An old Frenchwoman stood on her cottage doorstep and watched the ragged British soldiery stumbling through her village. As the mounted officer passed, she spat a livid stream of sarcasm at him: ‘You make a mistake,’ she hissed. (The young Captain would never forget the sting of it.) ‘The enemy is behind you. Are you not riding in the wrong direction?’
For 200 miles the German army pursued, looting, burning and wielding the weapons of summary massacre and collective retribution, for this was the policy of Schrecklichkeit – organised terror designed to inflict such horrific repression on the civilian population that it would never dare to resist. Hostages were shot and bayoneted, priests were executed, homes and towns were destroyed. At Louvain, in a signal act of desecration, the great library of more than 200,000 books was put to the torch. Some German soldiers were appalled at their own might. Ernst Rosenhainer, an educated and sensitive young infantry officer, was torn between exultation and repulsion as he watched civilians fleeing from their homes: ‘It was heart-rending to hear a woman beg a high-ranking officer, “Monsieur, protégez-nous!”,’ he wrote.
The local people watched in disbelief as refugees, Belgian and then French, streamed through the villages of the Somme and the Aisne, a ‘broken torrent of dusty misery’, dragging over-laden donkey and dog carts and recounting lurid tales of German brutality. Behind followed the BEF: horse-drawn ambulances with mangled wounded and long lines of exhausted and hungry soldiers, ‘an unthought-of confusion of men, guns, horses and wagons. All dead-beat, many wounded, all foot sore.’ At their backs, plumes of smoke marked the steady German advance in a spectacular frenzy of arson. An English officer turned around from a small incline to see ‘the whole valley and plain burning for miles’.
‘We must allow the enemy no rest,’ declared a German battalion commander. The British rearguard was forced to fight as it fled. Nerves frayed, bellies empty, minds warping from lack of sleep, some retreating soldiers dozed on the march while others began to see ghosts and castles along the way. Flight forged its own legends. The Angels of Mons’ were said to have been seen hovering over the retreat, the shimmering spectres of English bowmen killed at Agincourt five hundred years earlier, now resurrected to protect their fleeing countrymen.
The Times correspondent wrote: Amongst all the straggling units that I have seen, flotsam and jetsam in the fiercest fight in history, I saw fear in no man’s face. It was a retreating and broken army, but it was not an army of hunted men … Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.’ The lines stretched and snapped; authority dimmed, the stragglers multiplied, and the treasured distinctions of regiment and division blurred as units fragmented, re-formed, or broke away. Whatever the British reading public might have been told, most soldiers were terrified. When the horses were allowed to rest, their legs folded. Unable to march further, some men threw away their equipment and lay down to die or await the enemy. Officers who would have shot any man who acted thus a day or two earlier, did not now look back. ‘That pained look in the troubled eyes of those who fell by the way will not easily be forgotten by those who saw it. That look imposed by circumstances on spent men seemed to demand all forgiveness from officers and comrades alike, as it conveyed a helpless and dumb farewell to arms.’ The neat martial logic of the army as it had disembarked on the coast of France became hazy in retreat. Most men marched unquestioningly on. Some deserted. Some looted. Some hid. Others died of exhaustion. An officer of the Royal Fusiliers recalled a private from Hackney, ‘a most extraordinarily ugly little man in my company who could not march one bit … On the second day of the Retreat he collapsed at the side of the road and died in my arms. I have no record of his name, but as a feat of endurance and courage I cannot name his equal.’
A general noted sternly that a ‘good many cases of unnecessary straggling and looting have taken place’, and summary court martials were held. Some could not resist the lure of an empty home as a hiding place or a source of plunder, and hunger saw soldiers pulling chocolate rations from the pockets of dead men or chewing raw roots scrabbled from the fields. In Saint-Quentin, two senior British officers looked on their beaten men and agreed with the petrified city mayor that surrender would be preferable to a losing fight and the probable death of countless civilians in the crossfire. It was a most humane decision, for which both officers were immediately cashiered and disgraced.
Later, the Retreat from Mons would be rendered into history as a courageous action that had held up the Germans for long enough to ruin Field Marshal Schlieffen’s plan, ensuring that the advance would finally be stopped on the line of the River Marne. But to those who took part in it, the retreat was a grim shambles, just a few shades short of a rout, ‘a perfect débâcle’. The BEF had been severely wounded. (Most of those who survived the retreat would be hacked up at Ypres a few months later). Of the 80,000 British men who had come to France to partake in a short and decisive victory, 20,000 were either killed, wounded, captured, or found to be missing on the long retreat from Mons.
In the wake of the limping army, like the detritus from some huge and surreal travelling fair, lay packs, greatcoats, limbs, canteens, makeshift graves, horse carcasses and living men. In woods, ditches, homes and haylofts, alone and in small bands, surviving shreds of the khaki army felt the battle roll over them, and then heard it rumble south. The war correspondents of the Daily Mail and The Times observed the drooping tail of the retreat: ‘We saw no organised bodies of troops, but we met and talked to many fugitives in twos and threes, who had lost their units in disorderly retreat and for the most part had no idea where they were.’
The advancing German troops were thorough in flushing out the enemy remnants: Walter Bloem, novelist, drama critic, and a captain in the Brandenburg Grenadiers, recalled how advancing German hussars, rightly suspecting that British soldiers were hiding among the newly cut corn, ‘did not trouble to ransack every stook, but simply found that by galloping in threes or fours through a field shouting, and with lowered lances spiking a stook here and there, anyone hiding in them anywhere in the field surrendered’.
Some of the more resourceful residue contrived to fight, wriggle or wrench their way out. A band of Irishmen made it to Boulogne, and at one point stragglers headed west in such numbers that German intelligence was briefly confused into believing that the British army was making for the coastal ports. Bernard Montgomery and a small group of men from various regiments marched for three days between the marauding advance guard of German cavalry and the main infantry body. Montgomery finally outflanked the advance, linked up with the rest of the army, and went on to become Field-Marshal Montgomery of Alamein.
The BEF was a regular army, an army of professionals very different from Kitchener’s volunteer force that would follow. Here were the ‘Old Contemptibles’, recruits from the industrial slums of the north, illiterate farm boys, some ‘scallywags and minor adventurers’, men who were escaping trouble and a few who were looking for it. But unlike the conscript armies of Europe, they were experienced and well-trained: some had fought in the Boer War, and most were ‘adept in musketry, night operations and habits of concealment, matters about which the other belligerents had scarcely troubled’. For many who found themselves lost in what was now enemy territory, concealment was the first instinct. When the army finally caught its breath, about-faced and fought its way north again, sceptical commanders were not always easily persuaded that the men who emerged from barns and bushes were genuine stragglers rather than deserters. ‘It was the coward’s chance,’ thought one war correspondent. ‘Was it any wonder that some of these young men who had laughed on the way to Waterloo station, and held their heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own heroism, slunk now into the backyards of French farmhouses, hid behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent tales when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town of France