Mons War Walks

In August 1914, the "war to end all wars"

blazed through Belgium and northern France.

Over the next few months, an old world of swords, lances and bugles

would be shattered by the machine gun and the howitzer.

Most of the British troops in the first battles in the Great War

would not survive this new age of industrialised slaughter.

In the first few days of the campaign,

they marched across a landscape

that previous generations of British soldiers knew.

Here at the battlefield of Malplaquet,

in 1709, the Duke of Malborough won his bloodiest victory.

The smoky carnage of the battles of the horse and musket era

must have seemed a world away to the schoolboys of Edwardian England.

But in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force

marched past this very spot.

Two regiments even spent the night overlooking the battlefield

where their ancestors had fallen.

The British were moving up on the left of their French ally

in an offensive intended to win the war at a stroke.

In fact, they found themselves squarely in the path of German armies

pouring down through Belgium.

This monkey, his head rubbed smooth by countless hands for good luck,

sits at the crossroads of military history.

We're in the town of Mons,

now in southern Belgium, but for centuries a border garrison town.

That character is still called the Guard Room Monkey.

In the Middle Ages, Mons was famous for textiles.

But early this century, it was the capital of Belgium's Black Country.

Mons was fought through rather than fought over.

Its centre would still be recognisable

to the men in the British Expeditionary Force.

Their mobilisation had been a weird parody of a summer holiday:

a train journey and a walk in the country.

The men who came here in 1914 expected a war of movement

which would be over by Christmas.

It would be won by guts and determination.

A British training pamphlet declares, "The object of infantry

"in the attack is to get too close quarters as quickly as possible.

"During the delivery of the assault the men will cheer.

"Bugles will be sounded and pipes played."

The soldiers who reached Mons on the 22nd August, 1914,

were footsore and weary after marching up

from their concentration area south of the French border

and gladly rested in the Grand Place.

But they were advancing against an enemy they believed was in trouble.

They were greeted as heroes by the local population,

which pressed food and wine on them, sometimes in unwise quantities.

The soldiers here were from 4th Royal Fusiliers.

They didn't know that only a few miles away,

tens of thousands of Germans were swinging down on them like a mallet.

Nor did they know that within 24 hours,

many of them would be wounded or dead.

As the church bells rang out over Mons

on Sunday, 23rd of August,

they might have been sounding the death knell

for a world that was coming to the end of the line.

Two miles north of Mons is the tiny railway station of Obourg,

sitting alongside the Mons-Conde canal.

On the 23rd of August, the British held the canal

and early that morning,

German cavalry scouts appeared on the far bank

with infantry and guns close behind them.

The canal was an effective barrier

behind which the British could hold off the Germans for a time.

The fighting here was really vicious.

Although the Germans couldn't get across the canal,

just behind me, they were able to work across the open country

and come up into the Middlesex flank.

The soldiers fought on desperately though their commander was killed.

They got through and an unknown hero climbed onto the station roof

and kept the Germans back - he was eventually killed.

I come here often, but it never fails to move me.

When the station was demolished in 1981,

the Belgians left a bit of wall

commemorating that unknown Tom, Dick or Harry,

who gave his life defending his mates.

# Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag... #

The British Expeditionary Force was a musical army.

Its songs were the real soundtrack of that summer.

# What's the use of worrying? It never... #

A short walk along the canal

takes us to the next village westwards, Nimy.

# And smile, smile, smile! #

We've walked up the canal to the railway bridge at Nimy

and the next battalion along, 4th Royal Fusiliers.

The canal then was a bit narrower and there was a swing bridge

in place of that ugly concrete monstrosity.

Most of the men up here were Londoners,

reservists called back to the colours on the outbreak of war -

big black moustaches and a knowing eye for a mademoiselle.

The battalion's two machine guns were just up here,

like pimples on the chin of the British position.

They were commanded by Lt Maurice Dease,

an Irishman from County Mayo.

The machine gunners were an obvious target for German artillery

and soon they were all killed or wounded.

Dease himself was hit several times.

Then Private Sid Godley of the rifle company

admitted to knowing how to work one of these.

He came up here, dragged the dead and wounded to one side,

and kept firing till his friends had left and he was out of ammunition.

Then he smashed it on the bridge, threw it into the canal,

and skulked off into Nimy, bleeding profusely.

Dease and Godley were awarded the war's first two Victoria Crosses.

Dease died of his wounds and is buried nearby.

Godley survived in a POW camp.

His mates remembered him as an unlikely hero -

dour and inclined to be dangerous in a barrack room.

But then, heroes are like that sometimes.

As the day went on, the German attack

spread down the line of the canal.

It was brought to a dead stop by this, the Enfield rifle,

in the hands of men who knew how to use it.

They'd shot for their pay. Being a marksman brought you extra money -

for the wet canteen or for a tart to put a little comfort into soldiering.

These were not men given to great reflections on right or wrong.

They were hard men and, frankly, a lot of them enjoyed it.

This is an account by John Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles.

"Our rapid fire was appalling even to us.

"The worst marksman could not miss.

"We had only to fire into the brown of the masses of the enemy,

"who, on the fronts of our two companies,

"were continually and uselessly reinforced

"at the short range of 300 yards.

"Such tactics amazed us and, after the first shock

"of seeing men helplessly falling as they were hit,

"gave us a great sense of power and pleasure."

# It's a long way to Tipperary

# It's a long way to go

# It's a long way to Tipperary

# To the sweetest girl I know! Goodbye, Piccadilly... #

British units were strung out along the length of the canal.

As the day went on, the German attack spread to the west.

The British line was over by that unmilitary-looking service station.

It was being attacked by 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers.

One commander was a 46-year-old reserve officer called Walter Bloem.

He'd been snatched from a comfortable literary existence

to meet the demands of what he called The Tear Season.

Bloem's first problem was getting his company across this field

under heavy fire.

Bloem and his company headquarters got to about here,

where there was enough of a bank to keep that rifle-fire off them.

He then saw a corporal, a gentleman ranker he hadn't previously noticed,

offer a bottle of champagne to one of his officers.

The four of them, Bloem,

his orderly, the corporal and the lieutenant, finished the bottle.

How useful a sharpener is to men in that desperate situation.

No less useful to me!

When the bottle was finished, Bloem got his company together

for the last rush.

We'll let him take us over the top.

"The enemy must have been waiting to get us all together at close range,

"for immediately the line rose,

"it was as if the hounds of hell had been loosed at us,

"as a mass of lead swept in amongst us.

"'Graser!' I called out. No answer. "Where's Lt Graser?"

"And then, from amongst the cries and groans all round

"came a low-voiced reply.

"'Lt Graser is dead, sir, just this moment.

"'Shot through the head and heart as he fell. He's here.'

"'Within seconds, almost all this convivial little group

"'had been killed or wounded.'"

Although their line held,

the British realised that by staying put, they risked encirclement,

as the Germans pushed past on both flanks.

A little force of Norfolks and Cheshires

was left near the village of Elouges to cover the retreat.

They even gave a last hurrah, a cavalry charge.

The cavalry charged down the line of this Roman road,

4th Dragoon Guards on the left, 9th Lancers on the right.

The Lancers were commanded by Col David Campbell,

a flamboyant character who had won the Grand National on his horse Sora,

and was inevitably nicknamed Sora Campbell.

And see what the Lancers carried under the arm at the engage.

There were many versions of what happened next -

verse of varying quality and paintings like this one,

portraying heroic lancers spearing German gunners.

But all this is pure moonshine.

The cavalry hurtled down here,

heading for the German guns just the other side of the sugar factory.

They were stopped by wire, not fire. An innocent Belgian farmer's fence.

But it ran right in front of the German gun line

and they simply couldn't get beyond it.

Capt Francis Grenfell remembered

they ran up and down in front of it like rabbits.

Of course, they were easy targets, as Harry Easton tells us.

Something hit my horse in the neck, just in front of me, and it fell.

It took me out of the saddle and I lost the horse.

Well, I lost the lot.

And I am reminded of the Biblical saying of "Though I walk

"through the valley of death, I had no staff to comfort me."

Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards was luckier.

His horse was hit just here.

He was dragged into a farm building.

Just as the Germans appeared,

someone threw him onto a spare horse and he galloped up the Roman road.

He lost that horse as well. And he was sitting, wondering what to do...

when the Brigade signals officer

purred up in a blue and silver Rolls-Royce and wafted him to safety.

But there was no safety for the Cheshires.

The order to withdraw never reached them,

and they were engulfed as German infantry fought its way in with bayonet and rifle butt.

The action at Elouges cost 2nd Corps 2,000 men -

more than the battle of Mons.

Yet it allowed the BEF to begin its retreat.

The men were already tired by marching up to Mons

and they became tireder still marching away from it.

They crossed the border into France

and Mons' industrial suburbs were replaced by rich farming country.

The retreat imposed a huge strain on British commanders.

And on August 25th, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, 2nd Corps Commander,

found himself separated from the rest of the BEF

by the Great Forest of Mormal.

We're twenty miles south of Mons and two days into the retreat.

The mighty forest of Mormal lay like a wedge behind the British Army.

It forced Haig's 1st Corps off to the east

and Smith-Dorrien's 2nd Corps to the west.

Already, men were marching in a sort of trance.

Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers,

who slogged down this road with his mates,

remembered one of them believing he saw a castle twinkling in the woods.

They knew the Germans were close.

Nightly, the horizon was lit from burning villages.

Many found the plight of refugees hardest to take.

Alan Hanbury-Sparrow wrote of, "this broken torrent of dusty misery,

"wains drawn by great percherons, wagons tugged by oxen.

"Bicycles, tricycles, barrows and shandrydans,

"coagulate and concertina painfully along this via dolorosa."

The "via dolorosa" was to lead to the south,

to Le Cateau.

The retreat from Mons was sheer hell, especially for the reservists.

They'd been issued with new boots

and these had caused dreadful blisters on the march up.

I've seen infantry there with their feet bleeding.

I've seen men with their boots off and puttees wrapped round them.

I've seen men sobbing and turning around,

asking our officers, "Why the hell can't we fight?

"Why won't you let us fight?"

If we had an average sleep of two to three hours a day,

that's as much as we got.

And now they had the weather to contend with -

scorching hot summer days mixed with sudden downpours.

This is the school in the northern French town of Le Cateau,

birthplace of the painter Matisse.

During the battle of Mons, general headquarters was in this building.

As the British army fell back on Le Cateau, Capt James Jack,

a newly-appointed staff officer,

was sent to find out what orders there were for his brigade.

When he arrived he was met by an elegant staff officer

who sent him into town for something to eat.

Jack needed no second bidding

and stuffed himself with omelettes and bread rolls.

But when he came back, the place was empty.

There was, he said, "not even a pencil left behind."

While HQ was quick to retreat,

tired men on blistered feet were much slower.

By nightfall they were still drifting in to Le Cateau.

General Smith-Dorrien decided to stand and fight.

But he would do so outnumbered, outgunned and alone.

His gamble was that he could deliver a stopping blow

that would check the relentless pursuit.

The Germans appeared invincible, but they too were exhausted.

Most of them had been marching, day after day, for almost three weeks.

They had also been surprised by the ferocity of the British at Mons.

Smith-Dorrien's gamble wasn't quite as foolhardy as it might have seemed.

# Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

# And smile, smile, smile...

# While you have lucifers to light your fag,

# Smile, boys, that's the style!

# What's the use of worrying?

# It never was worthwhile! So...! #

Le Cateau was the sort of battlefield the men of 1914 expected.

It was perfect country for an infantry battle -

open, rolling fields.

But it offered little cover from German shells

and the British were to suffer grievously as a result.

One of the men who fought here

described it as Salisbury Plain without the trees. But he was wrong.

There was one tree.

Shown on the maps then, as now, as l'Arbre Rond - the round tree.

This, I have to say, is a modern replacement.

It was an obvious aiming mark

and it enabled German gunners

to drop their shells right here in the sunken lane, causing casualties.

Lt-Col Ballard of the Norfolks gave orders for it to be cut down.

This was almost finished when the wind changed,

threatening to blow the tree down, blocking the sunken road.

Then Brigade Commander, Count Gleichen,

told Ballard that on no account was this valuable route to be blocked.

The Pioneers had to guy the tree up with ropes

until they could pull it down into the field behind them.

A bizarre thing - worrying about tree-felling during a battle.

Evidence of the fighting at Le Cateau can still be found

in the fields around the town.

This is a relatively safe piece of First World War debris.

It is a German cartridge for the Mauser 98 infantry rifle.

We can tell that it is German because it is rimless.

The British version was fatter and had a pronounced rim, here.

Fired in 1914, lying here ever since.

As the morning of the 26th of August wore on,

the British took a terrible pounding from the German guns.

Smith-Dorrien's artillery commandos

had pushed their guns right up into the infantry line.

And when it was time to pull back,

the horses had to be sent forward to extract them.

Le Cateau was to be the last time in British military history

when guns were fought the way they had been at Waterloo,

wheel-to-wheel within sight of the enemy.

This track was the gun line of 122 battery, Royal Field Artillery.

Its six 18-pounder guns were just there, drawn up in the open.

They took a dreadful hammering,

first from German artillery, then from infantry and machine guns.

The Germans got some machine guns into the church spire.

Eventually, Smith-Dorrien decided the job was done.

He'd delivered a stopping blow,

and it was time to break clear if he was to have anything left to move.

The two guns here were commanded by Lt Lionel Lutyens,

who wrote home telling us exactly what had happened.

One of his guns was just over here.

The team came in, got over the bank,

hooked the gun in and got it safely away.

Lutyens said, "It was very smart and good."

But the next team came in here.

The bank was a bit too high and the horses wouldn't take it.

A machine gunner, perhaps one in the church tower,

brought down the drivers and then the horses too.

To Lutyens, there seemed to be nobody left alive.

He then glanced into the sunken road

and saw that his trusty groom had kept his charger Bronco.

He managed to get one foot up into Bronco's stirrup

and Bronco began to move backwards.

Lutyens remembered that he was "shaking with excitement and funk."

Then he was into the saddle and away up the hill.

By evening, it seemed that Smith-Dorrien's gamble had worked.

The survivors slipped away from the battlefield in broad daylight.

There were many days of retreat ahead,

but the pursuit would never again be so close.

Some of them came back through this village of Bertry.

And the extraordinary tale of one of them

is still remembered by the local inhabitants.

THEY SPEAK IN FRENCH

I am here being looked after by the station master at Bertry,

and his father.

And they are telling the story about Private Fowler and Corporal Hull,

of the 11th Hussars, who got cut off here in the village

and were looked after by the inhabitants.

Hull unfortunately was caught by the Germans

and as he was in civilian clothes he was shot.

The head of the house that had looked after him

was deported to Germany and never seen again. But Fowler was luckier.

He was looked after by Madame Belmont, who kept him

in a wardrobe for most of the day, and he was allowed out at night.

He actually spent the whole war like that.

In October 1918, a patrol of the 11th Hussars, led by Major Drake,

came back into the village.

They saw a strange dishevelled creature

being led along by a patrol of Canadians.

As they went past he shouted out,

"I know him, that is Mr Drake, my troop officer!"

And it was in fact Fowler recognising Drake,

who had been his troop leader in 1914.

Le Cateau is largely forgotten today,

overshadowed by bigger, bloodier battles.

But it gave the British a reprieve

and helped give the Allies time to regroup for a counter-offensive,

one of many that would eventually cripple an entire generation.

By the end of 1914,

of those thousand-strong battalions we've followed,

there remained, on average, one officer and thirty men.

It's as well that soldiers can't see the future.

The day after Le Cateau,

some of Smith-Dorrien's men crossed a little river here in Voyennes

in exactly the same spot as Henry V,

on his way to Agincourt, 499 years before.

The river? It's called the Somme.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC 1996