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
