Читать книгу Irish Voices from the Great War - Myles Dungan - Страница 11
Оглавление1. THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES
‘There’s a woman sobs her heart out,
With her head against the door.
For the man that’s called to leave her,
God have pity on the poor!
But it’s beat, drums, beat,
While the lads march down the street,
And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,
Keep your tears until they go.’1
(Winifred Letts, ‘The Call to Arms in Our Street’)
In the world of paranoid alliances which existed in Europe in 1914 it was not at all illogical that the shot fired by a Serbian nationalist which killed an Austro-Hungarian potentate in modern-day Bosnia should have forestalled a possible Irish civil war. That shot reverberated in Ireland like a loud bang which distracts two men involved in a squabble of their own. It was as if a neighbour’s house was on fire. Both ran to join the chain gang. Neither did so entirely from the purest of motives. They wanted to be seen with buckets in their hands dousing the flames. Both expected the neighbour would reward them once the fire was extinguished.
The Great War had loomed as the country hurried towards war between the supporters of the Union and the advocates of Home Rule. But instead of fighting each other thousands of Irishmen, of Unionist and Nationalist persuasion had joined the British forces and, for very many different and often conflicting reasons, fought the Germans, Turks and Bulgarians in World War One.
It was to take nine months for the uninitiated (and often naive) volunteers of August and September 1914 to begin to be ground through the human ‘sausage machine’ which the Great War quickly became. But there was no shortage of Irish soliders, already in uniform, to meet the Germans in the weeks after they marched into Belgium in early August 1914. These were the men who had chosen (frequently by default) the Army to provide them with a livelihood. Men who did not need to be drip-fed stories of German atrocities, the rape of nuns, the ravaging of ‘Little Catholic Belgium’. These were the Irish soldiers of the Regular Army, often in Irish regiments, which constituted the British Expeditionary Force, despatched to France and thence to Belgium, in August 1914. When war broke out 30,000 Irishmen were serving in the 250,000 strong British regular army, an institution that had long played second fiddle to the ‘Senior Service’, the Royal Navy.2
The men of nine Irish Infantry regiments were represented in that force. The Cavalry regiments, because of the static nature of the fighting, were of little consequence other than in the opening and final days of the war. As casualties mounted many cavalry officers and men were simply drafted into infantry units. Even in the early, mobile stage of the war cavalry was used sparingly enough. John Breen a regular with three years experience in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, didn’t see many German cavalry charges after he arrived in France. ‘The Germans had cavalry all right but they didn’t like the shell fire or the rapid fire. They didn’t put many of them up. They’d put them up now and again.’3
Eight units, The Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, each had two active service battalions in the regular Army, some on overseas, colonial duty; the Irish Guards had a single battalion. Each had its own natural recruiting hinterland, some (Dublins, Munsters, Leinsters, Connaughts) are self-explanatory but, broadly speaking, in the case of the Royal Irish Regiment it was mostly the South East; the Inniskillings drew their men from Donegal, Derry and parts of mid-Ulster; the Rifles from Belfast, Antrim and Down; and the Royal Irish Fusiliers from Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan.
Nine battalions of these famous regiments became members of an elite group, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), relatively few of whose members were to be left unscathed by the conflict. They called themselves ‘The Old Contemptibles’, the pejorative nickname being an ironic comment on the (probably apocryphal) order conveyed to the German First Army by the Kaiser as it cut a swathe through neutral Belgium. Incensed by the intervention of Britain he, allegedly, commanded his invading army to ‘exterminate the treacherous England. Walk over General French’s contemptible little Army.’4 The ‘Tommy’ in the BEF was not impressed, tending anyway to a comic opera view of the German soldier. ‘The field grey, rather baggy uniforms, comic boots, and helmets amused us. Anything strange or foreign was inferior, to the mind of the common soldier.’5 They adopted the ‘Contemptible’ tag as their own and turned it against the Germans.
Field Marshal Sir John French, who had been forced to resign for his pusillanimous approach to the recalcitrant officers of the 1914 Curragh Mutiny, was given charge of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of around 120,000 men who were mustered from the home-based units. (French lasted just over a year before being replaced by the ambitious First Corps Commander General, later Field Marshal, Sir Douglas Haig.) The BEF was quickly despatched to France by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Thanks to some stubborn and unexpected Belgian resistance it got there before the Germans did.6 The men were pitched straight into action as the hammer blows of the modified Schlieffen Plan descended on the towns and cities of Flanders and Picardy. Within three months 40,000 Irish soldiers,7 regulars and reservists, hauled in to fill the gaps left by the earliest casualties, would be involved in the fighting on the Western Front. This figure does not include the thousands of Irishmen in English, Scottish and Welsh regular Army units.
Before their departure for France each soldier recieved a personal message from the Secretary of State for War admonishing him to be on his best behaviour and to treat the French with due respect and deference. ‘Be invariably courteous, considerate and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act.’ On the other hand, the French being the French, renowned the world over for moral laxity and ‘fast’ women the innocent ‘Tommy’ was warned to be on guard against ‘temptations’ both in wine and women. ‘You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you must avoid any intimacy.’8 Such avuncular counsel was to be retained by every soldier in his Army Service Pay Book as a written encouragement to good behaviour. This also contained an ominous form which was to be filled out should a soldier wish to make his last will and testament. More importantly it told ‘Tommy’ that he would get higher pay while in the field risking life and limb. This was a source of some small consolation. Contrary to popular mythology few actually believed that the war would ‘be over by Christmas’, though many thought it would end within twelve months.9
John Lucy, a twenty-year-old Corporal, from Cork, had joined the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, along with his brother, who was a year younger, in January, 1912, shortly after the death of their mother. Studying the men (mostly from Belfast) who formed this battalion Lucy concluded that, on the basis of this representative sample, most of those in the regular army had been driven to the colours by ‘unemployment and the need of food’. There were some exceptions:
There was a taciturn Sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics, and who was very smart and dignified and shunned company. There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers. The remainder of us in our Irish regiment were either scallawags or very minor adventurers.10
Jack Campbell was one of a family of five brothers all of whom served in the forces during the war. Like Lucy, Campbell was an ‘Old Contemptible’ but he had been attached to a Scottish regiment on enlistment. He arrived in France, a raw private, with the 1st Royal Highlanders (The Black Watch) and served with them until 1918. Campbell and Lucy were fortunate in one respect, both were young and fit. Many of the men who made up the BEF were reservists who had been out of khaki for up to seven years. They were to find the going particularly difficult. Often, because of their return to ‘Civvy Street’, they were under the command of much younger men and tended to grouse more about the absence of home comforts.
The troops of the Irish Regular Army battalions left the country without much fuss or ceremony, the dour Kitchener being more inclined to secrecy than to show. There were a few enthusiastic send-offs in some garrison towns but, by and large, they slipped out of Irish or British barracks, sailed for the continent and were soon traversing the paved roads of Northern France.11 (Some – notably the Connaught Rangers – singing a popular marching song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary as they did so.) Edward Byrne, a Waterford man, who had been assigned to the 72nd Battery Royal Field Artillery in 1912 was 23 years old when Gavrilo Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo which precipitated the global confict. He handed in his dress uniform, like all the others in his unit, got on the train from Waterford to Queenstown and sailed to France – on a ship called the Kingstonian. Bad weather forced the vessel to return to Southampton. But not before having to jettison some terrified and unfortunate horses somewhere in mid Channel.
It was a member of one of the Irish regiments who acquired a dubious distinction. At 7.00 a.m on the 22 August, outside Mons, men of the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards spotted a group of four German cavalrymen. Corporal Edward Thomas, of ‘C’ Squadron, from Nenagh, Co.Tipperary, fired immediately and found his target. It is not known whether the bullet killed or wounded the enemy cavalryman. It was the first shot fired in battle by a soldier of the British Army on the continent of Europe for almost a hundred years and the first of the Great War. Thomas later won a Military Medal and, after surviving the war, was discharged in 1923.12
An anonymous Irishman was also the inspiration for one of the first famous recruiting posters. This depicts a British soldier lighting his pipe nonchalantly, while a German cavalry regiment hurtles towards him. The caption reads ‘Half a mo’, Kaiser’. The sketch emanates from a report of an Irish Guardsman who coolly cadged a cigarette from a fellow soldier and lit up with the enemy cavalry approaching.
Had Kitchener, himself the subject of the most famous recruiting poster of them all, been given his way the BEF would have been nowhere near Mons, it would have been deployed much further to the south. The old warlord feared that the small force, by advancing that far north to meet the Germans, would open its account in full retreat.The British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, on the advice of French, overruled him. Kitchener was proven right. Within a matter of days the BEF was retracing its steps, though at much greater speed. But on their pleasant late summer march in mellow August sunlight to Mons the BEF was feted by grateful French villagers giving a hearty welcome to their new saviours and encouraging them, by means of a universal gesture, to cut the throats of the ‘sale Boche’: ‘Their promiscuous kissing, the cut throat gesticulations, useless presents, mad hatred of the “dirty Germans”, and their petty pilfering of our cap-badges, buttons, and numerals, “browned” a good many of us off.’13 Astonishingly requests for mementoes continued with the BEF going in the opposite direction, in full retreat, a few days later. It was too much for one Dublin Fusilier in the 10th Infantry Brigade ‘who was wearily dragging himself along in the ranks of his company, hearing the too familiar cry of “souvenir” turned an angry glance over his shoulder and growled “Here, you can have my blooming pack for a souvenir!”’14 Naturally, the cheers were for ‘Les Anglais’, a misapprehension corrected by John Lucy in the case of the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles. ‘“Nous ne sommes pas Anglais, nous sommes Irlandais.” They liked that and laughed with pleasure, and then shouted: “Vivent les Irlandais,” and we cheered back at them: “Vive la France”.’15
Jack Campbell, who survived the war and died in 1993 at the age of 96, landed at Rouen with the Black Watch and entrained for Mons the following day. ‘It was Sunday evening when we arrived in Mons and as we marched through the town the church bells were ringing, calling the just to prayer, but we weren’t interested in prayer or anything like that because in a matter of hours we’d be engaged with war that would kill thousands and bring hardship and misery to millions all over the world.’16 A few miles outside the town the battalion left the road and formed ‘a kind of front’ in a wheat field. The stalks had already been cut and lay around the field in sheaves, Campbell and his Scottish comrades made comfortable bedding for themselves and settled in to wait and see what would happen. The calm was shattered at five o’clock the following morning when three batteries of field artillery opened up on a small wood a few hundred yards away from the Black Watch. Campbell quickly found out why:
A horde of cavalry came out of there. I didn’t think there was so much cavalry in the world to tell you the truth. They came heading straight for us. We could see they were losing heavily because there were other troops in front of us … They got to about 100 yards from where we were, then they seemed to falter and those that were left galloped back in the direction they came. A short while after that we got the order to fall in. We fell in and that started the retreat from Mons.17
Campbell had watched a German cavalry unit being torn to shreds. He wondered why, after that morale-boosting achievement, the BEF was pulled back. He was not alone in querying the move. John Lucy had been similarly blooded with the 2nd Rifles against an equally unsuccessful German infantry battalion. ‘Why did we retire?’ he asked. ‘We had beaten off an enemy calculated on the spot as being from five to seven times our number. We alone had wiped out at least one whole enemy battalion with the loss of a few men. We had beaten our enemy and were full of fight. Now we looked as if we were in full flight.’18 They were, and at breakneck speed.
In fact Lucy’s impression was erroneous, as might be expected from an individual infantryman blinkered by a lack of information or awareness of what was going on outside the reach of his own temporary entrenchments. The BEF had not defeated the enemy, it had barely managed to hold the enemy at bay. As French was well aware the Germans could quite easily outflank the overextended British force to the west (the French Army was positioned to the east) and cut off the BEF. ‘So we turned our backs on Mons, and it was a long time before our soldiers sang their songs again thereabouts.’19 John King, from Waterford, a seven-year veteran of the Royal Irish Regiment knew when he was beaten and why:
We were badly up against it. We had nothing to defend ourselves with. They outnumbered us by about six or seven to one and they had plenty of armaments and other things which we hadn’t. We were only learning as we went. We thought we were the best equipped army in the world but we found we were up against it when we went there.20
The withdrawal to a more defensible front, despite the presence of thousands of French and Belgian refugees going in the same direction and on the same narrow country roads, was well executed and saved the tiny force from embarrassment at best and annihilation at worst. Among the wild rumours which circulated through the ranks of the gullible or superstitious was that the saviour of the British regular Army was the ‘Angel of Mons’ . It was said that, clothed in white and on horseback, she had turned back the German tide.21
Of more practical assistance, however, was Lieutenant Maurice Dease of the 4th Royal Fusiliers, a 25-year-old Sandhurst graduate from Gaulstown, Co. Westmeath. Dease and the members of his company were set the unenviable task of defending a railway bridge near Nimy. Their job was to hold off the enemy advance for as long as possible to facilitate the retreat. Faced by four German battalions Dease and his command held out, literally, to the last man. Dease himself was hit five times in the course of the day and later died of his wounds. The Westmeath man also became the first Victoria Cross of the Great War. He is buried in St Symphorien military cemetry near where he died.22
From 23 August until the rot was finally stopped at the Marne in the first week of September it was helter-skelter back towards Paris for both the British and French Armies. Units that looked for guidance and leadership often found themselves left to their own devices in the pandemonium which frequently attended the retreat. Isolated individual and collective acts of courage and sacrifice were common as the BEF ‘ad libbed’ its withdrawal. Some units adopted the Falstaffian approach and put discretion before valour, retreating in a dangerous, uncoordinated, ‘every-man-for-himself ’ manner. Others, like Maurice Dease, put the welfare of Army comrades before their own personal safety and survival.
At Cambrai, later to be the scene of fierce fighting, some of the Dublin Fusiliers were preparing for a rearguard action. As they waited for the Germans they ran through their repertoire of stirring rebel songs. One of the songs to which they gave full voice was ‘Dear Old Ireland’ better known by its chorus ‘Ireland, Boys Hurrah’. It was a strange echo of half a century before when soldiers of Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish Brigade of the Union Army in the American Civil War had sung the same song on the banks of the Rappahannock River before the carnage of Fredericksburg. As they sang they were joined in the chorus by Irish units of the Confederate Army camped on the other side of the river. There is no record of the Germans having added their voices to the rousing Dublin’s chorus at Cambrai!
After that engagement a number of the 2nd Dublins were taken prisoner. Nine later attempted to escape along with a French officer. Seven managed to get away. Three of those succeeded in making their way to Boulogne with help from local people. They were dressed up in ‘clothes worn by peasants’ and given a cart full of hay. Two concealed themselves in the cargo and the third ‘walked in front with a hay fork on his shoulder’.23 It was still a time of relative innocence, ample potential for improvisation and of comparatively rapid movement.
Not all those who attempted to surrender, however, were so fortunate. There were rumours of atrocities on both sides. Captain Gerald Burgoyne of the 4th Royal Irish Rifles recorded that when a company of his battalion attempted to surrender on the Aisne they were;
Surrounded and were all shot down. The last to go was a Sergeant who put his hands up to surrender, but though he was hit in three places, the brutes bayoneted him. A body of some 400 Germans tried to surrender … about this time, and some regiment turned a machine gun on them.24
Where units beat a hasty retreat they ensured the Germans didn’t benefit directly from the withdrawal by spiking whatever guns they couldn’t take with them on a rapid march. But the 2nd Munsters probably took to extremes the injunction to leave nothing behind for the Germans to use. After beating off one attack by a German Uhlans cavalry battalion the Munsters realised that the horses which were supposed to pull their field guns had been killed in the fighting. They rounded up some of the riderless German steeds and yoked those highly-strung beasts to the guns instead. But they would still have been forced to leave some guns behind. Rather than do that a number of the Munsters yoked themselves to the guns and dragged them for about five miles until they came across some more horses. ‘As we had not enough horses we made mules of ourselves, for we were not such asses as to leave the guns to the enemy’, a wounded Munster is supposed to have commented later in hospital in Tralee.25 ‘That retreat from Mons was one test of endurance’, for Jack Campbell.
We got ten minutes rest every hour and what rest you got during the night depended on the proximity of the German Army that was advancing after us. Some times you got three or four hours, maybe you might get five hours. After a few days with the lack of proper rations we began to have hallucinations. You’d see evacuees going along, or a line of transportation and then you’d pull yourself together and there was nothing on the road at all.26
Rudyard Kipling, in his book on the Irish Guards (his son lost his life serving with the Regiment, hence his interest) described a similar phenomenon four days into the retreat; four days of footsore exhaustion and sleepless nights.
By this time, the retreat, as one who took part in it says, had become ‘curiously normal’ – the effect, doubtless, of that continued over-exertion which reduces men to the state of sleep-walkers … At night, some of them began to see lights, like those of comfortable billets by the roadside which, for some curious reason or other, could never be reached. Others found themselves asleep, on their feet, and even when they lay down to snatch sleep, the march moved on, and wearied them in their dreams.27
‘Our minds and bodies shrieked for sleep’, wrote John Lucy of the trudge southwards undertaken by the Royal Irish Rifles. ‘In a short time our singing army was stricken dumb. Every cell in our bodies craved rest, and that one thought was the most persistent in the vague minds of the marching men.’ Men who could go no further dropped out. They seemed to Lucy to be mostly the bigger, stronger looking specimens. ‘The smaller men were hardier.’ Officers rode up and down the ranks on horseback encouraging and cajoling (which must have rankled with some) knowing that the best the stragglers could hope for was a POW camp. ‘The pained look in the troubled eyes of those who fell by the way will not be easily forgotten by those who saw it.’28 Food was scarce and living off the land could have unwelcome side effects. ‘There was a lot of orchards in that part of France and we’d dip into the orchards and fill our pockets as full of fruit as we could then we’d eat that stuff and the bowel movements weren’t that comfortable.’29
Some units almost allowed themselves to be outstripped by the advancing Germans. A private in the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles remembers his battalion getting too close to the enemy for comfort and disappearing one night into the sanctuary of a small forest.. ‘We got on like the Babes in the Wood, holding each others hands … so as not to lose touch with each other. We dare not light a match or make a sound that would betray our presence.’ The ploy worked, but only just.
Once when they were looking for us their searchlight played in the open just where we were, only we were in the shade, and if we had moved another inch our shadows would have been seen. We heard them talking and shouting to each other, but they gave no chase, thinking we had got away in another direction.30
One of the early 2nd RIR casualties in the chaos of those first weeks of conflict was Corporal Arthur Doran. Doran was a member of the Church of Ireland from West Belfast, but, despite his religious background, was a nationalist. He was also a prominent trade unionist and a member of the Independent Labour Party. His was one of the first deaths to be announced in Belfast papers at the time. A memorial notice from the Belfast city ILP membership in the Belfast Evening Telegraph celebrated the life of ‘Comrade Corporal Arthur Doran’.31
One man who got very little opportunity on that hectic retreat to display either the leadership qualities which would vault him to prominence in World War II or the edginess and arrogance which were to bring about his downfall in that conflict was 2nd Lieutenant Eric Dorman-Smith of the 1st Battalion, the Northumberland Fusiliers. He would be garlanded in 1942 after the first Battle of El Alamein. Subsequently bypassed for promotion and then humiliated, largely through unpopularity due to his prickly and overbearing manner, he would return to his Cavan home in the 1950s and become an active supporter of the IRA’s border campaign, changing his name to Dorman-O’Gowan.
But all that was in the future in August 1914, and a very uncertain future it looked indeed, on 22 August 1914, as ‘Chink’ – so called because of his resemblance to the regimental mascot, a Chinkara antelope – waited for the advancing Germans with his platoon at a bridge over the Mons canal near the town of Mariette. His orders were to hold the bridge for as long as possible and then withdraw. Many of the men in his platoon were, surprisingly enough, Irishmen also. Like a lot of other regular Army regiments the Northumberlands (also known as the Fifth Fusiliers) found the working classes of Dublin and Belfast easier to recruit than those in their own natural hinterland. In the tense moments preceding the arrival of the Germans two Dubliners in his platoon exasperated a nervous Dorman-Smith by asking him if they could keep their rifles after the war – we don’t know for what purpose.
German infantry arrived in force and allegedly used local children as cover to get close to the far side of the canal from Dorman-Smith’s B Company. By mid-afternoon a field gun had been brought up to the canal bank to shell the Northumberland’s positions. Unknown to the men of B company they were on their own, the rest of their battalion had withdrawn an hour before. Their signaller had been one of the first to die in the initial German assault. They held out, waiting for the order to blow up the bridge. Finally, after taking heavy casualties for an hour they withdrew. As they fell back towards the town of Frameries instructions arrived to destroy the bridge, which was now in German hands. The experience of the Northumberlands in Frameries was similar to that of B Company in Mariette. As the Germans attacked orders came to some battalions to pull back. The 1st Northumberlands were the last to receive such an order. By the time they joined the general retreat the town had been almost completely overrun, and the Germans were snapping at their heels.
Initial setbacks had been turned into defeat which, in turn, had become a rout by 24 August. Dorman-Smith became a part of the tired and exhausted column of soldiers which, outnumbered and outgunned, now wound it’s way southwards. But their retreat was not fast enough to elude the German advance. The first phase of Chink’s war ended near Inchy on 26 August when a German shell overshot the hastily prepared defences of General Smith-Dorrien’s retreating Corps and burst near Dorman-Smith in a reserve position. He suffered a shrapnel wound to his left arm and severe surface cuts. He was evacuated to the base hospital at Rouen and from there to England.32
The most spectacular rearguard action by an Irish battalion was also the most costly and led to the virtual annihilation of the 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers (RMF) at Etreux on 27 August. The Battalion had been ordered to hold a position east of the Sambre-Oise canal (roughly fifty miles south of Mons) until instructed to withdraw. The move was designed to contain the advancing Germans while General Douglas Haig’s I Corps beat an orderly retreat. The Munsters, led by Major Paul Charrier, an excellent commander, described as a ‘hearty, genial Kerryman’,33 fulfilled their role superbly, fighting to hold off 7 battalions of German infantry, 3 artillery batteries, as well as cavalry. This was done with considerable panache and not a little black humour. A couple of hours after contact was first made with the advancing Germans, at about midday, the battalion cooks rapidly had to abandon operations and their base. Showing something of the same spirit which had prompted their colleagues to yoke themselves to artillery pieces and drag them for five miles the cooks were determined to bring their food with them. As they scampered across a lane, under heavy German fire, hefting large unwieldy dixies they were greeted by raucous and unsympathetic shouts of ‘Don’t be emptying all the tay down your trousers’, ‘Come out of that, Micky; what are you stopping in the middle of the road for.’34
An hour later and the 2nd RMF was still holding out. Gradually, however, the battalion’s position was chipped away until finally it became untenable. Charrier waited for the order to pull back, but none came. Finally;
To the meadow near the bridge where the Munsters were collected an orderly carrying a despatch came up at about three o’clock in the afternoon. The time of the dispatch was not marked upon the message, which was to order the Munsters to retire ‘at once’. The orderly who carried the message had, he said, been chased by the enemy, and after lying hidden for a time under the nearest cover, believed that it was not possible for him to bring the message through to Major Charrier. Upon this incident the tragedy of the whole day turned. Time had been lost, time too precious ever to regain.35
As they withdrew the odds were against any of the Munsters getting back to rejoin I Corps. By evening their retreat, along the road to Guise which lay a few miles to the south, had been cut off, their ammunition was running out and their guns were silent. ‘The last unwounded gunner met his fate struggling to carry an 18-pounder shell to the gun, standing on the road, surrounded by a small heap of huddled-up bodies.’36 ‘The enemy had entirely surrounded the Battalion, but, encouraged by the few remaining officers, the men fought on until 9.00 p.m. Sounds of approaching help were listened for in vain.’37 While attempting to force a way through, Charrier, having cheated death many times like a dishonest poker player on a roll, was finally killed. Accounts differ as to his exact fate. Capt H.S. Jervis in a letter to Charrier’s wife written on 29 August 1914, while a prisoner of the Germans, told her that her husband had already been hit twice. ‘Still leading and setting an example to all, he was shot a third time and mortally. He fell in the road.’38 But Jervis might have been sparing her the gory truth. Another officer, Lieutenant Thomas, in a letter to his mother wrote that ‘. . . he was blown to pieces in the end by a shell.’39
Thomas himself was too badly wounded to be taken to a POW camp with the other officers. A bullet had penetrated his windpipe and a shell had ripped the biceps from his left arm. To allow him to breathe a tube had to be inserted in his throat. He was able to eat and drink as a result but was unable to speak. Conditions in the field hospital where he lay with three other Munsters, more seriously wounded than he, were grim. ‘This town is about the size of Bandon, and is just one big hospital; every house is full of wounded, and flies and the smells are awful.’40 The low opinion Thomas formed of German medical care was partially corroborated by a man with far greater expertise in the area, Col H.N. Thompson of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), also a prisoner, who held that ‘The pure surgery was good, but the administration, sanitation, and feeding arrangements were very poor.’41
By dusk the position of the Munsters was untenable. Totally surrounded and having lost nearly 130 dead and with most of the rest wounded, the 250 or so Munsters who remained were forced to surrender. Only 155 members of the battalion escaped death or capture, one of those, a gunner, Pte Donovan, hid for months in France before making his way through Belgium to neutral Holland and back to England.42 The Germans gathered and buried the dead of both sides in two huge trenches in an orchard. A cross carved with the motto ‘Freund und Freind in Tod vereint’ (Friend and Foe united in Death) was placed over the graves. As the only medal which could be awarded posthumously was the Victoria Cross, and as it had to be granted for an act of courage seen by a superior officer, Major Charrier was given no gallantry award. But in 1919, after their release from their German POW camps, fifteen medals were presented to members of the battalion whose action had held up the equivalent of two German brigades for twelve hours. Almost sixty years after the event one of the last of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ Frank Hyland (who had joined up in 1902) of the Dublin Fusiliers, at the age of 88, would still get highly emotional at the memory of the Munsters at Etreux. ‘They were there and they were getting terrible cut up and when I think of it now it makes me cry. They were good men and all their lives were worth nothing.’43
The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers had only marginally more luck than the Munsters. Two companies of that unit, under a Major Shewan, found themselves in much the same position, isolated, devoid of information and holding high ground east of Haucourt, directly in the line of the German advance. When the Germans occupied Haucourt in strength, though lacking any orders to withdraw, and unaware that the rest of the 10th Brigade had already done so, Shewan decided to retire to the south, towards the village of Montigny. An advance party, under Captain Trigona moved ahead of the main force and was fired on outside the village. Reluctant to accept that the Germans had already penetrated this far south they chose to believe that they were the victims of what has since become known as ‘friendly fire’.
Checking the assumption, in the dim light just before dawn on the morning of 27August, they communicated to the men firing at them that they were the Dublin Fusiliers. Some of the soldiers opposite responded by waving their headgear and shouting ‘Dublin Fusiliers, right, come on!’. Trigona was suspicious and decided to investigate further. By the time Major Shewan and the main body of the two companies, plus various strays they had picked up along the route, had arrived, he had identified the defenders of Montigny as Germans! Growing impatient, and concluding that their ruse had failed the Germans began firing again. Shewan and his men retraced their steps and sought refuge in a nearby farmhouse but it quickly became clear that they couldn’t remain there for long. Shewan himself, and a number of others, had been wounded in the withdrawal so Capt N.P.Clarke took command of the two companies and ordered a further retreat before the isolated farmhouse became completely surrounded.
As they pulled out of their temporary lair the Dublins took more casualties. They moved back towards Haucourt, bypassed the town and began a hazardous march across German lines through Vitry and Lens to Abbeville and thence to Boulogne, where they managed to get transport back to England. Like some sort of Pied Piper Clarke had picked up so many stragglers that by the time his group reached the coast it included two officers and 73 men from ten different units. The remainder of the members of those two unfortunate companies of the 2nd Dublins were either killed or imprisoned, the battalion losing a total of 450 men, including Major Shewan who spent the war as a POW.
The ultimate German objective as they pushed southwards, was Paris, and they got perilously close. When the Irish Guards engaged them in a standing fight on 1 September it was at the densely wooded Villers Cotterets, near the Marne, almost within sight of the lights of Paris. Rudyard Kipling describes the engagement as ‘that heathen battle in half darkness’.44 On 31August the Guards had covered an extraordinary 35 miles, in extreme heat, with the loss of only five dropouts. But still it wasn’t enough. The Germans were inexorable, and the Guards CO Lt Col Morris decided it was better to choose a favourable location and a good moment to face them. The skirmish took place in the middle of a vast wood, roughly ten miles long by three across. Pte O’Shaughnessy from Tuam Co. Galway remembers being told the Germans were coming through the wood and that the Guards would go in and meet them. By Kipling’s account ‘the action resolved itself into blind fighting in the gloom of the woods, with occasional glimpses of men crossing the rides, or firing from behind tree boles … when a man dropped in the bracken and bramble, he disappeared.’45 Pte Patrick Joseph Bennet of Thurles later wrote to his siser, however, claiming that the Guards were unruffled by the onslaught of the Germans ‘The Irish boys were cool when the shots were flying around us. They were calmly picking berries.’46
Lt Col Morris chose to stay on horseback rather than seek the safety of the thick vegetation. He rode up and down the line encouraging his men. As the Germans launched shellfire into where they suspected the Guards’ positions were, according to Kipling’s account, he hollered ‘“D’you hear that? They’re doing that to frighten you.” To which someone replied with a simple truth: “If that’s what they’re after, they might as well stop. They succeeded with me hours ago.”’47 Private O’Shaughnessy saw the CO, at one point in the fighting, calmly sitting astride his horse smoking a cigarette. He never saw him again. Morris was shot dead, along with Major H.F Crichton and the commander of No. 4 Company, Captain C.A.Tisdall. (Tisdall’s name is commemorated on one of the windows of the tiny Church of Ireland church in Julianstown, Co. Meath.) Among the wounded was the Battalion adjutant Captain Lord Desmond Fitzgerald. Lt Colonel Morris left behind in Ireland a son who was barely a month old at the time. He had been born ten days before Morris had sailed for France with the BEF. The child, Michael, in time, would see service in World War Two, and play a small but significant role in the planning of D-Day before his post-war involvement in the Olympic movement led to him becoming, as Lord Killanin, President of the International Olympic Committee.
One of the junior Guards officers who survived the Villers-Cotteret engagement was a young Lieutenant, Neville Woodroffe. On 3 September, two days afterwards, he wrote to his mother. The letter conveys some sense of the losses suffered by the Guards. ‘The wood was very thick and the enemy was no less than 100 yards off. We lost considerably including nine officers three of whom only can be accounted for.’48 In a subsequent letter he enlarged on what happened. ‘The Coldstreams and us were together but the wood was so thick that I fear many shot one’s own men [sic] … The Germans are very fond of wood fighting and detail snipers to get up trees where they are not seen and pick off the officers, others lie on the ground and if caught pretend they are dead.’49 Despite heavy losses Woodroffe reported that the Guards entrenched in the woods and held their positions for six days. During that time the British and French rout was dramatically turned around and it was time to move forward again.
What happened was that the Germans had refined (i.e. abandoned) the Schlieffen Plan which for years had dominated their strategic planning for a renewed war with France. Instead of pounding Paris to dust with their guns or encircling and rounding up the remnants of the BEF the Germans turned their attention to the French Armies east of Paris. In doing so they weakened their right flank, left a gaping hole in the process and allowed the British and French to counter-attack. What followed, from 6–10 September, was the Battle of the Marne. ‘That was the time the Germans started moving back,’ recalled John Breen of the 2nd Royal Irish. ‘We knew we were attacking and that gave you great heart, to know you weren’t being hunted all the time.’50 Suddenly the Germans were falling back, over the Marne to the Aisne thirty miles beyond. They had clearly been caught unawares, overstretched and overconfident.
Across the Marne there were many encouraging sights of an army in rapid retreat. Discarded uniforms, equipment, and carts lay about along roads and hedges. We saw ammunition in large quantities … The abandoned German transport was the most heartening sight. The British Army was certainly getting its own back.51
Like a ball kicked firmly against a wall the BEF bounced back at its erstwhile pursuers.
By the time the Battle of the Aisne began on 13 September (the Germans having been pushed a further 30 miles back towards Mons) the pace was beginning to tell on the ‘Contemptibles’ who had trudged south for twelve consecutive days without respite and who were now footsore and feeling sorry for themselves. The Connaught Rangers was the Irish regiment which took most punishment from the Germans at the Aisne, losing 222 officers and men. They were employed at Soupir, on the northern side of the river, near the town of Soissons on 14 September. In the same battle Major W.S. Sarsfield Acting CO of the Rangers died of his wounds. He was a direct descendant of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, the great Irish soldier of the seventeenth century. The Rangers’ losses had helped secure the position of the Irish Guards, who had heavy casualties of their own. Woodroffe wrote to his mother on 30 September, in retrospect the tone was naive. ‘This is a terrible war and I don’t suspect there is an idle British soldier in France. I wonder when it will end; one hears so much. There has been more fighting and more loss of life crowded into seven weeks than there was in the whole of South Africa.’52 At that stage of the conflict the ‘sausage machine’ had not even begun to crank into action. Losses in the first seven weeks were, in military terms, within acceptable bounds. When compared with what was to follow Woodroffe’s observation sounds like a man falling off a cliff complaining of toothache.
Woodroffe didn’t live long enough to experience the ‘total wafare’ of the trenches. What he did bear witness to was the first sign of strain among some of the men around him. Nervous exhaustion so debilitating that it led to the first incidents of self-maiming in the war. ‘ It seems a favourite and old trick to shoot one’s finger off when one is cleaning one’s rifle. Two men were admitted to hospital having blown their fingers off.’53 The practice was widespread. John Lucy was almost hit by a bullet which had already achieved the purpose for which it was intended. ‘One evening in billets a man who had already said he was fed up, deliberately shot himself through the left hand. He was in the room below that in which I was billeted, and the bullet came through the floor near my feet, narrowly missing me. The man said that the wound was an accident and that it occured while he was cleaning his rifle, but others later confessed unofficially to have known his purpose.’54
Despite this the fighting of 1914 was, qualitatively, a different confict altogether to the type of warfare we associate with the Great War. The historian of the Leinster Regiment, writing about the preparation of the 2nd Leinsters for the battle of the Somme in 1916 contrasted the comprehensive bombardment which preceded that offensive with the earlier, almost gentlemanly, phase of the fighting:
There were a few veterans of 1914 who related to us how on the Aisne nearly two years ago a message would be sent round to say that our howitzers ‘would fire ten rounds at 4 a.m.’ This was to prevent the infantry becoming perturbed by the sound of such devastating bombardment and imagining that a great battle had begun. Veterans of course are never believed, but apparently ammunition was not fired away for fun in those far off days.55
The speed of the German onslaught (similar in nature to the ‘blitzkrieg’ of World War Two) had forced them to bypass Antwerp rather than risk putting their schedule of conquest out by even a day. In mid-September, with the first signs of the war becoming bogged down on the Aisne, the city was still (just barely) held by the Beligans. The BEF had espoused a policy of breaking for the sea in order to circumvent the German armies. The Germans followed suit. What could be more prejudicial to this plan than the collapse of one of Europe’s premier sea ports. Accordingly a Naval Division was landed there to stiffen Belgian resistance. Phillip Doyle was one of about 100 Wexfordmen who had joined the pre-war British Navy. He did so along with a friend, Jack Conway, who was to be killed at the Dardanelles the following year. But not even enlistment in the Navy meant that he could avoid trench warfare. Shortly afer the outbreak of the war this man of the sea was transferred from the Navy proper to the Naval Division and early in September found himself, with no infantry training, in a trench helping King Albert’s Belgian Army defend Antwerp. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, crossed the Channel to see for himself. ‘Mr Churchill got up on a box in a big shed in Antwerp and told us we were going to meet the enemy but they were all old men. Well we found out our mistake, they weren’t all old men.’ Sixty years after the event Doyle could afford a wry chuckle at the recollection. Given the way he was armed back in 1914 he would have needed a good sense of humour at the time. ‘We had nothing … only Japanese rifles and Japanese bullets … We were only on a bluff, bluffing the Germans.’ The Naval division was able to do little to prevent the fall of Antwerp on October 9th and when it changed hands Doyle and his colleagues were safely back in England after a stay of about six weeks. ‘We never seen [sic] a German … We were in the trenches for about a fortnight and then they withdrew us … we got out in the dark, back into Antwerp and from there we docked in Dover.’56
The stasis along the Aisne and the British race to the sea secured a front which hardly varied for the next three and a half years. The opposing war machines were like stricken dinosaurs, unable, through their own sheer weight and lack of formidable brainpower to push each other far beyond the countryside where the fighting started. One of Neville Woodroffe’s last letters reflected the reality of what life held in store for the Irish Guards for the next fifty-two months of attrition.
Things look very much the same, and it is comparatively monotonous after our previous adventure. We had a small patrol out in front of our trenches yesterday and it was awful to see the massacre and refuse which a wood to our left disclosed. Dead Germans and a few of the Wiltshire regiment which had been there fully a fortnight ago and in terrible conditions. Legs stuck in boots lay out in the open and corpses shattered from shell fire lay at short intervals. Kits and rifles, ammunition, helmets, tools etc. all lay in heaps. The stink was awful. We buried what we could, but the most one could not touch. However, enough!57
Less than a month after sending that letter Woodroffe himself was dead, he had failed to survive the first 100 days of the war. In a photograph taken of him in his Irish Guards uniform he looks more like a pre-pubescent drummer boy than a soldier, but the conflict was to claim younger lives than his. He had barely been a year out of school, and had experienced little of what life had to offer when he died.
An indication of the haemorrhage which was taking place even at this relatively early stage in proceedings was that the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment, to maintain its complement, was sent seven drafts of new recruits or fresh soldiers between the flight from Mons and the ‘Race to the Sea’. A draft of six officers and 353 men arrived on 15 October, in time for an attack on Le Pilly a small town on the spine of a ridge near the Ypres sector, a low-lying area of fields, dykes and muddy streams. The town was taken in the afternoon of 19 October. The failure of a French attack, however, left the 2nd Royal Irish, under its acting CO Major Daniell, exposed and vulnerable. Early on the morning of the 20th the Germans, who had only retired about 400 yards from the town, countered and surrounded the isolated Irish battalion. According to John Breen, Major Daniell offered them the choice of capitulation, so hopless was their situation. ‘He gave us the option. Would we fight through or would we surrender. We said we’d fight through and we’d get through some way or another.’58 Some did, including Breen, but most died or were taken prisoner. Daniell himself was shot and killed along with six other officers and 170 other ranks. The Germans took more than 300 Royal Irish prisoners, most of whom were wounded.
On that day the Germans attacked along a line between Arras and the sea and the 2nd Leinsters were back on the defensive, baulked in their attempt to reach Lille, the great industrial city of the French north west. In defence of a town called Premesques, near Armentieres, one of the most bizarre incidents of the entire war occured. It involved the historian of the Leinsters, F.E. Whitton, then a Captain, and fellow Captain R.A. Orpen-Palmer. The latter was the son of a Kerry-based Church of Ireland rector, Rev. Abraham Orpen-Palmer. His younger brother later commanded a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. R.A. Orpen-Palmer was known, simply as ‘O-P 1’ while his brother was ‘O-P 2’.59 Both Whitton and Orpen-Palmer were wounded and captured. Whitton was unable to walk and Orpen-Palmer, who had lost an eye in the fighting, was temporarily blind. Somehow both managed to escape from their captors, members of a regiment from Saxony. But their hopes of reaching the British lines were slim, given their disabilities. Nonetheless they succeeded in overcoming them. Writing two years later Frank Hitchcock, whose diary of the trenches Stand To became a classic of the war, recalled that, ‘some years afterwards I met a Sergeant in the 1st Royal Fusiliers who recalled the fact of seeing Leinster officers stumbling into their entrenchments. The blinded one, he said, was being directed by the one he was carrying.’60 Under cover of darkness and with a single pair of eyes and legs the two men had managed to blunder their way to the British lines.
The war now settled into a slough of entrenched immobility. All along the line from Alsace-Lorraine to the sea a narrow strip of land was given over to the belligerents. Civilians (who are rarely mentioned in First World War diaries), other than the owners of the ubiquitous hostelries known as estaminets, simply left the armies to it. In retrospect many were to see the first three months of hostilities as the heady halcyon days of innocence. Then, the war was fought, largely, between professional soldiers who were disposed to take a broadminded approach to the prospect of unalloyed discomfort and violent death. These were men who cared little who their enemy was nor who their allies were. As their ranks thinned they were replaced by a far less jaundiced breed, men to whose youthful idealism the British government had appealed. From the trauma of the Great War a new moral order would emerge. But that was in a future not yet predetermined.
Let us leave the last word to the men digging trenches across Northern France and Southern Belgium and coming to grips with narrowing horizons and the shock of the new quotidien. ‘No sooner is a trench dug than it fills with water … the soil is clay, and so keeps the water from draining away even if that were possible … pumping has been tried, but not with much success. The weather continues wet, and there does not seem to be any likelihood of a change. Consequently, we may expect some fresh discomforts daily.’61
