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
