by John Keegan
The BEF was equal to the task. Alone among those of Europe, the British army was an all-regular force, composed of professional soldiers whom the small wars of empire had hardened to the realities of combat. Many of them had fought in the Boer War fifteen years earlier, against skilled marksmen who entrenched to defend their positions, and they had learnt from them the power of the magazine-rifle and the necessity of digging deep to escape its effects. Russian veterans of the war against Japan remembered those lessons. The British were the only soldiers in Western Europe who knew them by heart. Ordered to hold the Mons-Condé Canal, they began to dig at once and by the morning of 23 August were firmly entrenched along its length. At the heart of a mining area, the canal offered excellent defensive positions, mine buildings and cottages providing strongpoints and the spoil heaps observation posts from which the supporting artillery could be directed onto the advancing enemy masses.65
The Germans, who outnumbered them by six divisions to four, were unprepared for the storm of fire that would sweep their ranks. “The dominating German impression was of facing an invisible enemy,” hidden behind freshly turned earth in trenches much deeper than the inexperienced French or amateur Belgians thought to dig.66 On the Tugela and the Modder rivers, at Spion Kop, the Boers had taught British infantry the cost of assaulting skilled riflemen in deep earthworks and on 23 August the British found the opportunity to teach the lesson themselves. The British Lee-Enfield rifle, with its ten-round magazine, was a superior weapon to the German Mauser, and the British soldier a superior shot. “Fifteen rounds a minute” has become a catchphrase, but it was the standard most British infantrymen met, encouraged by extra pay for marksmanship and an issue of free ammunition to win the badge in their spare time.67 A German officer of the 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers was among the first to experience the effect of long-range, well-aimed rifle fire. “In front [of my company position] lay an extremely long, flat marshy-looking meadow. Its left side was broken into by scattered buildings and sheds, and on the right a narrow strip of wood jutted into it. At the far end, about 1,500 yards straight ahead, were more scattered groups of buildings. Between the near and far buildings a number of cows were peacefully grazing.”68 The peace of the bucolic scene was illusory. On the day following, Captain Bloem would discover how the British “had converted every house, every wall into a little fortress; the experience, no doubt, of old soldiers gained in a dozen colonial wars.”69 On the morning of Mons, as his company stepped out into the void, the danger the empty vista held suddenly became reality. “No sooner had we left the edge of the wood than a volley of bullets whistled past our noses and cracked into the trees behind. Five or six cries near me, five or six of my grey lads collapsed in the grass … The firing seemed at long range and half-left … Here we were as if advancing on a parade ground … away in front a sharp, hammering sound, then a pause, then a more rapid hammering—machine guns!”70
The soldiers opposite the Brandenburg Grenadiers belonged to the 1st Battalion Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and it was their rifles, rather than the battalion’s two machine guns, that were causing the casualties. By the end of the day, Bloem’s regiment was “all to pieces.” Many of the men had lost contact with their officers during the fighting and, shamefaced and full of explanations, rejoined only in the evening; 500 had been killed or wounded, including three out of four of his battalion’s company commanders. Bloem was lucky to be untouched. The results were the same in many other units, for every British battalion held its ground and the supporting artillery, including the 60-pounders of 48th and 108th Heavy Batteries, had kept up a steady supporting fire throughout the action. Total British casualties were 1,600 killed, wounded and missing. German casualties, never fully disclosed, must have reached nearly 5,000; the 75th Regiment, of infantry from Bremen, lost 381 men attacking the Royal Scots and King’s Royal Rifle Corps, without making any dent in their line.
That evening the Germans of von Kluck’s army slept where they tumbled down, exhausted, on the north bank of the canal, with the day’s work of carrying crossings over it to do all over again on the morrow; only one foothold had been gained. The British, exhausted too, prepared to fall back on positions a little to the canal’s south. They were flushed with the emotion of a fight well fought; the German official historian’s judgement that “the Battle of Mons had ended in failure for the British” would not have rung true with them.71 They expected to sustain their defence of the Allies’ left flank the following day. Even as they began to retire to their night positions, however, new orders came in. They were for retreat.
Late on the evening of 23 August, the British liaison officer with the French Fifth Army, Lieutenant Edward Spears, arrived at General Sir John French’s headquarters with alarming news. General Lanrezac had warned Joffre that, as a result of the German success on the Sambre, he was giving orders for Fifth Army to retreat southwards the following day. French, who had announced only a few hours before that “I will stand … on the ground now occupied” and that positions were to be strengthened “by every possible means during the night” was forced to recognise that, as his allies intended to fall back, he must do likewise.72 On the morning of 24 August, the BEF began a general retirement. At 9:35 Joffre explained in a message to the Minister of War why the whole front must be withdrawn.
In the north, our Army operating between the Sambre, the Meuse and the British Army, appears to have suffered checks of which I still do not know the full extent, but which have forced it to retire … One must face facts … Our army corps … have not shown on the battlefield those offensive qualities for which we had hoped … We are therefore compelled to resort to the defensive, using our fortresses and great topographical obstacles to enable us to yield as little ground as possible. Our object must be to last out, trying to wear the enemy down, and to resume the offensive when the time comes.73
THE GREAT RETREAT
The great retreat had begun, a retreat which would carry the French armies, and the BEF on their left, back to the outskirts of Paris during the next fourteen days. GQG, Joffre’s headquarters at Vitry-le-François, would be abandoned on 21 August, first to roost at Bar-sur-Aube, then to establish itself on 5 September at Châtillon-sur-Seine, the river on which Paris itself stands. Yet Joffre’s despatch, doleful as it must have read to Messimy, Minister of War, remains one of the great documents of the war. In its few sentences it sketched out a plan of recovery, even of eventual victory. The great fortresses, Verdun foremost, were indeed still in French hands. The topography which defends France against Germany from the east, the mountains of the Vosges, the waterways of the Seine river system, were unviolated. The spirit of the French army, unwisely committed in peace to a maniac offensive, survived unbroken by war. Could the army but retain its cohesion as it fell back on the capital, the opportunity for a counterstroke remained. With every mile marched, the German army’s links with its base of support on and beyond the Rhine attenuated, while the French army’s were shortened and strengthened. “Future operations,” Joffre wrote in his General Instruction No. 2 of 25 August, “will have as their object to reform on our left a mass capable of resuming the offensive. This will consist of the Fourth, Fifth and British Armies, together with new forces drawn from the eastern front, while the other armies contain the enemy for as long as possible.”74
The location indicated by Joffre for the positioning of the “new offensive mass” (comprising the Sixth Army, under General Maunoury, and Ninth, under General Foch) was the line of the River Somme near Amiens, seventy-five miles south-west of Mons. Thus Joffre already envisaged a long retreat before his redeployment of forces could permit a resumption of the attack. There was a grim realism to his appreciation of the French army’s situation. Even in Lorraine, where it had suffered the worst of its setbacks, thirty miles was the longest retreat it had yet made. The reality of the coming retreat was to be grimmer by far than anything Joffre anticipated. The German infantry of the right wing, despite twelve days o
f fighting and marching through Belgium, remained fresh. Buoyed up by victories already gained, hardened by days on the road, hearts high with the expectation of final victory soon to come, they were ready to forget sore feet, lean on their chinstraps and step out with a will if the demands of distance would defeat the French army. “This frantic, everlasting rush,” Bloem’s battalion commander told him on the seventh day after Mons, “is absolutely essential … use all your powers to keep up spirits at any price. Make it clear that we must allow the enemy no rest until we have utterly defeated him on the whole front. Tell them that sweat is saving blood.” Bloem’s Brandenburgers needed little encouragement. Despite “inflamed heels, soles and toes … whole patches of skin rubbed off to the raw flesh,” they kept up the pace under the grilling sun of one of the century’s most brilliant summers for day after day.75 Falling back before them, the 1st Battalion the Gloucestershire Regiment, for example, recorded a distance covered of 244 miles in thirteen days, with only one of rest (29 August) and two successive marches of over twenty miles on 27 and 28 August.76 What the British and French endured, the Germans did likewise.
Both sides fought as well as marched, the French and British to delay the German advance or to escape from danger, the Germans to force a way through any resistance they met. The British I Corps had to fight at Landrecies and Maroilles on 26 August but, since it had suffered very little at Mons, disengaged easily and resumed its retreat; II Corps, battered by Mons, was forced to fight at Le Cateau on the same day an even bigger battle in order to get away. General Smith-Dorrien, commanding II Corps, had three infantry divisions under command, supported by the Cavalry Division. His tired men were assaulted on the morning of 26 August by three German infantry and three cavalry divisions, reinforced during the day by two more infantry divisions, a total of eight against four. Such an inequality of force offered the Germans the opportunity to overlap the ends of the British line and that, as the day developed, was what they achieved. The front ran along the ancient Roman road between Le Cateau and Cambrai where, three years and three months later, the British would launch the first massed attack with tanks, a weapon of war not then invented or even envisaged. At first the British infantry held the line by their usual outpouring of aimed and rapid rifle fire, supported by salvoes from the field artillery. Then, as enemy numbers mounted during the afternoon, the flanks began to crumble, units to break up and batteries to lose their gun crews under the weight of opposing bombardments. As evening approached, II Corps stared dismemberment in the face. It was saved partly by German mistakes but, as much as anything, by the intervention of Sordet’s Cavalry Corps, which at Le Cateau retrieved much of the reputation it had lost by its failure to find the Germans in their advance through Belgium, and by one of the despised French Territorial divisions, whose over-age reservists fought valiantly outside Cambrai to delay the arrival of the German II Corps. As dusk fell, II Corps, which had lost 8,000 killed, wounded and missing during the battle—more than Wellington’s army at Waterloo—summoned its reserves of strength to slip away and resume the retreat.77 Thirty-eight guns, half a divisional artillery, were lost nonetheless, despite desperate attempts to save them. At the position of 122nd Battery, Royal Artillery, efforts at rescue by a gallant officer and his team to extricate their equipment left “an extraordinary sight: a short wild scene of galloping and falling horses, and then four guns standing derelict, a few limbers lying about, one on the skyline with its pole vertical, and dead men and dead horses everywhere.”78
On the day of Le Cateau, Joffre met Sir John French, the BEF’s commander, at St. Quentin, together with Lanrezac and General d’Amade, Commander of the Territorial Group which had fought so unexpectedly well on the BEF’s left. It was not a happy meeting. Lanrezac and French had got on badly since their first encounter ten days earlier, while Joffre was already beginning to doubt the capacities of the Fifth Army commander, who had long been his protégé. The atmosphere of the conference, held in a darkened room in a private house, was uneasy. French denied having received Joffre’s General Instruction No. 2, for a future counter-offensive. All he could talk of were his own difficulties and, by implication, of Lanrezac’s failure to support him. Lanrezac’s manner implied that the BEF was an embarrassment rather than a support. There was a language difficulty. The French did not speak English, French scarcely any French; General Henry Wilson, Deputy Chief of Staff, translated. There were also personal differences. Joffre and Lanrezac, big, heavy men in dark blue, gold-buttoned uniforms, looked like station masters, the vulpine Wilson and the peppery French, in their whipcord breeches and glittering riding boots, like masters of foxhounds. It was also confusing to the French that the commander of the BEF was a field marshal. “Maréchal” was, in the French army, not a rank but a “dignity of state,” conferred on victors. The republican soldiers, none of higher rank than general, looked askance at a titular superior whose successes had been won against South African farmers.
The conference came to no clear decision and, when it ended, Lanrezac declined to lunch with French.79 Joffre, however, accepted and, when he left, returned to GQG with the intention of stiffening Lanrezac’s backbone. He perceived that the British needed a breathing space, for he was aware of the risk that a beaten BEF might disengage and head for safety in the Channel ports, and so sent orders to Lanrezac to check his retreat next day, 27 August, and counter-attack the German Second Army, treading close on his heels in its path towards Paris. Lanrezac complained but obeyed. His instructions were to align Fifth Army along the upper course of the River Oise, which Bülow’s divisions would have to cross to reach their objectives, with two corps, X and III, facing north in defence and another, XVIII, to attack to the west where the river turned south to join the Seine at Pontoise above Paris. A fourth Corps, the I, commanded by the very determined Franchet d’Esperey, was to stand in reserve behind the right angle formed by Fifth Army’s two wings. The battle—known to the French as Guise, to the Germans as St. Quentin—opened on the morning of 29 August in thick mist. The Imperial Guard Corps and Plattenburg’s X Corps stepped out with a will, their commanders believing that no serious French resistance was to be met before the River Aisne, thirty-five miles distant. They were surprised by the strength of X and III Corps’ opposition, against which they began to suffer heavy casualties. Plattenburg, the Guard Corps commander, lost a son killed in the fighting and at one stage Prince Eitel Friedrich, the Kaiser’s second son, had to put himself at the head of the 1st Foot Guards, Germany’s premier regiment, and lead it forward beating on a drum.80
During the course of the day, however, the Guard and the Hanoverians of X Corps advanced some three miles and, as evening approached, were preparing to consolidate the ground won. At that moment the character of the battle was transformed. Franchet d’Esperey had been ordered shortly after noon to engage in support and at six o’clock, having spent the intervening hours positioning his artillery to achieve maximum firepower effect, he did so in person. Riding a chestnut charger at the head of regiments advancing behind their unfurled colours and the braying brass of their bands, with the corps artillery thundering overhead, he led his soldiers forward in counter-attack. The effect galvanised III and X Corps to join in and, as darkness fell, villages lost in the morning were retaken and the victorious French took up positions from which they intended to resume the counter-attack next day. Their success was all the more surprising since their orders had been merely to hold ground, while de Mas Latrie’s XVIII Corps relieved pressure on the British by attacking towards St. Quentin. The result of 29 August on his front was disappointing and he would shortly be relieved of command. Franchet d’Esperey, by contrast, made his reputation at Guise. “Desperate Frankie,” as his British admirers christened the fire-eater, would soon succeed Lanrezac at the head of the Fifth Army. It would be a just reward, for his spectacular intervention had halted the Germans in their tracks and won an extra day and a half for the army to reposition itself for the counterstroke which Joffre
remained determined to deliver.
Whether he could or not now depended more on the movements of the German armies than his own. Were they to persist in their march south-westward, aiming to pass Paris to the right, Joffre’s scheme of forming an offensive mass to drive into their flank might be defeated by distance and logistic difficulty. Were they, on the other hand, to press to the south-east, leaving Paris on the left, they would be doing the French what Schlieffen, in another context, had called a “willing favour.” Schlieffen had, as his Great Memorandum reveals, come to fear that whichever decision was taken, it would favour the French. To aim to pass Paris to the right would expose the German outer wing to a thrust launched from the Paris fortified zone by its strong garrison; to pass Paris to the left would open a gap between the outer German force and those with which they should keep station, for Paris, like a breakwater, would then divide the tide of the German onset, open a gap in the line and expose the force the wrong side of it to an alternative thrust from Paris in the opposite direction. This “problem of Paris” had driven Schlieffen to “the conclusion that we are too weak to continue operations in this direction.”81 The fault of conception Schlieffen had recognised in his study the German General Staff was now discovering in the field, as its troops marched southward, while their chiefs dithered about their eventual destination.
The difficulty of choice had revealed itself soon after the Kaiser and the Great General Staff—the Supreme Army Command, Oberste Heersleitung or OHL, as it became in war—had displaced from Berlin to Coblenz, on the Rhine, on 17 August (its next location would be in Luxembourg and its final station the little resort town of Spa, in Belgium). Moltke’s decision to allow von Bülow, of Second Army, to oversee the operations of First and Third, understandable in the early stages of the campaign while the need to overwhelm Belgium was paramount, began to have unfortunate consequences soon after the move to Coblenz had been completed. Bülow’s anxiety to assure mutual support between the armies of the right wing deprived Hausen, Third Army, of the chance to strike into Lanrezac’s rear as he disengaged from the Sambre on 24 August. Then, as the line of battle descended to the River Somme, Moltke allowed anxieties of his own about the predicament of the Eighth Army, defending East Prussia against the Russians, to distort his control of the larger and more critical operations in the west. Seeing in the fall of Namur a chance to economise force, he decided to redirect the troops thus released not to their parent formations but across Germany to the eastern frontier.82