BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914

by Jerry Murland

  The 2nd Battalion Welch Regiment, mistaking the Gloucesters for the enemy, then charged and two of the Gloucesters were bayoneted. To add insult to injury, they then opened fire on the unfortunate Gloucesters again! Presumably after apologies all round the advance continued up towards the Chemin des Dames but failed to make any ground, Hyndson’s only comment being, ‘after a good deal of not knowing what to do, we got orders to retire’. The general referred to could only have been Herman Landon who was commanding 3 Brigade at the time. Thus the young Second Lieutenant had taken part in two attacks on the Chemin des Dames, been fired upon by both the Germans and his own side and remarkably, remained unscathed. Readers will not be at all surprised to hear that he ended the war intact and with the ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest. That night Hyndson sheltered under a waterproof sheet with Arthur Harding, ‘having supped off biscuits and jam’.

  Darkness saw the hard-pressed units of the 1st Division digging in along a line which ran along the Chemin des Dames from a point juat under two miles east of the Cerny crossroads, with its right flank in touch with the French Moroccan Division of XVIII Corps. It then skirted south of the sucrerie and headed southwest to a point where it crossed the high ground north of Mont Faucon and on into the Chivy valley. Here it linked up with the line held by units of the 2nd Division at the southern end of the Beaulne spur.

  After a heavy bombardment the sucrerie had been reoccupied by the Germans and the abandoned guns – rendered unusable by the British – had been limbered up and removed. As dusk fell 3 Infantry Brigade pressed forward in the gap between Haking’s 5 Brigade, Lieutenant Charles Paterson reporting that B and C Companies of the South Wales Borderers had reached the ridge but after being fired upon by outposts, had retired after losing the two remaining companies in the dark! Haking, we know, retired after his advance with 5 Brigade and Colonel Northy’s half battalion of 1/KRRC, after stumbling around in the dark looking for 3 Brigade, did likewise.

  We must now return to the plight of the Cameron Highlanders and the Black Watch and the German counter attack on the left flank. As 1 Brigade fell back from the factory the Camerons and Black Watch fought a desperate fighting withdrawal until they reached the shelter of the woods north of Vendresse whilst smaller parties worked their way down the Chivy valley. But one party of some sixty Camerons under the command of Major Hon Alfred Maitland, stubbornly hung onto the ground they had taken at Blank Mont.192 Seriously short of ammunition they resorted to collecting rounds from the dead and wounded before they were forced to withdraw leaving Maitland dead behind them.

  Devotion to duty was clearly very much to the fore amongst the ranks of the Cameron Highlanders on that shrapnel-torn ridge. Lieutenant James Matheson was badly wounded during the fighting in the morning and he was carried to a place of safety by Private Ross Tollerton. After the battalion had retired Tollerton had returned to Matheson to take him down to the dressing station but found himself and his wounded officer effectively cut off by advancing Germans. For three days Ross Tollerton – wounded in the head, back and hand – remained with the stricken Matheson before he was able to carry him down to Chivy. His award of the Victoria Cross was richly deserved.

  The Cameron Highlanders had been all but decimated in the fighting of 14 September, only 6 officers and 200 men answered their names that evening at roll call. Writing to his father on 24 September whilst aboard the hospital ship SS Asturias, Captain Lord James Thomas Stewart Murray reflected on the Cameron Highlander’s attack and their casualties:

  ‘We were ordered to attack across an open plateau, exposed to the most awful shell fire. My company was the leading one, and suffered most severely. We went into action with 5 officers and 221 men, the roll call after the battle showed no officers and 86 men, I fear Mackintosh, Alastair Murray (Polmaise) and Hector Cameron193 are all gone, Iain Maxwell (Lovett’s nephew) was severely wounded, and I myself slightly. My Company Sergeant Major was killed. I felt his loss very much, as we had done 10 years’ service together continuously in the same company. Part of the Black Watch (who were on the right) and most of my company got almost as far as a sugar factory held by the enemy, only to be beaten back with tremendous losses.’194

  As the fighting around Cerny ebbed and flowed, von Zwehl, the German VII Reserve Corps commander, ordered a counter attack on the British left flank to divert some of the pressure away from the hard pressed 27 Reserve Brigade. Three battalions and two machine-gun companies from 25 Reserve Brigade launched their attack at 10.00am with the intention of driving a wedge between Haig’s two divisions. This attack was met by 1/SWB and the 2/Welch with assistance from 113/ and 46/Batteries and from all accounts the German attack appears to have been stopped very effectively by the two 3 Brigade battalions. Von Zwehl in his account of the engagement admitted to heavy casualties:

  ‘One battalion had to retire with heavy losses. The remains of it assembled under the steep slope, south of Courtecon. The other two battalions were compelled to give up their positions, as the companies had got thoroughly mixed up … They assembled on the reverse slope between Malval Farm and Courtecon. The brigade commander was mortally wounded.’195

  It was during this engagement that Lance Corporal William Fuller of 2/Welch won the second Victoria Cross of the day for carrying a wounded officer, Captain Mark Haggard, a nephew of the novelist Henry Rider Haggard, to safety. Sadly Haggard died from his wounds the next day.196 As had happened elsewhere, once the mist cleared the British gunners were able to bring down a substantial bombardment on the Chemin des Dames. Watching from the relative safety of a wood, Charles Paterson, the South Wales Borderers’ adjutant, felt the Germans were not getting it all their own way as he watched, ‘swarms of Germans on the ridge, rather massed. Our guns open on them at 1,800 yards, and one can see a nasty sight through one’s glasses. Bunches of Germans blown to pieces’.

  There was a more sombre attitude amongst the men of the Cameron Highlanders and the Black Watch. 1st Division casualties from the fighting on 14 September amounted to over 3,500 officers and men and many of these were from the two highland regiments. The Cameron Highlanders alone lost some 600 officers and men and amongst the casualties suffered by the 1/Black Watch was their commanding officer, 44-year-old Adrian Grant-Duff, Major Lord Stewart Murray and Lieutenants Cumming, Don and Boyd.197 Six other Black Watch officers were wounded along with 40 other ranks killed, 112 wounded and 35 missing.

  Lieutenant Hon Gerard Freeman-Thomas, was the only officer killed in the 1/Coldstream but ten others, including John Ponsonby, were wounded along with 343 other ranks, many of whom were posted as missing.198 Edward Bulfin reported 41 officers and 926 NCOs and men killed, wounded or missing from 2 Brigade, of these the Royal Sussex lost five officers killed, including the commanding officer, Ernest Montresor and four other officers wounded. Eleven other ranks were killed; seventy-nine wounded and 114 were still missing by nightfall, many of whom were wounded and still lying out on the battlefield. Amongst the Sussex dead was 25-year-old Sergeant George Hutson of B Company.199 Hutson competed for Great Britain in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics winning a bronze medal in the 5,000 metres and a team bronze in the 3,000 metre-race.

  The Loyals suffered badly in their advance to the sucrerie and reported 78 other ranks and 12 officers killed, wounded or missing.200 Included amongst the dead was their commanding officer, Major Walter Lloyd, who was only in his third day of command after the death of Colonel Guy Knight at Priez on 11 September.201 There is no accurate figure for the number of men wounded or missing from the battalion but from the war diary we know casualties were, ‘very heavy indeed’. The officer casualties in 2/KRRC were eight killed and missing – of which only two were recovered for burial – and seven wounded, which together with the 306 other ranks killed wounded or missing, represented a sizeable proportion of the battalion.

  Initially the wounded were brought down to dressing stations which had been established in the Mairie at Vendresse and at the crossroads south of Ve
ndresse near La Mal Bâtie Farm. But these two aid points were completely overwhelmed early on in the morning by the sheer numbers of wounded men flooding down from the fighting on the Chemin des Dames. Consequently Vendresse Château, belonging to the Comte de la Maisonneuve, was taken over by 3/Field Ambulance and a little further south at Moulins, 1/Field Ambulance established itself in a cluster of buildings which were sheltered from shell fire by the high ground above. 2/Field Ambulance originally set up its dressing station in a farm near Oeuilly but shell fire soon encouraged a rapid move south of the river to Villers, where they established themselves in the château and local Mairie. It was not long before the relatively secure Villers became the divisional collecting station. Close to the firing line the advanced dressing stations – which in many cases were combined with regimental aid posts – were at Beaulne, Troyon, Chivy and Paissy.

  2/Field Ambulance originally set up its dressing station in a farm near Oeuilly but shell fire soon encouraged a rapid move south of the river to Villers, where they found a more secure base in the château and local Mairie. It was not long before the relatively sheltered Villers became the divisional collecting station but a crisis point was reached on 15 September when the numbers of wounded pouring into Villers were getting beyond the available resources of the field ambulance staff. An appeal to the French for assistance resulted in twenty motor ambulances and drivers arriving the next day to move wounded to Fère-en-Tardenois and Bazoches. This was the first instance in which British wounded had been transported by motor ambulance – as Brereton said of the occasion, ‘It was not quite a red letter day for the RAMC which was to come on the 20th when motor ambulances were first issued to all field medical units’.

  Reflecting on the day’s events, Lieutenant Charles Paterson was thankful that he and his friends in the battalion had, ‘not yet taken a knock’, but with 220 casualties sustained in one day’s fighting and the German Army entrenched in front of him, he knew, ‘there was lots more to come’.

  Chapter 10

  Trench Warfare

  The shrapnel we don’t care a damn about, but this other brute seems to forge its way through anything making a deafening explosion with a sort of black yellow cloud.

  Major Bernard Gordon Lennox – describing the effects of a ‘Jack Johnson’

  The heavy British casualties sustained on 14 September 1914 may be regarded as the brutal backwash to the wave of optimism which had been expressed in GHQ Operational Order No.24 the previous day. On 15 September Douglas Haig and William Pulteney were ordered to consolidate their positions but Smith-Dorrien was instructed to continue the attack with his II Corps. In reality the two divisions of II Corps were in no position to maintain their attack on 15 September, particularly in light of the lack of effective artillery support which had been a feature of the previous day’s offensive; in fact it wasn’t until 19 September that any replacements for the 18-pounder artillery pieces lost at Le Cateau began to arrive. On 14 September the 3rd Division had only just managed to stem a German counter attack and Fergusson’s 5th Division had made very little headway on the Chivres spur. The complete lack of progress by Fergusson’s division on 15 September together with the withering barrage of shell fire which descended on the whole BEF frontage, finally convinced a wavering Sir John French that the German retreat was over. Operational Order No.26, issued by GHQ at 8.30pm on 15 September, effectively signalled the beginning of positional warfare on the Aisne.

  On either flank of the BEF the French armies has reached similar conclusions. German reinforcements had successfully seen off any ambitions the French armies may have had of breaking through. On 14 September the French XVIII Corps under General de Mas-Latrie had lost Craonne and Craonnelle and to the west Boëlle’s IV Corps had failed to turn the flank of von Kluck’s First Army at Nampcel. Whilst deadlock looked almost certain it was vital to hold the Germans on the Aisne if the possibility of turning their flank west of the Oise was to become reality. As one might expect, such a move had not by-passed German thinking at OHL. Eric von Falkenhayn, who had succeeded von Moltke on 15 September 1914 as Chief of the German General Staff, was only too aware that the German right flank was, ‘in the air’ and without any appreciable reserves behind it. With a strategy that, to a certain extent, mirrored that of the French and British, he ordered a series of strong counter attacks along the Aisne front to the west and east of Reims in order to hold the Allied armies and to allow German units to be moved to the west. These attacks fell largely on the British sector.

  It should be said, however, that the perception of ‘permanence’ which characterized the trench warfare of later years was far from present in the minds of the men who now hastily dug their trenches on the Aisne. For those serving along the British line the prospect of an advance to victory was always at the back of their minds, as was the possibility of the war being over by Christmas; the tragedy being that a large proportion of those harbouring such optimism would be dead or wounded by Christmas, and not as they hoped, back in England. A prophecy of what was to come can be found in the pages of the Official History of 1914 – albeit written in retrospect – when Sir James Edmonds offered the ‘recipe’ for trench warfare which evolved on the Aisne and which would become familiar to the soldiers on both sides of the front line for the next three and a half years:

  ‘Artillery fire, though intermittent, never ceased for long. By day, sniping made it impossible to move about or to work except under cover; constant vigilance was required to detect enemy infantry attacks in good time. Night was livelier even than day, and was made almost as bright at times by the enemy’s flares and light balls; but during darkness working parties and supplies came up and reliefs were carried out.’202

  Trenches were hardly a new phenomenon in warfare, Brigadier General Aylmer Haldane had, ‘a good deal of experience of a campaign of this nature’, when he had been attached to the Japanese Army as an observer in Manchuria in 1904. Haldane felt that trench warfare was bound to have been visited sooner or later on Europe, given, ‘the huge forces placed in the field by both sides and the limited frontage for deployment’. The French were so opposed to trenches and all that they stood for, that during the Battle of Charleroi, when General Charles Lanrezac had ordered his corps to entrench along the Sambre, many chose to ignore the order. Trenches contravened the spirit of élan which underwrote the French military doctrine of avance, no better expressed than by a young French officer in the 33rd Infantry Regiment called Charles de Gaulle:

  ‘Everywhere, always, one should have a single idea: to advance. As soon as the fighting begins everybody in the French Army, the general in command, the officers and the troops have only one thing in their heads – advancing, advancing to the attack, reaching for the Germans. And running them through or making them run away.’203

  Naturally the Germans did not expect a situation to arise where positional warfare would be necessary since the Schlieffen Plan envisaged a complete victory in the west within forty days. They had, however, taken into consideration the material requirement for dealing with the French and Belgian forts. Unwittingly their arsenal of heavy siege batteries, searchlights, grenades and periscopes, all designed for the reduction of fortress defences, had in fact equipped them for trench warfare and they diverted these resources to the Aisne with some alacrity. On 14 September, the first trainload of heavy batteries and equipment arrived on the Aisne from Maubeuge.

  Thus, when the Germans stood their ground on the Aisne and dug themselves in along the high ground, the French and British had little option but to begin their own parallel line of defences, resulting in the birth of what was to become known as the Western Front; a line of fortifications which would eventually stretch from the Swiss border to Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast. Protection against the heavy calibre, high explosive shell fire, forced the British to dig ever deeper trenches and enter what became known as the ‘Augustan Period’ of field fortifications: narrow trenches with vertical sides, rarely continuous, 18 inch
es to 2 feet wide and often without traverses. Compared to the more elaborate defences which began to appear in late 1914, these holes in the ground were positively amateur. Barbed wire was soon introduced, although the feeble single strand in front of the South Wales Borderers’ trenches was dismissed as, ‘ridiculous’ by Captain Guy Ward. Needless to say both sides soon adapted to living below ground. Lieutenant Arthur Mills, a special reserve officer serving with 1/DCLI, arrived on the front line in October when the ferocity of the early days of the battle had all but died down:

  ‘We passed the morning sitting in the dug-out, reading a few old papers and smoking and talking. By eleven the sun was high enough to peep in over the top of the parapet and warm us, and it all seemed to me a very pleasant, lazy sort of existence. There was no firing except for an occasional “ping” from a sniper the [company commander] kept posted at the corner of the trench, and an answering shot or two from the German side. Rifle fire seemed a matter of tacit arrangement. When our sniper was joined by a friend, or fired two or three times in a minute instead of once every three or four, the German fire grew brisker and life in the trench less tranquil. Our sniper was thereupon reproved by the [company commander] and was silent, whereupon the German fire died down.’204

  Some brigade commanders took the opportunity to ensure all officers were fully versed in the building of trench defences. Whether Hunter-Weston had a notion as to what the future would bring or not, his directive to the 11 Brigade battalions on 30 September instructed commanding officers to go round the whole of their defences with their officers, ‘pointing out for instructional purposes good and bad points of various works’. It was on the Aisne that the hated working parties – drawn largely from men serving in the infantry battalions – were first used to construct new trench lines, the Somersets’ war diary records fatigue parties digging new trenches on 28 September, using, one hopes, tools more suited to the job than the 1908 Pattern Entrenching Tool. The British infantryman’s entrenching tool was quickly found to be totally unsuitable for the task and it was only when the area was scoured for shovels which were distributed to the front line units and consignments of tools were brought up by the engineers that British casualties from the heavy German shelling began to decline. The spade was becoming a weapon of war.