26-27 August, 1914
STRAGGLERS LOST for a WEEK
Author of the memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die, he went to France with the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1914. He saw continuous active service until 1918. Here he describes with characteristic understatement the exploits of an ‘Old Contemptible’ in the historic retreat from Le Cateau.
At dawn we marched out of Le Cateau with fixed bayonets. My mate Duffy said, ‘We'll have a bang at the bastards today’. And we all hoped the same. We were all fed up with the marching and would have welcomed a scrap to relieve the monotony. But we were more fed up before the day was over. The Second Argyll’s, who went to the assistance of the East Yorks, lost half of their battalion during the day, but we simply marched and counter-marched during the whole time that this was going on.
We kept on meeting people who had left their homes and were making their way south with the few belongings they could carry. One little lad, about twelve years of age, was wheeling his old grandmother in a wheelbarrow. They all seemed to be terror-stricken. In every village we marched through the church had been converted into a field-hospital and was generally full of our wounded. At about twilight we lined up in a sunken road. I was the extreme left-hand man of the battalion, Billy and Stevens being on my right.
Our colonel was speaking to our company commander just behind us when up the road came a man wheeling a pram with a baby in it and two women walking alongside. They stopped close by me, and the man, speaking in English, told me that the two women were his wife and mother-in-law, and that his only child was in the pram. He was an Englishman, the manager of some works in a small town, but his wife was French. They had been travelling all day. If they had delayed another hour they would have been in the enemy’s hands.
Just at this moment a staff-officer came along and informed our colonel that all our cavalry patrols were in, and that any cavalry or troops who now appeared on our front would be the enemy. He had hardly finished speaking when over a ridge in front of us appeared a body of horsemen galloping towards us. We immediately got out of the sunken road, and standing opened up with rapid fire at six hundred yards. I had only fired two rounds when a bugle blew the cease-fire. This, I may say, was the only time during the whole of the war, with the exception of the German bugle at Bois Grenier, that I heard a bugle in action. The light was very bad, and the majority of the bullets had been falling short because we couldn’t clearly see the sights of our rifles, but several horses fell. The horsemen stopped and waved their arms. We had been firing on our own cavalry who, I was told later, belonged to the 19th Hussars. I never heard whether any of them had been killed.
MARCH, MARCH – HOUR BY HOUR
When we got back down in the sunken road the women were crying and the child was bawling, but the man seemed to have vanished. Stevens said ‘Where has he got to?’ I asked the women, but couldn't get a word out of them, only crying, when out from under the cover of the pram crawled the man. He commenced to storm and rave and wanted to know what we meant by all that firing which had terrified his wife and child. (He didn't say a word about his mother-in-law.) He said that he would report us. Billy got hold of him and said: ‘Call yourself an Englishman! What the hell do you reckon you were going to do under that pram? For two pins I’d bayonet you, you bloody swine!’
‘Fall in!’ came the order, and we were on the march again. It was now dusk and I expect that family fell into the hands of the enemy during the night.
We retired all night with fixed bayonets, many sleeping as they were marching along. March, march, for hour after hour, with no halt: we were now breaking into the fifth day of continuous marching with practically no sleep in between. We were carrying our rifles any old way and it was only by luck that many a man didn’t receive a severe bayonet wound during the night. Stevens called out ‘There's a fine castle there, see?’ pointing to one side of the road. But there was nothing there. Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead-beat.
At last we were halted and told that we would rest for a couple of hours. Outposts and sentries were posted, and we sank down just off the road and were soon fast asleep. Fifteen minutes later we were woken up, and on the march again. We had great difficulty in waking some of the men. About ten yards from the side of the road was a straw rick, and about half a dozen men had got down the other side of it. I slipped over and woke them up. One man we had a job with, but we got him going at last. By this time the company had moved off, so we were stragglers. We came to some crossroads and didn't know which way to go. Somehow we decided to take the road to the right.
Dawn was now breaking. Along the road we took were broken-down motor lorries, motor cycles, dead horses and broken wagons. In a field were dumped a lot of rations. We had a feed, crammed some biscuits into our haversacks and moved along again. After a few minutes, by picking up more stragglers, we were twenty strong, men of several different battalions. I enquired if anyone had seen the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, but nobody had. By the time that it was full daylight there were thirty-five of us marching along, including two sergeants. We got into a small village – I had long since lost interest in the names of the places we came to – where we met a staff-officer, who took charge of us. He marched us out and up a hill and told us to extend ourselves in skirmishing order at two paces interval and lie down, and be prepared to stop an attack at any moment. About five hundred yards in front of us was a woodland; the attack would come from that direction.
British cavalry on the road from Mons.
The enemy commenced shelling our position, but the shells were falling about fifteen yards short. The man on my left was fast asleep; he was so dead-beat that the shelling did not even rouse him and the majority of us were not much better. We lay there for about half an-hour, but saw no signs of the enemy. The staff-officer then lined us up and told us to attach ourselves to the first battalion we came across. I had to shake and thump the man on my left before I could wake him up. We marched off again and came across lots of people who had left their homes. Four ladies in an open carriage insisted on getting out to let some of our crippled and dead-beat men have a ride. We packed as many as we could into the carriage and moved along, the ladies marching with us. Late in the afternoon we took leave of the ladies. The men who had been riding had a good day’s rest and sleep. If the ladies had all our wishes they would be riding in a Rolls-Royce for the rest of their lives.
During the evening when passing through a village, I got news that the battalion had passed through it an hour before. I and a man named Rhodes decided to leave the band and try to catch them. During the next few days we attached ourselves to three different battalions, but immediately left them when we got news of our own. We wandered on for days living on anything we could scrounge. It seemed to us that trying to find the battalion was like trying to chase a will-o-the-wisp. But we were going the right way – all roads seemed to lead to Paris.
One day when we were on our own and not attached to any unit, Rhodes and I came across a band of gypsies in a wood and made them understand that we were very hungry. They invited us to the meal they were about to have. I think we surprised them by our eating abilities. We thanked them heartily and, with bellies like poisoned pups, staggered off once more. It was the first square meal we had enjoyed since leaving Amiens. The next day we came to a railhead. A train was in and an officer asked if we had lost our unit; upon hearing that we were indeed stragglers he ordered us onto the train which was full of troops in the same fix as ourselves.