The Old Contemptibles

by Robin Neillands

  The path of the German armies in 1914 was marked by atrocities, the shooting of civilians and the wilful destruction of towns and villages. Hostages were taken, collective punishments imposed and fines levied on the civilian population, either for their having had the temerity to oppose the German advance or for no reason but the need to create terror. The fruits of this policy can be seen to this day in the towns and villages of eastern Belgium. On 21 August the Germans shot 211 civilians in the village of Andenne near Namur and burned the village to the ground. On the same day, another fifty Belgian civilians were murdered in the village of Seilles. On 22 August, German soldiers looted and burned the town of Tamines where- according to the existing memorial in the town cemetery- 384 men, women and children were massacred, some by firing squad, others with the bayonet. Two days later, at Dinant, no fewer than 612 civilians were done to death in the streets. These events are only the major atrocities. The shooting of men, women and children went on in every hamlet, village, town and city as the German armies surged into Belgium and northern France.

  The German excuse for this barbaric behaviour was that francs­tireurs, irregulars, descendants of those lone riflemen who had harassed the German advances in 1870, had been at work in Belgium and thus had brought down reprisals on their towns and villages. Even if this were true- and the evidence is scanty- it is hard to accept that the actions of a lone peasant armed with a rook rifle can justify the slaughter of hundreds of innocent people. The truth is that under the constant time pressure of the Schlieffen Plan the German generals intended to stamp out anything or anyone that delayed their advance, and did so by the naked application of terror.

  These atrocities were not isolated incidents perpetrated by undisciplined or drunken troops but the result of orders issued by the army commanders. General von Bulow ordered the shootings in Andenne and the taking of hostages in Namur. Von Kluck was implicated in the murder of Belgian civilians in Vise and General Max von Hausen, commander of the Third Army, was actually present when his soldiers carried out the massacre at Dinant. (2)

  The Kaiser's much vaunted Officer Korps was implicated in mass murder at the highest level - and no action was taken to bring the culprits to book or curb their behaviour. Their conduct destroys many of the arguments against British involvement in the war and provided the Entente powers with considerable propaganda, not least in the USA. After this advance through Belgium the German military machine - and the political will that drove it - was seen as a threat to civilized rule in western Europe. The Germans had to be resisted and the Belgians paid a terrible price for the tenacity of their resistance.

  The Germans needed to destroy the Belgian defences along the River Meuse, which, though not so numerous as those in eastern France, were still extremely strong. The first obstacle to the German advance was the fortress cities of Liège and Namur. Liège, the most easterly fortress, stood on a hill on the left bank of the Meuse and was protected by a ring of twelve forts constructed from 1880 onwards. Liège was regarded in military circles as the finest fortified position in western Europe, and for the Schlieffen Plan to work it had to be taken quickly. Liège was therefore attacked by six infantry brigades supported by special siege artillery, a force detached for the purpose from General von Bulow's Second Army and commanded by General Otto von Emmich.

  The Kaiser and the German High Command had hoped that the Belgians would either submit to their first demands for a free passage across Belgium into France or, if pressed, put up only token resistance. Anticipating a rapid surrender, and reluctant to slow their advance with a ponderous siege train, von Bulow's army had therefore left its heavy artillery behind. This included Skoda 305mm (12-inch) mortars and Krupp 420mm (16.5-inch) cannon, the largest guns then in service anywhere, massive ordnance fully capable of reducing the Liège defences to rubble. Without these guns, the first German attempt to take Liège took the form of an infantry assault supported by field artillery. This attack went in on 5 August and met with a crushing reverse.

  King Albert, the Belgian monarch, was determined to defend his tiny kingdom against any aggressor, and when the German armies crossed the frontier the Belgian Army put up a stout resistance. The light German field guns did little damage to the Liège forts and when they advanced to attack on 5 August the German infantry were met with machine-gun and rifle fire and a deluge of shrapnel from the Belgian guns. 'They made no attempt at deploying', wrote a Belgian officer later, 'but came on line after line, shoulder to shoulder until, as we shot them down, the dead and wounded were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask the fire of our guns.' (3)

  This first attack was broken off at dusk but at midnight Major­ General Erich Ludendorff took charge of the 14th Infantry Brigade and ordered a renewal of the assault on Liège at dawn on 6 August. This attack was driven home in spite of losses, and by mid-afternoon on 7 August the German brigades had penetrated the line of forts and entered the city. The Belgian field army then fell back to take up fresh positions in front of Louvain, but the garrisons of the Liège forts continued to hold out. They were still holding out five days later, on 12 August, when the great German siege guns arrived.

  The bombardment of the eastern forts began that afternoon. Twenty-four hours later three of the forts had fallen, shattered by shells, and by the following day all the forts east and north of the city were in German hands. The guns were then dragged through Liège to engage the western forts. On 17 August, the last of the Liège forts, Fort Loncin, was taken. With the fall of Liège, the advance of the German Second and Third Armies down the Meuse towards Namur could begin.

  The German juggernaut began to roll forward again, its way marked again by the bodies of dead civilians and burning Belgian towns. These latest crimes culminated in the sacking and burning of the university city of Louvain on 25 August, an act of savagery and vandalism unparalleled until that time. Five days earlier, on 20 August, von Kluck's First Army had entered Brussels and the Belgian Army fell back towards the port of Antwerp and its strong defensive outworks. For the next three days the divisions of von Kluck's First Army marched through Brussels, the citizens closing their ears to the sound of the German bands and the chanting of the marching infantry; the rear elements of the First Army were still in the city when their advance units ran into the BEF at Mons on 23 August.

  Meanwhile, Field Marshal French's force had started landing in France on 9 August and, having been railed to the north and assembled around Maubeuge and Le Cateau, was marching towards the Belgian frontier to take up its designated position on the left- or western - flank of the French Fifth Army.

  The reception accorded to the BEF at this time was little short of rapturous. Crowds flocked to the quaysides and lined the roads to watch the British soldiers come ashore and march to their camps, offering fruit and bottles of wine, begging for souvenirs; within hours of landing most of the private soldiers were without their cap badges and brass regimental shoulder tags. Lord Kitchener had distributed a written order to the troops, instructing that it should be pasted into every soldier's paybook before they embarked. The order concludes:

  Be invariably courteous and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property and always look on looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome and be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new situation you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations and while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.

  The last few lines were wishful thinking, as Lord Kitchener was probably well aware. The ladies of France were eager to meet these English soldiers and vice versa; inevitably one thing led to another and a good time was had by all.

  'I believe we were the first infantry battalion to enter Rouen,' wrote Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusilier
s, ‘and the inhabitants gave us a wonderful reception and cheered us all the way from the docks to our billets in a convent. On arrival at a new station we pre-War soldiers always made enquiries as to what sort of a place it was for booze and fillies. If both were in abundance it was a glorious place from our point of view. We soon found out we had nothing to complain about as regards Rouen. Each man had been issued with a pamphlet signed by Lord Kitchener warning him about the dangers of French wine and women; they may as well not have been issued for all the notice we took of them.’ (4)

  The BEF's assembly at Boulogne and Rouen was complete by 14 August and over the next few days they began to move north via the rail junction at Amiens to concentrate in the area between Maubeuge and Le Cateau. This move was effected by train or route march, but the aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) flew to the airfield at Maubeuge, where four squadrons, with 105 officers, 755 men and fifty aircraft, were assembled by 18 August.

  And so, delighted with their welcome, somewhat hung over, shedding badges, brass shoulder tags and caps, the infantry battalions of the BEF, singing heartily and surrounded by a crowd of young women and children, set off for their position on the Belgian frontier.

  When in position, the BEF would have General Charles Lanrezac's Fifth Army on its right flank but their left flank would be 'in the air' or completely open. Except for General Sordet's three­ division-strong cavalry corps, which had been making a forward reconnaissance into Belgium, and some French Territorial troops around Cambrai, there was nothing between the BEF's left flank and the Channel coast, 115 kilometres (70 miles) west of Mons.

  Field Marshal Sir John French arrived at Boulogne on the evening of 14 August. From there French and his staff drove to Paris, where the field marshal met the President of the Republic, M. Poincare, and the Minister of War, M. Adolphe Messimy. On 16 August they drove to the French Army headquarters, the Grand­ Quarrier-General or GQG, at Vitry-le-François, where French met the French Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre.

  French was clearly much impressed by his first sight of Joffre. Even speaking via an interpreter, he got the impression that the French generalissimo was a man 'of firm mind and steadfast intent, not easily moved from a position he had adopted or an opinion he had formed'. French was quite right in this assessment, though whether such entrenched characteristics are of real bene­ fit in an army commander is rather less certain. French adds that 'History will record him as one of the supremely great commanders', (5) a comment not borne out by later comments or wiser observers.

  Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre was born in the Pyrenees in 1852, one of eleven children of a small-town barrel cooper. His was an unusual background for an officer in the class-conscious French Army of the Third Republic, where Napoleon's pledge - that every French soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his knapsack - had long since been forgotten. As a student in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, Joffre found himself serving a cannon during the siege of Paris in 1871. This experience gave him a taste for the military life and he was commissioned into the artillery, transferring to the engineers before being sent to Indo-China in 1873.

  Joffre spent most of his military career in outlying parts of the French Empire. He took part in the Timbuktu Expedition of 1894 and served for several years in Madagascar, becoming Director of the Engineer Corps in 1904. Needing field command experience, he then spent the years from 1906 to 1910 commanding an infantry division and then an army corps, both in metropolitan France. In 1910 he became a member of the French War Council, and in 1911 Chief of the General Staff, the designated commander-in­chief of the French Army in the event of war. He supported the introduction of three-year conscription in 1913, increased the work being done on the fortifications along France's eastern frontiers and, with the assistance of his intellectual and aristocratic colleague and subordinate General Noel de Castelnau, finalized the details of Plan XVII, introducing the idea of an attack on the German centre through the Ardennes.

  Various traits stand out in Joffre's character. One modern historian has described him as 'a man with immense patience, enormous strength, great courage and few nerves; he was not an intellectual but he had intellectuals in his entourage and he listened to them'. (6) The one aspect of Joffre's character that attracted the greatest amount of comment at the time was his prodigious appetite; he ate gargantuan meals, followed by long siestas, and woe betide any officer or courier who interrupted either of these events, even with a vital dispatch. Alistair Horne has described Joffre as 'a true viscerotonic, a man who thought with his belly rather than his mind' (7)

  Joffre was certainly single-minded. He did not study strategy before the war and showed no interest whatsoever in how the war had been fought after the armistice in 1918. His attention was devoted to the here and now and the immediate future. Joffre's great contribution to the famous victory on the Marne and the survival of the French nation in the early months of the war can be attributed to his possession of some basic military assets, a feeling for the battlefield and a sense of the developing situation- plus a stubborn refusal to panic. When all seemed lost and chaos was reigning, Joffre remained calm. Whether this calm was due to a sense of destiny or his inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation hardly matters now. At the time, Joffre's dour nature and his refusal to let his strategic decisions be swayed by subsequent events saved his country from disaster in the late summer of 1914 and gave it victory on the Marne.

  It is fortunate that French formed a good opinion of Joffre. The two commanders would have to work together and French's orders from Field Marshal Kitchener were somewhat less than helpful on the question of Anglo-French cooperation. The crucial passage came in the fourth paragraph of his instructions: ‘...while every effort must be made to coincide most sympathetically with the plans and wishes of our Ally, the gravest consideration will devolve upon you as to participation in forward movements where large bodies of French troops are not engaged and where your Force may be unduly exposed to. attack. Should a contingency of this sort be contemplated, I look to you to inform me fully and give me time to communicate to you any decision His Majesty's Government may come to in the matter. In this connection I wish you distinctly to understand that your command is an entirely independent one and you will in no case come in any sense under the orders of any Allied general. (8)

  Advice on how the field marshal should follow these conflicting instructions was not provided, and they were to provide the BEF commanders with considerable headaches in the months and years ahead.

  Nor was French's faith in Joffre's judgement of long duration. Indeed, within hours of meeting the French generalissimo Field Marshal French found fault with one of Joffre's opinions, that General Charles Lanrezac, commander of the Fifth Army, was one of the finest officers in the service. French drove directly from Vitry-le-François to Lanrezac's headquarters at Rethel for a meeting that was to affect the BEF considerably in the days ahead. French records that Lanrezac was 'a big man with a loud voice and his manner did not strike me as very courteous.' (9) The field marshal's comment was an understatement; at this first meeting between the two commanders, General Lanrezac was very rude indeed.

  It was 17 August and Lanrezac was a very worried man- with good reason. The French Army was poised to implement Plan XVII, which called for four out of the five French armies, a force totalling around 800,000 men, to surge into Germany across Alsace and Lorraine with the aim of dislocating the German war machine before it could swing into action. Plan XVII was taking shape, but for some days past Lanrezac had been forming the impression that something formidable was building up in the North and threatening his left flank along the Belgian frontier on the rivers Sambre and Meuse. He had passed this worry on to GQG, where his views had been totally ignored.

  This was more than normally worrying, for his left flank was at present 'in the air', as the BEF had not yet arrived, as promised. As noted, the British Army had not mobilized with the French Army on 1 August and ha
d therefore not yet taken up position on Lanrezac's left, so the general felt both let down and fully entitled to be furious. His attitude had historic roots. Like many French officers, General Lanrezac was an Anglophobe and endowed with the common and enduring French notion that French officers- the heirs of Napoleon - were superior to the officers of any other armies and infinitely superior to the officers of the British Army. The exploits of Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Lord Wellington, victor of Vimeiro, Salamanca, Vittoria and Waterloo, were not much talked about at the Ecole Supérieure de la Guerre.

  One must sympathize with General Lanrezac's position at this time. Try as he would, he could not persuade Joffre, or anyone else at GQG, to pay any attention to his fears that the Germans now rampaging across Belgium were intent on encircling his left flank. Joffre had allowed Lanrezac to realign some of his troops along the Sambre, just in case there was some substance in these fears, but Lanrezac had not received any reinforcements for this action and was therefore obliged to thin out his centre in order to strengthen his left, a process known as 'taking ground to the flank' - and that flank should by now have been covered by the BEF This thinning out of his strength reduced his ability to repel any attack from the north, and he was therefore getting steadily more peeved with the still-absent British. As a result, when French and his staff drove into Lanrezac's headquarters on the morning of 17 August, they met a frosty reception. As they got out of their cars, Lanrezac's Chief of Staff, General Hely d'Oissel, greeted them with, 'Well, here you are, and about time too ... If we are beaten, it will be thanks to you.'

  Fortunately, this remark was made in French. Only Henry Wilson and Lieutenant Edward Spears, the British liaison officer with the French Fifth Army, understood it, for Field Marshal French's language skills were extremely limited. In spite of this, French and Lanrezac then withdrew into a side room for a private discussion, only to re-emerge swiftly when they realized that they could not understand each other. The two generals then consulted the war map, while a French staff officer gave an assessment of the situation, including the Fifth Army view that the Germans had reached the River Meuse. French traced the course of the Meuse and, putting his finger on one of the bridges at the town of Huy, he asked Lanrezac, in stumbling French, what he thought the Germans were doing there. Lanrezrac replied that he supposed the Germans 'had gone there to fish'.