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
