is too terrible, one feels absolutely done up in heart, soul and spirit.’ But regardless of his sore feet and the protestations in his diary, he managed four more days of hard marching before 11 Infantry Brigade reached the furthest point of its retreat south of Ozoir la Ferrière. On 31 August the 4th Division became part of the newly formed III Corps under the command of Lieutenant General William Pulteney, which was probably of little interest to George Pattenden and his comrades as they contemplated what the advance might bring.
On the morning of 6 September the three army corps of the BEF turned to take the offensive but because of Sir John French’s decision to continue his retirement they found themselves over 10 miles behind the line from which Joffre intended to launch his planned offensive. Brigadier General Colin Ballard, writing with hindsight in 1931, felt that although there had been, ‘a real confidence between Joffre and Sir John,’ the day spent marching in the wrong direction could easily have been avoided.9 But even when facing in the right direction the BEF was slow to get going. The Official History tells us that the BEF’s advance on 6 September was preceded by, ‘a wheel to the east pivoting on its right, so that it would come into line roughly parallel to the Grand Morin’. It was a manoeuvre which took up most of the morning and it was not until close to lunch-time that the BEF actually began its advance. Nevertheless the British were now advancing on a wide front with Allenby’s Cavalry Division in contact with Conneau’s cavalry corps and the Fifth Army on the right. Haig’s I Corps was east of Rozay-en-Brie and further west, II Corps and the 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades were just south of Coulommiers on the Grand Morin.10 In touch with Maunoury’s Sixth Army on the left was III Corps and like it or not, Sir John French was now committed to playing his part in the Battle of the Marne.
In the strictest sense of the word there was no one deciding battle which could be attributed to victory on the Marne. Indeed there was little actual fighting on the Marne itself, the significant clashes were in the region of the River Ourcq but when the battle was given its name, Joffre chose Marne because the rivers of the region amongst which the battle had taken place all flowed into the Marne.11 For the BEF, the fighting in which it was involved between 5 September up until the point when it reached the Aisne Valley on 13 September, was characterised by a series of seemingly unconnected and often frustrating engagements with German rearguard units as the British advanced towards the gap between the German First and Second Armies. As Captain John Darling of the 20th Hussars (20/Hussars) remarked afterwards, ‘it seemed curious to note that we never heard of this battle until it was over.’12 Yet the fact that the retreat had finally ended and they were now pursuing an enemy which had harassed them since 24 August, provided just the tonic which the weary men of the BEF had been waiting for. 28-year-old Lieutenant Arthur Acland, adjutant of the 1st Battalion Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, (1/DCLI) was delighted:
‘It was such a joy to know that we were going to push our late pursuers back over their own footsteps. Perhaps what pleased us most was that the Germans were now going to suffer exceedingly for the way they had burnt and pillaged their way south. We had hardly ever held an outpost position or formed a rearguard without having had the hours of darkness lighted by the volume of flames issuing from one of the huge close-stacked hay and straw barns or from some of the perfectly kept farm buildings which those savages had delighted in setting alight … Perhaps they thought their entry into Paris was a foregone conclusion and that they would never have need of the fodder and food they destroyed.’13
The precise raison d’êtres behind the much welcomed advance were still unclear in the minds of many in the BEF – the wider strategic movements to the north could only be guessed at – but for Brigadier General Count Edward Gleichen, in command of 15 Infantry Brigade, the turning of the tide brought with it a sea change in the spirits of his men. ‘What had happened, or why we were suddenly to turn against the enemy after days of retreat, we could not conceive,’ he wrote in his diary but the men ‘marched twice as well, whistling and singing, back through Tournans and on to Villeneuve.’14 It was an observation shared by Brigadier General Aylmer Haldane commanding 10 Infantry Brigade who remarked on, ‘the difference in demeanour of the troops now that they had their heads turned towards the enemy.’
As was the case with the British wounded incurred during the retreat from Mons, the German ambulance transport proved to be woefully inadequate for the task now that it was the Germans’ turn to retreat. German wounded were experiencing precisely the same trying circumstances which many of the British wounded had had to endure during the forced marching and fighting from Mons to points south of the Marne – that of being abandoned to face the ignominy of captivity.
Yet there was an essential difference; medical staff of the RAMC had generally remained behind to care for the British wounded for whom transport could not be found or who had been too ill to be moved. What was noticeable during the advance towards the Aisne was the almost total absence of German field ambulance staff from the field lazarettes attending the wounded. Field ambulance war diaries and personal accounts written by medical officers are punctuated with descriptions of the plight of unattended German wounded. Captain Robert Dolbey, the medical officer with the 2nd Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers (2/KOSB) noted that, ‘all along the roads in ditches, by haystacks, were German dead and wounded; victims, for the most part, of the shrapnel which hurried their flight’.15 Dolbey also recounts attending to groups of German wounded, ‘putting on first field dressings, making them comfortable, giving morphia and leaving instructions to await the field ambulances’.
But regardless of the change in demeanour noted by Haldane, the advance of the BEF was slow and cautious. To be fair it had no easy task to face. What lay ahead were five deeply incised river valleys, all of which, apart from some fordable sections of the Petit Morin, required bridges to be intact or constructed for the passage of troops. If the geography was against it, then the physical condition of the BEF was such that any advance was handicapped by the exhausted state of the men. Many units were very still much depleted by casualties sustained during the engagements of the past two weeks and reinforcements, although dribbling in slowly, were still not enough to replace the 488 officers and 19,532 men who had been lost since Mons.16 It was not a situation which inspired confidence and was one which Sir John French, for all his lack of effective command and control over the previous weeks, felt keenly. Whilst we may agree that as a commander-in-chief he was almost certainly out of his depth, his apparent reluctance to commit the BEF to further offensive fighting stemmed from an overall – albeit misplaced – concern that his troops were incapable of offensive action.
The BEF’s delay in moving northeast did not prevent its units from coming into contact with German forces on 6 September. The 1 Guards Brigade, under the command of Brigadier General Ivor Maxse,
came under attack from German artillery and infantry units of Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps and with rumours of additional enemy forces in the area Douglas Haig halted the I Corps advance at Rozay-en-Brie. The sounds of battle were clearly audible to the advance units of the 2nd Division and Lieutenant Charles Paterson, adjutant of the 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers, (1/SWB) was keenly aware that, ‘a battle had already begun eastward.’ His frustration at being kept out of the fight is clear from his diary account, ‘we move a bit nearer to the fight and then halt again.’ Arriving at La Chapelle-Iger there was a further wait of several hours which, Paterson reports with undisguised exasperation, gave the German columns ample time to escape. Even with II Corps in support and RFC reconnaissance reports indicating clear roads ahead, by the time Haig resumed his advance at 3.30pm von Arnim had escaped to the Ourcq to reinforce von Kluck. It had been a poor start and one on which General Franchet d’Espèrey had every reason to vent his anger, particularly when it became apparent that, despite II Corps reaching the south bank of the Grand Morin without opposition, the BEF had only advanced 11 miles. ‘A most tiring day,’ wrote Paterson, ‘though we have not done much.’
Monday, 7 September was hardly an improvement on the previous day. GHQ did not issue its orders for the day until 8.00am, prompted, it must be said, by delays in maintaining contact with adjacent French forces, but nevertheless the BEF was not underway until 11.00am that morning. Still concerned at the possibility of outrunning Conneau’s cavalry corps on the right flank, GHQ’s orders brought the BEF to a standstill by early afternoon with most units only moving forward 8 to 10 miles. II Corps, which had already reached the Grand Morin river hardly moved at all. At 5.00pm Lieutenant Alexander Johnston, the signalling officer with 7 Infantry Brigade, was still kicking his heels at Faremoutiers on the south bank of the Grand Morin wondering why they were not chasing the enemy hard:
‘Surely our duty is according to Field Service Regulations “not to spare man or horse or gun in pursuing the enemy etc” … Just heard that we are a long way ahead of the other divisions while we are well in front of our own which accounts for the delay as others have to catch us up. Also hear that, had our I Corps pushed a bit more, we ought to have cornered those Germans last night.’17
Eventually his brigade moved east to Coulommiers where the four battalions of 7 Brigade collected their reinforcements at the railway station. That evening the only British forces across the Grand Morin were the 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades.
There was one piece of news on 7 September which was more positive and it came from the cavalrymen of Brigadier General Henry de Lisle’s 2 Cavalry Brigade. Since Mons, de Lisle’s men had been involved in countless skirmishes with enemy cavalry during the course of the retreat, although not all could be counted as having a satisfactory outcome. At Audregnies on 24 August 4/Dragoon Guards and 9/Lancers had charged the massed infantry and guns of the German 7th Infantry Division during a rearguard action which saw the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment (1/Cheshire) reduced to 7 officers and 200 other ranks and the surviving cavalrymen of 2 Cavalry Brigade scattered far and wide. This disastrous cavalry action was in complete contrast to the rearguard action at Cerizy four days later when Brigadier General Phillip Chetwode’s 5 Cavalry Brigade put to flight a strong column of von Richthofen’s 1st Cavalry Corps with an effective combination of dismounted rifle and machine-gunfire and mounted action.
Yet, to date, there had been no cavalry action between British and German cavalry which had involved lance against lance and as George Paget correctly points out in his History of the British Cavalry, the fight at Moncel and Vieux Villers on 7 September was unique in that it was probably the first and certainly the last occasion during the Great War in which British cavalry used their lances against an opponent similarly armed.18 The action occurred between two troops of Lieutenant Colonel David Campbell’s 9/Lancers and a squadron of the 1st Guard Dragoons commanded by Rittmeister von Gayling. Campbell’s description is typically short and to the point:
‘I put the two troops behind a haystack … when I heard some firing from the east of the village and galloped over with my trumpeter to see what it was. At the north end I saw some lancers firing into a wood to the east … I left my trumpeter and went out towards the wood and when about four hundred yards from it saw 100 to 120 German cavalry begin to mount.’
Clearly intending to charge, the Guard Dragoons moved towards Campbell who galloped back to his haystack and brought his much smaller force into line and charged the advancing Germans. Campbell’s horse being much fresher quickly outpaced the others and the colonel found himself a good 100 yards ahead of his men:
‘It was, however, too late to wait, so I rode straight on, hoping for the best! As I approached the Germans, they closed in on their troop leader and their long iron lances presented a very disagreeable-looking wall. I directed my horse towards the troop leader, and when I got level with him I shot him as he was in the act of cutting at me with his sword. The next thing I remember was being carried very slowly over the tail of my horse to fall in a field. Both the Germans and our own men passed right over the top of me, but marvellous to relate not a single horse trod on my body.’19
After the charge, during which Campbell and six others were wounded and three others killed, both sides withdrew just as the 18th Hussars arrived at Moncel in time to administer the coup de grâce with dismounted rifle and machine-gun fire. It was hardly a major action or one which contributed much to the advance, but at least someone had got to grips with the enemy and had inflicted some damage.
The orders issued by GHQ for 8 September were lacking in any clear directive other than for all three British corps to continue the advance and attack the enemy wherever they were found. In contrast to previous days, British units were on the road by 6.00am which soon put them in touch with the German rearguards on the Petit Morin. At Sablonnières the 5th Dragoon Guards (Queen’s Bays) were caught off guard by the size and strength of the German rearguard. Lieutenant Algernon Lamb was with the troop which successfully took the railway bridge but was prevented from carrying the river bridge by a barricade:
A force of Germans were holding the village of Sablonnières. The 1st Cavalry Brigade took up positions on the south side of the valley of the Petit Morin River, opposite Sablonnières. The brigaded machine guns did a lot of firing across the valley which is very wooded, and the slopes held on the far side by the enemy look pretty high and steep. Later, we galloped on down the road under rifle fire from across the river, and came into another position without losing any men, close to Sablonnières station.’20
It was a similar story all along the Petit Morin, German rearguards had effectively brought the cavalry to a standstill and any further progress was on hold until the infantry arrived.
By 9.30am the advance guard of the 1st Division, the 1st Battalion the Black Watch (1/Black Watch), was 2 miles to the east of Sablonnières at Bellot. Here it found French cavalry in possession of the village and, like the British cavalry to the west, unable to make progress. Undeterred, the Black Watch pushed on through the village and into the wooded slopes of the valley on the north side and with the sound of firing quite audible to the west, the battalion turned towards Sablonnières where it came under heavy fire from elements of the Garde Jäger battalion and the Garde Kürassiere Regiment. This was a strong rearguard and it was not until the arrival of a company of the 1st Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (1/Camerons), supported by dismounted troopers of 4 Cavalry Brigade, that the heights were eventually taken at 1.00pm and the rearguard evicted.
Although Sablonnières was a relatively minor skirmish and one of a number of similar episodes along the Petit Morin that morning, the casualties had not been insignificant. Algernon Lamb noted, ‘a lot of German wounded and dead lying about’ and plenty of prisoners. In addition to their eighteen wounded, the Black Watch lost two of their officers, 31-year-old Captain Charles Dalglish and Lieutenant Ewen Wilson together with eight other
ranks, while the Cameron Highlanders lost Privates Ford and Davidson killed and Privates Macdonald, Hay and McShane wounded. Most notable amongst the cavalry casualties was the loss of 38-year-old Captain John Norwood who had won the Victoria Cross whilst serving as a second lieutenant with the Queen’s Bays in South Africa fourteen years previously. Nineteen casualties of the action now rest in a quiet corner of the riverside communal cemetery at Sablonnières.
While some had to fight their way over the Petit Morin others had little or no contact with the enemy on 8 September. Brigadier General Edward Gleichen observed that the noise of battle, although ‘going on just ahead of us or on both flanks,’ never got within striking distance of 15 Infantry Brigade. They crossed the river at St-Cyr-sur-Morin, sweating profusely as they climbed the steep hill out of the valley towards the Montapéine crossroads:
BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914 Page 4