Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (44 page)

Kluck’s soldiers were quite as tired as their opponents, having marched thirty miles the previous day. Contrary to British claims of overwhelming numbers of attackers thrown against II Corps, only six regiments, together with three or four Jäger battalions of skirmishers and several thousand dismounted cavalry, came into action against Smith-Dorrien on 26 August. This was a formidable force, backed by excellent artillery. But Le Cateau cannot credibly be portrayed as the David-and-Goliath clash of British myth: the respective forces were about equal.

Just as at Mons, wherever enemy masses appeared within rifle range, they were mauled. ‘It is impossible to miss German infantry,’ wrote forty-three-year-old Maj. Bertie Trevor, a company commander in the Yorkshires. ‘They come on in heaps.’ But the defenders in their turn suffered from artillery fire, which caused especially severe losses in British batteries, deployed as conspicuously as were their forebears on the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean, at Waterloo in 1815. Indeed, the first Duke of Wellington would have seen much at Le Cateau that was familiar to him: enemy troops advancing in close-packed columns; drivers lashing lathered artillery teams forward to unlimber; gallopers bearing orders hastening hither and thither.

A German officer wrote wonderingly: ‘I did not think it possible that flesh and blood could survive so great an onslaught … Our men attacked with the utmost determination, but again and again they were driven back by those incomparable soldiers. Regardless of loss, the English artillery came forward to protect their infantrymen and in full view of our own guns kept up a devastating fire.’ Another German participant, Lt. Schacht of a machine-gun company, observed more sceptically: ‘We could see a [British] battery which, according to our doctrine, was located far too far forward, in amongst the line of infantrymen, to which we had already approached very closely. Right! Sights at 1,400 metres! Rapid fire. Slightly short. Higher! Soon we could observe the effect. There could not be greater activity around an upturned antheap. Everywhere men and horses were milling around, falling down, and in among all this brouhaha was constant tack-tack-tack.’

When Smith-Dorrien ordered forward men of his slender reserve to reinforce the threatened right, few were able to cover the distance, across
ground swept by German fire. Bertie Trevor of the Yorkshires later described the battle as ‘too terrible for words … We fired 350 rounds a man in my company, and did a good deal of execution. But we were in an absolute trap – it is a marvel that anyone there is alive & untouched. Until one has been for hours pelted at with lyddite & shrapnel, machine-guns and rifles, one cannot understand war. Where the fun comes in, I don’t know.’ A circling German aircraft, dropping spasmodic coloured smoke-bombs to mark targets for the artillery, contributed a contemporary touch to a nineteenth-century battle. On Smith-Dorrien’s right, by 10 a.m. one artillery battery had lost all its officers, and had only a single gun left in action. This was a day when the county battalions of the British Army – Yorkshires, Suffolks, Cornwalls, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and East Surreys – conducted themselves with a stubborn steadiness and professionalism in which their senior officers – with the notable exception of the corps commander – showed themselves deficient.

On the British left, the day began with a small disaster. The 1st King’s Own had marched all night. Dawn found them on the Ligny road, waiting in column of companies for a promised breakfast. Capt. R.G. Beaumont spotted some horsemen on the horizon who looked neither British nor French, but he was sharply put down by his colonel for talking nonsense when he suggested they might be German. The enemy, snapped the CO, was at least three hours away. The welcome rattle of carts caused voices to call, ‘Here come the cookers!’ Men piled arms and took out their mess tins, even as the distant horsemen brought up wheeled vehicles of their own, and offloaded them in plain sight. These were German cavalry, and they were permitted unmolested to deploy machine-guns. As almost a thousand British soldiers crowded around their breakfast, the Maxims opened fire.

The first bursts killed the King’s colonel, and prompted a panic-stricken flight by three companies, who abandoned their piled rifles. Almost all those who tried to run were cut down: only men who embraced the earth escaped the slaughter. The unit’s second-in-command eventually rallied enough survivors to retrieve their weapons and bring in most of the wounded. But in the space of a couple of minutes the King’s had suffered four hundred casualties – a murderous demonstration of the price of exposure. Among the witnesses of this embarrassment was a platoon commander of the neighbouring Warwicks, Lt. Bernard Montgomery, later the field-marshal, who thought poorly of most aspects of British command and control that day. The King’s thereafter held their
ground for a time, assisted by the fact that they faced only German cavalry and skirmishers. But as horsemen of Gen. Georg von Marwitz’s corps worked around behind the King’s left flank, the British infantry withdrew.

When Germans exposed themselves in their turn, they suffered as heavily as Smith-Dorrien’s men: a battery unlimbered and opened fire in front of the Hampshires, whose rifles immediately obliged the gunners to retire. Both sides’ field artillery laboured under the handicap that crews needed to be able to see their targets – so-called direct fire. Forward observation officers linked by telephone to gun positions were not then available. It was a terrible business, recalling the British disaster at Colenso in the Boer War, to invite gunners and horse teams to deploy within sight and range of German rifle as well as artillery fire; yet this happened all day at Le Cateau, and again and again through that first campaign. British guns fired over open sights, as the term went, at ranges of 1,200 yards – no more than Wellington’s artillery knew. The Germans were better equipped to deliver indirect fire from concealed positions through their heavier howitzers, but both sides were constrained by the limited ammunition supplies they carried. The barrages seemed brutal to those who endured them, especially without benefit of trenches, but were mere miniatures of those that followed in subsequent battles.

It is characteristic of even the fiercest actions, that not all the participants are engaged all the time. At Le Cateau, though some units were severely punished, others had an astonishingly quiet morning in sectors initially untroubled by the Germans. Tom Wollocombe of the Middlesex recorded that around 11.30 he ‘got quite a good lunch’ at the battalion mess in the rear. Once back in the forward positions, for some time ‘we sat there talking and joking, and began to get quite bored’. Even when German shellfire began to fall around them, Wollocombe was chiefly fascinated by the spectacle of four black cows, grazing unconcernedly. One eventually received a direct hit and was killed, but the other three chewed the cud until the end of the battle. A German participant was similarly bemused by seeing a flock of sheep, bleating furiously, cross the front amid the cannonade.

Lt. Roebbling, an infantryman, found that although he peered intently towards the British positions through his telescope, he could not identify an enemy to fire at: ‘At the same time things were whistling past or crashing into the ground. Then all of a sudden the man two to my right called out “
Adieu
Subenbach, I’ve had it!” Corporal Subenbach said: “Don’t say
that, Busse! Keep your chin up!” A little later comes a groan: “Oh, I’ve only got it in the shoulder and ear!”’ Roebbling asked for the wounded man’s rifle and some ammunition, but still could not see anything to shoot at. Shrapnel began to burst around them, and a bullet hit the sling of his weapon, tearing open the lieutenant’s hand. One of his men applied a field dressing.

The young officer sensed British fire slackening as German shelling took its toll. But when Lt. Fricke leapt to his feet waving a sword and ordered his men forward, he was promptly shot down. Roebbling then watched his company commander, son of an officer of the Franco-Prussian War, meet the same fate: ‘The sword which his father had dropped when he lay mortally wounded at the head of the same 7th Company before Beaumont in 1870 fell to the ground for ever.’ At Caudry, Lt. von Davier raised a laugh to steady his men under fire by wailing satirically: ‘I have lost my monocle. Anybody who finds it should give it to me later!’ His enemies would have applauded.

The Germans began to press the British centre only around noon, and suffered considerably when they did so. Col. Hull of the Middlesex made his men wait until the enemy closed to five hundred yards. Their rippling fire then took effect, but dismounted German cavalry meanwhile infiltrated Caudry. The Royal Irish Rifles, holding part of the little town, were urged to make a counter-attack. To the relief of Col. Bird, that order was overruled by a senior officer who said: ‘what we want to do is stop and exhaust the Germans’. Soon after 1 p.m., shellfire began to fall in the vicinity. Bird saw British soldiers running towards the rear. All the transport horses of the Middlesex were killed, and houses were soon blazing. ‘There were a lot of men making their way back in a disgraceful manner, even NCOs,’ wrote signals officer Alexander Johnston, who was in the town. ‘It makes one sad and anxious for the future to see Englishmen behave like this, as the fire was not really heavy nor the losses great. Of course these were only the bad men or men whose officers had been hit and were therefore out of control, and one always found plenty of splendid fellows holding on gamely.’

Col. Bird was attempting to check fugitives from Caudry when he suddenly met his brigadier slumped in the saddle of a charger, being led rearwards by two staff officers. ‘Hullo, sir,’ said the colonel. ‘I hope you are not hurt.’ The brigadier mumbled in response, ‘No, I am just going back for a while,’ and left the battlefield. The senior officer’s retirement was excused by the fact that he had been concussed by a shell, but later in the
war humble rankers would be shot for doing the same thing. The Germans were temporarily evicted from the southern half of Caudry by a counter-attack delivered by a scratch group of British troops led by the divisional commander’s aide-de-camp.

Meanwhile on the right, II Corps’ predicament was worsening. Smith-Dorrien had counted on Haig for support, and instead I Corps’ formations were still retreating, scarcely pursued, while GHQ made no attempt to turn them back. Thus the German assault on the exposed flank at Le Cateau was unimpeded. Infantry and gun batteries faced a storm of artillery and machine-gun fire from an enemy who could now observe almost every yard of the British positions. Pte. Fred Petch of the Suffolks was firing at some Germans attempting to creep up a little gully on his right when one machine-gun bullet ricocheted off the stock of his rifle, and a second went through his left hip and out through his right leg, ‘which left me pretty well paralysed’. When there was a brief lull in German movements and firing, George Reynolds of the Yorkshires said, ‘it was as if the referee had blown his whistle. We lay there and wondered what the second half would be like.’

More of the same, was the answer. Soon after noon, it became plain that the British must pull back – some men were already trickling towards the rear. Several units withdrew intact, but others remained as German infantry worked around behind them, up the hill from Le Cateau. ‘About 2.30 the situation was as bad as it could be,’ wrote Bertie Trevor of the Yorkshires. ‘The ridge on our right … was shelled to pieces, and we were getting it from the Maxims half-right at about 900 yards, as well as volumes of shell – H[igh] E[xplosive] and shrapnel. Half the men were hit and the ammunition was running out … One battalion had held up its hands and I remember the German Guards coming up and taking them prisoners, and executing a parade march round them.’

The most urgent problem became that of extricating the British artillery. Some batteries were firing from positions alongside the infantry; these needed to bring forward horse teams, limber up and retire, within range of every German within a mile. The men holding Smith-Dorrien’s right witnessed a series of displays of extraordinary, absurdly old-fashioned gallantry as again and again gunners galloped forward to bring away their pieces amid a rain of shell and small-arms fire. Infantrymen sprang to their feet cheering at the spectacle of one battery’s horses charging down a forward slope in plain view of the Germans. On the other side, Lt. Schacht and his fellow machine-gunners watched in disbelief: ‘Half-right among the flashes appeared a dark mass. It was the [British] teams approaching at a mad gallop. We could not help but think: “Are they mad?” No, with extraordinary bravery they were attempting to pull out their batteries at the last minute … In a hectic rhythm twelve machine-guns poured bullets at the sacrificial victims. What a dreadful tangle it was up there … one [horse] remained standing among this wild hail of fire; started to graze; whinnied for water and shook its head tiredly.’

Again and again bullets struck and shells exploded among horses and riders, who collapsed in thrashing, bloody heaps. Two guns were extracted from the carnage and taken to the rear, but the neighbouring batteries had to be abandoned, breech-blocks removed. VCs were awarded to an officer and two drivers who dashed within two hundred yards of approaching German infantry, and somehow carried away one of two howitzers – the second team that made the attempt was shot to pieces. The Suffolks, Argyll & Sutherlands and Yorkshire Light Infantry covered the retirement of 5th Division at mid-afternoon, before those three units were progressively demolished where they stood. At 3 p.m., Maj. Trevor of the Yorkshires led back the survivors of his own company. Two men beside him were shot down as they crossed a cornfield, ‘however, we retired at a walk in true Aldershot fashion, and 3 times we turned and tried to answer the fire. Then it became a case of each man running to some trenches and so on under a murderous fire … We retired through the guns, the gunners lying dead all around.’