BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914

by Jerry Murland

  ‘We were in a curious position, for there was a big fight going on amid some burning villages in the plain far on our left – I don’t know what division – probably the 4th – and a smaller fight parallel to us on the right, not two miles off; and we were marching calmly along the road in column.’21

  Gleichen was correct about the division to his left. Pulteney’s III Corps had met little resistance until late morning when it had reached the south banks of the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, at which point the advance units discovered the bridges destroyed and a strong German rearguard on the north bank. As 9/Field Company, Royal Engineers, approached the Marne at La Ferté with 10 Infantry Brigade, Lieutenant Bernard Young idly wondered what condition he would find the main road bridge to be in. Less than a week previously, during the retreat south, 26/Field Company had successfully blown one of the stone arches of the bridge, now here they were again attempting to re-cross the Marne and would most probably have to construct a temporary bridge to get III Corps across!

  As dusk fell on 8 September the BEF had only averaged around 12 miles and apart from III Corps had not yet reached the Marne. However, the next morning the advance guard of II Corps, which was further east, found the Marne bridges intact and after some initial dithering were on the north bank by 9.00am. I Corps was across by lunchtime but there the advance sputtered to a halt in the face of determined German rearguard actions and from what appeared to be ‘a lack of determination’ on the part of brigade commanders. At La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, practically the whole of III Corps was stationary. Lieutenant Cecil Brereton, a gunner officer with 68/Battery, arrived at La Ferté to find:

  ‘The infantry were lining a street and the officer commanding told me anyone who showed their nose round the corner was as good as dead. Decided not to do so. All the houses on the north bank were loopholed and the place and hill opposite bristling with machine guns which were skilfully concealed.’22

  The town was scoured for enough material with which to construct a pontoon bridge and Bernard Young and his sappers got to work:

  ‘We moved down to La Ferté to bridge the river; street fighting and sniping was still going on and we didn’t get near the river till noon at the earliest. It was then still impossible to bridge and eventually infantry were ferried over to clear out machine-gun posts which still covered the only possible bridge site near the destroyed road bridge … However we were far from idle and collected barrels, scantling and planking etc for the bridge. Barrels were collected from nearby cellars, their contents being run to waste; we found quite a lot of Bosche in the process, many dead drunk. I am glad to say none of our men succumbed to such temptation; all realized there was too much to be done.’23

  The actual bridge building began at 5.45pm on 9 September and was completed by 6.30am the following day. In 12 hours the engineers had built a 218 foot long bridge constructed largely from local materials and boats found on the river. As Bernard Young commented in 1933, if III Corps had got its act together and anticipated the crossing by bringing the Bridging Train up quickly, ‘the Marne – as far as we were concerned – could have been bridged in a quarter of the time’.

  Young’s confidence in his bridge was not entirely shared by the men and wagons of 20/Field Ambulance who crossed the pontoon bridge later that day. Lieutenant Travis Hampson felt the bridge appeared to be a little flimsy and was quite relieved when he was safely on the other side:

  ‘The pontoon bridge didn’t look too strong. It was made with RE bridging pontoons (needless to say the road bridge had been blown up) but there were not enough to span the river, and some oddments of civilian boats had to be used as well. After all that had gone over it already we had another wait while it was strengthened, and even then is sagged a good deal as our heavy GS wagons went over one by one. The ordinary bridges had all been blown up, and there was nowhere else to cross anywhere near. Here we saw the results of the shelling of the town by both sides. Many of the houses were complete ruins, and all showed rifle bullet and shrapnel holes.’24

  George Pattenden, by now travelling with the battalion transport as his feet had given up on him, crossed over the pontoon bridge at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre at 9.00am: ‘Today we are now on the German line of retreat, the state of the place is awful. It is impossible to describe the state of affairs, houses upside down, bottles in thousands’. Pattenden was very much aware of a new tempo being injected into the advance once they were across the Marne, a change of pace induced by GHQ, which, encouraged by the retirement of the German First and Second Armies, now appeared to throw caution to the wind and ordered the BEF to pursue the Germans with all haste. Von Kluck was at this time moving east across the British front and Sir John French, all too late, finally realised there was a real chance of outpacing him.

  Although 10 September was perhaps the most successful day of the advance so far with II Corps in contact with the enemy for most of the day, the shortcomings of poor communications were amplified by several ‘friendly fire’ incidents. Not only did the 1st Divisional artillery open fire on the Royal Sussex and Loyal North Lancashire battalions, but to make matters worse they were joined by the 2nd Division artillery and units of the Royal Horse Artillery. The Royal Sussex war diary rather generously attributes the incident to the fact that it was raining hard and the battalion were wearing their rain capes, the ‘artillery thinking apparently we were Germans’. At the time the battalion were engaged with a strongly entrenched enemy at Priez and finding themselves under fire from both sides, Brigadier General Edward Bulfin who was commanding 2 Brigade was forced to order a temporary retirement. It is not clear how many of the seventeen killed and eighty-three wounded were the result of friendly fire. Not to be outdone, the 3rd Divisional artillery shelled the Royal Berkshires and King’s Royal Rifle Corps at Hautvesnes later in the morning, wounding four men. It was, wrote Sergeant Reeve of 16/Battery RFA, ‘an unfortunate occurrence’, and one which Douglas Haig took seriously enough to halt I Corps near Neuilly and regroup.

  10 September was the last chance the BEF forward units had of catching the retreating Germans and by nightfall it was painfully obvious that this was not going to happen. An RFC reconnaissance report logged by Captains Robert Boger and Robin Grey from 5 Squadron on 9 September, confirmed long columns of von Kluck’s 5th Division moving northeast through Ocquerre but fresh orders from Joffre, which turned the direction of advance of the BEF and the French Fifth and Sixth Armies to the northeast, were too slow in materializing.25 Thus on the morning of Friday, 11 September, British divisions found themselves sharing overburdened roads, not only between themselves but with the French. The new direction had effectively narrowed the BEF frontage and an already overstretched staff now had to face the challenge of squeezing the army into their new positions. Cecil Brereton’s battery of six 18-pounder guns was not the only unit to feel the burden of Operational Order No. 21:

  ‘Roused at 3.00am but did not move until about 5.30am. How we wished the staff would take the trouble to work out time and space problems. Had a longish halt in the middle of the morning and then continued on our way along evil smelling roads till we were again blocked by the French near Dammard – our division and a French division were apparently allotted the same road.’26

  To make matters worse it began to rain heavily in the afternoon and as the long columns of British and French units dragged themselves slowly northeast, the German Army retired practically unhindered to the Aisne. Brereton was not alone in cursing the congestion on the roads, Lieutenant Alexander Johnston and 7 Infantry Brigade soon found themselves sharing the same road as 5 Infantry Brigade and it was not until they passed through Neuilly St Front that they finally got clear. Johnston’s diary continued to reflect the frustration he felt at the pace of the advance:

  ‘As I have feared, we have let the Germans get clear away with very little loss. Even though we may have got ahead of the other divisions on our right and left, and might have even risked getting an advanced guard knocked about
, surely we should have harried the enemy as much as possible. I expect we shall find that the enemy will have been able to retire more or less unmolested on to a strong fortified position somewhere further north which will give us a great deal of trouble.’27

  Little did he realize exactly how far his prophetic diary entry would reflect a future reality.

  As the rain continued to pour it exacerbated the already poor state of the roads and the growing congestion which caused delay after frustrating delay and misery for the marching infantry. For Captain James Pennyman, the machine-gun officer with 2/KOSB, Saturday 12 September was,’ cold with incessant rain’, during which he spent ‘a wretched day listening to much gunning southeast of Soissons and wondering what was up.’ It was little different for the men of 16 Battery. It was raining when they got up at 3.30am and continued to rain for the remainder of the day. That evening after a difficult day, Reeve and his men managed to find dry billets somewhere near Brenelle:

  ‘The village square was in a state of chaos. Cavalry riding through on one side, transport held up on the other, and infantry trying to get along in the centre. Officers shouting orders and the answering back in the pitch darkness added to the confusion and to crown it all it was pouring down a deluge … after struggling through this mass and getting boots full of water we found a billet in a farmyard.’28

  Accordingly, on the evening of 12 September the only British units to reach the heights above the south bank of the Aisne were the vanguard of III Corps and a few isolated advanced cavalry patrols. North of the Aisne the German Army – having blown most of the bridges – consolidated its defensive positions on the high ground overlooking the river valley. Their geographical positions may have been formidable, but the gap between the German First and Second Armies which had opened up during the battle of the Marne remained and what’s more it was now positioned partly on the British line of advance.

  Chapter 3

  Parrying the Blow

  It is easier to hold ground than to take it.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  Before we continue with the advance of the BEF over the Aisne we should take a moment to consider the deployment and movement of the German Army after its retreat from the Marne. As far as British and French forces were concerned the German Army was in full retreat and, ‘nobody doubted the beginning of the end had come’. The enemy, reckoned Christopher Baker-Carr, ‘had shot his bolt and we had him on the run.’ Baker-Carr was a former officer of the Rifle Brigade who had retired as a captain in 1906. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he went to France with the BEF as one of the twenty-five civilian volunteer drivers with the Royal Automobile Club Volunteer Force whose task it was to chauffer senior officers of the staff around the front. Baker-Carr’s judgement of the state of the enemy retreating in front of him was one also held by Second Lieutenant Jack Hay, an intelligence officer attached to GHQ. Hay was sure that the Germans would, ‘have to fall right back, away past St Quentin and Le Cateau … to the line of the Sambre, where they’ll want more shifting.’ The ‘hardest job’ he felt was going to be pushing them back past the line of the Rhine.

  Whether this view had been influenced by GHQ – which was now convinced the Allies would chase the Germans all the way back to the Rhine – is anyone’s guess but it did point to the new wave of optimism abroad at GHQ; an optimism which General Horace Smith-Dorrien tempered with a little more caution. Writing on 10 September, Smith-Dorrien went as far as admitting that, ‘today is the first that has made me come to the conclusion that there is real evidence of our enemy being shaken,’ but he went on to add:

  ‘The roads are littered and the [German] retreat is hurried; but I still realize that the main bodies of the German Corps in front of us may be in perfect order and that the people we are engaged with are strong rearguards, who are sacrificing themselves to let their main bodies get far enough away for fresh operations against us.’29

  The roads were indeed littered with all manner of debris, Captain James Pennyman remembered marching through, ‘unsavoury German remains’ and ‘debris of all kinds along the roads, consisting of wagons and things they had got rid of in order to hasten their progress, a dead horse every 10 yards and a fair number of soldiers’. Many British accounts of those wet and exhausting days before the line of the Aisne was reached tell of the large numbers of empty wine and spirit bottles left by the retreating Germans, citing this as another indication of the moral collapse of what must be a drunken German Army. But ‘Jim’ Pennyman was sure that had the Germans been drunk, as the number of empty bottles would seem to have suggested, ‘we should have caught them.’ The scattered bottles pointed, he thought, to an, ‘organized distribution of liquor rather than indiscriminate looting’.

  As we now know, there was no moral collapse on the part of the retreating German Army or indeed a relentless pursuit! The Germans may have drunk an inordinate amount of alcohol but the BEF only came into serious contact with the enemy rearguards sporadically as it moved north – sandwiched as it was between the French Sixth and Fifth Armies. Correlli Barnett attributes this almost entirely to, ‘good German staff work and limp leadership and sheer exhaustion on the allied side’.30 Barnett’s belief that good German staff work was evident during the retreat to the Aisne contrasts greatly with the poor quality of staff work in the BEF, a running sore which would remain to haunt the British for some time to come.

  The staff corps of an army is akin to the middle management of a large organization and without an effective staff an army cannot function. It is the staff officer who is responsible for everything from troop movements to supply to the distribution of mail from home and there is no doubt that the skill of its staff working in conjunction with senior officers gave the German Army a decisive edge on the battlefield. With sixty years of successful battlefield encounters behind it, the German Army of 1914 could field over twenty-five regular army corps and sixteen reserve corps which were serviced and administered by a core of trained and experienced staff officers. When war was declared in August 1914 it is estimated that the British Army had only 447 qualified staff officers who had passed the two-year staff course at Camberley and as a result could put ‘psc’ after their name. Moreover, by the end of 1914, when the officer shortage became desperate, many of those qualified staff officers who were not already serving with fighting units returned to their units to fill much-needed vacancies at battalion level.

  This deficiency of good staff officers in the BEF had an enormous impact when war came in 1914. There were simply not enough qualified staff officers available to fill the void which existed, and those who were available were largely inexperienced when compared to their German counterparts. Indeed, when it came to the logistics of managing a land force the size of the BEF, not one of the senior core of British commanders had experience of handling more than a single division in the field; and although there were some very capable individuals serving on the staff, the lack of regard held by many regimental officers towards their counterparts on the staff was still in evidence and part of British Army culture.

  This contrasted hugely with the prestige which accompanied graduation from the three–year staff course at the German Kriegsakademie. By 1871 the contribution of staff officers trained at the Kriegsakademie to victories on the battlefield had been linked directly to their extensive training in the art and science of war. German staff education can be traced back to 1765 when Frederick the Great saw the need to educate officers who advised him on military matters. It wasn’t until 1801 that any similar education was established in England for the training of staff officers and it was only the débâcle of the Crimean War which accelerated the opening of a dedicated Staff College at Camberley in 1858 where students undertook a two-year course. If further evidence of efficient German staff work in 1914 was required one only had to look at the huge turning movement ordered by von Kluck when he swung his forces through ninety degrees to face Maunoury’s Sixth Army on the Ourcq during the Battle of the Marne. Such
a huge and extremely efficient movement of a vast body of troops should be seen in contrast to the painstaking manoeuvring of the BEF during the advance to the Aisne.

  In many ways the British Army of 1914 was still torn by a conflict generated by its relatively new role as part of a European alliance and its continuing colonial responsibilities; a clash which manifested itself, for example, in the tactical doctrine used by the artillery – something which will be examined a little more closely in Chapter 12. Although politically the BEF was committed to a role in Europe and, ‘as divisional units they trained for the continent; as part of the old colonial system they trained drafts for the army overseas’.31 It was this dual role of battalions based in Britain which was principally responsible for the large number of reservists being called in August 1914 up to bring the home battalions up to war strength. To a certain extent the home battalions were always under strength whilst the overseas battalions were usually at full complement. In reality, despite the political will, the British Army of 1914 was not designed for a European war, hence as the junior partner in 1914 the learning curve of the BEF was a steep one, as historian Paddy Griffith pointed out:

  ‘Despite its enviable regimental cohesion … the BEF of August 1914 was scarcely an instrument for total war. It was in no sense designed to act as the dominant partner in the main battle against the main enemy in the main theatre.’32

  Not only had the retreat from Mons been a close-run affair for the BEF but it had also highlighted the limitations in command and control exercised by Sir John French and GHQ. Now, faced with the German Army entrenching on the higher ground above the north bank of the River Aisne, the line of its learning curve was about to become steeper.