after the autumn of 1914, the Germans were in occupation of a wide swathe of French territory, which included not simply the great city of Lille, but the surrounding area of mining belt along the Franco-Belgian border. It was the land of les galibots, lads who went down the mine at the ages of eleven or twelve, dreadful mining accidents (1,101 miners were killed at Sallaumines in March 1906), and an area which rivalled the ‘red belt’ round Paris as the heartland of French socialism. Until German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line in early 1917, the angle where the front turned to run eastwards was near the little town of Noyon, which is as close to Paris as Canterbury is to London. It is easy for British or American readers to forget this now, though it was impossible for soldiers then to be unaware of the shocking damage that the war was inflicting on France or the front’s proximity to the French capital.
For most of the war the BEF was not under French command. Haig was temporarily so placed for the ill-starred Nivelle offensive of April 1917, and after the German offensive of March 1918 General Ferdinand Foch became Allied supreme commander, although his role was more one of effective co-ordination than tactical command. Yet both French and Haig knew that they had to fight a coalition war, difficult, frustrating and costly though it so often was. The timing and location of the British offensives at Loos in 1915 and the Somme in 1916 were the direct result of French pressure, and the state of the mutiny-struck French army in 1917 was an element in the decision-making process which led Haig to attack at Ypres that summer.
The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force disembarked at Le Havre and moved by train to its concentration area on the triangle Maubeuge-Hirson-Le Cateau. With its commander confident in the success of the French armies executing Plan 17 it set off northwards on 21 August, and the following night halted with its advance guard on the line of the Mons-Condé Canal, just across the Belgian border. By now Sir John French was beginning to hear that the French attack had met with bloody repulse, although he had no inkling that it was in fact to cost France almost a quarter of her mobilised strength and nearly half her regular officers. On 23 August 1914 the BEF fought its first battle on the canal just north of Mons.
Although Mons was a small battle by later standards, it had a resonance all its own as the Old Army of Catterick and Quetta did what it was paid to do. Corporal John Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles was in a shallow trench under German shellfire when German infantry came forward.
In answer to the German bugles or trumpets came the cheerful sound of our officers’ whistles, and the riflemen, casting aside the amazement of their strange trial, sprang to action. A great roar of musketry rent the air, varying slightly in intensity from minute to minute as whole companies ceased fire and opened again … Our rapid fire was appalling, even to us, and the worst marksman could not miss, as he had only to fire into the ‘brown’ of the masses of the unfortunate enemy who on the front of our two companies were continuously and uselessly reinforced at the short range of three hundred yards. Such tactics amazed us, and after the first shock of seeing men slowly and helplessly falling down as they were hit, gave us a great sense of power and pleasure. It was all so easy.41
But both the BEF’s flanks were turned, and French was reluctantly persuaded that continuing an apparently successful defensive battle would be disastrous. So that night the BEF began a retreat which took it to Le Cateau on 26 August, scene of a much bigger battle than Mons, and then on to the River Marne. The retreat from Mons tried even the Old Army to the limit, as John Lucy remembered.
I rate Tymble for lurching out of his section of fours, and he tells me to go to bloody hell. I say: ‘Shut up, cover over, and get the step.’ He tells me that bastards like me ought to be shot for annoying the troops and it would not take him long to do it. I get annoyed, and moving close to him ask him what he would suppose I would be doing while he was loading up to shoot me. His comrade nudges him. He titters like a drunkard, wipes his mouth wearily with his sleeve, and says he is sorry. A bad business. Too much on the men when they begin to talk like that.42
By 30 August, Sir John French, his mercurial personality influenced by the losses he had sustained, the apparent collapse of French plans, and Kitchener’s warning about running risks, proposed to fall back on his lines of communication to regroup, and told General Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, that he would not be able to fight on the Marne. An alarmed Kitchener travelled to France to meet him in the British embassy in Paris on the afternoon of 1 September. The two men did not get on, and French was especially affronted by the fact that Kitchener arrived in field marshal’s uniform – not surprisingly, for he wore it every day. Although accounts of the meeting vary, it ended with a note from Kitchener which emphasised that the BEF would ‘conform … to the movements of the French army …’.43 Although the BEF played an unimportant role in the battle of the Marne, the climactic struggle of the summer’s campaign, it took part in the general advance which followed the Allied victory. ‘[It was] the happiest day of my life,’ declared Jack Seely, Liberal politician turned cavalry colonel, ‘we marched towards the rising sun.’44
Despite optimistic chatter that the war would now follow the traditional pattern of advance, decisive battle, retreat and peace, it soon became clear that this was not to be the case. In mid-September the Germans dug in on the northern bank of the River Aisne and, although the BEF crossed the river, it made little impression on German defences. Sir John French, no military genius, but no fool either, quickly saw what had happened, and told King George V that:
I think the battle of the Aisne is very typical of what battles in the future are most likely to resemble. Siege operations will enter largely into the tactical problems – the spade will be as great a necessity as the rifle, and the heaviest calibres and types of artillery will be brought up in support on either side.45
In late September French formally asked Joffre for permission to disengage from the Aisne and to move onto the Allied left flank, which would make it easier for him to maintain communications with this home base and give his cavalry the opportunity of operating against the German right flank. What followed, known to historians as ‘The Race to the Sea’, saw both sides shift troops northwards, feeling for an open flank. It established that, just as the southern end of the front already stretched to the Swiss border, the northern end of the front would reach the North Sea. In the process the movement northwards took the BEF to the little Belgian town of Ypres, first attacking on the axis of the Menin Road in the expectation that it was turning the German flank, and then desperately defending against strong thrusts aimed at the Channel ports.
The first battle of Ypres ended in mid-November 1914. By then the fluid pattern of the summer’s fighting had set in earth, and the Western Front had taken up the line it was to retain, give or take local changes, until the Germans pulled back from the nose of the Noyon salient in early 1917. By the year’s end the BEF had grown from around 100,000 men, organised in the four infantry divisions and one cavalry division that had gone to France in early August, to two armies and a cavalry corps, a total of more than 270,000 men, already more than half as many as had served in the Boer War during the whole of its duration. In the process it had lost 16,200 officers and men killed, 47,707 wounded and another 16,746 missing and taken prisoner. These dreadful figures were soon to be exceeded by more terrible casualty lists, but their impact on Britain’s conduct of the war goes beyond sheer human suffering. For most of these casualties had been incurred by the regular army and, as we see later, the destruction of trained manpower in the early months of the war was to haunt the British army for the entire conflict.
Early in 1915 French initiated planning for an attack on the La Bassée–Aubers Ridge, on the southern end of the British sector. It was held by General Sir Douglas Haig’s 1st Army, and he had altogether more confidence in Haig than in Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien of 2nd Army. In part this reflected the fact that Haig had
