CHAPTER VI

MONS

"_If the English had any apprehension they would run away._"

* * * * *

"_That island of England breeds very valiant creatures: their mastiffs are of unmatchable courage._"

The dawn of Sunday, the 23rd, broke dim and misty, giving promise of heat. From the late afternoon of the previous day squadrons and reconnaissance patrols from Chetwode's Cavalry Brigade had been pushing well forward on the flanks and front of the British line. They were regiments with names "familiar in our mouths as household words": 12th Lancers, 20th Hussars and Scots Greys.

It was pretty though delicate work this feeling forward to get into touch with enemy outposts and patrols. Nor was there a troop which did not have some story to tell that evening of a tussle with enemy cavalry, with its ending, happy or otherwise, determined by the more wide-awake patrol.

In one place an officer's patrol, moving quietly out from a grassy forest track, stumbled straight upon a dozen Uhlans having a meal. The British had no time to draw swords, and certainly the Uhlans hadn't, it was just a question of riding them down, and swords and pistols out when you could.

In another place a German and a British patrol entered a village simultaneously from either end, unbeknown to each other. The turn of a corner and they were face to face. Our men were the more wide-awake, and they got spurs to their horses and swords out before the enemy grasped the situation. The little affair was over in five minutes.

But as our cavalry pushed farther and farther northwards they found themselves confronting ever-increasing numbers, and retirement became necessary.

Thus were the first shots fired.

At six in the morning of this Sunday, Sir John French held a "pow-wow" with the three G.O.C.'s, Generals Haig, Smith-Dorrien and Allenby, and discussed the situation, somewhat in these terms:[1]

"So far as I can see from the messages I've had from French H.Q. I don't think we've got more than a couple of Corps in front of us, perhaps a Cavalry Division as well.[2] And it doesn't look as though they are trying to outflank, because the cavalry have been right out there and didn't meet with much opposition; nor do the aircraft appear to have noticed anything unusual going on. It'll be a big enemy superiority, but I don't think too big if we've got dug in properly and the lines are all right. We ought to hold them when they come on. The French, as you know, are holding our right, Namur, and down the Meuse."

Here is a plan to show the situation as it was known at G.H.Q.:

The morning wears on. You picture the country-side as not unlike one of our own mining districts, the little villages and low-roofed houses giving that curious smoky, grimy effect of mean suburbs bordering on a large industrial town. Here and there great heaps of slag or disused pits and quarries; gaunt iron stems carrying great wheels and heavy machinery.

The soldiers are billeted all through the houses or make a shake-down in odd barns and yards. Look over the garden gate of one little house and you will see the company cooks of one regiment getting the Sunday dinner ready, peeling the potatoes, swinging the pots on to the camp fires.

From a barn hard by you'll hear the sound of singing. A padre has looked in as the rollicking chorus of "Who's your lady friend?" swung out into the roadway, and with gentle interruption has improvised a short service, suggesting "Rock of Ages" as a substitute for the music-hall ditty.

Down the road a couple of sergeants of the West Ridings lean idly over a gate smoking and watching the folk going off to Mass.

Out over the canal line the men are hard at work trench-digging, pausing now and again to look skywards as the drowsy hum of an aeroplane propeller sounds over them. Whether the machine is friend or foe they have no idea.

Three girls saunter down the road, arms round waists, and stop to look with interest and amusement at some of the West Kents washing out their shirts. One of the men is stripped for a wash and Marie exchanges a little repartee with him, to run off laughing as a burly lance-corporal plants a sounding kiss on her cheek, by way of finishing the argument.

So peaceful it all is, with just that under-current of excitement which the presence of strange troops would give. Imagine a Lancashire or Yorkshire village on a summer Sunday morning and you have the picture.

It is now eleven o'clock and the people are streaming home from church. The service seems to have been cut rather shorter than usual and there is just a hint of anxiety to be seen on their faces. What was it the curé had said, something about keeping quietly in their homes and trusting _le bon Dieu_? But there is no danger, the English are here to protect us. Still, those aeroplanes have an ugly sound, something of _un air menaçant_.

Another aeroplane--and look, it has a great black cross under the wings! Un Boche? No, it cannot be. Ah, see, see, a French one, ours! It goes to meet it. Mon Dieu! they fight! And dimly from the sunny heaven there falls the crackle of revolvers.

A motor dispatch-rider hurls himself from his machine straight upon the astonished group of West Kents.

"Where's the officer? Get moving; you're wanted up there!" and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

The men rush for their kit and rifles. Away to the west there is the crack of an 18-pounder.

Down the street the cyclist pants. A subaltern bursts in on the Sunday dinner of the Bedfords.

"Fall in outside at once!"

Another aeroplane sails over. It hovers for a moment over the Scottish Borderers in their trenches. A trail of black smoke drops down, and instinctively the men cower below the parapet. Slowly it falls. Nothing more. The men raise their heads.

"Eh, man, but a thocht yon werre one o' thae----"

A sudden, odd hum in the air, and then--crash!

The Scots corporal slowly and painfully drags himself out from the pile of earth and debris and looks round. There is a curious numb feeling in his right arm. He sits up with a dazed gasp. There is a hand by him on the ground. His? He looks at his arm, and realises. Near by five of his pals are laid out. He seems to have escaped.

"The Lord ha' maircy--but the regiment's fair blooded this day," and he falls back in a faint.

More aeroplanes, more trails of smoke; and, wherever they fall, within twenty odd seconds a German shell bursts fair and true.

All down the line there springs the crack of rifles. Beyond the canal the outposts of the Lincolns, Royal Scots and others are coming in at the double. A curtain of shell-fire is lowered behind them as the British batteries come into action. A curtain of fire rolls down before them as the German guns take the range.

It is now close upon one o'clock, and enemy shells have begun to creep nearer and nearer in from the suburbs upon Mons itself. The good curé and his words are forgotten, for what living things can remain? And so there begins that pitiable exodus of old men, women and children which streamed steadily southwards, ever increasing as it crowded through the villages and towns.

But there is no time to-day to think of them. They must go, or stay and perish--anything so long as they do not interfere with the great game of War.

North of the town, where our lines necessarily bulged out, making a salient, the fighting was becoming desperate. Here three regiments especially (the Middlesex, Royal Irish and Royal Fusiliers) lost very heavily as they sturdily contested every yard of ground. This particular point had, from the first, been recognised as the weakest in the British lines.

Barely an hour since the first shots were fired, and now by one o'clock practically every gun and every rifle of the British Force is blazing away as though the powers of hell were set loose.

As yet it would seem that the ammunition is being merely wasted for the sake of making a noise. There is no enemy in sight save in the air the circling aeroplanes, and away on the flanks dimly-seen clouds of horsemen. A modern battlefield with its curious emptiness has so often been described that here one need only record the fact in passing. There is nothing to be seen. The men are firing, in the first flush of excitement, at corners of possible concealment--the line of a hedge, the edge of a wood, the very occasional flash of a field-gun. On the left, in the Second Corps, the British fire slackens somewhat as the men pull themselves together. No one has the foggiest notion of what is really happening. It is the officers' business of the moment to steady the ranks and keep them under cover.

But away on the right, out by Binche, where the Guards are, the storm has burst in fullest fury. No slackening there. The extreme right was held by battalions of historic regiments, names to conjure with: Munster Fusiliers, Black Watch, Scots and Coldstream Guards. Ah, those Guards! The glorious discipline of them! But how distinguish between any of the regiments that day, and after?

Almost from the first the senior officers began to realise that something was wrong, especially on the right. The Divisional Commanders and their immediate staffs, to whom the general idea of strengths and dispositions was known, began to wonder whether a big mistake had not been made. "Well, never mind, we're in for it now, we must do the best we can. But, those guns! There certainly should not be so many out there."

And it was positively uncanny how the German guns got their range. That fact struck everybody almost more than anything else. There appeared to be no preliminary ranging, as was always usual, but guns got direct on to the target at once.

It is difficult at times to avoid launching out into details which are of more interest to soldiers than to the general public, but as everything at this time was so new an occasional lapse may perhaps be excused.

Again, one's brain is so confused with such a mass of detail that it becomes most difficult to disentangle impressions and note them down in dispassionate language. If, however, the reader will take the little pen-pictures of incidents which are given and imagine them, not as isolated facts but as being reproduced fifty times all through the fighting lines, he may get a fair idea of the course of events.

* * * * *

As the day wore on that uncanny effect of the German fire increased. There is no doubt that it was mainly due to the amazingly efficient secret service of the enemy. The H.Q. of a division or a brigade, for instance, does not blatantly advertise its position, and yet time and time again shells were dropped clean on to the particular building where the Staff happened to be. And when they got into another building, plump would come more shells.

Looking back it is a little curious to remember that even in that first week a very considerable percentage of our total casualties were caused by high explosive shell, and the shooting of them was astonishingly accurate.

Yes, the German guns did their work well, but they did not fully succeed in their object. Their local successes were great, especially against British guns and batteries.

Here is a British battery which has made two mistakes--it is not sufficiently concealed, the battery commander is perched up on an observation limber, and the guns are not far enough back behind the crest. (The Germans always "search" for some 300 yards behind crests of hills.) The B.C. is quickly spotted by an aeroplane observer and a perfect hell of fire is switched on by the enemy. In a moment telephone wires are cut, communications are broken, and within five minutes the gun detachments are wiped out.

The effect of a shell from the enemy heavier guns is overwhelming. The flank gun of the battery is hit, practically "direct." Some R.A.M.C. men double up a few minutes later to help out the wounded. There is nothing, save a great hole, fragments of twisted steel, and--a few limbs of brave men. Nothing can be done except, later, dig in the sides of the pit to cover the remains.

The rest of the guns remain, but there is no one to work them. The horses, a little way to the rear, have also suffered badly. A subaltern officer staggers painfully through the tornado of fire from one gun to the next, slowly, deliberately putting them out of action, rendering them useless should the enemy come up to capture them.

Early in the afternoon Brigade Commanders have got orders round to the British lines to hold up the infantry fire as far as possible. It is now all well under control, for everyone realises that the artillery bombardment was a preliminary only, that the real attack is yet to come. The men have had their baptism of fire and magnificently have they stood it. This is discipline, and now they are ready for anything which may come along.

But already the casualties have been very heavy. Early in the day you have seen that company of the West Kents double up to the support of their battalion entrenched about half-way along the Second Corps line. I find a note in my diary: "W. Kents, Middlesex and Northumberlands" (they were all in the Second Corps) "decimated by shell fire." One or two companies of the W. Kents were, I believe, on outpost duty, which would mean that they were literally wiped out.

And, remember, the British trenches were not those of later days round Ypres. They had all been hastily dug in extremely hard and difficult ground, so that there were none of the niceties of snug dug-outs and bomb-proof shelters. In many places it was just a matter of scratching up the soil behind a hump of shale and cramming oneself in as far as one could go. To imagine, as one is led to do by some writers, that our men sat snugly in deep trenches through all that shell fire waiting calmly for the infantry attack is to get a hopelessly wrong idea. And if this was so on the first day when the men started in fresh, the conditions during the days which followed may be vaguely guessed.

Think for a moment of the splendid work the R.A.M.C. were doing all this time. I wonder how many V.C.'s were earned by that self-sacrificing corps during the week. It is easy enough to do what people call a gallant deed with arms in your hands when the blood is up, to pick up a live bomb and hurl it away--little trifles of the moment which no one thinks twice about,--but the courage demanded in walking quietly into a hail of lead to bandage and carry out a wounded man, a feat which the R.A.M.C. men in the firing lines do a dozen times a day, _that_ is worth talking about.

On our right the fight does not go well for us, and the suspicion that some mistake has been made becomes a certainty. If it is only a matter of two German corps and a Cavalry division in front of our position where on earth have all those guns come from?

Still the British guns out towards Binche go pounding gallantly on, hopelessly outmatched though they are. It's pretty shooting, for our 18-prs. can get in six or seven shots a minute more than the German field-guns, but we cannot compete against their heavier metal. And, just as in a naval fight, it is the heavier metal which tells.

The fighting on the right where General Lomax has the 1st Division has not slackened for a moment, but steadily becomes more intense. Now, for the first time, the enemy is really seen. And as his infantry begin an advance the German shell-fire redoubles in intensity. Every house where British can be concealed, every possible observation post, every foot of trench, every hill-crest and 400 yards behind it is swept and devastated by the tornado.

What communication between units is possible in such a storm? Now battalions and batteries find themselves cut off from their neighbours, each fighting and carrying on by itself.

Chetwode's Cavalry Brigade is caught in the thick of it. The Guards are out there and they hold on almost by their teeth. The 1st Irish are in action for the first time since their formation. They'll see the Germans in hell before they're going to quit. The Munsters are in the hottest corner, if indeed you can see any degrees of difference.

The cavalry have to go; and the Munsters and Black Watch lose horribly as they cover the retirement. No finer fighting regiments in the world than these on the right, but nothing human can stay there and live. The little town of Binche is abandoned; the first enemy success that day. The First Corps has had to swing back its outer flank.

But if you think that the Black Watch, or the Guards, or any of them, have been sitting there quietly to be shot at when there's an enemy in sight, you know little of those regiments. And you don't imagine that the Scots Greys, or Lancers, or Hussars, with such a reputation behind them, are going to sneak out of Binche by a back way without first getting a little of their own back.

No, if the Germans have got to have Binche they must bring up a great many more men than that to take it. There has been much talk of a repetition of that famous charge of the Greys, with the Black Watch hanging on to the stirrup-leathers. If indeed it was repeated that August then this must have been the moment. I am sorry to say that I have never been able to obtain any real confirmation of the story, so I shall not set it down.

But it might well have happened, and one likes to think that it did. Anyway, during that hour or so, there was many a gallant, desperate charge in that corner. A charge against overwhelming odds, when the utmost to be expected was the breaking and rout of the first two or three lines of the advance.

It needs no vivid flight of imagination to picture it. On the far outskirts of the town a railway line runs. Under the lee of a sheltering embankment and bridge the officers collect and re-form some of the squadrons, now grown pitiably less in numbers. Words of command are almost inaudible, but the men understand. Hard by, on their left, you have the flanking companies of the line regiments. One or two brief messages pass to and fro between cavalry and infantry.

"The Greys and Lancers are going to charge the left of infantry advancing beyond the wood. Give them all the support you can!"

The British fire slackens from loophole and broken window. The Scottish regiment and the Coldstream Guards insist on taking a share. They cut out through the leaden hail and make some yards' advance, dropping again under what cover they can.

A last look round, a final pull at girth-straps, and the word is passed. The enemy infantry is 300 yards away.

"Tr-rot!" They are clear of the embankment. All well in hand. The enemy guns have not yet got them.

The Scots and Coldstream Guards make another rush and again drop.

"Can-ter!" And men and horses settle down into the steady swing. The infantry who have got the orders to support start blazing away again as fast as they can get the magazine clips home.

Now the German gunners see what is happening and one gun after another drops its range and fuse. The German infantry is 250 yards away.

"Cha-arge!" No need to sound it. The officers are in front, and where the officers go their men will follow. Anywhere!

The Scots and Coldstreamers are after them as hard as they can leg it.

The enemy on the flank try to swing round to meet the charge, but there is no time. The German guns mercilessly drop the range still more--what matter if they sweep away their own men as well.

One hundred yards! Fifty yards! A long, sickening crash--and the Greys and Lancers are in them. Hacking, slashing, hewing! The Scots are hard on their heels just to their left. A mighty heave as the bayonets get home. The first rank is through. There are no more ranks, only a vast confusion.

Five little minutes (it seems an eternity) and the enemy flank is crushed in, smashed to pulp as a block of stone smashes in the head of a man.

"Who goes home?" Who can? Ten men, a dozen, perhaps twenty have struggled through. A few will cover again the ground over which they charged. A few, such a tiny few, will get back under cover again. "The rest is silence."

But they have done it. The enemy have learned what a British charge is like. They know now what bayonet work is, and the lesson sinks deep. They will not face the steel again. Ask the men who fought at the Aisne, at Ypres.

[1] I have simply turned paragraphs of Sir John French's dispatch into imaginary spoken words.

[2] A German Cavalry Division numbered, approximately, 5,200, all ranks, including 2 batteries Horse Artillery and 1 machine-gun battery.