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
