Our pursuit could not be called vigorous, but then we were still a somewhat jaded army.
Major Tom Bridges – Alarms and Excursions
Although Operational Order No. 16 signalled the final day of the BEF’s retreat from Mons it still subjected the British Army to another full day’s retirement in the wrong direction. For the officers and men of the 2nd Battalion Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (2/Ox & Bucks) the reality of this was a further march of 10 miles which began from the field at Le Fay where they had spent the night of 4 September. That evening as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Davies – now in receipt of orders from 5 Infantry Brigade to advance the next day – surveyed his tired and footsore battalion bivouacked in yet another field northeast of Pézarches, he reflected on the thirteen days he and his men had been in retreat since the encounter at Mons on 23 August.
‘Between 24th August and 5th September we did 178 miles in 12 marches and 1 halt day … Never in my life have I felt anything like the degree of tiredness which I felt on this retreat. Everyone felt like this. I remember that we wondered if we should ever feel rested again and whether it would leave some permanent effect on us. The worst thing was the want of sleep. The next worst thing the heat of the sun and the thirst … More than half the men were reservists who in spite of the route marches had not got into proper condition for the marching and consequently there were a good many sore feet … We usually had no ambulances with us so that even the men who fell down unconscious with sun-stroke had to be got along on transport of some kind or on artillery limbers.’
Despite the physical hardships of the retreat, the experience of Davies and his men, who were part of General Douglas Haig’s I Corps, had been relatively straightforward. Unlike several other brigades of I Corps they escaped the weight of the pursuing German forces and over the course of the retreat lost only one man.
Saturday 5 September began, for the majority of Lieutenant General Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps units as it had for the previous thirteen days, with another long march. The II Corps experience since arriving in France had been very different to that of I Corps; not only had Smith-Dorrien’s command fought a defensive battle at Mons but it had also stood again a few days later at Le Cateau on 26 August. To the men of the 1st Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers (1/NF) the news that they were to advance the next day was greeted with both relief and anticipation. At last they were going to get to grips with the enemy again. The Fusiliers had embarked for Le Havre with the 3rd Division on 13 August with 28 officers and 988 NCOs and men on the SS Norman. At Mons two companies of Fusiliers had defended a stretch of the Mons-Condé Canal by the lifting bridge at Mariette and afterwards fought a desperate rearguard action through Frameries. A few days later at the battle of Le Cateau they fought at Inchy alongside the three other battalions of 9 Infantry Brigade. Now, having arrived at Châtres after a long night march the battalion adjutant transcribed the names and regimental numbers of every casualty suffered by the battalion from enemy action. It was a long list, the battalion’s war diary detailed over ninety men killed and wounded, not to mention those who had fallen by the wayside and were still on record as missing. But this was only the prelude to what was to come.
Casualties on this scale were something the men of the 1st Battalion Hampshire Regiment (1/Hampshire) had only recently been introduced to. Having missed the clash at Mons the battalion had arrived in France with the 4th Division on 22 August in time to join II Corps in its stand at Le Cateau. Deployed to a position southeast of Cattenières the battalion found itself digging in under fire astride the railway line and in the ensuing battle the battalion lost 10 of their officers killed, wounded or missing and nearly 180 other ranks killed and wounded. Although these were regular soldiers it had still been a bloody and shocking introduction to war and one which had had a profound effect upon Private George Pattenden. In his considered opinion, ‘we marvellously escaped annihilation, we had to retire and they caught us with shrapnel, it was nearly a wholesale rout and slaughter.’ Prone to outbursts of pessimism, Pattenden was a reservist who had served his time with the colours and had been called up in August 1914. Like so many of the reservists serving with BEF during those fraught days of the retreat he suffered badly, ‘my feet are very painful, I can just manage to shuffle along now’, he wrote on 1 September, ‘it is too terrible, one feels absolutely done up in heart, soul and spirit.’ But regardless of his sore feet and the protestations in his diary, he managed four more days of hard marching before 11 Infantry Brigade reached the furthest point of its retreat south of Ozoir la Ferrière. On 31 August the 4th Division became part of the newly formed III Corps under the command of Lieutenant General William Pulteney, which was probably of little interest to George Pattenden and his comrades as they contemplated what the advance might bring.
On the morning of 6 September the three army corps of the BEF turned to take the offensive but because of Sir John French’s decision to continue his retirement they found themselves over 10 miles behind the line from which Joffre intended to launch his planned offensive. Brigadier General Colin Ballard, writing with hindsight in 1931, felt that although there had been, ‘a real confidence between Joffre and Sir John,’ the day spent marching in the wrong direction could easily have been avoided.9 But even when facing in the right direction the BEF was slow to get going. The Official History tells us that the BEF’s advance on 6 September was preceded by, ‘a wheel to the east pivoting on its right, so that it would come into line roughly parallel to the Grand Morin’. It was a manoeuvre which took up most of the morning and it was not until close to lunch-time that the BEF actually began its advance. Nevertheless the British were now advancing on a wide front with Allenby’s Cavalry Division in contact with Conneau’s cavalry corps and the Fifth Army on the right. Haig’s I Corps was east of Rozay-en-Brie and further west, II Corps and the 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades were just south of Coulommiers on the Grand Morin.10 In touch with Maunoury’s Sixth Army on the left was III Corps and like it or not, Sir John French was now committed to playing his part in the Battle of the Marne.
In the strictest sense of the word there was no one deciding battle which could be attributed to victory on the Marne. Indeed there was little actual fighting on the Marne itself, the significant clashes were in the region of the River Ourcq but when the battle was given its name, Joffre chose Marne because the rivers of the region amongst which the battle had taken place all flowed into the Marne.11 For the BEF, the fighting in which it was involved between 5 September up until the point when it reached the Aisne Valley on 13 September, was characterised by a series of seemingly unconnected and often frustrating engagements with German rearguard units as the British advanced towards the gap between the German First and Second Armies. As Captain John Darling of the 20th Hussars (20/Hussars) remarked afterwards, ‘it seemed curious to note that we never heard of this battle until it was over.’12 Yet the fact that the retreat had finally ended and they were now pursuing an enemy which had harassed them since 24 August, provided just the tonic which the weary men of the BEF had been waiting for. 28-year-old Lieutenant Arthur Acland, adjutant of the 1st Battalion Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, (1/DCLI) was delighted:
‘It was such a joy to know that we were going to push our late pursuers back over their own footsteps. Perhaps what pleased us most was that the Germans were now going to suffer exceedingly for the way they had burnt and pillaged their way south. We had hardly ever held an outpost position or formed a rearguard without having had the hours of darkness lighted by the volume of flames issuing from one of the huge close-stacked hay and straw barns or from some of the perfectly kept farm buildings which those savages had delighted in setting alight … Perhaps they thought their entry into Paris was a foregone conclusion and that they would never have need of the fodder and food they destroyed.’13
The precise raison d’êtres behind the much welcomed advance were still unclear in the minds of many in the BEF – the wider strategic movements to the north could only be guessed at – but for Brigadier General Count Edward Gleichen, in command of 15 Infantry Brigade, the turning of the tide brought with it a sea change in the spirits of his men. ‘What had happened, or why we were suddenly to turn against the enemy after days of retreat, we could not conceive,’ he wrote in his diary but the men ‘marched twice as well, whistling and singing, back through Tournans and on to Villeneuve.’14 It was an observation shared by Brigadier General Aylmer Haldane commanding 10 Infantry Brigade who remarked on, ‘the difference in demeanour of the troops now that they had their heads turned towards the enemy.’
As was the case with the British wounded incurred during the retreat from Mons, the German ambulance transport proved to be woefully inadequate for the task now that it was the Germans’ turn to retreat. German wounded were experiencing precisely the same trying circumstances which many of the British wounded had had to endure during the forced marching and fighting from Mons to points south of the Marne – that of being abandoned to face the ignominy of captivity.
Yet there was an essential difference; medical staff of the RAMC had generally remained behind to care for the British wounded for whom transport could not be found or who had been too ill to be moved. What was noticeable during the advance towards the Aisne was the almost total absence of German field ambulance staff from the field lazarettes attending the wounded. Field ambulance war diaries and personal accounts written by medical officers are punctuated with descriptions of the plight of unattended German wounded. Captain Robert Dolbey, the medical officer with the 2nd Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers (2/KOSB) noted that, ‘all along the roads in ditches, by haystacks, were German dead and wounded; victims, for the most part, of the shrapnel which hurried their flight’.15 Dolbey also recounts attending to groups of German wounded, ‘putting on first field dressings, making them comfortable, giving morphia and leaving instructions to await the field ambulances’.
But regardless of the change in demeanour noted by Haldane, the advance of the BEF was slow and cautious. To be fair it had no easy task to face. What lay ahead were five deeply incised river valleys, all of which, apart from some fordable sections of the Petit Morin, required bridges to be intact or constructed for the passage of troops. If the geography was against it, then the physical condition of the BEF was such that any advance was handicapped by the exhausted state of the men. Many units were very still much depleted by casualties sustained during the engagements of the past two weeks and reinforcements, although dribbling in slowly, were still not enough to replace the 488 officers and 19,532 men who had been lost since Mons.16 It was not a situation which inspired confidence and was one which Sir John French, for all his lack of effective command and control over the previous weeks, felt keenly. Whilst we may agree that as a commander-in-chief he was almost certainly out of his depth, his apparent reluctance to commit the BEF to further offensive fighting stemmed from an overall – albeit misplaced – concern that his troops were incapable of offensive action.
The BEF’s delay in moving northeast did not prevent its units from coming into contact with German forces on 6 September. The 1 Guards Brigade, under the command of Brigadier General Ivor Maxse, came under attack from German artillery and infantry units of Sixt von Arnim’s IV Corps and with rumours of additional enemy forces in the area Douglas Haig halted the I Corps advance at Rozay-en-Brie. The sounds of battle were clearly audible to the advance units of the 2nd Division and Lieutenant Charles Paterson, adjutant of the 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers, (1/SWB) was keenly aware that, ‘a battle had already begun eastward.’ His frustration at being kept out of the fight is clear from his diary account, ‘we move a bit nearer to the fight and then halt again.’ Arriving at La Chapelle-Iger there was a further wait of several hours which, Paterson reports with undisguised exasperation, gave the German columns ample time to escape. Even with II Corps in support and RFC reconnaissance reports indicating clear roads ahead, by the time Haig resumed his advance at 3.30pm von Arnim had escaped to the Ourcq to reinforce von Kluck. It had been a poor start and one on which General Franchet d’Espèrey had every reason to vent his anger, particularly when it became apparent that, despite II Corps reaching the south bank of the Grand Morin without opposition, the BEF had only advanced 11 miles. ‘A most tiring day,’ wrote Paterson, ‘though we have not done much.’
Monday, 7 September was hardly an improvement on the previous day. GHQ did not issue its orders for the day until 8.00am, prompted, it must be said, by delays in maintaining contact with adjacent French forces, but nevertheless the BEF was not underway until 11.00am that morning. Still concerned at the possibility of outrunning Conneau’s cavalry corps on the right flank, GHQ’s orders brought the BEF to a standstill by early afternoon with most units only moving forward 8 to 10 miles. II Corps, which had already reached the Grand Morin river hardly moved at all. At 5.00pm Lieutenant Alexander Johnston, the signalling officer with 7 Infantry Brigade, was still kicking his heels at Faremoutiers on the south bank of the Grand Morin wondering why they were not chasing the enemy hard:
‘Surely our duty is according to Field Service Regulations “not to spare man or horse or gun in pursuing the enemy etc” … Just heard that we are a long way ahead of the other divisions while we are well in front of our own which accounts for the delay as others have to catch us up. Also hear that, had our I Corps pushed a bit more, we ought to have cornered those Germans last night.’17
Eventually his brigade moved east to Coulommiers where the four battalions of 7 Brigade collected their reinforcements at the railway station. That evening the only British forces across the Grand Morin were the 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades.
There was one piece of news on 7 September which was more positive and it came from the cavalrymen of Brigadier General Henry de Lisle’s 2 Cavalry Brigade. Since Mons, de Lisle’s men had been involved in countless skirmishes with enemy cavalry during the course of the retreat, although not all could be counted as having a satisfactory outcome. At Audregnies on 24 August 4/Dragoon Guards and 9/Lancers had charged the massed infantry and guns of the German 7th Infantry Division during a rearguard action which saw the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment (1/Cheshire) reduced to 7 officers and 200 other ranks and the surviving cavalrymen of 2 Cavalry Brigade scattered far and wide. This disastrous cavalry action was in complete contrast to the rearguard action at Cerizy four days later when Brigadier General Phillip Chetwode’s 5 Cavalry Brigade put to flight a strong column of von Richthofen’s 1st Cavalry Corps with an effective combination of dismounted rifle and machine-gunfire and mounted action.
Yet, to date, there had been no cavalry action between British and German cavalry which had involved lance against lance and as George Paget correctly points out in his History of the British Cavalry, the fight at Moncel and Vieux Villers on 7 September was unique in that it was probably the first and certainly the last occasion during the Great War in which British cavalry used their lances against an opponent similarly armed.18 The action occurred between two troops of Lieutenant Colonel David Campbell’s 9/Lancers and a squadron of the 1st Guard Dragoons commanded by Rittmeister von Gayling. Campbell’s description is typically short and to the point:
‘I put the two troops behind a haystack … when I heard some firing from the east of the village and galloped over with my trumpeter to see what it was. At the north end I saw some lancers firing into a wood to the east … I left my trumpeter and went out towards the wood and when about four hundred yards from it saw 100 to 120 German cavalry begin to mount.’
Clearly intending to charge, the Guard Dragoons moved towards Campbell who galloped back to his haystack and brought his much smaller force into line and charged the advancing Germans. Campbell’s horse being much fresher quickly outpaced the others and the colonel found himself a good 100 yards ahead of his men:
‘It was, however, too late to wait, so I rode straight on, hoping for the best! As I approached the Germans, they closed in on their troop leader and their long iron lances presented a very disagreeable-looking wall. I directed my horse towards the troop leader, and when I got level with him I shot him as he was in the act of cutting at me with his sword. The next thing I remember was being carried very slowly over the tail of my horse to fall in a field. Both the Germans and our own men passed right over the top of me, but marvellous to relate not a single horse trod on my body.’19
After the charge, during which Campbell and six others were wounded and three others killed, both sides withdrew just as the 18th Hussars arrived at Moncel in time to administer the coup de grâce with dismounted rifle and machine-gun fire. It was hardly a major action or one which contributed much to the advance, but at least someone had got to grips with the enemy and had inflicted some damage.
The orders issued by GHQ for 8 September were lacking in any clear directive other than for all three British corps to continue the advance and attack the enemy wherever they were found. In contrast to previous days, British units were on the road by 6.00am which soon put them in touch with the German rearguards on the Petit Morin. At Sablonnières the 5th Dragoon Guards (Queen’s Bays) were caught off guard by the size and strength of the German rearguard. Lieutenant Algernon Lamb was with the troop which successfully took the railway bridge but was prevented from carrying the river bridge by a barricade:
A force of Germans were holding the village of Sablonnières. The 1st Cavalry Brigade took up positions on the south side of the valley of the Petit Morin River, opposite Sablonnières. The brigaded machine guns did a lot of firing across the valley which is very wooded, and the slopes held on the far side by the enemy look pretty high and steep. Later, we galloped on down the road under rifle fire from across the river, and came into another position without losing any men, close to Sablonnières station.’20
It was a similar story all along the Petit Morin, German rearguards had effectively brought the cavalry to a standstill and any further progress was on hold until the infantry arrived.
By 9.30am the advance guard of the 1st Division, the 1st Battalion the Black Watch (1/Black Watch), was 2 miles to the east of Sablonnières at Bellot. Here it found French cavalry in possession of the village and, like the British cavalry to the west, unable to make progress. Undeterred, the Black Watch pushed on through the village and into the wooded slopes of the valley on the north side and with the sound of firing quite audible to the west, the battalion turned towards Sablonnières where it came under heavy fire from elements of the Garde Jäger battalion and the Garde Kürassiere Regiment. This was a strong rearguard and it was not until the arrival of a company of the 1st Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (1/Camerons), supported by dismounted troopers of 4 Cavalry Brigade, that the heights were eventually taken at 1.00pm and the rearguard evicted.
Although Sablonnières was a relatively minor skirmish and one of a number of similar episodes along the Petit Morin that morning, the casualties had not been insignificant. Algernon Lamb noted, ‘a lot of German wounded and dead lying about’ and plenty of prisoners. In addition to their eighteen wounded, the Black Watch lost two of their officers, 31-year-old Captain Charles Dalglish and Lieutenant Ewen Wilson together with eight other ranks, while the Cameron Highlanders lost Privates Ford and Davidson killed and Privates Macdonald, Hay and McShane wounded. Most notable amongst the cavalry casualties was the loss of 38-year-old Captain John Norwood who had won the Victoria Cross whilst serving as a second lieutenant with the Queen’s Bays in South Africa fourteen years previously. Nineteen casualties of the action now rest in a quiet corner of the riverside communal cemetery at Sablonnières.
While some had to fight their way over the Petit Morin others had little or no contact with the enemy on 8 September. Brigadier General Edward Gleichen observed that the noise of battle, although ‘going on just ahead of us or on both flanks,’ never got within striking distance of 15 Infantry Brigade. They crossed the river at St-Cyr-sur-Morin, sweating profusely as they climbed the steep hill out of the valley towards the Montapéine crossroads:
‘We were in a curious position, for there was a big fight going on amid some burning villages in the plain far on our left – I don’t know what division – probably the 4th – and a smaller fight parallel to us on the right, not two miles off; and we were marching calmly along the road in column.’21
Gleichen was correct about the division to his left. Pulteney’s III Corps had met little resistance until late morning when it had reached the south banks of the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, at which point the advance units discovered the bridges destroyed and a strong German rearguard on the north bank. As 9/Field Company, Royal Engineers, approached the Marne at La Ferté with 10 Infantry Brigade, Lieutenant Bernard Young idly wondered what condition he would find the main road bridge to be in. Less than a week previously, during the retreat south, 26/Field Company had successfully blown one of the stone arches of the bridge, now here they were again attempting to re-cross the Marne and would most probably have to construct a temporary bridge to get III Corps across!
As dusk fell on 8 September the BEF had only averaged around 12 miles and apart from III Corps had not yet reached the Marne. However, the next morning the advance guard of II Corps, which was further east, found the Marne bridges intact and after some initial dithering were on the north bank by 9.00am. I Corps was across by lunchtime but there the advance sputtered to a halt in the face of determined German rearguard actions and from what appeared to be ‘a lack of determination’ on the part of brigade commanders. At La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, practically the whole of III Corps was stationary. Lieutenant Cecil Brereton, a gunner officer with 68/Battery, arrived at La Ferté to find:
‘The infantry were lining a street and the officer commanding told me anyone who showed their nose round the corner was as good as dead. Decided not to do so. All the houses on the north bank were loopholed and the place and hill opposite bristling with machine guns which were skilfully concealed.’22
The town was scoured for enough material with which to construct a pontoon bridge and Bernard Young and his sappers got to work:
‘We moved down to La Ferté to bridge the river; street fighting and sniping was still going on and we didn’t get near the river till noon at the earliest. It was then still impossible to bridge and eventually infantry were ferried over to clear out machine-gun posts which still covered the only possible bridge site near the destroyed road bridge … However we were far from idle and collected barrels, scantling and planking etc for the bridge. Barrels were collected from nearby cellars, their contents being run to waste; we found quite a lot of Bosche in the process, many dead drunk. I am glad to say none of our men succumbed to such temptation; all realized there was too much to be done.’23
The actual bridge building began at 5.45pm on 9 September and was completed by 6.30am the following day. In 12 hours the engineers had built a 218 foot long bridge constructed largely from local materials and boats found on the river. As Bernard Young commented in 1933, if III Corps had got its act together and anticipated the crossing by bringing the Bridging Train up quickly, ‘the Marne – as far as we were concerned – could have been bridged in a quarter of the time’.
Young’s confidence in his bridge was not entirely shared by the men and wagons of 20/Field Ambulance who crossed the pontoon bridge later that day. Lieutenant Travis Hampson felt the bridge appeared to be a little flimsy and was quite relieved when he was safely on the other side:
‘The pontoon bridge didn’t look too strong. It was made with RE bridging pontoons (needless to say the road bridge had been blown up) but there were not enough to span the river, and some oddments of civilian boats had to be used as well. After all that had gone over it already we had another wait while it was strengthened, and even then is sagged a good deal as our heavy GS wagons went over one by one. The ordinary bridges had all been blown up, and there was nowhere else to cross anywhere near. Here we saw the results of the shelling of the town by both sides. Many of the houses were complete ruins, and all showed rifle bullet and shrapnel holes.’24
George Pattenden, by now travelling with the battalion transport as his feet had given up on him, crossed over the pontoon bridge at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre at 9.00am: ‘Today we are now on the German line of retreat, the state of the place is awful. It is impossible to describe the state of affairs, houses upside down, bottles in thousands’. Pattenden was very much aware of a new tempo being injected into the advance once they were across the Marne, a change of pace induced by GHQ, which, encouraged by the retirement of the German First and Second Armies, now appeared to throw caution to the wind and ordered the BEF to pursue the Germans with all haste. Von Kluck was at this time moving east across the British front and Sir John French, all too late, finally realised there was a real chance of outpacing him.
Although 10 September was perhaps the most successful day of the advance so far with II Corps in contact with the enemy for most of the day, the shortcomings of poor communications were amplified by several ‘friendly fire’ incidents. Not only did the 1st Divisional artillery open fire on the Royal Sussex and Loyal North Lancashire battalions, but to make matters worse they were joined by the 2nd Division artillery and units of the Royal Horse Artillery. The Royal Sussex war diary rather generously attributes the incident to the fact that it was raining hard and the battalion were wearing their rain capes, the ‘artillery thinking apparently we were Germans’. At the time the battalion were engaged with a strongly entrenched enemy at Priez and finding themselves under fire from both sides, Brigadier General Edward Bulfin who was commanding 2 Brigade was forced to order a temporary retirement. It is not clear how many of the seventeen killed and eighty-three wounded were the result of friendly fire. Not to be outdone, the 3rd Divisional artillery shelled the Royal Berkshires and King’s Royal Rifle Corps at Hautvesnes later in the morning, wounding four men. It was, wrote Sergeant Reeve of 16/Battery RFA, ‘an unfortunate occurrence’, and one which Douglas Haig took seriously enough to halt I Corps near Neuilly and regroup.