Night marching across unknown country is not always easy in peace time, with guides at the heads of columns. Now there was the added confusion of the crowds of emigrants, a perfect network of roads to choose from, and, above all, continual alarms of enemy attacks which the British had to turn to meet. The whole of the night and all the Monday was one long period of marching, fighting, marching and fighting.
Early in the morning another infantry brigade, the 19th, arrived by railway, detraining at Valenciennes, and it is no exaggeration to say that the men went straight off the trains into the thick of the fight. It was a very welcome reinforcement of about 4,000 men.
By 8 A.M. the enemy had burst through Mons, across the canal line, and were in hot pursuit in overwhelming numbers. Away on the left flank they had attacked Tournai, which was occupied by French Territorials and also, I believe, by a British battery, though how it got there, or why, I do not know. That bit of fighting was over by midday with the capture of the town and the destruction or capture of its defenders. The Germans were then free to resume their victorious advance.
About the middle of the morning, then, the line of the Second Corps extended from a little Belgian village called Frameries, five miles S.W. of Mons, through the village of Dour. The right flank was the more forward, partly because the regiments there had to encounter the more furious attacks and could not break away.
It was at this point that there was made one more of those splendid but hopeless cavalry charges of which we so often read in military history. It is, curiously enough, almost the only definite incident mentioned by Sir John French in his dispatch. But the incident, or rather the sequel to it, caught the public imagination, mainly because of the fine work of that most gallant gentleman, Francis Grenfell.
Of all the noble, lion-hearted men who have "gone west" in this bloody war, no man more worthily deserves the description applied to the Chevalier Bayard, "sans peur et sans reproche," than Francis Grenfell—he and one other whom I shall name hereafter. Gallant soldier, brilliant sportsman, graceful poet, and true lover of Nature, a genuine statesman in his dealings with men, and the most loyal of friends, he died later on the field of honour, and Britain—nay, the world is the poorer for his loss.
The charge was made by the 9th Lancers, which regiment, with others of the 2nd Brigade, had been moved forward to ease the pressure on the right flank.
About 400 yards from the German infantry and guns the Lancers galloped full tilt into barbed wire. There was nothing for it but to swerve across the German front. How a single man or horse escaped the hail of shell and bullets which was turned on them one can never understand. But a poor remnant, under Captain Francis Grenfell, did indeed get across, mercilessly pursued by that storm of lead, and eventually found some little shelter under a railway embankment.
A R.F.A. battery was in action here. At least, the guns were still there, but officers and detachments had been gradually wiped out until there were just one officer and two detachments left to work the battery. It was only a matter of minutes before the remainder must be killed and the guns fall into the hands of the enemy, for the German guns had the range and the German infantry were crowding up.
The 9th Lancers and the Gunners are old friends, and the Lancers do not leave old friends (or new ones) to finish a losing fight alone.