The growing perils of the current situation were not the fault of Field Marshal French. He had been ordered to cooperate with the French Army by following the wishes of General Joffre, and that was what he was trying to do. Joffre had ordered him north, to take up the long-planned position on the left flank of the French Army, and he had tried to do that as well. What had not been foreseen was the vast open flank between the BEF and the sea on the left- and German pressure forcing the French Fifth Army back on the BEF's right.
The BEF was supposed to protect the left flank of the Fifth Army but who was protecting the left flank of the BEF? Only one weak French Territorial division, the worn-out troopers of Sordet's corps and some of Allenby's cavalry regiments. This was hardly enough to stem the advance of the powerful German First Army now coming down from the north, which, thanks to that growing gap between the BEF and the Fifth Army- a gap now fourteen kilometres (nine miles) wide - was perfectly positioned to split the Allied forces in two. Should that happen, one or other- or both of these forces would be destroyed.
The error lay partly with the French Fifth Army and partly with GQG, and the problems were not only affecting the BEE Lanrezac's retreat was also allowing the German Third Army to push itself forward at Charleroi into the gap between the Fifth Army and General Langle de Cary's Fourth Army on Lanrezac's right, so creating a gap that Lanrezac was desperate to close. Like Field Marshal French, General Lanrezac was far more worried about his right flank and was fully prepared to abandon the British on his left in order to stay in touch with French Fourth Army.
The only answer to the problem lay in close inter-Allied cooperation and the maintenance of a common BEF -Fifth Army Fourth Army front against this developing attack from the northeast. Joffre, the effective generalissimo of the Allied armies, issued no orders to that effect, and sirice the relevant generals were no longer communicating- French and Lanrezac were barely even on speaking terms - this did not happen. In sum, therefore, on the evening of 22 August, the BEF was being abandoned by its allies. Unable to grasp what was happening, either through poor intelligence, a lack of information or an inability to read the situation, Field Marshal French elected to hold his ground along the canal and give battle to the enemy at Mons.
At dawn on the morning of Sunday, 23 August, another misty, rainy morning, Field Marshal French called a corps commanders' conference at Smith-Dorrien's HQ at Sars-la-Bruyère. French was clearly in good spirits, telling his subordinates that 'at most' two enemy corps -four divisions- and perhaps a cavalry division were advancing on the BEF This estimate of the enemy forces was a gross miscalculation. According to Die Schlacht bei Mons, an account of this action published by the German General Staff in 1919, -six divisions attacked II Corps, three and a half divisions attacking the positions of the 3rd Division and two and a half divisions attacking those of the 5th Division; other units engaged Haig's I Corps. Von Kluck had four corps- the IX, III, IV and the II Cavalry Corps- to the BEF's front, a force which together mustered six infantry divisions plus three cavalry divisions. In numbers, the Germans had some 160,000 men with 600 guns compared with the BEF's 70,000 men with 300 guns.
Fortunately, at this time the Field Marshal was blissfully unaware of these odds and was therefore, according to SmithDorrien, 'in excellent form' at his conference on the morning of 23 August, ordering his commanders to prepare for another advance but also to strengthen their outposts and to prepare the numerous bridges on the II Corps front along the canal for demolition - this slight confusion in orders perhaps indicating some doubt over what to do next.
Smith-Dorrien pointed out the inherent weakness of his position along the canal, especially in the Mons salient, adding that he had already issued orders for the preparation of a second defensive line two miles south of Mons. The Field Marshal approved of this arrangement - yet a third alternative plan - and prepared to return to GHQ, which had now moved south to Valenciennes. The opening shots of the Battle of Mons were already being fired as this conference at Sars-la-Bruyère ended, and the sound of artillery and rifle fire could be heard from the north as the field marshal drove away.
The Battle of Mons was not a major engagement. Indeed, by the Western Front standards set only a few weeks later, Mons would hardly amount to a skirmish. It has gained its memorable place in British military history because it was the first British battle of the Great War, and because it was here that the welltrained soldiers of the British regular army - the old BEF - first displayed their traditional tenacity in defence and their superb skill with the .303 bolt-action rifle.
It has frequently been alleged, and there is some truth in the allegation, that the British soldier is not at his best in offensive operations. This may.be due to the fact that the British are not an aggressive nation, or because their small armies have traditionally preferred to fight a defensive battle that goes some way to negate their usual shortage of numbers; as a rough rule, it takes three men to attack a position and only one man to defend it.
However, the traditional ability of the British soldier in defence may have more to do with the British soldier's equally traditional bloody-mindedness. Give the British soldier a piece of ground to defend and he will not lightly give it up - and will charge the enemy a heavy price when he attempts to take it. That has been the case on a hundred bloody fields in the long and glorious tradition of the British Army, and so it was here at Mons on the Belgian frontier on Sunday, 23 August 1914, just three weeks after Britain entered the war.
British outposts on the canal started bickering with German cavalry scouts around 0600 hours. This skirmishing continued for some hours while the German infantry came up and the enemy brought forward their artillery, which started to shell Mons and the British positions in the salient at around 0900 hours. At 1000 hours, when he was returning to his HQ from a visit to the forward positions west of Mons, Smith-Dorrien saw a shell burst on the road in front of his car. German artillery had been pounding Mons for about an hour before their infantry advanced and the fighting then spread around the Mons salient and westward along the canal, British riflemen in cover engaging German infantry in the open while their positions were probed and pounded by the German guns.
The main pressure at first came against the 4th Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment in the salient- where the Germans could not have found a British regiment traditionally less willing to budge. At the Battle of Albuhera on 15 May 1811, during the Peninsular War, Colonel William Inglis of the 57th Regiment of Foot, later the Middlesex Regiment, lay wounded among his soldiers as they fired their volleys into the advancing French, urging them on with cries of 'Die hard, 57th ...die hard'.
'They could not be persuaded they were beaten,' wrote the French commander, Marshal Sault, later. 'They were completely beaten and the day was mine but they would not admit it ... and they would not run.' The British commander at Albuhera in his report of the battle recorded that 'Our dead, particularly of the 57th Regiment, were lying as they had fought, in rows, and every wound was in the front.'
The Middlesex Regiment was ever afterwards known as 'The Diehards', and the men of 1914 were as steady and determined as their ancestors of 1811. The British Offical History (8) records that the Middlesex were offering 'a stubborn resistance' to the German advance and that the German infantry were 'met by a shattering fire from rifles and machine-guns and were seen to suffer heavily'. (9) The German infantry do not seem to have made any attempt to deploy or use fire and movement tactics in an attempt to suppress this fire and move forward. As with the French 'attaque à outrance', this may be a result of a pre-war doctrine which declared that objectives must be taken at any cost and held at any cost, and if lost be retaken by immediate counter-attack. German infantry field instructions, issued in 1906, make this very clear: 'The actions of the infantry must be dominated by this one thought; forward on the enemy, cost what it may ... an uninterrupted forward movement and the desire to get ahead of its neighbours should animate all units in the attack.' (10
) This fact, and the German losses at Mons and elsewhere in 1914, should give the lie to the popular and deeply ingrained belief in many quarters that only the British generals sent their infantry forward across open ground to face decimation by enemy fire.
The Brandenburg Grenadiers from the German 5th Division attacked the well-concealed positions of the 1st Battalion, The Royal West Kents and the 2nd Battalion, The King's Own Scottish Borderers (2nd KOSB) along the canal. The Brandenburgers advanced in solid company formations, presenting a perfect target, and were swept with a fire so intense and so rapid that they believed that only machine guns were being used against them, the soldiers unable to accept that bolt-action rifles could produce such a weight of fire.
In 1914, even the average British infantryman could get off fifteen aimed shots a minute, and most of these soldiers could do far better than that. The German tactic - massed infantry assaults supported by artillery -provided these marksmen with excellent targets. At Mons the German infantry came on 'in solid blocks, standing out sharply against the skyline', and the British infantry, recalling the painful lessons learned fighting the Boers in South Africa, and firing from positions the enemy could not locate, poured a barrage of fire into the German ranks.
This storm of rifle fire sorely dismayed the Germans. The writer Walter Bloem, then serving with the Brandenburg Regiment, recalls his battalion commander that night, lamenting the loss of 'my proud, beautiful battalion ... shot to pieces by the English, the English we laughed at'. Throughout the morning and for part of the afternoon the German infantry continued to come on in solid masses and were shot down in great numbers, not even seeing where this fire was coming from. The German tactic at Mons was both crude and ineffective; it amounted to little more than naked attrition, an attempt to overwhelm the British line by force of numbers, accepting heavy casualties as the price of success.
Nor was heavy rifle fire the only obstacle to the German advance; the British infantry were using their brains in this engagement, another asset of the South African War. The soldiers waited under cover until the advancing Germans were in range and fully exposed before opening fire, and they picked their targets carefully. The British officers and NCOs detailed the better shots in their sections to note the swords and stripes of the German officers and NCOs and shoot them down; men without commanders will hesitate, mill about in the open, and become especially vulnerable. So the slaughter across the canal and around the Mons salient went on, hour after hour, throughout that long summer day, the enemy death roll increased by stubbornness and considerable gallantry.
This fighting went on until evening, the last British units withdrawing from Mons at 1800 hours. The 'Battle of Mons' lasted only about twelve hours, and on the British side involved just one reinforced infantry corps - the two divisions of II Corps, the 5th and 3rd, and the 19th Infantry Brigade. The British Official History notes that the strength of II Corps at Mons amounted to just under 36,000 men, about the same number as Wellington had commanded at Waterloo, ninety-nine years before.
Until his soldiers came under accurate rifle fire, von Kluck had no idea that British troops were in the line at all, and that first blast of musketry came as a distinct shock to both the general and his troops. Then, slowly, as more German troops filtered towards the canal and German guns began to shell the British positions, the fighting spread along the canal to the west and around the salient and British casualties began to mount.
Two of von Kluck's corps, the III and the IX Corps -four divisions, plus a cavalry division- were soon heavily engaged, mainly with Smith-Dorrien's divisions. Haig's I Corps front, which faced the dividing line between the German First and Second Armies, remained quiet, largely as a result of the overall German strategy, which, as described, was designed to keep moving to the west and head for Paris. Throughout the day more German units came up and were sent towards Mons by brigade and battalion, all heading for the bridge at Nimy in the salient.
This should have been more than enough to swamp the British positions but the German troops were not well handled and their tactics were poor. At first they made little use of their advantage in artillery and sent in their infantry virtually unsupported- with predictable results. The carefully concealed and well-deployed British infantry had a clear view of these large German infantry formations advancing on their front and quickly turned the countryside north of the canal into a killing ground.
Being new to battle, inexperienced troops tend to cling together for mutual support; while understandable, this creates a large target for enemy fire. Old soldiers, wiser in the art of staying alive, much prefer spreading out, taking up hidden positions, digging in or going to ground to avoid concentrated fire. The only way the British could be winkled out of these positions was by rooting them out with the bayonet after scouring their ground with artil lery. Both were tried, but separately; the first proved costly for the German infantry but the second gradually became effective. The combination carried the Germans across the canal and into Mons - at a price.
One of the partially correct legends regularly revived about the British Army is that it is always ready to fight the last war. In South Africa the British infantry had learned- the hard way- that, when outnumbered, good infantry, such as the Boers, fought on the defensive, occupied concealed positions, and hit what they aimed at with their rifles.
The lessons taught by the Boers at Spion Kop and the Modder river had not been forgotten. These useful, complementary skills fieldcraft and musketry - were skills that had to be maintained with constant practice. In pre-war years long hours had been spent on the depot rifle ranges, concentrating on rapid fire and accurate shooting, and the results were evident here in the casualties inflicted on the grey mass of German troops, stumbling forward unawares towards the British line at Mons.
Eventually, their ranks thinned by rifle fire from men they could not see, the German infantry faltered- and only then did the balance of the day begin to turn against the British, for German artillery then took over the weight of the battle. Enemy guns were in action from around 0900 hours but the German artillery only came fully into play from mid-morning, when their heavy guns began to probe the British line.
'All at once,' says one British account, 'the sky began to rain down bullets and shells.' At Mariette, five kilometres (three miles) west of Mons, the enemy manhandled two field guns forward and opened fire with high-explosive shell on the Fusiliers defending the canal bridge there. The first shell fell on a house containing a number of Fusiliers who were further confused when, in the midst of this action, a crocodile of Belgian children, making their way home from church, came filing down the road. The Fusiliers stopped firing and the enemy rushed forward to the banks of the canal, from where they could put the bridge defenders under enfilade fire.
The Great War was to become an artillery war- around 60 percent of all British deaths and casualties between 1914 and 1918 would be due to shellfire- and if the shelling at Mons was trifling compared to the later bombardments at Ypres or the Somme it was still bad enough for troops that were not yet accustomed to it. It was the guns and not German infantry attacks which finally drove the British out of the Mons salient and back from the canal, where their line was anyway too long and their numbers too few.
This withdrawal began at around 500 hours, after six hours of heavy fighting. The British battalions in the salient - the 4th Middlesex, the 4th Royal Fusiliers, the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers, the 2nd Royal Irish - were engaged by a full German division. Farther west, pressure was building up along the canal until the defending battalions blew up the vital bridges at Nimy, Jemappes and Mariette and fell back, company by company, to the position Smith-Dorrien had prepared two miles behind Mons.
The German units attacking along the canal had been held off without great difficulty, but once the salient had gone the entire canal position could be outflanked. German strength was steadily increasing in the early afternoon, and Smith-Dorrien had no reserves to put into the line. T
he Germans had more and heavier artillery and a greater number of troops; sooner or later they would cross the canal, turn his flank and trap the battalions in Mons. Before that could happen, he had to withdraw.
Fortunately for the BEF, General Horace Smith-Dorrien- and his troops - knew their business. The 4th Royal Fusiliers, the forward battalion defending the bridges inside Mons, withdrew first, blowing the bridges before they fell back. Then the whole of the British line, starting on the right and shifting steadily left- or west- began to pull back, again after destroying the bridges on the battalion fronts. At Jemappes, just west of Mons and Mariette, a mile farther west, the first demolition charges failed to detonate. Therefore, while some infantry sections stayed in position, keeping up a steady fire to hold the Germans back, Captain T. Wright of the Royal Engineers crawled back to replace the detonators at the Mariette bridge. Captain Wright was severely wounded on his first attempt but tried again, winning the Victoria Cross for his efforts, but still failing to destroy the bridge. At Nimy, Lieutenant M. J. Dease and Private S. F. Godley of the 4th Royal Fusiliers won the Victoria Cross for manning two machine guns and holding off the enemy while their company withdrew. At Jemappes, another sapper, Lance Corporal G. E. Jarvis, aided by a private soldier, worked under the bridge for over an hour to place fresh explosive charges and gained a well-earned VC when the bridge collapsed.
The Old Contemptibles Page 15