THE BATTLE OF MONS.
It is a peaceful Sunday morning; the sun is shining and the bells are ringing. The Belgians in Mons and the surrounding mining villages are flocking towards their churches; but in the British lines our soldiers are hard at work in their shirt-sleeves deepening the trenches and making ready to meet the threatened attack. As the morning wears on a German Taube[20] comes gliding high over the trenches like a huge vulture seeking its prey. It circles round and round, and more than one enterprising "Tommy" discharges his rifle at it. Now a British aeroplane ascends to give it battle; but the Taube makes a long curve northward, and disappears in rapid flight. Meanwhile our own airmen and cavalry scouts are coming in with the news that large numbers of the enemy are moving through the green woods towards the centre of the line, and that towards Binche and Condé other columns are on the march.
Sir John French assembled his commanders at six in the morning on August 23, and explained to them what he understood to be General Joffre's plan. He knew nothing of what had happened on his right, and he believed that one, or at most two, of the enemy's army corps, with perhaps one cavalry division, were on his front. He had no idea that the enemy outnumbered him by at least two to one, and that they were attempting to envelop him by attacking his exposed flanks.
A private in the 1st Royal West Kent Regiment tells us how the battle began. He says: "It was Sunday, 23rd August, that we were at Mons, billeted in a farmyard, and we were having a sing-song, and watching the people coming home from church. At about 12.30 an orderly had gone down to draw dinners when an aeroplane appeared overhead, throwing out some black powder. After this shrapnel began to burst, acquainting us with the fact that the Germans were in the vicinity. All was confusion and uproar for the moment, because we were not armed, and our shirts and socks were out to wash, that being the only chance we had to get them washed. It did not take us long, however, to get in fighting trim and go through the town of Mons to the scene of operations, which was on the other side of a small canal that adjoined."
The British were soon standing to arms in their position along the whole twenty-five miles of the battle-line. Hardly had they thrust the cartridges into their rifles before the terrible thunder of the German guns began. These guns were massed just outside the southern edge of the woods, behind railway embankments, roadside trees, hedgerows, and the raised towing-paths of the willow-fringed canals. The thunder of the cannonade speedily showed that the enemy was in far greater force than had been supposed. Not, however, for some hours did Sir John French and his staff realize that they were everywhere outnumbered.
The guns were booming, but there was no sign of the enemy. The front seemed empty of men, but an observer would have seen soft, fleecy clouds hanging above the British trenches—a sign that shrapnel was bursting over them, and that a deadly flail of iron bullets was beating down upon them. Our soldiers, who had learned to take cover in South Africa, lay close, and waited, whiling away the time by joking and by playing marbles with the shrapnel bullets that fell among them. At first the aim of the enemy's artillery was not very good, but speedily their aeroplanes came circling over the trenches, and by throwing down smoky bombs revealed their whereabouts. Then they made very accurate shooting, and many of our men were hit. Meanwhile our artillery began to reply, and more than once silenced a battery of the enemy.
Our officers knew full well that the roar of the guns was the signal for the German infantry to advance. For a time nothing could be seen of them, for they took cover well, and their bluish gray uniforms seemed to melt into the leafy background. Our officers, who were eagerly scanning the landscape with field-glasses, only saw them when they began to open fire with rifles and machine guns.
The Germans believed that if they kept up a fierce artillery fire on our trenches our men would become so terrified that they would scuttle from their burrows like rabbits at the approach of a ferret. They did not then know of what stuff British soldiers are made. No fighters in the world are so cool and dogged; none can take such severe punishment without flinching, or wait so patiently for the right moment to advance.
And now the blue-gray masses of the Germans came into full view. They made desperate attacks near Binche, where, owing to the retirement of the French, the flank was exposed to a turning movement. Some of the troops who were to help in holding this part of the line had only just arrived, after a long and trying march under a hot sun, and were busy "digging themselves in" while the shrapnel was bursting over them.
When the infantry of the enemy began to appear our soldiers had three surprises. In the sham battles which they had fought at Aldershot or on Salisbury Plain they had learned to fire at men moving forward in a thin, extended line, with eight or ten paces between them. To their amazement they saw the Germans coming on in dense masses, as though they were parading in the streets of Potsdam. Our men grasped their rifles and waited until the enemy came within six or seven hundred yards of them. On rolled the Germans, singing their national songs, and believing that they could sweep the British out of their trenches by sheer weight of numbers. At last the word was given, and a tornado of rifle and machine-gun fire crashed down upon the dense masses.
Our men fired as steadily as though they were shooting at targets in time of peace. Not a shot was wasted; every bullet found its billet. "The Germans were in solid square blocks, standing out sharply against the skyline," wrote Sergeant Loftus, "and you couldn't help hitting them. It was like butting your head against a stone wall." Before the rapid fire and sure aim of the British the hosts of the enemy went down in heaps. "It was like cutting hay," said a private. In one place there was a breastwork of German dead and wounded five feet high, and our soldiers had to leave their trenches in order to see the foe.
The second surprise was the poor shooting of the German infantry. They fired as they marched, with their rifles at their hips. Though thousands of their bullets whizzed by, very few of them found a mark. "They can't shoot for nuts," said one Tommy; "they couldn't hit a haystack." "They couldn't hit the gas works at Mons," said another. "If they had, I wouldn't be here."
The third surprise was the vast numbers of the enemy that made the attack. Our first line did not consist, at any time, of more than 80,000 men, and against them von Kluck hurled at least 150,000 men, without counting the masses of cavalry which were moving towards the space between our left at Condé and the town of Tournai. Though the Germans were shot down in thousands, they continued to roll on like the waves of an incoming tide. "It was like the crowd leaving a football ground on a cup-tie day," was the description of one of our soldiers. For every five men which the French and the British had in the field in the early days of the war the Germans had eight.
Against these terrible odds our men fought stubbornly. Again and again the dense masses of the Germans pressed towards them, and as they did so a sheet of flame flickered along the line of British trenches, and they were beaten down like a field of standing wheat before a hailstorm. But no sooner were they swept to earth than their supports appeared, only to meet the same fate. Our men grew sick with slaughter. In some places the crowded ranks of the enemy managed to come close to the British trenches. Then our men leaped forward with a cheer and drove with the bayonet through and through the ranks, until the survivors turned and fled, followed by the pitiless fire of Maxims and field guns.
The British in their Trenches at Mons. From the picture by Dudley Tennant.
One important feature of the attack was the very large number of machine guns used by the Germans. They were mounted on low sledges, so that they could be rapidly brought into the firing line and worked by men lying down. It seemed in these early days of the war as though the enemy was going to do the real fighting with artillery and machine guns, and that his infantry were only to act as supports.
You already know that von Kluck was throwing his main strength chiefly on the British right, but there were also furious fights along the canal towards Condé, where our men were holding the bridges. Frenzied attacks were made on these bridges, but they were stubbornly held. When, however, the overwhelming numbers of the enemy appeared, our troops were withdrawn to the south bank, and orders were given to blow up the bridges and the barges in the canal. The engineers did the work with the coolest courage in the face of a deadly fire.
A hundred deeds of gallantry were done that day. One bridge was held by a devoted company of the Scottish Borderers. When they saw that it must be abandoned, a sergeant and three men dashed on to it to fire the fuse. The three men dropped in their tracks, and the sergeant went on alone. He hacked the fuse short and fired it; but with the destruction of the bridge he too was destroyed.
Foiled at the bridges, the enemy now attempted to cross the canal by means of pontoons. Our guns were trained on them, and an awful scene of slaughter and destruction began. Ten separate times the Germans managed to throw their pontoons over the water, and ten separate times the guns of the British smashed them to fragments.
Stubbornly as our men were fighting, the terrible pressure of the Germans could not be resisted. About three o'clock Sir Philip Chetwode's cavalry brigade, which had been guarding the flank, had to be withdrawn; whereupon the enemy occupied Binche. Sir Douglas Haig then drew in his right, and slowly fell back to a long swell of ground south of the village of Bray. You know that the British line had been almost straight; the retirement of the 1st Army Corps swung the right half of the line towards the south, so that there was a sharp angle between it and the 2nd Army Corps, holding the line of the Mons-Condé canal. The British were now in the same sort of dangerous position as the French when they held the angle between the Meuse and the Sambre. General French saw at once that his men in Mons were exposed to attacks from the front and the flanks, and that they were in peril of being cut off; so he directed the commander of that part of the line "to be careful not to keep the troops on this salient too long, but, if threatened seriously, to draw back the centre behind Mons."
Hardly had this message been sent off before a startling telegram from General Joffre reached General French. It gave him news which he ought to have received hours before, and made his gallant stand quite unavailing. It told him that Namur had fallen on the previous day; that the 5th French Army and the two reserve divisions on his right were in retreat; that the passages of the Sambre between Charleroi and Namur were in the hands of the enemy; that at least three German army corps were moving on the front of his position, while another was making a wide turning movement round his left by way of Tournai. Probably at this time some 200,000 Germans were about to attack Sir John French's 80,000. All this meant that the little British army, though it had done, and could still do, miracles of valour, was in peril of being cut off, enveloped, and destroyed. There was nothing for it but to hold on until nightfall, and then retreat. You can imagine the bitter disappointment of our men, who now knew that they were more than a match for the Germans.
A sergeant tells us that all day long the British defied every attempt of the enemy to dislodge them from their trenches. "After the last attack," he says, "we lay down in our clothes to sleep as best we could; but long before sunrise we were called out, to be told that we had got to abandon our position. Nobody knew why we had to go; but like good soldiers we obeyed without a murmur."