The Guns of August (45 page)

Lanrezac’s staff was urging him to permit a counterattack by Franchet d’Esperey who reported a glittering opportunity. A German force in pursuit of the retreating Xth Corps was presenting its flank to him. Other ardent pleaders urged a counterattack on the far left by the XVIIIth Corps to relieve pressure on the British who on this day at Mons were engaged against the full force of von Kluck’s Army. To the disgust of the forward-minded, Lanrezac refused. He remained silent, gave no orders, waited. In the controversy which critics and partisans were to weave for years afterwards over the Battle of Charleroi, everyone pronounced his own version of what went on in the soul of General Lanrezac that afternoon. To some he appeared pusillanimous or paralyzed, to others as a man soberly measuring the chances in an obscure and perilous situation. Left without guidance from GQG, he had to make his own decision.

Late in the afternoon occurred the decisive incident of the
day. Troops of Hausen’s Army enlarged a bridgehead across the Meuse at Onhaye south of Dinant. Franchet d’Esperey at once sent a brigade under General Mangin to deal with the danger which threatened to take the Fifth Army in the rear. At the same time word at last reached Lanrezac from General de Langle. It could not have been worse. Not only was the Fourth Army not successful in the Ardennes, as an earlier communiqué from GQG had implied, but it was being forced into retreat that would leave unguarded the stretch of the Meuse between Sedan and Lanrezac’s right flank. At once the presence of Hausen’s Saxons at Onhaye took on added threat. Lanrezac believed—“I was bound to believe”—that this force was the van of an army that would be given liberty of action by de Langle’s retreat and would be reinforced if not immediately thrown back. He did not yet know—because it had not happened yet—that General Mangin’s brigade in a brilliant charge with fixed bayonets would throw the Saxons out of Onhaye.

On top of this, word came that the IIIrd Corps in front of Charleroi had been attacked, had failed to hold its ground, and was falling back. Commandant Duruy arrived with news that the Germans had taken the northern forts of Namur and entered the city. Lanrezac returned to Corps Headquarters at Chimay where he “received confirmation of the check to the Fourth Army which since morning had been retiring in such a way as to leave the Fifth Army’s right completely uncovered.”

To Lanrezac the danger on his right “seemed acute.” The thought haunted him of that other disaster at the very place where de Langle’s Army was now giving way, “where 44 years ago our army was encircled by the Germans and forced to capitulate—that abominable disaster which made our defeat irretrievable—what a memory!”

To save France from another Sedan, the Fifth Army must be saved from destruction. It was now clear to him that the French Armies were in retreat along their whole line from the Vosges to the Sambre. As long as the armies existed the defeat was not irretrievable as it had been at Sedan; the fight could go on. But if the Fifth Army were to be destroyed, the
whole line would be unhinged and total defeat follow. Counterattack, however bravely pressed and urgent the need, could not save the situation as a whole.

Lanrezac finally spoke. He gave the order for a general retreat. He knew he would be taken for a
“catastrophard”
who must be got rid of—as indeed he was. His own account tells that he said to one of his officers: “We have been beaten but the evil is reparable. As long as the Fifth Army lives, France is not lost.” Although the remark has the ring of memoirs written after the event, it may well have been spoken. Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

Lanrezac made his decision, which he believed Joffre would disapprove, without consulting GQG. “Enemy threatens my right on the Meuse,” he reported, “Onhaye occupied, Givet threatened, Namur carried.” Because of this situation and “the delay of the Fourth Army,” he was ordering the retirement of the Fifth Army. With that message vanished the last French hope of defeating the ancient enemy in a short war. The last of the French offensives had failed. Joffre did disapprove—but not that night. In the befogged and bitter hours of Sunday night, August 23, when the whole French plan was collapsing, when no one could be certain what was happening from sector to sector, when the specter of another Sedan haunted minds other than Lanrezac’s, GQG neither questioned nor countermanded the Fifth Army’s retreat. By his silence Joffre ratified the decision; he did not forgive it.

Afterward the official account of the Battle of Charleroi was to state that General Lanrezac, “thinking himself menaced on his right, ordered a retreat instead of counterattacking.” That was when GQG, in need of a scapegoat for the failure of Plan 17, settled upon the commander of the Fifth Army. In the hour when he made his decision, however, no one at GQG suggested to General Lanrezac that he merely “thought” himself menaced on his right without actually being so, as the postwar phrase implied.

Far to the left, since early morning, the British and von Kluck’s Army had been locked in a duel over the sixty-foot
width of the Mons Canal. The August sun broke through early morning mist and rain, bringing promise of great heat later in the day. Sunday church bells were ringing as usual as the people of the mining villages went to Mass in their black Sunday clothes. The canal, bordered by railroad sidings and industrial back yards, was black with slime and reeked of chemical refuse from furnaces and factories. In among small vegetable plots, pastures, and orchards the gray pointed slag heaps like witches’ hats stuck up everywhere, giving the landscape a bizarre, abnormal look. War seemed less incongruous here.

The British had taken up positions on either side of Mons. To the west the IInd Corps commanded by General Smith-Dorrien lined the fifteen-mile stretch of canal between Mons and Condé and filled in a salient formed just east of Mons where the canal makes a northward loop about two miles wide and a mile and a half deep. On the right of the IInd Corps General Haig’s Ist Corps held a diagonal front between Mons and the left wing of Lanrezac’s Army. The cavalry division commanded by General Allenby, future conqueror of Jerusalem, was held in reserve. Opposite Haig was the dividing line between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies. Kluck was keeping as far to the west as he could, and thus Haig’s corps was not attacked in the fighting of August 23 that was to become known to history and to legend as the Battle of Mons.

Sir John French’s headquarters were at Le Cateau, 30 miles south of Mons. The 5 divisions he had to direct over a front of 25 miles—in contrast to Lanrezac’s 13 divisions over a front of 50 miles—hardly required him to be that far back. Sir John’s hesitant frame of mind may have dictated the choice. Worried by the reports of his air and cavalry reconnaissance, uncertain of his neighbor, uncomfortable about the zigzag line of the front they shared which opened multiple opportunities to the enemy, he was no more happy about undertaking an offensive than was Lanrezac.

On the night before the battle he summoned the senior staff officers of both corps and the cavalry division to Le Cateau and informed them that “owing to the retreat of the French
Fifth Army,” the British offensive would not take place. Except for its Xth Corps, which was not adjacent to the British, the Fifth Army was not in retreat at this time, but Sir John French had to blame someone. The same comradely spirit had moved General Lanrezac a day earlier to blame his own failure to take the offensive on the nonappearance of the British. As Lanrezac had then ordered his corps to hold the line of the Sambre instead of attacking across it, Sir John French now issued orders to hold the line of the canal. Despite Henry Wilson who was still thinking in terms of the great offensive northward that was to throw the Germans out of Belgium, the possibility of a very different kind of movement was conveyed to the commanders. Recognizing it, General Smith-Dorrien at 2:30
A.M.
ordered the bridges over the canal to be prepared for demolition. It was a sensible precaution of the kind excluded by the French and, because excluded, the cause of the terrible French casualty rate of August 1914. Five minutes before the battle opened, Smith-Dorrien issued a further order directing the bridges to be destroyed on divisional order “in the event of a retirement being necessary.”

At six in the morning when Sir John French gave his last instructions to corps commanders, his—or his staff’s—estimate of the enemy strength they were about to meet was still the same: one or at most two army corps plus cavalry. In fact, at that moment von Kluck had four corps and three cavalry divisions—160,000 men with 600 guns—within striking distance of the BEF whose strength was 70,000 men and 300 guns. Of von Kluck’s two reserve corps, one was two days’ march behind and one had been left behind to mask Antwerp.

At 9:00
A.M.
the first German guns opened fire on the British positions, the attack falling first upon the salient made by the loop of the canal. The bridge at Nimy at the northernmost point of the salient was the focus of the attack. Lunging at it in their dense formation, the Germans offered “the most perfect targets” to the British riflemen who, well dug in and expertly trained, delivered fire of such rapidity and accuracy that the Germans believed they faced machine guns. After repeated assault waves were struck down, they brought up
more strength and changed to open formations. The British, under orders to offer “stubborn resistance,” kept up their fire from the salient despite steadily growing casualties. From 10:30 on, the battle was extended along the straight section of the canal to the west as battery after battery of German guns, first of the IIIrd and then of the IVth Corps, were brought into action.

By three in the afternoon when the British regiments holding the salient had withstood shelling and infantry assault for six hours, the pressure on their dwindling numbers became too strong. After blowing up the bridge at Nimy they fell back, company by company, to a second line of defense that had been prepared two or three miles to the rear. As the yielding of the salient endangered the troops holding the straight section of the canal, these too were now ordered to withdraw, beginning about five in the evening. At Jemappes, where the loop joins the straight section, and at Mariette two miles to the west sudden peril loomed when it was found that the bridges could not be destroyed for lack of an exploder to fire the charges. A rush by the Germans across the canal in the midst of the retirement could convert orderly retreat to a rout and might even effect a breakthrough. No single Horatius could hold the bridge, but Captain Wright of the Royal Engineers swung himself hand over hand under the bridge at Mariette in an attempt to connect the charges. At Jemappes a corporal and a private worked at the same task for an hour and a half under continuous fire. They succeeded, and were awarded the V.C. and D.C.M.; but Captain Wright, though he made a second attempt in spite of being wounded, failed. He too won the V.C., and three weeks later was killed on the Aisne.

During the early evening the delicate process of disengagement was effected under sporadic fire with regiment by regiment covering the withdrawal of its neighbor until all had reached the villages and billets of the second line of defense. The Germans, who appeared to have suffered equally from the day’s fighting, made no serious effort to force the undemolished bridges nor showed any appetite for pursuit. On the
contrary, through the dusk the retiring British troops could hear German bugles sounding “Cease fire,” then the inevitable singing, then silence across the canal.

Fortunately for the British von Kluck’s more than double superiority in numbers had not been made use of. Unable, because of Bülow’s hampering orders, to find the enemy flank and extend himself around it, Kluck had met the British head on with his two central corps, the IIIrd and IVth, and suffered the heavy losses consequent upon frontal attack. One German reserve captain of the IIIrd Corps found himself the only surviving officer of his company and the only surviving company commander of his battalion. “You are my sole support,” wailed the major. “The battalion is a mere wreck, my proud, beautiful battalion …” and the regiment is “shot down, smashed up—only a handful left.” The colonel of the regiment, who like everyone in war could judge the course of combat only by what was happening to his own unit, spent an anxious night, for as he said, “If the English have the slightest suspicion of our condition, and counterattack, they will simply run over us.”

Neither of von Kluck’s flanking corps, the IInd on his right and the IXth on his left, had been brought into the battle. Like the rest of the First Army they had marched 150 miles in 11 days and were strung out along the roads several hours’ march to the rear of the two corps in the center. If all had attacked together on August 23, history might have been different. Some time during the afternoon von Kluck, realizing his mistake, ordered the two central corps to hold the British until the flanking corps could be brought up for envelopment and a battle of annihilation. Before that time a drastic change of plan forced itself upon the British.

Henry Wilson was mentally still charging forward with medieval ardor in Plan 17, unaware that it was now about as applicable to the situation as the longbow. Like Joffre who could still insist upon the offensive six hours after receiving de Langle’s report of disaster in the Ardennes, Wilson, even after the line of the canal had to be given up, was eager for an offensive next day. He had made a “careful calculation” and
concluded “that we had only one corps and one cavalry division (possibly two corps) opposite to us.” He “persuaded” Sir John French and Murray that this was so, “with the result that I was allowed to draft orders for an attack tomorrow.” At 8:00
P.M.
, just as his work was completed, it was nullified by a telegram from Joffre which informed the British that accumulated evidence now put the enemy force opposite them at three corps and two cavalry divisions. That was more persuasive than Wilson and at once put an end to any thought of attack. Worse news followed.

At 11:00
P.M.
Lieutenant Spears arrived after a hurried drive from Fifth Army headquarters to bring the bitter word that General Lanrezac was breaking off battle and withdrawing the Fifth Army to a line in the rear of the BEF. Spears’ resentment and dismay at a decision taken without consulting and without informing the British was like that of Colonel Adelbert on learning of King Albert’s decision to withdraw to Antwerp. It still colors Spears’ account written seventeen years later.