A Foreign Field Read online

  A general noted sternly that a ‘good many cases of unnecessary straggling and looting have taken place’, and summary court martials were held. Some could not resist the lure of an empty home as a hiding place or a source of plunder, and hunger saw soldiers pulling chocolate rations from the pockets of dead men or chewing raw roots scrabbled from the fields. In Saint-Quentin, two senior British officers looked on their beaten men and agreed with the petrified city mayor that surrender would be preferable to a losing fight and the probable death of countless civilians in the crossfire. It was a most humane decision, for which both officers were immediately cashiered and disgraced.

  Later, the Retreat from Mons would be rendered into history as a courageous action that had held up the Germans for long enough to ruin Field Marshal Schlieffen’s plan, ensuring that the advance would finally be stopped on the line of the River Marne. But to those who took part in it, the retreat was a grim shambles, just a few shades short of a rout, ‘a perfect débâcle’. The BEF had been severely wounded. (Most of those who survived the retreat would be hacked up at Ypres a few months later). Of the 80,000 British men who had come to France to partake in a short and decisive victory, 20,000 were either killed, wounded, captured, or found to be missing on the long retreat from Mons.

  In the wake of the limping army, like the detritus from some huge and surreal travelling fair, lay packs, greatcoats, limbs, canteens, makeshift graves, horse carcasses and living men. In woods, ditches, homes and haylofts, alone and in small bands, surviving shreds of the khaki army felt the battle roll over them, and then heard it rumble south. The war correspondents of the Daily Mail and The Times observed the drooping tail of the retreat: ‘We saw no organised bodies of troops, but we met and talked to many fugitives in twos and threes, who had lost their units in disorderly retreat and for the most part had no idea where they were.’

  The advancing German troops were thorough in flushing out the enemy remnants: Walter Bloem, novelist, drama critic, and a captain in the Brandenburg Grenadiers, recalled how advancing German hussars, rightly suspecting that British soldiers were hiding among the newly cut corn, ‘did not trouble to ransack every stook, but simply found that by galloping in threes or fours through a field shouting, and with lowered lances spiking a stook here and there, anyone hiding in them anywhere in the field surrendered’.

  Some of the more resourceful residue contrived to fight, wriggle or wrench their way out. A band of Irishmen made it to Boulogne, and at one point stragglers headed west in such numbers that German intelligence was briefly confused into believing that the British army was making for the coastal ports. Bernard Montgomery and a small group of men from various regiments marched for three days between the marauding advance guard of German cavalry and the main infantry body. Montgomery finally outflanked the advance, linked up with the rest of the army, and went on to become Field-Marshal Montgomery of Alamein.

  The BEF was a regular army, an army of professionals very different from Kitchener’s volunteer force that would follow. Here were the ‘Old Contemptibles’, recruits from the industrial slums of the north, illiterate farm boys, some ‘scallywags and minor adventurers’, men who were escaping trouble and a few who were looking for it. But unlike the conscript armies of Europe, they were experienced and well-trained: some had fought in the Boer War, and most were ‘adept in musketry, night operations and habits of concealment, matters about which the other belligerents had scarcely troubled’. For many who found themselves lost in what was now enemy territory, concealment was the first instinct. When the army finally caught its breath, about-faced and fought its way north again, sceptical commanders were not always easily persuaded that the men who emerged from barns and bushes were genuine stragglers rather than deserters. ‘It was the coward’s chance,’ thought one war correspondent. ‘Was it any wonder that some of these young men who had laughed on the way to Waterloo station, and held their heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own heroism, slunk now into the backyards of French farmhouses, hid behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent tales when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town of France to which they had blundered?’

  Those who never reappeared were duly recorded in the regimental files. A few months later, once the full-blown trench war of stasis was underway, their families received a letter, no different from the hundreds of thousands to follow, communicating the news, with official sadness, that a husband, son or brother was missing. Yet there were some who were neither dead nor captive.

  At dawn on 26 August 1914, Robert Digby, Private No. 9368, and his comrades in the Hampshire Regiment trained their rifles across the clover and beet fields north of the small town of Haucourt, and waited for the enemy. The offensive of Le Câteau had begun. As the day brightened the sound of shelling grew steadily louder. In the darkness of the night before battle, an officer had read aloud passages from Sir Walter Scott’s poem ‘Marmion’, a thumping epic full of appropriate granite-hewn sentiment.

  Where shall the traitor rest,

  He, the deceiver,

  Who could win maiden’s breast,

  Ruin, and leave her?

  In the lost battle,

  Borne down by the flying,

  Where mingles war’s rattle

  With groans of the dying.

  And when the mountain sound I heard

  Which bids us be for storm prepar’d

  The distant rustling of his wings,

  As up his force the tempest brings.

  At nine in the morning, the attack finally began, and the officers of the Hampshire Regiment had ‘the pleasure of seeing Germans coming forward in large masses’. Under cover, a handful of Gennans crept up to the Hampshires’ position and shouted ‘Retreat!’, in English. It all still seemed to be a public school game. British snipers tried to pick off the machine-gun crews and officers, distinguishable by their swords. Heavy fire was exchanged and then, inexplicably, the guns on both sides fell quiet. ‘The stillness was remarkable; even the birds were silent, as if overawed.’ Just as suddenly, the battle resumed with deafening violence. Grey troops rushed across the clover, and it was ‘as if every gun and rifle in the German army had opened fire’. Too late, the order was given for the Hampshires to withdraw. Seizing rifle and pack, Private Digby joined the throng fleeing down narrow lanes. As dusk gathered, the chaos spread. ‘We marvellously escaped annihilation,’ Private Frank Pattenden wrote in his diary. ‘It was nearly wholesale rout and slaughter.’ Lurching south, the regiment began to dissolve, mixing with other fragments of the disintegrating rump of the British army. At nightfall, a small contingent of 300 Hampshires briefly held on in the village of Ligny, but then fell back once more, leaving behind dozens of injured men in a temporary dressing station. The walking wounded made their way into the woods, and the remainder waited in the darkness.

  The Hampshires tramped on through the night across fields, snatching two hours’ sleep beneath a hedgerow. In the morning they stumbled into the village of Villers-Outréaux, where a German battery awaited them, having leap-frogged the retreating British in the dark. It opened up when the Hampshires were a hundred yards away. A force of fifty men under Colonel Jackson was left to provide cover, and fought dismounted German cavalry and cyclists with rifle and bayonet as the main body of troops scrambled away. Jackson was shot in the legs and carried into the home of the local curé, where he was captured a few hours later. Private Pattenden, struggling south on bleeding feet, noted the gaps in the ranks and the many missing men: ‘I am too full for words or speech and feel paralysed as this affair is now turning into a horrible slaughter … my God it is heart breaking … we have no good officers left, our NCOs are useless as women, our nerves are all shattered and we don’t know what the end will be. Death is on every side.’ The tall figure of Private Robert Digby was last seen by his comrades clutching a bloodied arm in the temporary dressing station in Ligny. A German bullet had passed through his left forearm
, narrowly missing the bone, a debilitating ‘Blighty wound’ – the sort of injury that was survivable but deemed serious enough to warrant a passage home – that men would later long for in the trenches.

  When Robert Digby re-emerged from the surgeon’s tent, his arm hastily bandaged and held in a rough sling, he was no longer part of a moving mass of men, but alone. ‘I lost my army,’ he would later observe ruefully. He had also lost his Lee Enfield rifle, his bayonet, 120 rounds of ammunition, his peaked cap, his knapsack, and his bearings.

  Captain Williams, the surgeon of the Hampshire Regiment, was tending the wounded when the Germans stormed into Ligny. But by then Digby had taken solitary flight. A final, brief and unemotional entry in British military records concludes his official contribution to the Great War: ‘Private Robert Digby, Wounded: 26th August, 1914.’

  The previous day, William Thorpe, a tubby and genial soldier of the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment, had been sitting down to breakfast in the corn stubble above Haucourt when his war started. Thorpe and the other men were tired, having marched for three days to meet the advancing German forces, but their spirits were high. ‘The weather was perfect,’ noted one of Willie’s officers, and even the spectacle of Belgian refugees fleeing south, as ‘dense as the crowd from a race meeting but absolutely silent’, had not much dampened the mood as the King’s Own marched from the railhead. The soldiers whooped at a reconnaissance plane flying overhead, which came under ragged fire from somewhere in the rear, although Captain Higgins declared the aircraft to be British.

  Lieutenant Colonel Dykes had led the column of twenty-six officers and 974 other ranks past a tiny church north of Haucourt, down a gentle slope to a stream, and then up a steep hill to a plateau on the extreme right of the British line, before he gave the order to rest. ‘A full 7 to 10 minutes was spent admonishing the troops when it was found that some had piled their weapons out of alignment.’ The time might have been better spent looking at the horizon. An hour earlier the troops had been ‘greatly reassured’, although amazed, by the sight of a French cavalry unit, clad in their remarkable plumes, breastplates, and helmets: handsome and conspicuous imperial anachronisms. Since the French advance guard was supposed to be out ahead of the British troops, an officer declared that the enemy ‘could not possibly worry us for at least three hours’. This was, therefore, an excellent moment to eat breakfast.

  As they waited for the mess cart to arrive, the officers observed another group of uniformed horsemen some 500 yards away, which paused to watch the relaxing troops before trotting away. One of the younger officers quietly suggested that the cavalrymen might not be French, and was sharply told ‘not to talk nonsense’. The men were lounging and talking in groups in the quiet cornfield; the sun was growing warm when the mess cart finally rumbled up. On top of the wagon perched the regimental mascot, a small white fox terrier, clad in a patriotic Union Jack coat, that had been adopted before leaving Southampton. ‘New life came to the men’, who leapt to their feet, mess tins at the ready.

  At that moment the German Maxim guns opened up. Colonel Dykes was killed in the first burst, shot daintily through the eye, his groom making ‘a valiant attempt to hold his horse until it also was killed’. ‘Some tried to reach the valley behind,’ but the older and cannier soldiers lay flat on their faces and hugged the earth, as the bullets flicked the tops of the cut corn stalks. ‘Of those who got up, most were hit.’ After two minutes of uninterrupted firing, the German gunners paused to reload and the survivors scrambled for cover below the crest of the hill. For the next five hours, what remained of the regiment was pounded with shells. Through field glasses, the future Field Marshal Montgomery observed the ‘terrible sight’ and then followed orders to try to help the trapped Lancasters. ‘There was no reconnaissance, no plan, no covering fire. We rushed up the hill.’ With predictable results. This was ‘terrible work as we had to advance through a hail of bullets from rifles and machine guns and through a perfect storm of shrapnel fire. Our men … were knocked down like ninepins.’

  Many of the wounded were too badly injured to be moved, and by late afternoon, when the order came to fall back, the King’s Own Lancasters had been torn apart. Haucourt church was packed with bleeding and dying men, while dazed pockets of survivors, separated in the panic, wandered in search of their commanding officers and orders. A day that had started in perfect calm ended in utter confusion, as what was left of the King’s Own joined the great retreat. ‘There was nothing to do for it but to leave the wounded and hope that any stragglers would rejoin,’ one officer said. When the battalion was finally able to draw breath, the losses seemed barely believable: fourteen officers and 431 other ranks killed, wounded or missing, along with the mess cart, commanding officer, two machine guns and the fox terrier. (The distraught driver of the mess wagon was found to be carrying the dead dog under his shirt the next day, and was sharply ordered to bury it.) In three hours of battle, the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment had lost half its strength and much of its morale. It had also lost Private William Thorpe.

  David Martin, Thomas Donohoe and the Royal Irish Fusiliers had arrived in France in typically jovial fashion, ‘singing and cheering and chanting the regiment’s motto, Faugh-a-Ballagh, “Clear the Way”.’ The local French civilians found the Irishmen intriguingly odd, and the curiosity was mutual. During a reconnoitre to the east, one officer from the Irish regiment was taken prisoner by an over-enthusiastic French commander who evidently suspected that he had come across a German spy posing as an Allied soldier. He also seems to have had some peculiar notions about the distinguishing anatomical features of a British officer, for he told his astonished captive: ‘Although I am sure you are what you say you are, still these are unusual times and perhaps you would not mind undressing, and giving me some proof that you are English.’ The officer huffily refused to demonstrate his nationality thus, and sadly we will never know what the Frenchman hoped to find that would have convinced him.

  Like the King’s Own Lancasters and the Hampshire Regiment, the Irish Fusiliers were positioned close to Haucourt, just south of the village. By mid-morning on 27 August, the regiment was locked in a ferocious artillery duel. ‘Outnumbered and outranged,’ the Irish troops fell back shortly before nightfall and by the early hours of the next day the battalion, one of the last regiments to vacate the position, was in headlong retreat, but still displaying a jollity that astonished the regimental interpreter: ‘I do not understand you Irish,’ he said. ‘We Frenchmen are glad when we go forward but sad when we come back; you Irish are always the same, you always laugh and all you want is bully beef.’

  The laughter swiftly subsided as the withdrawal turned into a continuous forced march, often under attack from the rear. The day grew hot and humid, but there was no pause. Slogging along grimly ‘as if in a trance’, the men stripped off their packs and threw them by the roadside. As the twenty-fourth hour of non-stop marching approached, some were left ‘with only the remains of boots’. Others collapsed, ‘physically unable to march further without rest’, but there was no time to wait for them to recover, nor was there the means to move them. The brigade commander pressed on, noting that ‘to our rear the lurid glare of burning farms and haystacks shed a fitful light on the scene’. On the evening of 28 August the exhausted Irish troops crossed the Somme River, just before the bridge was blown up, and were able to rejoin the British rearguard. When the muster roll was called, 136 men and officers were found to be missing, including Privates Thomas Donohoe and David Martin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Villeret, 1914

  South of the cornfield battlefields lay Villeret, a small village of simple brick houses with roofs of slate, tile and thatch, tucked into the folds of the Picardy countryside. A wayfarer stumbling upon Villeret by chance in 1914 – and few strangers ever came through save by accident, since Villeret was not on the way to anywhere – might have paused to take in the picturesque view from the hill above the village, for as one traveller obs
erved, ‘nature is beautiful around Villeret, and the poet or painter might stop here to depict the scene, one in the harmonious language of verse, the other by fixing the scene on his canvas’. The wanderer might also have stopped for a restorative drink, perhaps a glass of genièvre, the ferocious local gin, in the café on the corner: an establishment called ‘Aux Deux Entêtés’, the two hard-heads, with a sign showing two asses pulling stubbornly in opposite directions. Or he might have halted to observe the modest tombs in the undistinguished church, or to admire the well-kept rose garden in front of the girls’ school, the pride of the young schoolmistress, Antoinette Foulon. He might have inquired what great personage lived in the ornate, still-new château on the hill. But since he would most likely have been lost, he would have tarried just long enough to obtain directions before hurrying on to the larger settlement of Hargicourt, just across the valley, or to the ruined fortress at Le Câtelet, the most important town in the canton, five miles to the north on the road between Cambrai and Saint-Quentin.

  Villeret moved to a rhythm and pattern as immutable and familiar as the motifs in the cloth woven down the centuries by its villagers. Here Léon Lelong baked his bread to a recipe bequeathed by the ancients; women in wooden clogs drew water from a pump in the cobbled square; and looms rattled in every cellar, reaching a crescendo at dusk and then slowly fading into the night, the steady clanking heartbeat of a Picardy village.

  That August Villeret appeared, at least on its homely surface, to be following its regular ambling course, as contented as the pig lounging in the shade of butcher Cardon’s house. But a glance inside the door of the mairie, a grand two-storey structure with the unmistakable pomposity of French municipal architecture, might have offered a rather different impression. For in the summer of 1914 Villeret was on a war footing, its elders in a state of unprecedented anxiety. Of the approaching German army, and the carnage it had wrought, Villeret knew almost nothing. But the war had already jolted village life out of kilter, and Camille ‘Parfait’ Marié, the acting mayor of Villeret, was having to put his mind to a problem not encountered by the village since the Prussians had marched into northern France forty-four years previously: with so many men already summoned into uniform, there would be barely enough hands to bring in the harvest, which was late this year as it was. (At the same time, across the Channel, the conflict in Europe was impinging on normal existence in a similarly upsetting fashion. On 4 August, the Catford Journal reported: ‘What with the war and the rain, last Saturday was a most depressing day for the Catford Cricket Club.’)