by Mark Rowe
We could see a big battleship making straight towards us. We began to wonder whether it was a German. Our ship ran up a lot of signal flags. It still made right towards us, till we could see it plainly. It had four funnels. It turned out to be an American battle cruiser ...
On Monday they did nothing except sleep between meals, ‘which were: cheese and biscuits for breakfast, bully beef and biscuits for dinner, and jam and biscuits for tea’. By the Monday evening they were sailing up a French river, so they thought:
The French people at the villages on each shore of the river were cheering and waving flags. A lot of them came out in boats and got on the ship, and gave flowers all round.
On the Tuesday they landed, in Rouen; they had come up the Seine:
The place is packed with soldiers of all sorts. The French soldiers look very funny in their uniforms. There must be thousands of soldiers here. I keep seeing whole regiments marching off to the front. There are eight or nine ships unloading soldiers at once. As fast as one ship goes another comes to its place. I have discovered a post office. With best love from Harry and Will.
If the Woodins knew what censorship was yet, they had broken it. Plainly they were still thinking like civilians; understandably, as they were doing the same work as at home. As their local weekly, the Alfreton Journal, did not print the letter for a couple of weeks, by that time the world knew where the British Expeditionary Force had gone. The government censor allowed the papers to break what The Times on August 18 called a ‘conspiracy of silence’, and the country heard the BEF had landed in France, without a casualty.
There were a few casualties soon after landing, who only had themselves to blame. The ‘right royal welcome’ as Private John Harding put it stuck in the memory of many that month: “It was one of the finest times in our lives,” he recalled a few weeks later, with a smile, to a reporter of the Essex County Standard. “As we marched along, the roads were lined with people holding tobacco, cigarettes, jugs of wine and baskets of fruit. The men had only to put out their hands to help themselves.” J L Dent, a lieutenant in the 2nd battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, left Aldershot on August 11 and landed at Le Havre on August 13. “The town was en fete, flags and banners welcoming les braves anglais were displayed on all sides,” he wrote in his diary: “ ... we had been to some pains in teaching the men the Marseillaise and there were a good many mouth organs among the company so that when we struck up there was a tremendous burst of enthusiasm ...” Unfortunately, after two sleepless nights of travel, and little food, of the hard biscuit variety as endured by the Woodins, the march out of town to a camp was enough to exhaust some of the South Staffs. Well-meaning French people poured wines and liqueurs down the flagging soldiers’ throats. “Many fell out,” Dent recorded. “These were increased when the men in the ranks passed those who had fallen out and saw them being fanned, bathed with eau de cologne and revived with brandy by pretty French girls.”
A rail journey, and days on the march followed, “in the hot sun, along the dusty, stony roads,” as Harding recollected: “the nights were just as cold as the days were hot”. Whether because the French would only risk sending trains so far towards the enemy, or because you could always rely on the soldier, the Tommy, to walk, the soldier walked. The intoxicating welcome to a foreign country - at Le Havre ‘civilians fairly hugged us’ recalled a Royal Engineer corporal, Charles Wallbank, later - was only a break in the deadening limbo of travel. Wallbank described his train to train to Landrecies in northern France as ‘tedious and miserable’. It all created an air of unreality which Wallbank was one of the few to note afterwards. “Hardly a soul imagined that we were really going to fight, not at all serious,” he wrote.
On the march, no longer with women around their necks, they went back to soldiering at its most basic, no different from the armies of Wellington, or King Alfred for that matter. Men carried what they needed, heading (they assumed) for the enemy, who was doing the same. Weapons, true, had changed with the times. The BEF wore khaki, as the fashion for red-coats to scare the enemy had passed. Now you were not supposed to advertise where you were; you found cover, a hedge or wall, or made your own, a ‘fire trench’ dug three feet deep or more, and waited to shoot the enemy off the battlefield. If you knew where the enemy was; and if your feet lasted long enough to take you there.
II
Private Dixon, a postman from Pudsey, had a rupture. “We pressed on and on, night and day, with a load of 80lbs on our backs, and from 100 to 500 rounds of ammunition.” Dixon, and everyone, was carrying the equivalent of a small person on his back. “We had very little time for meals. Men who were in South Africa say they never suffered so much. I stuck it until I dropped by the road, and was picked up by a Scottish regiment.” Dixon was serving in the Munster Fusiliers. “I bandaged myself as best I could with a puttee,” the long strip of cloth with a Hindi name that the soldiers had to wind from their ankles to their knees, as support, “and was placed in the ambulance.”
We can hardly expect such men to remember, or care, where they were or which day it was. From now on the wounded, or the incapacitated like Private Dixon, offer the best stories, as their time on the campaign was cut short. Or occasional civilian witnesses offer a different point of view: such as an English couple, the Taylors, living in Quievrain a few miles inside Belgium, halfway between Valenciennes in France and the Belgian mining town of Mons. British troops began arriving on Saturday August 22. As a sign that the clash was expected, Mrs Taylor had to tell the Quievrain villagers that the soldiers were British, not German. Besides feeding hundreds, so she told the Loughborough Echo after fleeing to England, she was much in demand to translate:
The British soldiers were all enchanted with their reception in France and Belgium and many said they wanted for nothing as the inhabitants came out with food and drink which they freely distributed among the troops ... I saw several of the men carrying French children as they marched along while their mothers walked at their sides.
By later on Saturday, Mr Taylor was concerned, so he said later, whether they were in front of, or behind, the armies:
All Saturday night troops poured in and on Sunday we distinctly heard the firing of guns but could not distinguish the exact locality. Airplanes were soaring over at a great height over the village during Sunday afternoon and towards evening one of the English soldiers told me that they had to harness up immediately. I went into the village and saw a great deal of activity, horses and artillery being prepared for evident departure. The staff officers were also on the move ... several of the soldiers told us they thought we ought to have been already gone several days. About 11.30pm the tocsin bell which is rung at the churches in case of a national calamity such as war began to ring and I was told that volunteers were wanted to dig trenches around the district and it was then that I finally decided to start for England.
III
Private Thomas Cross of the 2nd South Staffords, a veteran of South Africa, was among the first to fight and the first to be wounded, in front of Mons on Sunday August 23. “The Germans were like bees on honey. As fast as we shot one down others came up in rows. After about 20 minutes of this the order came to retire and as we were doing so I was knocked in the right side by a shell from a big gun which luckily for me failed to explode. It knocked me down and for a time I was unconscious. I got back with the regiment and didn’t know I was so badly hurt.”
Private John Jennings was an old soldier called up from the loco department of the Midland Railway Company - or rather, he re-joined the Royal Irish regiment before the call-up papers reached his Derby home. “I expect you have heard about the battle of Mons,” he wrote a couple of weeks later, in hospital at Netley. “We had enough to do, but I can tell you we gave them something, though there were thousands of them, and they kept coming.” Another wounded reservist, Bombardier William Simpson, told an Ashbourne Telegraph reporter that the German fire at
Mons ‘defied description’:
He did not think there was a man amongst them who believed he would get out of the battle alive, but thanks to the skilful tactics of their officers the retiring movements were carried out most satisfactorily. The English guns were hopelessly outnumbered, but it was evident that the Germans were surprised and angry at the stubbornness and pluck with which the English fought.
We can query how Simpson could tell what the Germans were feeling. He may have felt he had to sound knowledgeable to the newspaper reporter. He was the town’s first returned hero, welcomed off the train by the same band that sent off the Territorials the month before, and carried to his parents’ house by two men on their shoulders. He had every reason to praise his side (and hence himself). Yet however he tried to hide it, the Germans were too many and too strong; the British had fallen back. Or rather, as that did not sound heroic enough, the British made ‘retiring movements’, leaving Mons in flames. (Mons was the first town they reached in the country they had gone to war to save; the BEF was back in France and the Belgians were on their own.)
Already the pattern was set, whether you bumped into the enemy or he bumped into you, or a little of both, as happened to Harry Mason, a cyclist of the 2nd South Staffords, from Walsall. He, too, was one of the very first British units to fight. He rode all through Saturday night, August 22, he wrote to friends from hospital, and at daybreak on Sunday ran up against uhlans, German cavalry with lances.
We were only about 180 strong and the job we had in front of us was a very hard one. We occupied rather a good position and caused the enemy to open out but after scrapping for about nine hours they got their artillery up and then I experienced the hottest time in my life. After being shelled for about half an hour we had the order to retire and then the fun began. Knowing we were part cyclists and that we could only get away by the road they had the range already eyed, so when we began to get away they simply dropped shell after shell after us. I think when we got to the next rise we only had about 70 men left.
Here Mason got his wound, in retreat down a hill: “I was riding by the side of one of the hussars. This poor chap was killed by the shells that were sent after us as also was the horse, the poor thing taking the best part of a shrapnel shell. It fell on the top of me and at the rate we were going you could guess what a nasty spill I had.” Picked up unconscious, he came to in a Belgian nunnery. Here was the pattern: the British, infantry or cavalry (or cyclists, a sort of mechanical mix of both) could fight other infantry or cavalry well enough. Another Walsall man, 19-year-old Private Charles Broadhurst, spoke of ‘ten hours’ continuous scrapping’ at Mons. He saw a captain’s head blown off, had a bullet pass through his cloth cap, and but for the kit he carried, would have a bullet in his back; yet they ‘revelled in their work, and those who were unfortunate enough to get wounded’, like Broadhurst in the thigh, ‘were as bright and jolly as those who were more fortunate’. Man firing at man (on foot or on top of a horse or bicycle) was reasonable enough ‘work’, if you like Broadhurst, Mason and the rest were under cover, killing German after German until their rifles became hot - too hot to work, even. The battle became ‘hotter’, in the soldiers’ slang, when the Germans fired something heavier, artillery shells, from guns you probably could not even see. You either ducked, until the shells hit you and killed you, or the Germans stopped firing, or fired at someone else; or you fled; and by showing yourself you put yourself in even more danger until you were beyond the shells and out of sight or under better cover; as Mason found.
The battle of Mons, and the first battles of August 1914, are supposed to hark back to previous wars, the battle of Waterloo, even, while the rest of the First World War dragged on in trenches, until a few more open months at the end. In truth the British were digging from the very start, as they were trained and for their own good, the same as they did in the Second World War. Private Charles Dudley Moore of the Yorkshire Light Infantry was wounded within half an hour at Mons:
The shrapnel shells of the Germans were bursting over the trenches where we were lying and I was struck in the foot with a piece of shell which took the heel of my boot clean off. Five minutes later when I was trying to help a fellow near me who had been hit in the shoulder, I was struck in the right thigh by a pellet from a shrapnel shell. This was my first experience of actual fighting, and I can tell you it is a funny sensation at first to see the shells bursting near and around you, to hear the bullets whistling by you, and to see men being killed and wounded near you, but you soon get used to it all.
Or as Charles Wallbank of the Royal Engineers put it, with a few words that hinted at the agony of suspense and then the shock of violence: “My God, to think of that first day.”
The British understood well that the killing power on the battlefield had become so great; they had seen what their firepower had done to the Zulus, Sudanese and enough others. Now that the British faced firepower like their own, they knew they had to burrow, to have more chance of survival. The problem - and the failure to get around the problem would be counted in deaths - only became plain later, when the front line settled and the British and French found they had the task of pushing the invaders scores of miles back to Germany (let alone as far as Berlin). Until then, the first wounded returning to England in early September agreed: the German infantry couldn’t ‘shoot for toffee’, they shot from the hip and didn’t take aim; you were quite safe from it at 100 yards. But their artillery! Men called it ‘simply terrible’. Some did not like to admit it, and claimed even the German artillery couldn’t shoot. “It’s numbers that does it, nothing else,” said one wounded man. But more men were killed and wounded by the artillery than anything else. Either the Germans had more or bigger guns, and machine guns, than the British, or they made better use of them. Private J R Tait, of the 2nd Essex regiment, wounded at Mons, spoke for many: “Their rifle shooting is rotten; I don’t believe they could hit a haystack at 100 yards. Their field artillery is good, and we don’t like their shrapnel.”
IV
To put across the sights and sounds of their first battle, to people who would never go near a war, the soldiers fell back on what they did know: the natural world. Private Frederick Bruce of the Suffolk regiment, wounded in the shoulder by a shell, told his parents in Cambridge the German artillery was ‘worse than being in a hailstorm’. Charging British hussars cut Germans down ‘like chaff’, an easy comparison to make if the cavalry rode across fields. Private C E McLoughlin of the Coldstream Guards spoke of shooting Germans, caught on barbed wire in a village one night, ‘as easily as shelling peas’. Other infantry spoke of shooting Germans ‘like rabbits’, whether because at a distance the men looked smaller or because some of the shooters were used to shooting rabbits (whether legally like Clifford Gothard, or as poachers). If Germans on the attack lost heart, they ‘ran like rabbits’, someone invalided home told The Times on August 31. When the British in their hastily dug trenches shot gaps in the packed lines of attackers, the Germans filled the gaps ‘like marionettes’. It sounded as if men in battle saw the enemy - and any civilians in the way - as less than human. Private Shepherd of the 1st Lincs spoke of ‘being compelled’ to open fire on old men and women in front of him, ‘mown down like so many sheep’ - ‘the occasion was not one for squeamishness’.
Another vocabulary to explain the battlefield came from religion. Sgt Crockett, a gardener and Royal Welsh Fusiliers reservist, the first wounded man home to Burton-on-Trent, called the artillery ‘hellish’. Likewise to Private Thomas Cross ‘it was like opening the lid of hell when the first shots came upon us’. Bombardier William Simpson went even further: “It was worse than hell, if it could be expressed that way,” he wrote home to his parents; and he only went through the first two days.
Chapter 21
Back
Retirements in face of the enemy must be conducted with the greatest circumspection.
Infantry Training, W
ar Office manual, 1914
I
That Infantry Training manual, helpfully printed on August 10, 1914 - and so official that any other training was ‘forbidden’ - had chapter after chapter about drill; plenty to say about attack, and defence; but barely a page about ‘retirements’. British soldiers were evidently not allowed to go backwards on the battlefield; it was altogether best not to think about it. Yet after a couple of days at Mons, the British were .... retiring.
Retirement did rather suggest that that you thought you were not winning. And as the manual was quick to point out, in case anyone was too dim to spot it, a ‘hurried retreat’ not only might panic your side, but gave ‘a great encouragement to the enemy’. You were giving the enemy the impression that he was winning.
II
Like all things, a retirement (or withdrawal, or whatever you wanted to call it) could be worse, or better. How far you retired, and how fast, would affect how well your army managed, because no matter how strong your will, and young and fit your body, you could only take so much for so long. Lieutenant JvL Dent and the South Staffords began marching back too on the Monday night, August 24, after they had been shelled, but before they had fired a shot. Joseph Dent found that bad for morale. So began days of marching, and nights of entrenching:
I shall never forget the march, the terrible heat, the feeling of disaster which one scarcely dared admit even to oneself, the struggle to maintain march discipline and keep the men going at all and the terrible sight of the villagers crying and rushing to pack their belongings, realising what our retirement meant.
By the Tuesday night, Dent was making himself stay on his feet, ‘to avoid falling off to sleep’. Even so, several times he fell sleep standing ‘and crashed to the ground’. By then the order had come for men to leave their packs, so they could walk with less load, and Dent ‘lost’ his ‘useless’ sword. Tiredness may have dulled Dent to the physical discomforts. His last night under a roof had been on the Saturday, August 22. The nights were cold enough to leave a nip in the air and dew on the ground by early morning, which men would feel in the open as they had thrown away their bedding. Or, discomforts may have depressed an already tired man, no longer able to think straight, so that he felt the confusion and the shame of retreat all the more. In a diary entry for Thursday August 27, he wrote: