Some thirty minutes after the bombardment began Douglas Miers was wounded by a shell splinter and returned to the HQ cave to have his wounds attended to by Lieutenant John Crocket, the battalion medical officer. Sending word to Captain Allan Cameron – the next senior officer in the battalion – to take command, Miers waited in the cave to hand-over to Cameron officially. His departure for the dressing station at Verneuil was delayed by another salvo of German shells and it was whilst he remained in the shelter of the cave that two large shells scored direct hits, one on top and the other at the entrance. The whole structure was brought down entombing the twenty-nine occupants.
This was another serious blow to the battalion. Not only had Miers and Allan Cameron been killed in the falling rubble but three other officers, John Crocket, Lieutenant Napier Cameron and the battalion adjutant, Lieutenant Kenneth Meiklejohn were also killed along with the Regimental Sergeant Major, George Burt.256 There were four survivors including Bandsmen Rosser and Ursell who escaped unscathed and Corporal Mitchell who was pulled out alive but badly crushed. Command of the battalion fell to Captain Ewen Brodie who was one of only two officers left alive.257 Three days later the new draft of officers and men – sent out to replace the losses of 14 September – arrived with the new commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas McEwen.
With McEwen’s arrival on the Aisne on 28 September the British positions were almost exactly the same as they had been at nightfall on 14 September. The morning had begun with the usual mist, which, on the 2/Coldstream frontage, allowed a small patrol of three men to approach the forward German trenches unseen. Suddenly the mist lifted placing the three men in range of enemy rifle fire, two were shot down and the third escaped with only a graze to return to the safety of the Coldstream front line. Not waiting for darkness to bring in the two wounded men. Private Frederick Dobson crawled out under heavy fire across the exposed ground to find one of the men dead and the other badly wounded but alive. Having applied first aid he returned to his company trenches to collect a stretcher. Accompanied by Corporal Brown the two men successfully brought the wounded man back to safety. Dobson was awarded the Victoria Cross and Brown the Distinguished Conduct Medal for their selfless acts.
Dobson’s VC was the second which had been awarded to men of the Coldstream Guards since war had been declared and the seventh and last to be won on the Aisne in 1914. By early October both sides were exhausted; frontal attacks – no matter how gallantly led or undertaken – had proved ineffectual and the two sides appeared content for the time being to throw high explosive at each other. But unbeknown to the Germans, plans were afoot for the BEF to move to Flanders.
Chapter 12
Ubique
In the afternoon the Rev. Blackburn conducted a short divine service close to our bivouac and amongst the trees. He asked if it was safe as it was exposed, but everywhere was exposed. The enemy opened fire where we were paraded and rounds fell about 100 yards off, the chaplain ducked his head and excused himself.
Major G B MacKenzie – 2/Siege Battery
The artilleryman on the Aisne in 1914 either fought with the Royal Field Artillery, (RFA) the Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) or the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA) which manned the heavy and siege batteries. The RHA was an integral part of the Cavalry Division and with its lighter 13-pounder guns provided artillery support to the cavalry brigades. Unlike infantry regiments, the artillery has no regimental colours; its colours are the guns themselves and are treated with the same reverence. Neither does the artillery have specific battle honours, their battle honours are encompassed in the word ‘everywhere’ or Ubique, an honour unique to the gunners. Ubique is a declaration that wherever there is battle there are gunners.
When war was declared the artillery went to war with three principle weapons in its armoury. The 18-pounder field gun, which initially only fired shrapnel, the field howitzer firing a 35-pound shrapnel or high explosive (HE) round and the 60-pounder gun – or ‘cow guns’ as they were sometimes called – which could throw a 60-pound HE or shrapnel shell. The 18-pounder was adopted for service on Christmas Eve 1904 and despite the early difficulties with the recoil function, the gun proved to be an enormous success; versions of the Mark II were still in service during the Second World War. Successful trials during 1914 with HE rounds saw the gun adapted to fire shrapnel, HE, smoke and gas shells throughout the war, its range was 6,525 yards or 5.9 kilometres. The 60-pounder Mark I field gun entered service a year later in 1905 replacing the older 4.7-inch gun. Weighing in at some 4.5 tons it was at the limit of what could be drawn by horses but its range was significantly longer at 10,300 yards or 9.4 kilometres. The Mark II version of this gun saw service in the Western Desert during the Second World War. Finally in 1908, the 4.5-inch field howitzer – designed by the Coventry Ordnance Works – was taken into service. Weighing 1 ton it had a range of 7,300 yards or 6.6 kilometres.
Whilst gunners referred to all their weapons as ‘guns’ there were essential differences between the field gun and the howitzer which lay in the length and elevation of their barrels. Howitzers had a short barrel and a relatively low muzzle velocity and in order to increase its range the barrel was depressed from its starting point of 45 degrees; the field gun, on the other hand had a longer barrel with a higher muzzle velocity and its barrel was raised from the horizontal to increase its range.
This mix of guns was similar to that of the Germans, although the German High Command had introduced heavy mortars and howitzers in anticipation of reducing the heavily reinforced walls of the bastions which were the French and Belgian forts. Their arsenal of 105mm (4-inch) and 150mm (5.9-inch) howitzers together with the formidable 210mm (8.2-inch) howitzer, which were used to such great effect on British and French troops on the Aisne, settled once and for all the question of which arm would conquer the battlefield during the next four years.
In what must be regarded as a very short-sighted move, the French rejected howitzers almost entirely from their weaponry, opting instead for the quick firing 75mm field gun – the soixante-quinze. In line with their doctrine of L’offensive à outrance, the French High Command saw a mobile artillery corps making such good use of ground that a long-range gun would not be required to get within effective range of an enemy. Howitzers, on the other hand were weapons which suggested concealed positions, accurate and calculated map shoots and deliberate counter-battery firing and accordingly, were largely excluded from French military thinking. Not every French artilleryman agreed with this principle, some continued to warn that the high rate of fire of the French ‘75s’ made it the ideal gun for neutralizing the enemy’s fire but completely useless in knocking out the heavy batteries deployed against it. Charles Deedes, a British staff officer with GHQ thought the French guns, ‘looked like toy cannon when compared with our splendidly horsed and heavier 18-pounders’. Fortunately the French hadn’t discarded all their heavy guns, there were still some 300 in service and some of these were soon in action on the Aisne and elsewhere.
The control of British artillery on the battlefield was, in theory, the responsibility of the divisional Commanders Royal Artillery (CRA), but in effect they had little actual control over their guns. Supported by a small staff and a brigade major, some CRAs were used by divisional commanders purely as administrators whilst others were used more as a channel of control putting into effect divisional orders for the deployment of guns. In 1914, artillery was still seen as an accessory to the tactics employed by the infantry, there was no conception of the CRA being a partner in the planning of operations. Moreover, there was no centralized control of artillery in early 1914 beyond that of the divisional structure; the artillery fire plan, which was to become such a crucial element in future battles, was not part of the planning process. Whilst this rather blinkered control of a division’s guns may have worked well in the past when gunners were in close proximity to the infantry, on the Aisne the shortcomings created by poor communication with the infantry, particularly by batteries w
hich were forced to come into action some distance from their targets, were quick to surface.
Even during the advance from the Marne the lack of co-ordination between infantry and artillery had, on numerous occasions, resulted in ‘friendly fire’ episodes which unfortunately continued to bedevil the British on the Aisne. On 13 September, for example, the 4th Division war diary records a complaint from 11 Brigade – timed at 11.42am – that the Rifle Brigade was being fired upon by the division’s guns and the next day Lieutenant Arthur Griffith and his section of 71/Battery guns at La Cour de Soupir Farm was fired on by his own battery! Friendly fire was a phenomenon which even Jock Marden complained about in his diary on 18 September: ‘Why don’t gunners have telescopes or field glasses?’ he asked, ‘then perhaps they wouldn’t shell their own side so much!’ Despite Jock Marden’s sarcasm, however, which was undoubtedly shared by many infantrymen, the gunners were learning quickly and by the concluding weeks of the campaign there was more evidence of the allocation of artillery zones being used in an effort to tie each brigade of guns to a specific frontage. This development went some way to reducing the incidents of ‘friendly fire’ and introducing a fire plan discipline.
The decentralization of control over artillery was but one of a number of features which was reflected in the British artillery manual – Field Artillery Training 1914 – a volume which had numerous failings within its pages, not least of which was its attempt to reflect the dual purpose of the British Army of 1914 – that of Imperial police force and potential European partner in a continental war. This inability to completely define the form of warfare in which it envisaged the artillery to be engaged was not apparent in the French and German tactical manuals. In both cases the tactical doctrine was clearly defined – there was little doubt in the minds of French and German military planners where the next war would be fought, or indeed against whom! But here again there were differences between the two. Whereas the German Drill Regulations for the Field Artillery recommended concealed positions and the use of indirect fire control by observers, the French – as we know – were in favour of a more direct method of fire control by placing their batteries out in the open and close to their infantry where the targets could be identified by the gun teams themselves.
The lack of a clear tactical doctrine in the British manual and its vague references to ‘positional warfare’ and the ‘war of movement’ did little to educate artillery officers and merely drew attention to the great debate on the employment of artillery on the battlefield taking place in military circles in Britain at the time. In general, the spirit of the 1914 regulations leant towards the French belief that batteries should take up their firing positions in the open so as to give continuous direct fire to the infantry. Unfortunately on the Aisne the opportunities where this was possible were few and far between and where battery commanders were able to get their guns forward, casualties amongst the gunners tended to be high. It was not uncommon for a battery to cross the river and be unable to find a suitable position from which to come into action and subsequently to retire. All too frequently guns were withdrawn from exposed positions having not fired a single round.
A case in point was XL Brigade which reached the pontoon bridge at Vailly at dawn on 14 September and crossed over to the village to wait for the infantry to clear the high ground. Finding the steep hillsides thickly wooded the XL Brigade batteries could not locate any suitable gun positions or observation points:
‘We hunted everywhere for targets and positions and although we were under intermittent rifle and gunfire, it all seemed to come out of the blue. Later on in the morning the Infantry Brigadier told the colonel that the enemy were getting round to our left and we must clear out back across the river and try and find positions to support the infantry from there.’258
It was very much the case in 1914 that the three arms – cavalry, infantry and artillery – each saw their role in isolation of the other and the principle of co-ordination between the three elements was not one which was generally considered to be of importance. Consequently any interaction between fire and movement was lost in the failure to formulate an agreed doctrine of strategic and tactical ideology. All this was to come later.
Without doubt the campaign on the Aisne produced a new set of difficulties for the gunners who found themselves ascending a steep learning curve of development. Not only were the 18-pounder field guns found to be woefully short of range but even after the crossing of the river had been successfully negotiated and the infantry were dug in on the slopes of the spurs, the guns were still struggling to reach the German positions. Alexander Johnston’s diary records his frustrations on this subject:
‘The German observation posts are extraordinarily good: directly there is any movement anywhere they shell the place at once … one can see them building redoubts and trenches about 1,000 yards away. But they are pretty well out of range of our artillery who therefore cannot stop them, while if we endeavour to do so we get shelled to blazes at once.’259
A few days later on 19 September Johnston was again watching the Germans, this time moving across his front towards 4 Brigade. ‘We could do nothing ourselves but as the Germans were very conspicuous on the hill I should have thought our gunners could have done something, however, they did not’. Unfortunately for Johnstone and 7 Brigade, beyond the river on his frontage there were few suitable sites where batteries could be brought into action as these were generally overlooked and under direct observation. It was only the 60-pounder heavy batteries which could reach the enemy guns from the southern heights above the river. The 48/Heavy Battery guns could reach the traffic running along the Chemin des Dames, ‘sometimes we got a shot off at enemy ammunition wagons on the move, or traffic on the long road running east and west; at about 10,000 yards range we stopped the traffic’.
The 3rd Division artillery brigades in particular were handicapped by the width of the Aisne valley opposite Vailly which, together with the lack of cable and telephones for forward observation, made artillery support a logistic nightmare, a factor perhaps not always fully appreciated by the infantryman under enemy shell fire. However, where the guns were able to be brought forward they were often very effective in supporting the infantry. Battery commanders such as Wilfred Ellershaw of 113/Battery did not shy away from carrying out their duties according to Field Artillery Training 1914. He would have been very much aware of the infantry’s expectation that batteries should be positioned well forward, an expectation which dated back to the deployment of guns in the South African War. Indeed, the only gunner Victoria Cross of the campaign was won by Bombardier Ernest Horlock of 113/Battery. On 14 September the battery was under the orders of 3 Infantry Brigade and had unlimbered with 46/Battery in a quarry south west of Vendresse near Chivy. The morning was misty and the fighting confused as the infantry struggled to climb the spurs towards the Chemin des Dames. On being ordered uphill, the battery commander, Major Wilfred Ellershaw, observed a German attack developing and engaged it with shrapnel fire at a range of some 900 yards. The battery at once came under heavy counter-fire from German gunners, and despite being twice severely wounded, Horlock continued to aim his gun and remained at his post.
There had already been a classic but very costly example of this tactic at Le Cateau just over two weeks previously. At Le Cateau on 26 August the 5th Division batteries were positioned within battalion lines and while the support they gave the infantry with their direct fire was effective, they were eventually overrun and over thirty guns were lost. Bravery there might have been that day – four gunner Victoria Crosses were won on Suffolk Hill – but the losses in guns and men had severe repercussions for the 5th Division infantry attack on the Aisne. In contrast 108/Heavy Battery was positioned east of Reumont out of sight of the main battle on the reverse slope of the hill and had its fire directed by an observer placed further forward on the Montay spur.
As one might have expected after the first two days of fighting on the Aisne, when the tw
o sides began to dig defensive lines, artillery commanders tended to switch their tactics to indirect fire from more concealed positions which demanded the use of Forward Observation Officers (FOO) – linked to the battery by telephone communication where possible. Some divisions were better placed than others to establish telephone lines. The 3rd Division telephone equipment was in such a bad state of repair when it arrived on the Aisne that most batteries had to fire in the open unavoidably placing the guns under direct observation. Paul Maze, a French interpreter attached to Gough’s cavalry, came across the results of such folly on his way to Vailly:
‘Immediately beyond the village of Chassemy the shattered remains of one of our batteries stood in front of a wood under full observation from the enemy, holding the heights on the north bank of the river. Every gun and limber had been pulverized by their fire, and judging by the number of men lying about, few of our gunners had escaped.’260
Where batteries were forced to seek concealed positions without the benefit of telephone connection to an observation point, lines of gunners were used to pass messages to the batteries and it was only by 18 September that enough cable was found for one 3rd Division battery to establish a telephone link to its FOO.
Lessons were certainly being learned quickly – even amongst the French gunners. Jack Hay’s diary described an occasion when he was at a French ‘75’ battery observation post near Lassigny in the Sixth Army sector:
BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914 Page 22