pilfering of our cap-badges, buttons, and numerals, “browned” a good many of us off.’13 Astonishingly requests for mementoes continued with the BEF going in the opposite direction, in full retreat, a few days later. It was too much for one Dublin Fusilier in the 10th Infantry Brigade ‘who was wearily dragging himself along in the ranks of his company, hearing the too familiar cry of “souvenir” turned an angry glance over his shoulder and growled “Here, you can have my blooming pack for a souvenir!”’14 Naturally, the cheers were for ‘Les Anglais’, a misapprehension corrected by John Lucy in the case of the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles. ‘“Nous ne sommes pas Anglais, nous sommes Irlandais.” They liked that and laughed with pleasure, and then shouted: “Vivent les Irlandais,” and we cheered back at them: “Vive la France”.’15
Jack Campbell, who survived the war and died in 1993 at the age of 96, landed at Rouen with the Black Watch and entrained for Mons the following day. ‘It was Sunday evening when we arrived in Mons and as we marched through the town the church bells were ringing, calling the just to prayer, but we weren’t interested in prayer or anything like that because in a matter of hours we’d be engaged with war that would kill thousands and bring hardship and misery to millions all over the world.’16 A few miles outside the town the battalion left the road and formed ‘a kind of front’ in a wheat field. The stalks had already been cut and lay around the field in sheaves, Campbell and his Scottish comrades made comfortable bedding for themselves and settled in to wait and see what would happen. The calm was shattered at five o’clock the following morning when three batteries of field artillery opened up on a small wood a few hundred yards away from the Black Watch. Campbell quickly found out why:
A horde of cavalry came out of there. I didn’t think there was so much cavalry in the world to tell you the truth. They came heading straight for us. We could see they were losing heavily because there were other troops in front of us … They got to about 100 yards from where we were, then they seemed to falter and those that were left galloped back in the direction they came. A short while after that we got the order to fall in. We fell in and that started the retreat from Mons.17
Campbell had watched a German cavalry unit being torn to shreds. He wondered why, after that morale-boosting achievement, the BEF was pulled back. He was not alone in querying the move. John Lucy had been similarly blooded with the 2nd Rifles against an equally unsuccessful German infantry battalion. ‘Why did we retire?’ he asked. ‘We had beaten off an enemy calculated on the spot as being from five to seven times our number. We alone had wiped out at least one whole enemy battalion with the loss of a few men. We had beaten our enemy and were full of fight. Now we looked as if we were in full flight.’18 They were, and at breakneck speed.
In fact Lucy’s impression was erroneous, as might be expected from an individual infantryman blinkered by a lack of information or awareness of what was going on outside the reach of his own temporary entrenchments. The BEF had not defeated the enemy, it had barely managed to hold the enemy at bay. As French was well aware the Germans could quite easily outflank the overextended British force to the west (the French Army was positioned to the east) and cut off the BEF. ‘So we turned our backs on Mons, and it was a long time before our soldiers sang their songs again thereabouts.’19 John King, from Waterford, a seven-year veteran of the Royal Irish Regiment knew when he was beaten and why:
We were badly up against it. We had nothing to defend ourselves with. They outnumbered us by about six or seven to one and they had plenty of armaments and other things which we hadn’t. We were only learning as we went. We thought we were the best equipped army in the world but we found we were up against it when we went there.20
The withdrawal to a more defensible front, despite the presence of thousands of French and Belgian refugees going in the same direction and on the same narrow country roads, was well executed and saved the tiny force from embarrassment at best and annihilation at worst. Among the wild rumours which circulated through the ranks of the gullible or superstitious was that the saviour of the British regular Army was the ‘Angel of Mons’ . It was said that, clothed in white and on horseback, she had turned back the German tide.21
Of more practical assistance, however, was Lieutenant Maurice Dease of the 4th Royal Fusiliers, a 25-year-old Sandhurst graduate from Gaulstown, Co. Westmeath. Dease and the members of his company were set the unenviable task of defending a railway bridge near Nimy. Their job was to hold off the enemy advance for as long as possible to facilitate the retreat. Faced by four German battalions Dease and his command held out, literally, to the last man. Dease himself was hit five times in the course of the day and later died of his wounds. The Westmeath man also became the first Victoria Cross of the Great War. He is buried in St Symphorien military cemetry near where he died.22
From 23 August until the rot was finally stopped at the Marne in the first week of September it was helter-skelter back towards Paris for both the British and French Armies. Units that looked for guidance and leadership often found themselves left to their own devices in the pandemonium which frequently attended the retreat. Isolated individual and collective acts of courage and sacrifice were common as the BEF ‘ad libbed’ its withdrawal. Some units adopted the Falstaffian approach and put discretion before valour, retreating in a dangerous, uncoordinated, ‘every-man-for-himself ’ manner. Others, like Maurice Dease, put the welfare of Army comrades before their own personal safety and survival.
At Cambrai, later to be the scene of fierce fighting, some of the Dublin Fusiliers were preparing for a rearguard action. As they waited for the Germans they ran through their repertoire of stirring rebel songs. One of the songs to which they gave full voice was ‘Dear Old Ireland’ better known by its chorus ‘Ireland, Boys Hurrah’. It was a strange echo of half a century before when soldiers of Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish Brigade of the Union Army in the American Civil War had sung the same song on the banks of the Rappahannock River before the carnage of Fredericksburg. As they sang they were joined in the chorus by Irish units of the Confederate Army camped on the other side of the river. There is no record of the Germans having added their voices to the rousing Dublin’s chorus 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