The First Seven Divisions / Being a Detailed Account of the Fighting from Mons to Ypres

by Lord Ernest Hamilton

Four miles further east, at Maroilles, the order to retire raised some doubts and a certain difference of opinion among the various commanders of the 6th Brigade as to the best route to be followed in order to arrive at the St. Quentin position. Local opinion was divided, and, in the end, the commanders assembled at midnight in the cemetery to decide the point, with the result that it was arranged that each C.O. should follow the road that seemed best to him.

It will be seen then that the disposition of the 1st A.C. was such that the C. in C. by no means overstated the case when he told Sir Horace that he could give him no help from that quarter. The position of the 2nd A.C. was now very nearly desperate, and it is to be doubted whether Sir Horace or the C. in C. himself saw the dawn break on August 26th with any real hope at heart that the three divisions west of the Sambre could be saved from capture or annihilation.

On paper the extrication of Sir Horace's force seemed in truth an impossibility. Three British divisions, very imperfectly entrenched, were awaiting the onset of seven German divisions, flushed with uninterrupted victory, and backed up by an overwhelming preponderance in artillery. Both flanks of the British force were practically in the air, the only protection on the right being the 1st and 3rd C.B. at Le Souplet, and on the left Allenby with another two Cavalry Brigades at Seranvillers. As a buffer against the German army corps which was threatening the British flank from Tournai, two Cavalry Brigades were clearly a negligible quantity. Desperate diseases call for desperate remedies, and the C. in C. had recourse to the only expedient in which lay a hope of salvation from the threatened flank attack, should it come.

General Sordet was at Avesnes with three divisions of French cavalry, and the C. in C.—with all the persuasion possible—put the urgency of the situation before him. The railways were no help; they ran all wrong; cavalry alone could save the situation; would he go? General Sordet—with the permission of his chief—went. It was a forty mile march, and cavalry horses were none too fresh in those days. Still he went, and in the end did great and gallant work; but not on the morning of the 26th. On that fateful day—or at least on the morning of that fateful day—his horses were ridden to a standstill, and he could do nothing.

LE CATEAU

The battle of August 26th is loosely spoken of as the Cambrai—Le Cateau battle, but, as a matter of fact, the British troops were never within half a dozen miles of Cambrai, nor, for that matter, were they actually at Le Cateau itself. The 5th Division on the right reached from a point halfway between Le Cateau and Reumont to Troisvilles, the 15th Brigade, which was its left-hand brigade, being just east of that place. Then came the three brigades of the 3rd Division, the 9th Brigade being north of Troisvilles, the 8th Brigade on the left of it north of Audencourt, with the 7th Brigade curled round the northern side of Caudry in the form of a horseshoe. Beyond was the 4th Division at Hautcourt. The whole frontage covered about eight miles, and for half that distance ran along north of the Cambrai to St. Quentin railway.

The 4th Division, under Gen. Snow, had just arrived from England; and these fresh troops were already in position when the Mons army straggled in on the night of the 25th and was told off to its various allotted posts by busy staff officers. The allotted posts did not turn out to be all that had been hoped for. Trenches, it is true, had been prepared (dug by French woman labour!), but many faced the wrong way, and all were too short. The short ones could be lengthened, but the others had to be redug. The men were dead beat: the ground baked hard, and there were no entrenching tools—these having long ago been thrown away. Picks were got from the farms and the men set to work as best they could, but of shovels there were practically none, and in the majority of cases the men scooped up the loosened earth with mess-tins and with their hands. The result was, trenches by courtesy, but poor things to stand between tired troops and the terrific artillery fire to which they were presently to be subjected.

The battle of Le Cateau was in the main an artillery duel, and a very unequal one at that. The afternoon infantry attack was only sustained by certain devoted regiments who failed to interpret with sufficient readiness the order to retire. Some of these regiments—as the price of their ignorance of how to turn their backs to the foe—were all but annihilated. But this is a later story. Up to midday the battle was a mere artillery duel. Our infantry lined their inadequate trenches and were bombarded for some half a dozen hours on end. Our artillery replied with inconceivable heroism, but they were outnumbered by at least five to one. They also—perhaps with wisdom—directed their fire more at the infantry than at the opposing batteries. The former could be plainly seen massing in great numbers on the crest of the ridge some two thousand yards away, and advancing in a succession of lines down the slope to the hidden ground below. They presented a tempting target, and their losses from our shrapnel must have been enormous. By the afternoon, however, many of our batteries had been silenced, and the German gunners had it more or less their own way. The sides were too unequal. Our infantry then became mere targets—Kanonen Futter. It was an ordeal of the most trying description conceivable, and one which can only arise where the artillery of one side is hopelessly outnumbered by that of the other; and it is to be doubted whether any other troops in the world would have stood it as long as did the 2nd A.C. at Le Cateau. The enemy's bombardment was kept up till midday. Then it slackened off so as to allow of the further advance of their infantry, who by this time had pushed forward into the concealment of the low ground, just north of the main road. By this time some of the 5th Division had begun to dribble away. That awful gun fire, to which our batteries were no longer able to reply, coupled with the insufficient trenches, was too much for human endurance. Sir Charles Fergusson, the Divisional General, with an absolute disregard of personal danger, galloped about among the bursting shells exhorting the division to stand fast. An eye-witness said that his survival through the day was nothing short of a miracle. It was a day indeed when the entire Staff from end to end of the line worked with an indefatigable heroism which could not be surpassed. In the 19th Brigade, for instance, Captain Jack, 1st Cameronians, was the sole survivor of the Brigade Staff at the end of the day, and this was through no fault of his. While supervising the retirement of the Argyll and Sutherlands, he coolly walked up and down the firing line without a vestige of protection, but by some curious law of chances was not hit. He was awarded a French decoration.

In spite of all, however, by 2.30 p.m., the right flank of the 5th Division had been turned, the enemy pressing forward into the gap between the two Army Corps, and Sir Charles sent word that the Division could hold its ground no longer. Sir Horace sent up all the available reserves he had, viz., the 1st Cameronians and 2nd R. Welsh Fusiliers from the 19th Brigade, together with a battery, and these helped matters to some extent, but the immense numerical superiority of the enemy made anything in the nature of a prolonged stand impossible, and at 3 p.m. he ordered a general retirement. This was carried out in fairly good order by the 3rd and 4th Divisions, which had been less heavily attacked. The withdrawal of the 5th Division was more irregular, and the regiments which stuck it to the end—becoming practically isolated by the withdrawal of other units to right and left—suffered very severely.