23 August, 1914

HE RODE WITH FEAR

Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Osburn

Arthur Osburn was at Mons as a medical officer with the 4th Dragoon Guards, the first British regiment to fire a shot in the war. After serving in the ranks in the Yeomanry during the Boer War, he went on to qualify as a doctor in 1902. He was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1903. He was promoted major in 1915 and awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1916.

Sunday, 23 August and we had arrived at Thulin on the bank of the canal that stretches from Mons to Condé. We had had no sleep worth talking about for some days and we had been the first unit in the British Army in contact with the enemy. On the Saturday, Captain Hornby, with a half squadron had got as far as Soignies, where from the church tower the battlefield of Waterloo was just visible. They had pursued and charged some German cavalry: Bavarian ploughboys kitted out in German uniforms, that was all they really were. These youngsters carried long metal lances, like lengths of gas-piping, they could hardly manage. Some of the lads had been killed and three or four wounded and captured. Fair, resolute, genial and a keen soldier, Captain Hornby with his troop, magnificently mounted – as indeed we all were – all yelling at full charge, their long, straight swords a glittering row of steely points, would have struck terror into far more hardened soldiers.

After forty-eight hours of almost continuous movement we had finished up with a long night ride through the wretched slums of Frameries, Wasmes, and Paturages. That ride had been a nightmare; a thin drizzle had turned the coal dust that lay everywhere into a greasy slime. Our horses, half-asleep like ourselves, had staggered on, stumbling over the uneven cobbles and cinder heaps, slipping and falling on the endless network of tram and trolley lines. So on that Sunday we were all drowsy and slack, yet the tension in the air was unmistakable. Early in the afternoon there had fallen an ominous silence. Everyone and everything, even the great line of elm trees opposite our billet, seemed to be attentive, as if waiting for something to happen.

A sense of impending disaster pervaded the silent village. We knew that the Germans were not far way. Twenty minutes later we were engaged in the battle of Mons; five hours later we had begun the Long Retreat.

I shall not easily forget the overture of that extraordinary battle. At 3.30 pm on that sultry Sunday afternoon there rose, apparently about 800 yards in front of us, a crackling sound, exactly like the noise of an October bonfire into which a cartload of dry holly boughs has been suddenly thrown: a fierce, steady crackle that grew ominously louder and angrier and nearer, nearer moment by moment. I had heard nothing like that in the Boer War!

My heart sank. There surged over me the first and worst moments of dismay – of fear – in the war. Afterwards I was often partly indifferent to danger from sheer exhaustion, nerve strain and fatigue, yet not seldom – like, I think, most others – I walked and rode with Fear, or at least, apprehension. Fear, like a tall, grey figure stalking by my side or never very far away. The deep thunder of our own or enemy artillery fire could be stimulating, but the angry crackle of massed rifles I shall always loathe.

FIRST HOT ENGAGEMENT

The regiment mounted, and we moved off a few hundred yards to the left and dismounted again. A German and an English plane, firing viciously at one another, circled overhead.

The infantry in the line ahead of us were evidently in for a hot time. We, as cavalry, were merely standing-to for eventualities. Presently wounded from the infantry regiments just in front of us began to limp and stagger down the road on our right. I left the regiment and walked over to some cart sheds just across this road, which I had already marked down as my prospective ‘dressing station’. My groom and servant and my corporal led our horses over, and I knelt down in the shed to dress the first of the British troops who had been wounded. As I did so the first bursts of German shrapnel were coming over with a venomous buzz, like swarms of angry hornets. Soon I was up to my eyes in work, the knees of my riding-breeches soaked with the blood that was running all over the place from those who were badly wounded.

More and more, in twos and threes, sixes and sevens, then in streams, the wounded poured in, some walking, some carried pickaback or in hand-seats, and a few on stretchers. Men of the Manchester Regiment and Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (DCLI), King’s Own Scottish Borderers (K.O.S.B.) and several other regiments. But where were their doctors? There seemed to be not a sign of one. At that point I did not realize the almost hopeless task that the infantry doctors were engaged in. My orderly and myself made desperate attempts to cope with the streams of wounded men. The whole of the cart shed was now full of wounded that lay or sat about in the mud and sodden straw. Every post was being clung to by those able to stand; some slipped down and fainted. There were now streams of men, presumably wounded, passing right and left across the fields, going I know not where.

Men of the British Cavalry Division, commanded by Major General E.H. Allenby in the opening weeks of the war.

It never occured to me that anyone was retreating. More shrapnel was coming over and our own Royal Horse Artillery was replying.

We must have been there for hours, but it seemed only a few minutes before we were lighting candles and lanterns to see what we were doing. So numerous now were the wounded that I could only find time to look at the worst, and then do little more than tighten an amateur tourniquet or plug a gaping wound in the chest wall with gauze, and give morphine in heroic doses to those who appeared to be in the most pain.

I got up and went out. A blaze of burning hayricks and a night glow from a hundred thousand rifles in rapid fire lit up the darkening northern sky just beyond some trees. Down the centre of the road on the other side of which I had left my regiment were coming streams of wounded, hopping, crawling, walking or being carried, but the dry ditches on either side of the road just outside my dressing-station were full of whispering shadows.

‘What’s the matter with you all there?’ I demanded.

There was no reply from the huddled forms in the darknessof the ditch. I was really too weary to be indignant, but I pretended to be.

‘It you do not immediately rejoin your regiment in the firing line, I’ll take every man’s name and regiment and send him to his adjutant. You know what that means – court martial for desertion in the face of the enemy!’

There was a silence and then a few, only a few, of the huddled forms sullenly emerged with their rifles and walked with slow, depressed step; back towards that pink glow and that ‘holly-bush’ crackling beyond the trees.

Getting suddenly alarmed at all the possibilities, I collected my gear, with some haste and we mounted, leaving, alas, many wounded, some partly with wounds dressed and others unattended. I left them in charge of a senior non-commissioned officer who was only slightly wounded. I reminded him of the most simple forms of tourniquets, and giving him an armful of dressings, advised him when the carts came back to take all the rest of the wounded were to be taken to Thulin, the village about half a mile back on the road behind us. This I think he did, for carts with wounded began arriving while I was attending to those already in the town hall there. This was not the only time in which it was quite impossible to fulfil my duty to my unit and to the wounded of other units. We entered the little town of Thulin in darkness and silence; indeed, I was rather surpised how silent everything had suddenly become. There was but one building that had any light in it. As we passed it I was besieged by a party of Belgian priests and nuns.

‘M’sieur is a doctor? Please come in at once – in here! There are many English wounded. There are no doctors and we do not know what to do.’

I dismounted and entered what was evidently the Mairie, or town hall.

The steps were thronged with a jostling crowd of wounded. Many excited Belgian peasants and Sisters of Mercy were carrying in mattresses, straw, jugs of water and old sheets for bandages.

The scene inside was one with which I was soon to become only too familiar. It was packed with wounded, lying down, crouching or standing; the stairs were blocked with sitting cases, the passages with loaded stretchers. There were several whose hastily applied tourniquets had evidently slipped, lying in a dead faint from loss of blood.

Everywhere lights and confusion and a babel of tongues – Cockney, French, Flemish, and broken English. I spoke but little French, and getting hold of the most responsible priests and the older Catholic sisters, I urged them to keep the badly wounded cases on the ground floor and all the slightly wounded cases up to the rooms on the upper floors of the building. They had started doing the very reverse.

‘But why, m’sieur?’

‘Because in case of fire you will never get the stretcher cases down again in time, if you carry them up those narrow stairs.’

‘Fire! But why should there be a fire? The bad cases will be much more comfortable upstairs. Besides there are far too many slight cases to put up in the small rooms above. And some of the upper rooms are locked, half full of the town’s records.’

Thulin Town Hall (Marie) where Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) Osburn set up a temporary dressing station. It was from here that he made his escape when the Germans arrived unexpectedly.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Break the doors open. Let all the wounded who can walk go up and leave the stairs and passages free. They can sit down on the floor in the upstairs rooms.’

We began gradually to get the place in some sort of order. The palliasses and mattresses which were being brought in we arranged in rows. Straw had been put down where there were no mattresses, much too much straw, for the harvest time was just beginning.

The sisters were giving the men cigarettes. I tried to dissuade them. ‘Don’t encourage them to smoke here, or you will soon have all this straw alight.’

‘Soldiers! Poor English soldiers! Not smoke! After such a brave battle!’ They gazed at me, astonished. I might as well have ordered them to stop the men breathing. Soon I was terribly busy with the worst cases. Only two can I remember in all that confusion. One badly wounded in the head, yet conscious enough to point to the man lying next to him.

‘Sir, that man alongside blew off his own right hand recharging a fuse to blow up a bridge across that canal which the Germans had just captured. He went back alone of his own accord to do it himself. The first charge wouldn’t go off. If he hadn’t stopped the Germans they would have enfiladed our entire line.

The two men were, I feel sure, both Royal Engineers. I dressed the stump of the hero of the bridge and hastily scribbled his name and number in my notebook.

‘You won’t, be forgotten,’ I said. You deserve a VC. I’ll see that the General hears about it.’

I was in the midst of giving instructions as to each wounded man not injured in the stomach having at least a litre of milk a day, when an excited sister seized me by the arm.

M’sieur! Go at once! The Germans are here.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes, m’sieur. In the street outside. No! Not that way! By the side door to the right. Quick! Quick!’

I dashed to the side door and there found my groom and orderly looking pale and excited. They, too, had just seen the Germans; indeed had actually rubbed shoulders with them in the darkness outside. We all three flung ourselves on our horses and dashed away from the Mairie, not knowing in the least which direction to take.

A light rain had begun to fall and the cobble stones were greasy. Shots behind added wings to our speed. Galloping madly in the darkness, slithering and skidding through those silent streets, we were nearly down half a dozen times.

Where was everybody? What had become of the British Army? Why had nobody told me? Where were we galloping to?

I called out, ‘Ou sont les Chasseurs anglais?’ to no one in particular. ‘Ou sont les Dragons de la Garde?’ I shouted through the echoing streets – the excitement playing havoc with my scanty French. There was no answer to my ill-judged question as to where the English cavalry in general was, and where were the Dragoon Guards in particular. Only shots and the echoes of our clattering hoofs could be heard.

Suddenly we were fired at point-blank from in front; the flash showed a group of dismounted cavalry on the left of the road. Someone challenged us with an unmistakable English accent: ‘Qui va la?’

‘Who’s that? We’re 4th Dragoon Guards.’

‘Ninth Lancers,’ answered the voice. ‘Where the hell have you come from?’

Brigadier General Beauvoir De Lisle.

We had bumped into the rear troop of the rearguard of 2 Cavalry Brigade, which was under the command of Brigadier General de Lisle. Geoffrey ã Court, I think it was, in charge of the rearguard, he and his men were guarding the railway crossing. There was a hurried explanation, and the sliding metal gates rolled back for us to cross the lines. I found our regiment half a mile back, in a soaking cornfield, whose every sheaf drenched us as we touched it. No lights were to be shown and it was almost out of the question to lie down, for the ground was sodden. We had had only a very few light casualties in the regiment; Pat Fitzgerald, our machine gun officer, had his cheek slit open with a bullet. I sewed up the wound, which was several inches long, by the screened light of a candle as he and I crouched behind a sheaf.

The road past the field was crowded with Belgian peasants and their children hurrying away in the dark. For a moment or two I watched the refugees, trying to think what on earth could be happening. It was unbelievable that any part of the British Army should have begun to retire in the first few hours of ‘Armageddon’ [Biblical war to end conflict for ever]. Would not some of us be court martialled? The Army and Navy had for years been looking forward in confidence to a sharp decisive scrap with Germany. In the naval ward-rooms I had visited and the military messes I had lived in, conversation constantly returned to the subject. We had all been cheerfully assured of victory; prepared as we were to the last range-finder, and ready to the last gaiter button – and now this.

UP IN FLAMES

Presently a bright light flared up behind us; some of the refugees turned, their white faces lit by the glare.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘It must be the town hall, m’sieur. It is the only building of that size in Thulin.’

So the expected had happened. I have always had a horror of fire, especially in hospitals; I thought of that crowded building, with so many nearly helpless men and confused and frightened priests and sisters; of the suffocating blaze and smoke from damp straw, khaki clothing and matresses. With all those men smoking it needed no prophet to see what was almost a certainty. And my VC hero, too weak from loss of blood from that jagged stump to walk. Poor devil! He had looked as white as a sheet; was he at that moment being burnt alive?

I fumbled for my notebook. At least this gallant soldier should have a posthumous honour for his mother and his relations. Then there was his corps and his country, they should know of his self sacrfice.

My notebook was gone.

I had had it in my hand when the sister warned me. That panic-stricken dash from the town hall, the mad ride over those greasy cobble-stones, accounted all too easily for the loss. I learnt afterwards that the Germans, all things considered, devoted great care and skill and were very kind to our wounded.

Mons, looking along the length of the Mons-Condé Canal from the church tower. This is looking westward towards St Ghislain and the Mariette Bridge. The slag heap in the centre is at Jemappes.

CONFUSED FIGHTING

Gradually our men were being pressed back to the outskirts of Élouges [24 August]. It is hard to describe clearly what happened, or just when and where the trouble began; but as concerns one of the most famous incidents of the retreat from Mons, it may be worthwhile to make some attempt, though I was but a puzzled spectator, not a participant. The difficulty in giving a clear account was increased by the confusing nature of the country. Within a radius of about three thousand yards of Élouges and of one another lay at least six little villages: Angre, Angreau, Audregnies. Montignies, Onnezies and Wihéries, similar in size, each situated in a little valley, their names having to English ears a similar sound. Outside each village, and as alike as two peas, were one or more little cemeteries surrounded with brick walls. In or near this area, strange to us on that eventful morning, dotted as it was with conical slag-heaps about sixty feet high, and intersected with many sunken roads, railways and trolley lines, no fewer than three brigades or twenty-seven squadrons of our cavalry were active between 8 am and noon, in addition to several battalions of infantry and many artillery units. If my account of what I saw appears muddled, confusing, it is my only excuse. It must have been about 11 am when the brigade turned about at the shrine and rode back through the two villages towards the small cemetery at Wihéries.

The brigade halted twice. Artillery fire had begun on our right; this I supposed to be our guns on the hillside to the south and east of us. Then heavy firing began from the German positions both to the north and east and also on our left. Some shrapnel was coming over. I had the impression that an important move was about to take place, and as my position in an action should be alongside my own colonel, who was on ahead, I decided to overtake him. I saw him and a few of his staff turn up to the right and then halt. The remainder of the regiment, all three squadrons, as I thought, turned to the left, toward the Germans.

I missed my groom and stopped for a moment to look for him; then a squadron of the 9th who had got just in front of me turned about, and I had perforce – because of the narrowness of the lane – to turn about with them. They turned down to their right between two walls and there they halted, facing the Germans. I turned about again, intending to rejoin the headquarters of my own regiment. Instead of overtaking them, I found myself with some of the 18th Hussars riding up a slope above some railway lines to where our field and horse batteries were halted. The firing had become much heavier. Some of the cavalry were riding towards the railway lines between us and the Germans, making, apparently, for the tall brick buildings of a sugar factory. A perfect hurricane of shelling began. Then the whole scene was blotted out in smoke and dust. Like most of the others, I had heard no orders and did not know a charge was taking place. I don’t think anyone except those taking part in it did, and many of them told me afterwards that they thought it was only a reconnaissance.

German battery of 77 mm field guns laying down supporting fire for attacking infantry.

The noise was now terrific. Shells were bursting higher up the hill; some seemed to be skimming just overhead. With two mounted signallers and a man of the 18th Hussars, I rode in between two walls, close to the cemetery, where we sheltered. The broad slope of the hill above and behind, to the south of us, was now one white cloud of bursting shells. Then some of the 9th and 11th came galloping past us excitedly. Everybody seemed to be shouting, though the din was so deafening we could not hear what they said; but with the signallers I followed some of them, only to find myself again in one of the villages we had passed through nearly an hour before.

BRITISH CAVALRY CHARGE

It must then have been about 11.30 am. The Hussar – an officer’s servant – had followed after us. He and I rode up to the hilltop crowned by the little shrine at the fork roads. The artillery fire all round was very heavy.

I could see infantry moving down below me across our front, but whether English or German I could not be certain (probably the Cheshires, or part of our 19 Brigade). Unaware that my regiment – and indeed the whole brigade – were dispersed and disorganized, temporarily nonexistent, I started off again to find them.

Only by piecing together the conflicting accounts and experiences of survivors did I manage during the next week to get a hazy idea of the day’s events. At 10 am the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, sixteen or seventeen hundred officers and men, Dragoons, Lancers and Hussars, had been virtually intact; yet before noon the brigade was so broken and scattered as to be for the time being non-existent. By 7 o’clock that evening about two hundred men and a few officers had arrived in Wargnies-le-Petit, believing themselves to be the only survivors. Whole batteries of horse and field artillery had apparently been exterminated.

One account was that General de Lisle, hearing that the 5th Infantry Division on our right was in difficulties and trying to extricate itself from the German attack, had placed his brigade at the disposal of the GOC. To delay the advance of the Germans on our retreating infanty and prevent the capture of our field batteries, our brigade was to make some sort of demonstration in force. This was to be preceded by a reconnaissance of the ground by two troops of the 18th Hussars or the 9th Lancers.

Either the orders were confused or confusing – or the general’s commands were given direct to the troops and squadrons concerned, (always a fatal mistake, instead of being passed as they should have been through the regimental commanders).

At all events the two troops sent out to reconnoitre had been followed, by practically the entire brigade. The Germans, seeing a comparatively large mass of cavalry suddenly let loose and galloping towards them, got a bad attack of nerves – why, it is hard to understand, for the network of hedges, wire fences, allotments, trolley lines and other obstructions made it unlikely that our cavalry would ever reach their infantry or guns. But nearly every German gun within range had at once been put on to the small area on which our cavalry were moving.

Presumably to counter this, our field and horse artillery had also been compelled to open fire, thus disclosing prematurely and fatally their own position. They in turn had been hopelessly hammered by the German massed artillery. A first-class battle had in fact developed with the rapidity of a whirlwind from this muddled order. For the German infantry, imagining themselves to be seriously threatened by this charge of British cavalry, had taken it seriously and halted their advance.

German infantry resting during their advance.

Every rifle and machine gun on their side was now blazing away at our desperate and rather objectless cavalrymen.

What our men did exactly when they emerged from the cover of those walls into a perfect hail of shell and machine-gun fire, and the clouds of dust and ashes disturbed from the slag heaps, no one seems to know. Some eventually got over to a sugar factory, from which they were driven out again by a concentration of machine-gun fire. Horses tripped over signal wires, railway lines, plunged into ballast pits alongside the railway lines, killing and injuring their riders. Men and horses managed to reach a hedge and wooden fence surrounding some allotments on the far side of the railway, terrifying the Germans in that sector. That reckless and meaningless onrush unnerved them, as a German told me after the war.

Incredibly, some men actually galloped under this terrific fire through a half-circle of two miles and survived.

The Vicomte de Vauvineur, our principal French liaison officer, was blown to pieces, with many of the 4th Dragoon Guards around him. Most of the other French officers attached to us were either killed or wounded. Major Tom Bridges had his horse shot from under him and in the resulting fall the bones of his face were badly damaged as he crashed onto the railway lines. Climbing into the sugar factory, at which half a dozen German machine guns were firing, he got out of a window and, dropping onto the back of a riderless horse, somehow got away. Although the casualties eventually turned out to be less heavy than at first supposed, about three hundred of our magnificent horses – many of them had come from Rothschild’s stables – had been killed.

The London papers, hard up for any cheering news, transmuted this unfortunate affair into ‘a magnificient charge of the 9th Lancers – German gunners sabred!’

Colonel David Campbell, commanding the 9th Lancers, was, as we were told, offered a VC on the strength of it all, an honour he was said to have indignantly refused. ‘I want my squadrons back again, not VCs or any other medals.