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  The Old Contemptibles

  The British Expeditionary Force, 1914

  ROBIN NEILLANDS

  © Robin Neillands 2013

  Robin Neillands has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by John Murray Publishers in 2004

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2013

  This one is for Professor Michael Biddiss and Dr Frank Tallett of the Department of History, University of Reading, who may find parts of it strangely familiar.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  The Continent Goes to War 1871-1914

  The British Go to War 1898-1914

  Wilson at the War Office 1910-1914

  Mobilization, Transport and Logistics 1911-1914

  The BEF Advances 9-22 AUGUST 1914

  The Battle of Mons 23 August 1914

  The Battle of Le Cateau 26 AUGUST 1914

  The Retreat to the Marne 27 AUGUST-5 SEPTEMBER 1914

  From the Marne to the Aisne 5-12 September 1914

  On the Aisne 13 September-2 October 1914

  The War in the North 2-18 October 1914

  Ypres 19-31 October 1914

  Gheluvelt 29-31 October 1914

  Nonne Böschen 1-22 November 1914

  Epilogue

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from The Death of Gloryby Robin Neillands

  With the BEF, France, 1914

  When the troops arrived, singing 'It's a long, long way to Tipperary' at Maubeuge, after forced marches in the dark, it was one of the most tremendous moments I have ever experienced. The most tremendous. They swung up - or the tune swung them up - a very steep hill over the singing pavement and the French came out and threw them flowers, fruit and cigarettes, and they looked so young, so elastic and so invincibly cheerful, so unmixedly English, so tired and so fresh.

  And the thought of these men swinging on into horror undreamt of- the whole German Army- came to me like the stab of a sword and I had to go and hide in a shop for the people not to see the tears running down my cheeks. I couldn't let my mind dwell on it for days without the gulp in my throat coming back.

  I went to Mass this morning and in was nice to think that I was listening to the same words, with the same gestures that Henry V and his 'contemptible little army' heard before and after Agincourt, and I stood between a man in khaki and a French poilu and history flashed passed like a jewelled dream.

  Lt. Maurice Baring, 25 October 1914

  Introduction

  This is the third book I have written about the First World War on the Western Front. The First World War or the Great War, or, as the French call it, the Guerre de Quatorze, has exercised a constant fascination for historians and the general public for decades and books on every aspect of the struggle continue to appear, ninety years after the conflict began. The reason for this enduring interest is quite simple. The Great War was a human tragedy on an epic scale, and large tragedies merit close study. If we can understand how that war started and why it endured beyond the point of reason we may reach some kind of understanding about ourselves and why the human race periodically indulges in such bloodbaths.

  The Great War - which did not become the First World War until the Second World War began in 1939 - is also redolent with myths. My first Great War book examined the popular, public, British myth that the Great War generals were, without exception, a group of callous, incompetent cavalry officers who sent a whole generation of young men up the line to death, thereby causing a human catastrophe from which Britain has never recovered. This is not a view I share.

  That book, The Great War Generals on the Western Front, was followed some years later by Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front, 1916, which examined the battles of Verdun and the Somme and speculated on why all the generals on the Western Front - German and French as well as British - abandoned their 1915 strategy of attempting a breakthrough in favour of a strategy based on pure attrition. My opinion here is that any doctrine based on attrition is insanity.

  This present book, on the early months of the war - but also on the years preceding it - covers a shorter period and a smaller canvas and is somewhat short on myths- with the possible exception of the 'Angels of Mons'. This book is about the British Regular Army of 1914 - the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF or, as the survivors liked to call themselves, the 'Old Contemptibles', that well-trained, highly skilled, professional army which left Britain in August 1914. In the next four months the BEF was almost totally destroyed in the battles of Mons and Le Cateau, in the fighting on the rivers Marne and Aisne and, last of all, in the ferocious battle of 'First Ypres' in October and November 1914, where this little army of professional soldiers stood and fought and died, doggedly keeping their faces to the foe.

  The survivors of the BEF took their curious nickname from the Kaiser's orders, allegedly issued at Aix-en-Chapelle on 19 August 1914: 'It is my Royal and Imperial command that you exterminate the treacherous English and march over General French's contemptible little army.'

  There are some doubts as to whether Kaiser Wilhelm ever issued such an order. Other claims assert that even if he did issue such a command the German word means 'insignificant' rather than 'contemptible', that what he was actually referring to was a contemptibly small army - and small the BEF certainly was.

  No matter. The name stuck and many 'Old Contemptibles' long outlived the Kaiser. Wilhelm II died in exile in 1940. The Old Contemptibles held their last parade at the garrison church of All Saints in Aldershot on Sunday, 4 August 1974, sixty years after the outbreak of the Great War, and took tea afterwards with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. That done, they folded their standards and passed into history. There is no one left alive today who served in that famous little force.

  The original intention was to concentrate on the exploits of that army in France but, as often happens, the course of research revealed that this narrow concentration would not do. The subject of the BEF in France had already been extensively covered and it gradually became evident that another equally interesting story underpinned the activities of the BEF in the field. This part of the story also examines the fundamental question as to what, after ninety-nine years of 'splendid isolation', the BEF was doing in France, taking part in this long-pending struggle between two continental powers.

  That question clearly required an answer. The story told here therefore covers the BEF from before the moment of its conception at the end of the nineteenth century to its final demise in the water-logged trenches and misty woodlands around the Belgian town of Ypres in the autumn of 1914. Considerable attention is also paid to the actions and intentions of that wily officer Brigadier General Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office from 1910 to 1914, whose activities in the pre­ war years deserve more attention than they usually receive.

  The original BEF of 1914 was a very small army - it never amounted to more than seven divisions or around 160,000 men and the original force that sailed from Britain in early August numbered only half that - but it was a professional jewel among the much larger, conscript armies of continental Europe. It was also a very British army, composed of regular battalions drawn from the Guards and the Infantry of the Line, supported by famous cavalry regiments, still horsed at this time, and the dashing gun troops of the Royal Artillery, though it was later joined by one or two Territorial battalions and some splendid units of the Indian Army.

  Essentially, though, in 1914 the BEF was the British Army, with all its faults and virtues. It was far too small and quite inadequately equipped for the job
it was sent to do - but it did it anyway, soldiering on all the way from Mons to Ypres. Quality, not quantity, was the secret of its success, and that quality stemmed largely from the courage and skill of the officers and men, all professional soldiers, all fully determined to show the enemy - the Hun - what British soldiers could do. Telling what they did, and how they did it, and how and why the BEF was sent to France at all, is the purpose of this book.

  The Continent Goes to War 1871-1914

  The illusions with which the First World War began all stemmed from the belief that the war would be short.

  James Joll, Europe since 1870, p. 193

  This is the story of a small, professional British army and what became of it in the opening months of the First World War. In recent decades the story of the front-line soldiers in the Great War has tended to concentrate on the fate of the volunteers - the Territorials of 1915, the 'Pals Battalions' of Kitchener's armies in 1916 or those conscripts called to the Colours after 1916 who fell in such numbers on the Somme or at Arras, Passchendaele or Cambrai.

  Less attention has been devoted to the soldiers of the old, pre­war, Regular Army, the one that held the line in 1914 until the Empire at large could muster and take the field. This hard duty has been the task of the Regular Army in all Britain's wars, but the army of 1914 - the British Expeditionary Force or BEF - was different from all other armies. This army was the product of a bygone Victorian age with all its faults and certainties. This was the first British army to take the field in Western Europe for almost a hundred years, an army that stood and fought and died at Mons and Le Cateau, on the Marne and the Aisne, and at First Ypres; a small, dauntless, professional army that deserves to be remembered.

  It is necessary to put the actions of the BEF in the context of continental affairs. What were British soldiers doing on the continent of Europe in 1914, marching along the cobbled roads of northern France in August or dying in muddy Belgian trenches in December? What chain of events led the British nation into this terrible war after a century of disengagement from continental wars and disputes? To follow the events in Britain it is first necessary to discuss the drift to war in continental Europe.

  There is a popular belief that the story of the First World War properly begins with the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and there is some truth in this conviction. The establishment of a united Germany under the first Kaiser after the Franco­ Prussian War fatally altered the balance of power in Europe and led to the establishment of a large, well-populated and aggressive militaristic state in the very heart of the continent. This, coupled with French resentment over the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, forcibly ceded to Germany in 1871, ignited the dangerous train of events that led to the general explosion in August 1914.

  These events may account for the conflict between Germany and France, at least in part, but they do not explain why Britain found itself obliged to take part in this insanity. Britain had managed to stay out of direct military involvement on the continent since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and had been careful to avoid any firm, dangerous, continental commitment for the best part of a hundred years. Why had this policy been abandoned?

  Again, popular belief holds that the British became involved in August 1914 because Germany had violated the neutrality of Belgium, a neutrality guaranteed by all the powers, including Britain and Prussia, in 1839. There is truth in this belief also but Britain's involvement in the Great War has deeper roots and less noble motives and began long before the German Army crossed the Belgian frontier in August 1914.

  One of the great and most widespread delusions at the start of the First World War was that this new conflict would be short. In the UK it was widely believed that the British Army, less a few casualties, would be 'home by Christmas' or, as the Kaiser told the departing German regiments, 'You will be home before the leaves fall.'

  Neither of these hopeful statements proved correct. In just four years the Great War killed 9 million soldiers and destroyed empires; slaughter and destruction on such a scale should have been foreseen before the armies were mobilized, for European industrialization and population growth - except in France - had strengthened the sinews of war and greatly increased the supply of cannon fodder in the years since 1871. Given these assets, the war was bound to be prolonged.

  Knowing why the war began and putting the motives and actions of the various nations in context will help to explain why this war could not be stopped when it rapidly outran all previous projections of cost and loss. Viewed objectively, and with the precious benefit of hindsight, the war should have been terminated by the end of 1915, when the destruction of the first BEF and the countless losses to French and German soldiers on the frontiers, on the Marne and Aisne, at First Ypres, Second Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert, Vimy and the Chemin des Dames- not to mention the slaughter on the Eastern Front- had already put 2 million young men in early graves; slaughter on this scale had never been anticipated and the nations' leaders might have recoiled from such a bloodbath.

  Yet nothing happened. The war continued in spite of all the evidence that victory on the battlefield could only be achieved, if at all, at far too high a price. The inevitability of further killing was not denied but peace could not be contemplated, and so the war continued. This attitude - this political myopia - needs to be explained, and any explanation must begin with the politics of Europe before 1871.

  Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a precarious European peace had been maintained by a 'balance of power' between the continental nations. There were local wars in plenty - in Spain and Italy, between France and Austria, between Prussia and Denmark, between Prussia and Austria, between Russia and an allied France and Britain in the Crimea - but the latter part of the nineteenth century witnessed no major conflagration on a Napoleonic scale, partly because no aggressive dictator had yet arisen, mostly because no one nation was able to overawe an alliance of the rest; power was defused and peace, albeit fragile, reigned. There was, however, a growing power in Europe, one aiming at a united Germany and so destabilizing this peace - Prussia.

  The north German states - the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine and Prussia, amounting to some thirty-nine states in 1815- began to unite through trade, most notably in the Prussian­ dominated Zollverein or Customs Union, which came into being in January 1834 and comprised eighteen of the German states, some 23 million people.

  This commercial union - a distant ancestor of the EEC - began to erode the ancient foundations of the Rhine Confederation and the remains of any former regal power. During the nineteenth century most of the European monarchs were related; many were descendants of Queen Victoria - the grandmother of Europe - and their domains were frequently linked. The King of England, for example, remained King of Hanover until 1837, when the accession of Queen Victoria broke that connection, and the King of Denmark was Duke of Holstein until as late as 1864.

  There are strong echoes of Ruritania, Anthony Hope's fictional kingdom in nineteenth-century Europe. (1) This was a continent of kings and crown princes, archdukes and electors and serene highnesses, clinging on grimly to their traditional powers and influence as the world changed about them and new-fangled notions like liberalism, socialism, communism and constitutional democracy began to shake the ground around their thrones.

  The dynamic for political change was civil unrest, industrial expansion - and war. The main power using war for political ends was Prussia, where the man most directly responsible was the Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, a man who saw force, not argument, as the most useful catalyst of change.

  The first application of this Prussian process came in 1864 with the violent settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question. Schleswig and Holstein were two duchies on the edge of the Baltic and had been possessions of the kings of Denmark since the fifteenth century. By the 1850s, however, the population of Schleswig was half German and the population of Holstein almost wholly German- and Holstein had been a member of that
Napoleonic construct, the Confederation of the.Rhine.

  Irredentism - the nineteenth-century notion of reclaiming for­ merly held land or that people of the same nation or race should live under national rule- made the Schleswig-Holstein question a hot political issue. The Danish king would not give up these valu­ able duchies, so in February 1864 Prussian troops crossed the River Eider and occupied Schleswig. In October of that year, unable to get any help from the other European powers, Denmark capitulated and the two duchies were transferred to the joint ownership of Austria and Prussia. There was, however, a long-term strategic aim here. The seizure of Holstein gave Prussia the territory needed to construct the Kiel Canal, which enabled German warships to pass quickly and safely between German naval bases in the Baltic and the North Sea.

  Prussia then turned on Austria. The intention was to gain full possession of the Schleswig-Holstein duchies- and dominate the other states of Germany. Bismarck cleared the ground for this step in r865 by visiting the French Emperor, Napoleon III, and assuring him that while war was inevitable between Austria and Prussia, there was no threat to France. In fact, Bismarck's sole reason for meeting Napoleon was to prevent a Franco-Austrian alliance while Austria was crushed and so to clear the way for the subsequent step, an attack on France.

  With the danger of a Franco-Austrian alliance averted, Bismarck played up differences with Austria over the Danish duchies, and in June 1866 the two countries went to war, Prussia calling on Austria's allies, the east German states of Saxony, Hanover and Hesse-Cassel, to demobilize or face invasion. These three states were occupied by Prussian troops in as many days, and the Austrian-Saxon army was crushed at Sadowa on 3 July - just two weeks after the declaration of war. Once again, Prussian violence had paid a rapid dividend.