The Old Contemptibles

by Robin Neillands

  French did not understand this reply but he caught the tone of it and realized that Lanrezac was being deliberately insulting. The atmosphere in the room became tense, and after twenty minutes Field Marshal French said a brief goodbye and withdrew. 'I left General Lanrezac's headquarters believing that the Commander­ in-Chief had overrated his ability.' (10)

  Spears records this French-Lanrezac meeting as 'a complete fiasco', (11) and it certainly had the most unfortunate repercussions. It was vital that the two armies, Lanrezac's Fifth and the BEF, should cooperate closely in the hard days ahead, but the commanding generals had already formed an unfavourable impression of each other and French had no particular desire to meet Lanrezac again. He hurried on to Le Cateau, where his own headquarters were being set up; there he would be surrounded by his own officers, men with manners, gentlemen who knew more about war than any arrogant French upstart. When he arrived at Le Cateau, still not in the best of spirits, he received some bad news; the II Corps commander and his close friend, Lieutenant General James Grierson, had collapsed and died from a heart attack, another blow to this beleaguered commander.

  Like Henry Wilson, Field Marshal Sir John French was an Ulsterman. He was sixty-two years old in 1914- rather old for a field command -and had never commanded any field force larger than a cavalry brigade. The young French had hoped to be a sailor but, having no head for heights or scaling masts, he left the Royal Navy in 1874, transferring first to the 8th Hussars before moving to the fashionable 19th Hussars. It took money to maintain the expected lifestyle of a cavalry officer and French had none, a chronic problem that eventually got him into debt. He was also very fond of the ladies, maintaining a string of mistresses and marrying twice. On the other hand, he displayed a deep interest in his chosen profession, studied strategy and was a great admirer of Napoleon. French served in India and was with Kitchener in the Sudan in 1885, fighting with distinction at the Battle of Abu Klea. By 1895 he was a colonel and Assistant Adjutant General at the War Office.

  So far his career had followed the path taken by many officers, but he made his name and ensured more rapid advancement when commanding a cavalry brigade during the South African War. French took part in the relief of Kimberley, remained in South Africa until 1902 and was one of the few commanders who returned from that disastrous war with an enhanced reputation. This led to his advancement to the rank of major-general and his appointment to the prestigious Aldershot command.

  Unfortunately, in an age of increasing firepower, General John French's field experience was as a cavalry commander. He had little interest in the other arms of service, and in spite of ample evidence from the Boers that the days of sword and lance were over, French came back from the veldt a vocal advocate of arme blanche (sword and lance) cavalry tactics, regarding with con­ tempt anyone who pressed the advantages of mounted riflemen, infantry tactics and the deployment of new-fangled machine guns. For the next few years, while the lessons of South Africa were gradually being digested, French continued to argue that there was no substitute for sword, lance and the cavalry charge. In 1907 this passion for sharp points and cold steel was to bring him into conflict with his successor at the Aldershot command, Major­ General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien- and this was to pose another problem for the BEF, for in August 1914 Smith-Dorrien was the man chosen by Kitchener to replace General Grierson as commander of II Corps.

  Horace Smith-Dorrien was an infantry officer of considerable experience and known ability. He was also one of the few British officers to survive the massacre at Isandlwana in 1879, when a Zulu impi destroyed the 24th Regiment of Foot - later The South Wales Borderers. Smith-Dorrien was born in Hertfordshire in 1858 and was fifty-six years old in 1914. He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in February 1876, and was commissioned into the old 95th Foot (later the 2nd Battalion, Sherwood Foresters) in January 1877. His first overseas posting was to South Africa for the Zulu War of 1879, and he then served in Egypt under Sir Garnet Wolseley, taking part in the 1882 Arabi campaign. He spent some time in India before being seconded to the Egyptian Army for the Suakin campaign against the dervishes. In that campaign he took part in the Battle of Ginnis, the last occasion on which British soldiers wore their red coats in battle.

  He attended the staff college from 1887 to 1889 and returned to India, where he saw further action in the Tirah campaign of 1897-8. In 1898 he took command of a Sudanese battalion for Kitchener's Nile campaign and fought at the Battle of Omdurman, after which victory he accompanied Kitchener up-river to meet Commandant Marchand at Fashoda.

  Smith-Dorrien's promotions came slowly. By the outbreak of the South African War in 1899 - after twenty-two years' service­ he was only a lieutenant-colonel, commanding the 1st Battalion, Sherwood Foresters. However, in February 1900 he took command of the 19th Infantry Brigade and was quickly promoted to the rank of major-general. Smith-Dorrien saw a great deal of active service in South Africa, where he served with Sir John French, and by all accounts the two men got on well. From 1903 to 1905 he commanded the 4th Division of the Indian Army, and in 1907 he succeeded French at the Aldershot command, a highly prestigious post at the home of the British Army. This was Smith­Dorrien's first posting in the United Kingdom for twenty-seven years, and during it he fell out decisively with Sir John French.

  Smith-Dorrien was noted for his ferocious temper and for taking good care of his men. When he took over at Aldershot in 1907 his first tasks were to cancel the military police patrols around Aldershot town that harassed the men in their off-duty hours and to order the cavalry regiments in garrison to start learning infantry tactics and improve their performance with rifle and carbine. Sir John French took this abrupt departure from his own arme blanche methods as a slap in the face and conceived a dislike for Horace Smith-Dorrien that soon amounted to hatred.

  On leaving Aldershot in 1910, Smith-Dorrien was offered the South African command, but preferred to take over the Southern Command in the UK. Here he became acquainted with Britain's newly formed Territorial Force troops, whom he came to admire for their enthusiasm and intelligence. By now knighted and a lieutenant general, he was still in charge of Southern Command in August 1914 when Kitchener offered him the chance of a field command in France- under Sir John French. Smith-Dorrien was fully aware of French's antipathy towards him- indeed, the entire Army was aware of it- but what was he to do? He was a professional soldier and a fighting man; the only place for a British officer in August 1914 was with the army in France.

  John French provides the classic example of an officer promoted above his level of ability. He had been a good brigade commander in South Africa- where the competition was admittedly not great­ but he peaked at that level. His advocacy of lance and sword in an age of the magazine rifle and automatic weapons was more than short-sighted, and his reaction to Smith-Dorrien's implied criticism in his abandonment of obsolete cavalry tactics was disgraceful. To find the reasons for this- and for why French was allowed to get away with it- it is necessary to look briefly at the military mind.

  The military mind is essentially conservative. It dislikes new and unfamiliar methods, weapons and tactics. It prefers to stick to the old ways, even when advances in technology have clearly rendered those methods and tactics out of date, if not positively dangerous. The horse - that noble steed - had stood the aristocracy in good stead since the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and it seemed churlish to abandon it now simply because someone had invented the magazine rifle. Many senior officers were former cavalry officers; they were reluctant to give up cavalry tactics because cavalry tactics were what they knew and the basis of their professional reputation. But there is no reason to assume that because a man was a cavalry officer he was automatically a fool; the best of them had already realized that while the horse could provide the means of rapid transport to the battle, it no longer had a place on the battlefield. They saw the future of the cavalry in the tactics employed so successfully by the Boers - as mounted riflemen. Sir John French, on the
other hand, regarded the mounted rifleman as an abomination.

  However, it was not French's blinkered approach to modern war which caused the BEF so many problems in 1914; the problems arose from French's character rather than his competence. As the Lanrezac incident illustrates, Field Marshal French was quick to take offence and enjoyed bearing a grudge. He was vindictive, touchy, volatile, indecisive and, when confronted with the German Army in 1914, completely out of his depth. He was also weak willed; he tended to heed the advice of the last man he had spoken to; he was only too willing to listen to Henry Wilson and putty in the hands of Ferdinand Foch.

  The Field Marshal's relations with the French were not helped by the instructions he had received from the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Kitchener. The dichotomy in his orders would have been difficult for any commander to square and the situation was made even more difficult because the Allied generals involved were French and fully determined to bend the British to their wishes. French did not speak French and had no understanding of French methods or intentions; for that he had to rely on Henry Wilson, who was not the best man to ask for impartial advice. It is also probable that French was too old for such a heavy responsibility, far beyond anything he had experienced so far; sixty-two is not the best age to take an army to France and engage the full might of the German Army.

  While awaiting the arrival of his new and unwanted subordinate, French held a conference at Rethel and outlined the current situation, in so far as it was known, to General Allen by, commanding the cavalry division in the BEF, and General Haig of I Corps. Most of the news he had to give came via Henry Wilson or Colonel Victor Huguet, now the French liaison officer at French's headquarters, from the French GQG. The burden of this intelligence was that some five German corps - ten divisions - were about to move across the northern French frontier on a line between Brussels and Givet. In fact this was only a part of the force so deployed, but that the Germans were massing in the north did not seem to be causing Joffre any undue alarm. Nothing ever did, but on this occasion Joffre's chronic calm was leading him into error- and exposing the Anglo-French forces in the north, the BEF and Lanrezac's Fifth Army, to an overwhelming attack.

  On 18 August Joffre concluded that 'The enemy may engage only a fraction of his right wing north of the Meuse. While his centre is engaged frontally by our Third and Fourth Armies, the other part of-his northern group, south of the Meuse, may seek to engage the flank of our Fourth Army.' In making this assessment Joffre appears to have assumed that von Moltke was as obsessed with Plan XVII as he was, and deploying his forces in the north with the sole purpose of taking the French armies in the flank as they pushed to the east. That the Germans were preparing a great thrust, south and west into France from Belgium, had not occurred to him, and any intelligence reaching GQG indicating such a move was simply ignored. Joffre told Lanrezac that the BEF and the Belgians were 'quite capable of dealing with the German forces north of the Meuse and Sambre', an optimistic forecast in view of the forces involved, but for the moment Field Marshal French, informed by this GQG intelligence held to the same opinion and ordered his forces north as soon as they assembled.

  August 20 was a significant day on many sections of the Western Front. On this day the German First Army entered Brussels. RFC patrols reported long columns of German infantry and artillery heading south and west, straight for an area north of Le Cateau, where the British were destined to form up on the left flank of the French Fifth Army. These RFC reports were quickly rejected by Henry Wilson, the Sub-Chief of Staff who was in charge of intelligence at GHQ. Relying on GQG intelligence, Wilson declared that the RFC information was 'somewhat exaggerated ... only mounted troops or jagers are in your area'. Here is another example of wishful thinking; there is no point gathering intelligence if you do not pay attention to what it says.

  Farther south, the French armies pushing into Alsace and Lorraine were met and counter-attacked by the German armies­ the Sixth and Seventh under the command of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. This counter-attack was to have a grave effect on the operation of the Schlieffen Plan, for the German armies were supposed to make a fighting retreat, drawing their opponents east, deeper into the Schlieffen trap. The counterattack happened because the French tactic of 'l'attaque à outrance' did terrible damage to the French forces in the first days of August and presented Rupprecht with an opportunity he was unable to resist. When his guns were carpeting the ground before them with tens of thousands of French dead, it seemed insane to retreat.

  Therefore, from 16 August Rupprecht was bombarding von Moltke with requests that he should counter-attack and move on Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, declaring that the French armies could be equally well contained by an attack - a claim which, though true, was exactly contrary to the Schlieffen Plan. (12) The telegraph wires between von Moltke and Rupprecht grew hot, but on 18 August German Supreme Headquarters (OHL) passed the buck back to Rupprecht. They would neither forbid him to attack nor order him to do so; the decision was up to him.

  Rupprecht's decision can hardly have been in doubt; the Sixth and Seventh German Armies were ordered to stop retreating and prepare for a counter-attack, (13) and that attack too went in on August 20. The 'revolving door' had been stopped and was about to go into reverse. As a result the Schlieffen Plan promptly started to unravel; the French front would start to firm up as her armies, rather than pushing deeper into the trap, were forced to retreat and able to stay in contact.

  On 20 August French reported to General Joffre that the BEF had formed up and was ready to march north towards the Belgian frontier and take up position on the flank of the French Fifth Army. This march commenced on 21 August. On that day the new commander of II Corps arrived, the general Field Marshal French cordially detested - Lieutenant-General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. From then on French found some relief from his other worries by pursuing his long-held vendetta against Smith-Dorrien- so creating one of the great personal tragedies of the war.

  The two men met that day at Bavai; all seemed friendly and the BEF movement forward continued. However, by this time the effects of the German counter-attack in Lorraine and the advance from the Meuse were being felt - on 22 August, Lanrezac's army was being pushed back across the Sambre by the German Second Army and the French Fourth and Third Armies farther south were being driven back by the Germans in the Ardennes. The 'Battle of the Frontiers' was not going France's way; the French armies were in trouble and worse, much worse, was to follow.

  The Schlieffen Plan had always depended on time. Liège - the blocking point on the main German 'axis of advance' down the Meuse valley- fell on 16 August, but Belgian resistance there had put the first crimp in the plan. So too had Rupprecht's decision to counter-attack in Lorraine, an entirely avoidable and unforced German error. The next, totally unexpected obstacle the advanc­ ing German armies would encounter was the 100,000 strong BEF, which appeared in front of the German First Army along the canal at Mons on 23 August.

  The BEF had assembled around Maubeuge, 24 kilometres (15 miles) south of Mons, on 20 August. Orders were then issued for the advance north towards the Belgian frontier, and on that day the RFC and cavalry made their first reconnaissance forays towards Binche. They saw no sign of the enemy south of Louvain, where a large column of German infantry from von Kluck's First Army was spotted by the RFC. Von Kluck also had his troubles and was now obliged to detach two corps - the III Reserve and later the IX Reserve, the equivalent of five divisions - to pen the Belgian Army in Antwerp while the rest of his force marched through Brussels, which was entered on 20 August.

  The Official History (14) describes 20 August at 'as fateful day in many respects', a comment that seems entirely justifiable. As we have already noted, a lot happened on this day, less than three weeks into this war: the Belgian Army retreated to Antwerp, the Germans marched up to Namur in the Meuse valley, and Joffre gave the order for a general advance on the German forces to their front, an instruction that obliged the BE
F on the left of the French Fifth Army- which was in fact already falling back under the pressure exerted by the German Second Army - to advance to the north-east. This meant that while the BEF were marching north towards the German First Army, the Fifth Army was retreating south before the German Second Army.

  Although neither side knew it, this forward action from 20 August set the BEF and von Kluck's army on a collision course; on the other hand, it was possible that von Kluck's army, still edging west in a bid to outflank the Allied line, would pass the left flank of the BEF and offer Field Marshal French the chance for a flanking attack - should the field marshal become aware of the situation. To support and screen the BEF advance, GQG ordered General Sordet's Cavalry Corps to take up position on the left of the BEF while General d'Amade's three Territorial infantry divisions, positioned still farther west, were to push north as well and see what they could find.

  The BEF advance began on the misty morning of 21 August and went well, the troopers of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade entering Mons before noon. There was no opposition in the town but enemy cavalry patrols were spotted by the 9th Lancers and the 4th Dragoon Guards approaching the bridges over the Mons-Condé canal at Obourg and Nimy, while the local peasants described seeing large German forces at Soignies, 16 kilometres (10 miles) north-east of Mons, the previous evening. By that evening the 9th Infantry Brigade were in position west of Maubeuge, 10 miles or so south of the Mons Canal, overlooking Marlborough's battlefield of Malplaquet. That night the BEF outpost line was formed by battalions from two regiments- the Lincolnshire Regiment (10th Foot) and the Royal Scots Fusiliers (21st Foot}, which had fought against the French at Malplaquet in 1709.