‘When I got near him [Johnston] he signalled me not to approach. He and Flint were working the raft to and fro … I sat down under cover with Pennycuick and a few men ready to assist and so we spent the day …Johnston and Flint continued this work until 7pm when they were relieved, quite worn out. Johnston received a VC for this and Flint a DSO. I was able to recommend them personally as I saw it all.’48
At 11.00am on 13 September the sappers of 17/Field Company arrived further downstream at Moulin des Roches and began ferrying 14 Brigade across the river. Second Lieutenant Kenneth Godsell described the night’s activity:
‘On reaching the river we discovered a boat on the far side and a Sapper of my section stripped, swam across, and fetched it back. It was discovered later that there was nobody in front of us and the Germans were holding an entrenched position on the hills just the other side of Missy. By 12 o’clock No. 2 Section had made a pontoon raft and had started ferrying the infantry across. We got 53 men on to the pontoon raft and nine in the boat. Each trip took 8 minutes if the party to board were ready on the bank. Later we constructed a landing bay each side by using the Weldon Trestles which accelerated boarding and reduced the time per trip to 6 minutes. The actual place of crossing was most convenient as it was where a track, which crossed the railway by a level crossing, ran into the tow path along the river bank. The point was sheltered from observation by a belt of trees and a small copse.’49
Godsell estimated that, ‘the river at this point was some 70 yards wide and flowed at a good rate’, but any hopes of a rest were soon dispelled when the advance guard of 15 Brigade arrived at 11.30pm. ‘We found ourselves on the bank’, wrote Edward Gleichen, ‘with a darker shadow splashing backwards and forwards over the river in our front, and some RE officers talking in whispers’. Godsell’s diary records an exhausting night with the last man of 15 Brigade crossing just before 6.30am the next morning. ‘It was’, he felt, ‘a very wet night but we were too busy to notice it’.
At Vailly, Second Lieutenant Cyril Martin from 56/Field Company and Major Henderson the officer commanding the 57th, soon discovered that the bridge over the Canal Latéral was undamaged but in contrast the river bridge boasted but a single plank spanning a rather precarious looking gap. Despite making a wide detour to avoid being spotted by German infantry from IR13 on the far bank, Henderson was hit in the elbow by enemy fire. Martin sent Henderson back ‘with the man we had with us and then made a rough sketch of the bridge’ and headed back to lodge his report. On returning to the bridge to see if the gap was safe enough to traverse by infantry, Martin managed to jump across and secure the plank. ‘It was a pretty warm time as the Germans were firing from quite close’. Martin’s apparent lack of concern for his own safety had already been demonstrated at Le Cateau, where he won a DSO. He would be noticed again in April 1915 when his stubborn refusal to give up a captured trench resulted in the award of the Victoria Cross. The bridge, Martin felt, was probably not going to take the weight of an infantry brigade, but after a personal inspection by Hubert Hamilton, commanding the 3rd Division, 8 Brigade was ordered to cross the river using the bridge.50
What followed was a repeat of the Vénizel experience, a single plank spanned the breach in the road bridge and the Royal Irish and Royal Scots began crossing at 3.00pm on 13 September. Being daylight they were under continual shell fire from German batteries, both battalions taking casualties, however, by 6.00pm they had established themselves around Vailly: the Royal Irish east of St-Pierre and the Scots at Vauxcelles Château, a mile or so northwest of Vailly. That night 9 Brigade followed on using the same precarious plank whilst 56 and 57/Field Companies began the task of erecting a pontoon bridge across the river, completing their task by 3.00am on 14 September.
Further east, the approach to Bourg lay across two canal bridges and a road bridge which crossed the river itself. An initial cavalry reconnaissance reported the village clear of enemy troops but when Lieutenant Robert Featherstonehaugh and a troop of B Squadron, 4/Dragoon Guards arrived, they were met with a hail of gun fire from well entrenched German infantry along the canal bank. Similarly, when A Squadron approached the bridges at Villiers – which had both been destroyed – the canal bank was found to be occupied by an enemy rearguard. Fortunately the two canal bridges at Bourg were intact and taken by the dragoons under heavy fire. Given the task confronting them, casualties were extraordinarily light: only one officer and three men killed. When 28-year-old Captain Gerald ‘Pat’ Fitzgerald, the machine – gun officer, went down with a bullet between the eyes, Arthur Osburn, the regimental medical officer was only yards away: ‘Fitzgerald was unconscious when I got to him, his wound no bigger than a blue pencil mark in the centre of his forehead. Then in a moment he was gone’.51 Once across the canals it became apparent that although the road bridge had been destroyed, the aqueduct carrying the canal over the river was intact. Apart from an ‘uncomfortable quarter of an hour’, when the cavalrymen were caught in crossfire, Osburn recorded his relief in watching the defending German rearguard being the subject of some accurate shell fire and eventually retreating towards the wooded slopes of the high ground to the north.
Just upstream of the Bourg bridges 2 Cavalry Brigade crossed the river using the hand-drawn ferry where, despite the obvious dangers from gunfire, the ferry boy was still at work, a deed which impressed Second Lieutenant Jock Marden, an officer with A Squadron, 9/Lancers:
‘6.25, orders to move at once – off in a confusion at 6.35 then we attack Bourg and the crossings of the Aisne and parallel canal – the furthest bridge of the two having been blown up. We go to the right and cross by 6s in a ferry under an irritating sniper’s fire from a church tower. Gave the ferry boy a franc for courage.’52
With the cavalry across the river, the waiting infantry and artillery units which were gathering south of the Canal Latéral began moving to join them. Lieutenant Evelyn Needham had been on the road since 4.00am with his company of 1st Battalion Northamptonshire Regiment and arrived south of Bourg to find, ‘the cavalry and artillery hotly engaged with the enemy on the far side of the river’.53 Glad of the rest they were held up for three or four hours before the order to advance saw the battalion crossing the aqueduct. ‘Oddly enough’, wrote Needham, ‘I have no recollection of this crossing beyond the fact that we doubled across as fast as we could, so as to get under cover on the far side’. Second Lieutenant James Hyndson who crossed with B Company, 1st Battalion Loyal North Lancashire Regiment (1/Loyals), noticed, ‘strong barricades and disguised trenches abandoned by the enemy which, if held, would certainly have cost us casualties’. Corporal J N Perks, a motorcycle rider with the 1st Signal Company, remembered his crossing over the aqueduct vividly:
‘The Germans had obviously though we might try and cross this way and had tried to blow up the viaduct but had only succeeded in blowing a small hole in the towpath which engineers soon repaired with wooden faggots … the reason for the German failure was obvious, as lying by the side of the towpath were 3 dead Germans who had obviously been killed before they could finish the job.’54
Perks’ assessment of the German failure was almost certainly incorrect; there is no record of a German demolition party being killed and the dead Germans he saw were probably casualties of the earlier fighting. The aqueduct was a massive steel structure carrying the canal and would have required a considerable amount of explosive to destroy it, a task clearly beyond the resources of the German rearguard. After crossing the river on his Triumph Roadster, Perks was nearly pushed into the canal by an artillery brigade who took up most of the available road, ‘I only had a few feet to ride between the guns and the edge of the canal, and the towpath was awfully greasy’. To make matters worse just as he reached the junction with the main road – the modern day D88 – German gunners were beginning to get the range of the advancing troops: ‘Just in front of me a shell landed in front of a team of horses drawing a gun, killing the leaders but luckily not touching the drivers’.
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bsp; Frederick Coleman, another of the RAC volunteer drivers, managed to get his vehicle over the aqueduct but almost came to grief in the rain on the muddy towpath attempting to drive up a steep slope. ‘No choice remained but to charge it at such speed as one could muster. Near the top the whirring wheels refused to bite and back the car slid towards the river’. Surrounded as he was by units of the 1st Division he eventually ‘crawled upwards’ and over the crest of the bank to join the advance north towards Vendresse. Also at Bourg, Corporal Cuthbert Avis of the 1/Queen’s Royal West Surreys remembered scrambling, ‘along girders of a destroyed bridge’ and advancing with his battalion in heavy rain up the slopes of the river bank. ‘It was an unlucky day’, he recorded, ‘when the battalion forced the passage of the river with a loss of nearly 100 killed and wounded’.
Meanwhile at Pont-Arcy, 11/Field Company began work on the road bridge which had only been partly destroyed, while a mile and a half upstream the sappers of 5/Field Company started construction of a pontoon bridge which was in use by 5.00pm that afternoon. One of the first battalions to cross the river at Pont-Arcy was 2/Connaught Rangers which, under fire, used the single girder that remained – albeit partly submerged – and took up positions on the north bank where they covered the crossing by the remainder of 5 Brigade over the pontoon bridge. The Connaughts had lost their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Abercrombie, at Le Grand Fayt on 26 August.55 Forced into fighting a rearguard action after the battalion’s strength was divided, Abercrombie and some 100 officers and men were ambushed as they entered the village, resulting in the eventual capture of the colonel and the majority of the party. The battalion, now under the command of Major William Sarsfield, was ordered into Soupir to take up positions on the northern and western outskirts of the village. At 1.00am Major Sarsfield – on his own initiative – moved the battalion up to La Cour de Soupir Farm which lay at the head of the valley through which the next day’s advance would take place. The Connaughts arrived at 5.30am on 14 September and found no sign of the enemy. They were less than 2 miles from the Chemin des Dames ridge.
Further downstream opposite Chavonne, 4 (Guards) Brigade, under the temporary command of Lieutenant Colonel Fielding, was assembled to begin crossing the canal at Cys-la-Commune. They had arrived late and it was not until noon that they were ready to cross. Notwithstanding the information that Chavonne was apparently only lightly held, the approaches to the village were distinctly hazardous for the infantryman. The 800 yard wide stretch of ground between the canal bridge at Cys and the river crossing at Chavonne was devoid of all cover and offered no protection to assaulting infantry. On the northern bank the partially wooded ground rose steeply from the river providing cover for a concealed enemy who had the benefit of excellent fields of fire over the whole area. If the village and the commanding heights above it were held in force and the rearguard determined to resist, a successful crossing would be very much in the balance.
With the three remaining battalions of the brigade in support, it fell to the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards (2/Coldstream) to test the strength and resolve of the German rearguard. Captain Gilbert Follett and Number 2 Company soon came under heavy rifle and machine gun fire as he approached the canal bridge, prompting Lieutenant Colonel Pereira to send up two further companies to return fire from the canal bank. Watching the afternoon’s events from the high ground south of Cys was Major Lord Bernard Gordon Lennox and the men of 2/Grenadier Guards. He notes in his diary that, ‘after a couple of hours they [the Coldstream] ejected the Dutchmen [sic] who were seen scuttling up the hill and over the skyline’.56
The ‘scuttling’ retreat of the German rearguard had been encouraged by the combined firepower of shell fire from the guns of 71/Battery which scoured the ridge above Chavonne and the machine-gun section from 2/Grenadier Guards commanded by Lieutenant Hon. William Cecil which came into action by the canal bridge. By 4.00pm the Coldstream were on the river bank where a leaking boat found by Lance Corporal Albert Milward provided the transport for Number 3 Company to begin establishing themselves on the northern bank. The Coldstream war diary records the, ‘considerable opposition from hostile infantry and machine guns and at least a squadron of German cavalry’, which was met by the Coldstream’s Number 3 Company as it fought its way up onto the heights of Les Crinons above the village. Meanwhile the Grenadiers had begun crossing the river a mile or so east of Chavonne using what the regimental historian describes as, ‘three or four boats of doubtful buoyancy’. No doubt it was the onset of darkness and heavy rain which decided Colonel Fielding to withdraw the brigade – except the Coldstream Company established on Les Crinons – to the safety of St Mard and Cys for the nigh; a welcome alternative to a riverside bivouac. Bernard Gordon Lennox and his company officers were fortunate in that they:
‘Found an obliging farmer, whose daughter had come home from Paris for a fortnight’s holiday … she proved to be an awfully good cook and made us an excellent bouillon of vegetable followed by an equally excellent omelette …a pouring wet night and were glad to have a roof over our heads.’57
However, the logic as to why Fielding was ordered to withdraw his forces on the north bank remains a mystery, but the orders came directly from I Corps Headquarters. Had Fielding pushed his men over the river and continued the advance that night – as 2/Connaughts did – the stalemate which became synonymous with Cour de Soupir Farm may have had a more favourable outcome.
So by dawn on 14 September the Cavalry Division and the 1st Division were across the river and established between Paissy and Verneuil. Only 5 Infantry Brigade – plus one company of Coldstream at Chavonne – from the 2nd Division had crossed and were occupying a line running roughly from Verneuil to Soupir. Then there was a gap of some 5 miles where 8 and 9 Infantry Brigades were established at Vauxelles, before a further gap of 3 miles occurred – formed by the Condé salient. At Missy two battalions of 13 Brigade, the 1/Royal West Kents and 2/King’s Own Scottish Borderers were dug in together with 14 and 15 Brigades. Close by were the three brigades of the 4th Division occupying positions from St Marguerite to Crouy. South of the Aisne, and not yet across the river, were 4 and 6 Infantry Brigades at Veil Arcy, Cys and St Mard, 3 and 5 Cavalry Brigades and 7 Infantry Brigade at Braine, and the two missing battalions of 13 Brigade somewhere south of Missy. 19 Brigade were at Billy-sur-Aisne.
Both flanks of the BEF were in touch with their French counterparts. On the right General Conneau’s Cavalry Corps had fallen back on Jouvincourt in the face of strong enemy resistance, however, on Conneau’s right the French XVII Corps appeared to be having more success in their advance towards Corbeny and Craonne. On the left of the BEF, the French Sixth Army advance was held up at Soissons by the demolished bridges and heavy shell fire from the heights between Crouy and Vaurezis. The 55th Division had failed to advance beyond Cuffies and the 56th Division’s attempts to cross the Aisne at Pommiers had also resulted in failure. However, the 14th Division had crossed the river at Vic-sur-Aisne and part of the French IV Corps had completed a similar exercise at Berneuil. This piecemeal success was the first sign of the looming strategic nightmare which would halt the northward advance of the BEF and see the name Chemin des Dames pass forever into French consciousness and become part of Gallic military legend.
Chapter 5
The Left Flank – 4th Division
Everything went more or less calmly till 9.30am when our own guns spotted us in our waterproof sheets, as it was still raining, from the opposite side of the river, and thinking we were Germans, started shelling us with lyddite.
Lieutenant Lionel Tennyson – diary entry 13 September, 1914.
11 Infantry Brigade’s march to the Aisne on 12 September began later than anyone had expected. Breakfast had been eaten at 2.15am and although the initial orders had been for a 3.30am start, the four infantry battalions did not begin their march for another four hours. Movement along the congested roads was not made any easier by the advance units of two Royal Engine
ers field companies bustling past them with their bridging equipment and by the time the 1st Battalion Somerset Light Infantry (1/SLI) halted at Montreboeuf Farm at mid-day most of the battalion felt they had already put in a good day’s march.
The Somersets had begun their day with the loss of their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Swayne. Gazetted second lieutenant in 1885, Swayne had commanded the battalion from 1913. Disembarking at Le Havre on 22 August he and his battalion had joined the BEF in time to take part in General Smith-Dorrien’s stand behind the N43 Le Cateau – Cambrai road. The rigours of the subsequent retreat had clearly taken their toll on the 50-year-old Swayne and his departure on sick leave left Major Charles Prowse in command. The 45-year-old Prowse was an ideal replacement, but unlike his former Commanding Officer, he would not survive the war.
Commanding 11 Infantry Brigade was Brigadier General Aylmer Hunter-Weston. An interesting and somewhat unpredictable individual, he had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1884, and had served in South Africa on the staff and later in command of a unit of mounted engineers. Described as having ‘reckless courage combined with technical skill and great coolness in emergency’, the 11 Brigade commander – universally known as ‘Hunter-Bunter’ by the men – was more usually seen on the back of a motorcycle which appeared to be his preferred seat of command.58
Whether George Pattenden ever saw his brigade commander on his motorcycle is not disclosed in his diary but he had good cause to remember 12 September, noting rather despondently that they ‘marched all day passing through several villages’, to arrive at Septmonts at about 5.00pm where he hoped the battalion might have a rest and find something to eat. A rest they were able to take but the expectation of obtaining food was short-lived and before long the exhausted battalions were again on the move, this time heading for Vénizel with the additional weight of another 100 rounds of .303 ammunition per man. Pattenden may well have still been ‘in the dark’ as to their destination but Lieutenant Gerald Whittuck of the Somersets had a much clearer picture as he approached the Aisne valley. ‘Germans were evidently close in front of us as the inhabitants informed us that they had only passed through in the morning’. For Whittuck it was looking more and more likely that they would attempt the crossing of the river that night – an exercise he viewed with some apprehension. The young lieutenant was in temporary command of B Company, his diary recording that they had ‘three quarters of an hour’s halt in the middle of the day, but otherwise were marching all day’. Concerned that, ‘many of the men were suffering with diarrhoea’, he was relieved to reach Vénizel about 8.00pm that evening, rather proudly recording, ‘they stuck to the march wonderfully’.
BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914 Page 8