The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, had arrived in France with little knowledge of where the Germans were or what they were doing or even what he was supposed to do when he found them.
who had resigned as Chief of the Imperial General staff at the time of the Curragh Mutiny-carried with him written instructions from the new Secretary of State for War, the formidable
of Khartoum. These instructions weren't however, what a man in his position might have expected. They didn't urge him to pursue and engage the invading Germans with all possible vigor, to remember that England expected victory, or even to support his French allies to the fullest possible extent in their hour of desperate need.
In fact, he found himself under orders to do very nearly the opposite of these things. He was to remember that his little command-a mere 5 divisions, 4 of infantry and 1 of cavalry-included most of Britain's regular army and couldn't be spread. "It will be obvious that the greatest care must be exercised towards a minimum of loss and waste," Kitchener had written. "I wish you to distinctly understand that your force is an entirely independent one and you will in no case come under the orders of any Allied General."
In other words, French wasn't to rush his army and wasn't to regard himself as subordinate to Joffre or Lanrezac or any other French General. By taking this approach Kitchener created an abundance of problems.
Certainly the BEF, compared with vast forces that France and Germany had already sent to the Western Front, seemed so small as to rush being trampled. Kaiser Wilhelm, drawing upon his deep reserves of foolishness in exhorting his troops to victory, had called it Britain's "Contemptibly Little Army". But man for man the BEF was as good as any fighting force in the world; well trained and disciplined, accustomed to being sent out to the far corners of the world whenever the empire's great navy wasn't enough. The BEF was also an appealingly human, high spirited army. Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain's urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything.
When they learned what the Kaiser had said about them, they began to call themselves "The Old Contemptibles". When the 1st shiploads of them crossed from South Hampton to Le Havre, they found the harbor jammed with crowds who burst into the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise". The 1,000's of British troops-Tommies, they were called at home-responded by bursting spontaneously not into "God Save The King" but into one of the indelicate music hall songs with which they entertained themselves while on the march. The French watched and listened reverently, some with their hands on their hearts, not understanding a word and thinking that this must be the anthem of the United Kingdom.
The BEF moved 1st to an assembly point just south of Belgium, and on August 20th began moving north to link up with Lanrezac's 5th army and extend the French left wing. They were still en route when, on August 21st, the units that Lanrezac had positioned near Charleroi on the River Sambre were struck by Bulow's German 2nd army. Sir John French when he learned of this encounter, ordered his 1st Corps(2 divisions commanded by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien) to move up towards the town of Mons, about 8 miles west of Charleroi. From there, it was to cover Lanrezac's Flank.
On the next day, with Germans and French alternately attacking each other on the Sambre(Lunderndorff who happened to be in the area as a member of Bulow's staff, organized the seizure of the bridges across the river), a scouting party of British cavalry encountered German cavalry coming out of the north. The Germans withdrew. The British, savvy veterans that they were, dismounted and began using their trenching tools to throw up earthwork defenses while
infantry came up from behind and joined them. They didn't know what to expect when the sun rose, but they intended to be as ready as it was possible for men armed with little more than rifles to be.
Ahead of them in the darkness was the entire German 1st army. Its commander, Kluck, knew nothing except that his scouts had run into armed horsemen, and that they claimed those horsemen were British. It didn't wound serious; Kluck's intelligence indicated that the main British force was either not yet in France or , at worst, still a good many miles away. There seemed no need to mount an immediate attack.
Kluck at this point was an angry, frustrate man who didn't want to be where he was, and in fact shouldn't have been there. He had recently been put under orders of the more cautious Burlow, whose army was on his left. The Germans, like the French, were still in the early stages of learning to manage warfare on this scale, and they hadn't yet seen the value of creating a new level of command to direct forces as large as their right wing. Neither side had yet seen that when 2 or 3 armies are operating together and need to be coordinated, the answer is not to put the leader of one of those armies in charge of the others. It's almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that a commander made 1st among equals in this way will give to much weight to the objectives and needs of his own army.
This is exactly what happened between the rough-hewn Kluck and the careful, highborn Bulow. Kluck wanted to swing wide to the right, well clear of the French. Bulow insisted that he stay close, so that their 2 armies-plus
.jpg)
3rd army on his left-would be able to deal with Lanrezac together. Kluck protested, but to no effect. Bulow was a solid professional who had long held senior positions in the German army, and a decade earlier he had been a leading candidate to succeed Schlieffen as head of the General Staff, losing out to Moltke largely because he favored a direct attack on the French in case of war, rather than envelopment. His approach in August 1914 was conventional military practice; if his army locked head to head with Lanrezac's, Kluck and Hausen would be able to protect his flanks and then try to work around Lanrezac's flanks and surround him. But Bulow's orthodoxy(obviously the war would have opened in an entirely different way if he rather than Moltke had been in charge of planning since 1905)cost the Germans a huge opportunity.
Left free to go where he wished, Kluck would have looped around not only the French but also the forward elements of the BEF. He then could have taken Smith-Dorrien's corps in the flank, broken it up, and pushed its disordered fragments into Lanrezac's flank. The possible consequences were incalculable; the destruction of Lanrezac's army-of any of the armies in the long French line-could have led to a quick end to the war in the west. Continuing to protest, appealing to Moltke but finding no support there, Kluck had no choice but to follow orders. Doing so caused him to run directly into the head of the British forces, engage them where they were strongest instead of weakest, and give them a night to consolidate their defenses more dangerous than a roving cavalry detachment.
On the morning of August 23rd(a day marked by Japan's declaration of war on Germany), Kluck ordered an artillery bombardment of the enemy positions in his path. When this ended at 9:30, thinking that the defenders must now be in disarray, his troops attacked-and were quickly shot to pieces in a field of fire so devastating that many of them thought they must be facing an army of machine guns. They attacked repeatedly and were cut down every time. What they were up against was the fruit of years of emphasis on what the British still called musketry. Every private in the BEF carried a .303 Lee Enfield fitted with easily changed 10 round magazines and had been trained to hit a target 15x a minute at a range of 300 yards. Most could do better than that. Every soldier was routinely given all the ammunition he wanted for practice, and high scores were rewarded with cash. These practices had been put in place after the South African War at the turn of the century, when the Tommies had found themselves outgunned by Boer farmers fighting as guerrillas, and this was the payoff. But as the day wore on, hour by hour and yard by bloody yard, the persistence of the Germans and the sheer weight of their numbers forced the British back. When the day ended, more than 1,600 of Smith-Dorrien's men had been killed, and the Germans had lost at least 5,000. Kluck and his army had been stopped for a full day. But if the Germans could be stopped for another day and another after that, Moltke's entire campaign would begin to fall to pieces.
After sundown, the BEF's 2nd Corps under
Sir Douglas Haig
Having come forward to join Smith-Dorrien's, the British again went to work on their defenses. But during the night an English liaison officer arrived at French's headquarters with stunning news; Lanrezac, rather than holding his ground at Charleroi, was pulling back. This exposed the British right and gave them no choice but to pull back as well. French reacted bitterly. He regarded Lanrezac's withdrawal-which probably saved his army and was conducted with great skill under difficult circumstances-as unnecessary. He had entered the war with a very British disdain for the French. That disdain now began to turn into entirely unjustified contempt.
Now in the after math of this battle arose the strangest and most beautiful legend of the war. It was said that, when the British peril was at its height, a majestic figure appeared high in the sky with an arm upraised. Some said it had been pointing to victory, others that it held back the Germans as the Tommies got away. It came to be known as the Angel of Mons. Even more colorful was the simultaneous legend of the Archer of Agincourt. In the late Middle Ages at Agincourt-not a great distance from Mons-English yeoman armed with longbows had won a great victory over a much bigger force of mounted and armored French Knights. 499 years later there were stories of German soldiers found at Mons with arrows through their bodies.
It was all nonsense. The disappointing truth, established beyond doubt by postwar investigations, is that the legends were journalistic inventions, and that they 1st emerged long after the battle. No one ever found a witness who had personally seen an angel, arrows, or anything of the kind.
When the Germans resumed their attack on the morning of August 24th, braced this time for tough resistance, they found nothing in front of them but abandoned entrenchments. They got back on the road, caught up with the BEF after 2 days of hard pursuit, and on Agust 26th hit Smith-Dorrien's corps at the Le Cateau. Under severe pressure, his men exhausted, Smith-Dorrien found it impossible to disengage and resume his retreat when ordered to do so by French. He was the proverbial man with a wolf by the ears, unable to take the initiative and unable to escape. He organized a rear guard that managed by the narrowest of margins to fight off envelopment. Le Cateau turned into a bigger, bloodier fight than the on at Mons, with 55,000 British desperately holding off 140,000 Germans.
Ultimately when the Germans found it necessary to pull back and regroup, the British were able to resume their retreat. They had taken some 8,000 casualties(more than Wellington's at Waterloo) and lost 36 pieces of artillery. And already-strained relationships within the BEF command were-worsened. French, who had disliked Smith-Dorrien for years and hadn't wanted him in his command, refused to believe that he hadn't been willfully disobedient. Smith-Dorrien, for his part, thought that Haig had been too slow in entering the fights both at Mons and at Le Cateau. Its a mark of how desperate the British were for something to feed into their propaganda machine that Le Cateau was celebrated, at the time and long afterward, as a British triumph. The only thing to celebrate was the BEF was sitll intact when it made its escape.
No comments:
Post a Comment