by Max Hastings
The BEF marched two hundred miles between Mons and the Marne, averaging four hours’ sleep a night. Three exhausted Irish Guardsmen, literally sleepwalking, shuffled southwards clinging to the belt of their adjutant, Lord Desmond Fitzgerald. On 28 August Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote: ‘Marches are much slower now, but we cover the ground somehow.’ At halts, they cut wire from farm fences to make defensive entanglements, and dug potatoes from the fields with a sense of guilty delight at being licensed to steal. Bizarrely, on 29 August the Grenadiers spent two hours holding a routine pay parade.
And spasmodically they scuffled with Germans. The Connaught Rangers had made a notable contribution to the culture of the war by singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as they first disembarked in France. George Curnock, Daily Mail star reporter, heard the song and mentioned it in a dispatch. The paper’s news editor wrote in his diary: ‘The chief [Lord Northcliffe] has given us orders to boom it, to print the music so that everybody shall know it. He says, thanks to Curnock’s genius, we shall soon have everybody singing it.’ And so they did. But on 26 August the Connaught Rangers had a much less happy experience. They were acting as rearguard when they failed to receive an order to retire; six officers and 280 men were lost, including their colonel, almost all taken prisoner.
On 27 August, 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers suffered even more severely. The unit was commanded by an officer of French descent named Paul Charrier, who three weeks earlier had enthused about the prospect of fighting the Germans, his people’s hereditary foes. North of Etreux, the Munsters fell victim to yet another of the campaign’s communications breakdowns: missing an order to pull back, they were cut off. The Irish soldiers attempted to escape down roadside ditches while a Maxim gun kept the enemy at bay. They were finally cornered in an orchard, where they fought until evening, when the Germans used a herd of cattle to mask their final assault. Four wounded Munsters officers and 240 men were taken prisoner, while ten officers and 118 other ranks were killed – including Charrier, a figure of notable eccentricity who fought wearing a sola topee; he was twice wounded leading counter-attacks before succumbing. Another of the dead was a certain Lt. Awdry, said to have fallen with his sword in his hand, whose brother later achieved an incongruous celebrity as author of the children’s tales of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Elsewhere, driver Horace Goatham’s best mate in his 18-pounder battery put a hand over his horse’s back to mount, and promptly received a bullet through it. Goatham somehow pushed the man onto another horse and whipped up the gun team. After a time, however, his mate slumped in the saddle from loss of blood, then slid to the ground. The gunners were fortunate enough to meet a field ambulance wagon which picked up the wounded man, who reached safety, as others did not. Goatham’s worst subsequent experience came when his battery reached a river where the bridge had been blown. Only a precarious Royal Engineers’ pontoon offered a route southwards, with German shrapnel bursting around it. ‘We had to wait till the shells burst, then gallop like hell over, one gun at a time. We lost one team, blown all over the shop. My off horse got hit, but we got clear. If ever men deserved to be decorated, every manjack of those REs did, for as fast as one got bowled over and fell in the water another would run along the bridge and jump in the [pontoon] boat to replace him.’
A sergeant of the Oxf & Bucks shouted repeatedly during those days, ‘Stick it lads! We are making history!’ If such histrionics read well to posterity, however, they merely exasperated the weary men whom he addressed. Cpl. Bernard Denore of the Berkshires was better pleased when his pal Ginger Gilmore found a mouth organ and staggered along at the head of the company playing tunes ‘despite the fact that his feet were bound in blood-soaked rags … Mostly he played “The Irish Emigrant”. Which is a good marching tune … An officer asked me if I wanted a turn on his horse, but I looked at the fellow on it and said, “No thanks.”’ Others were less unselfish. When the medical officer of the Royal Welch dismounted to attend a wounded man, he asked a passing Cameronian to hold his reins. The man promptly scrambled into the saddle and cantered away, leaving the hapless doctor to continue his own progress on foot.
Horses soon began to go lame in large numbers, many because they needed shoeing, and there were no smithies at hand. Limping and dead animals littered the line of march, along with discarded carts and equipment. Driver Charles Harrison and his mates subsisted chiefly on raw vegetables picked from roadside fields. Several later found themselves in trouble for losing their caps, which slipped off as their heads slumped in sleep, even as they rode. And all the while the retreating army competed for road space with dense columns of refugees, incongruously clad in their Sunday best, because that was what they always wore for leaving their own villages – as some now did at the commencement of a four-year exile.
The manner in which the campaign flooded across France, swamping a large tract of a great country not yet adjusted to war, produced some bizarre encounters. When the Royal Flying Corps headquarters staff found themselves in need of automobile tyres and headlights, on 29 August an officer simply drove to the Daimler showroom in Paris and purchased as many as his vehicle could carry, paying in gold sovereigns from a bulging portmanteau entrusted to him for such purposes. ‘Les anglais sont épatants,’ marvelled the French salesman, shaking his head in admiration for these ‘wonderful’ people. The jumble of ancient and modern was illustrated by the experience of exhausted RFC pilots, who one night during the retreat slept fully dressed on a straw stack in a barn, while their machines in a neighbouring field were guarded by a squadron of the Northern Irish Horse.
A staff officer dispatched on a liaison mission from I Corps met Smith-Dorrien and his staff on the 29th, and recorded in his diary that he found the mood at II Corps utterly different from that of GHQ, and anything but cast down: ‘quite calm, approachable and pleasant; not too busy to say a cheery word or two, and quite unfluttered’. But some officers felt that the morale of the entire BEF was sagging. Col. George Morris of the Irish Guards – who would be killed two days later – was ‘very gloomy’, telling a fellow officer ‘it was the old story of allies failing to get on together and that everything was going wrong … we should be re-embarking for England in a fortnight’. Guy Harcourt-Vernon wrote home on 29 August: ‘the marches have been awful & unless we get a day of rest soon we shan’t have a man in the ranks’. But then he added, after a few hours’ priceless repose: ‘We shall be able to carry on for a long time yet. It is wonderful what a different view of life you take after a sleep & meal.’ Yet still they continued to retreat southwards day after day, as did the French armies on their right.
On 25 August Lt. Col. Gerhard Tappen, Chief of the Operationsabteilung of the General Staff, declared with satisfaction: ‘In six weeks we shall have the whole job done.’ Whatever the significance of Mons, Le Cateau and comparable French actions in allied minds, the only reality that seemed to matter to most Germans was that they continued to advance, and to repulse every French counter-attack. By the 27th the high command had tacitly, if not explicitly, abandoned its plan to encircle Paris from the west, deciding that it was now necessary only to hound the beaten foe to destruction. The German army’s successes spawned a huge misjudgement. After inflicting vast casualties on the French, Moltke and his subordinates failed to recognise that, in history’s greatest clash of arms, even such carnage did not suffice to destroy an enemy’s powers of resistance. A fatal complacency overtook the Kaiser’s commanders in the last days of August and the first of September: they persuaded themselves that a coherent strategy was no longer necessary to complete their triumph.
Yet in some places, notably the Lorraine front, the advancing Germans were now suffering almost as severely as the retreating French. On 25 August Joffre’s forces launched a counter-attack in the Trouée des Charmes between Tour and Epinal, a difficult country of steep hills and rivers. In what became known as the Battle of the Mortagne, some 225,000 French soldiers clashed with 300,000 of Prince Rupprecht’s men. Fi
ghting petered out in a draw on 28 August, but the Bavarians had bled freely for small advantage – one historian estimates that they suffered 66,000 casualties in Alsace-Lorraine. The Germans’ advance slowed, especially that of Hausen’s Third Army: at least until early September, Moltke’s commanders acknowledged a need to keep step with neighbours, which sometimes required holding back their own men. On the evening of the 29th came a decisive moment: Bülow invited Kluck, his subordinate, to change his axis of advance, to wheel inward – further east – to strike a killing blow at Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. This initiative was duly adopted without authorisation from the chief of staff, yet it represented a critical departure from even OHL’s modified version of the Schlieffen concept. Next day Moltke acquiesced. He too seemed to suppose that it was now merely necessarily to herd the shattered French armies south-eastwards, towards the Swiss frontier.
The formidably powerful Eiffel Tower radio station intercepted the German signals about this movement; within hours, a copy of the critical order was on Joffre’s desk. Whatever the commander-in-chief’s earlier blunders, he immediately understood the significance of the German decision to cross the French front before Paris, and discerned a great opportunity beckoning for the allies. With stunning hubris, Bülow had ordered Kluck to execute a parade march in the face of an undefeated foe. Falkenhayn warned Moltke on 30 August that the French army had not collapsed – instead, it was conducting an orderly withdrawal. If Joffre was indeed beaten, the Prussian war minister demanded, where was the great haul of captured guns and equipment, the vast mass of prisoners that should be falling into the victors’ hands?
Moltke professed to dismiss Falkenhayn’s strictures, but in truth they added to the discomfiture of a commander already prey to feverish secret anxieties of his own. He had earlier felt sufficiently convinced of imminent triumph in the West to propose the dispatch of six corps to East Prussia, and eventually to send two. But on that same 30 August, to Admiral Müller he spoke much as Falkenhayn had done to himself, expressing unease about the absence of the flotsam associated with shattered armies: ‘Contrary to the Kaiser’s fantasies, we have pushed the French back, but they are not yet beaten. That has still to happen. Where are our prisoners?’ On 1 September, the chief of staff’s spirits briefly revived. He became excited by a prospect of achieving a new envelopment between Verdun and Reims. But, as so often in those days, the Germans advanced too slowly and Joffre’s forces withdrew too fast to make this possible. Moltke’s anguish intensified. Were the victories that so thrilled his royal master mere occupations of Belgian and French real estate? To subordinates, he avowed unease. But since he had abdicated operational direction of the armies, his apprehension exercised no influence upon the conduct of Kluck and Bülow in the critical days that followed.
It is mistaken, however, thus to burden the two army commanders with responsibility for the looming collapse of Germany’s fantasy of victory in 1914. Rather, they became prisoners of the fundamental unsoundness of their nation’s war plan. It is unlikely that any grand design could have produced a swift, conclusive outcome unless the allied armies suffered total moral collapse – which they did not. But Moltke had progressively abandoned even his own diluted version of Schlieffen, weakening the right, and on 24 August agreeing that Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Bavarians should pursue Castelnau’s retreating army towards Nancy. As German complacency grew, Schlieffen’s sophisticated if flawed vision was supplanted by the crude pursuit of objectives of opportunity. The Kaiser’s commanders saw themselves sustaining a headlong advance, while the French and British fled before them. Bülow, Kluck and their counterparts further south were more disturbed by the effects of exhaustion on men and horses than by their battle casualties. They supposed that the hard fighting was already behind them.
Back in Berlin, Bethmann Hollweg’s confidant Kurt Riezler wrote: ‘One is already beginning to make plans for the victory booty … We looked at the map today. I always preach the erection of vassal states. Today the chancellor had me come to him, asked me about peace conditions and my ideas.’ He added a few days later, in lyrical mood: ‘We Germans have … awakened powers in ourselves the magnitude of which we would never have imagined. Above all, we have discovered a spiritual essence through which we can concentrate these powers.’
On the other side in the last days of August, while Joffre grasped a gleam of possibility of redeeming the ghastly defeats that had befallen French arms under his leadership, few of his subordinates shared his kindling hopes, and certainly not the senior officers of the BEF. They experienced only the reality of continuing flight from the enemy, ever further southwards. On the 27th, Joffre signalled Lanrezac at his headquarters at Marle. Fifth Army was continuing its withdrawal, across the river Oise: GQG told its commander that he must now wheel his left-hand corps to the west, and launch an attack on Kluck’s left flank, to relieve pressure on the BEF. After the C-in-C’s departure, Lanrezac exploded in fury, denouncing both Joffre and the British with a fury that shocked his staff. He saw no prospect of such an attack succeeding, and believed that he would merely thrust his army into the jaws of a German vice. Sir John French, meanwhile, showed no interest in anything Lanrezac might or might not do, and continued his retirement.
On the 28th, momentously, Joffre in his long black overcoat appeared in person at Fifth Army’s headquarters. At first, his demeanour was cordial and flattering, identifying several officers for praise. But then followed an explosion of rage, and an explicit threat: if Fifth Army failed to attack next day, Lanrezac would be sacked. A liaison officer was dispatched to Haig and Smith-Dorrien, informing them of what was to happen, and seeking their cooperation. Near Lucy the Frenchman found the British I Corps commander receiving an excited report from an RFC pilot, who had just landed to confirm that Kluck’s flank was exposed, his columns veering eastward. Haig passed word to Lanrezac that a great opportunity beckoned; he would be happy to support a major counter-attack, and his formations could move at 5 a.m. next day.
During the hours that followed, however, some British units brawled with the Germans, and suffered delays. Haig sent word first that his own move must be delayed until 5.30 a.m., then that he needed a further postponement until midday. Finally, he said he could do nothing without the assent of Sir John French. This was abruptly refused: the C-in-C declared that I Corps needed a rest day. Lanrezac was incandescent, Joffre despondent. Spears, who had to endure both voluble and mute reproaches from Fifth Army’s staff, wrote: ‘the French considered that the British were running away at the critical moment, while the British were persuaded that they had been treated so badly that they could place no further reliance on their Allies’. Fifth Army’s attack proceeded anyway.
Guise nestles in the deep valley of the Oise, where open fields are interspersed with dense woodlands on the hillsides both north and south of the river. There are views for miles, landmarked with farms bearing such sardonic names as ‘Désolation’ and ‘Monchagrin’. Here, next morning, Lanrezac ordered forward his formations – the left driving at Kluck, the right against Bülow. Initially, the latter of these thrusts met some success, driving back the Germans up to three miles. ‘He manipulated his units with the skill of a master at the great game of war,’ wrote Spears, ‘but he played his hand without zest or faith.’ The second part of this statement was manifestly true; but the claim seems unfounded that, for once in his life, on 29 August Lanrezac played the part of an inspirational commander.
On the left, Fifth Army’s main attack was thrown back with heavy casualties. Before the assault, the Germans captured a corps chief of staff whose papers showed that the principal French objectives lay on Kluck’s front. Bülow, next door, could thus be confident that he had nothing important to fear. When the French advanced towards Saint-Quentin, the Germans were ready: some ground the attackers won at heavy cost was soon lost again. Only further north, around Guise, did Fifth Army make significant progress, pushing forward on both sides of the town to exploit a gap between K
luck’s and Bülow’s armies. German local command broke down, and German artillery caused substantial casualties by firing on one of its own Guards units.
The vanguard French brigade driving towards Le Hérie was led by the corps commander, Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, who would later prove one of the outstanding French generals of the war. He was fortunate that he survived to do so, because on 29 August he rode his horse towards the German line south of Guise, amid his regiments with colours flying and bands playing. Bülow became sufficiently concerned by the vigour of the attack to solicit support from his neighbor Hausen, who responded that he had his hands full on his own front. Bülow also urged Kluck to pivot still more sharply southward, further foreshortening the great German sweep.
Lanrezac sent a new appeal to the British for support, met by a renewed refusal from their C-in-C, conveyed by Henry Wilson. The latter thought Fifth Army’s attack madness because it could lead nowhere, against overwhelmingly superior forces. That night, Wilson drove to Reims to meet Joffre, and begged him to order a withdrawal before Kluck and Bülow closed in upon Lanrezac, perhaps precipitating disaster. Joffre indeed instructed Fifth Army to resume its retreat, though it is unlikely that his decision was influenced by Wilson. Bülow reported to Moltke that he had gained a victory – but added that his men were too tired to march next day. Thus Lanrezac, and the corpses of several thousand men, secured another breathing space. Franchet d’Espèrey was the only general to emerge with credit from the actions at Guise.