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 at the recollection. Given the way he was armed back in 1914 he would have needed a good sense of humour at the time. ‘We had nothing … only Japanese rifles and Japanese bullets … We were only on a bluff, bluffing the Germans.’ The Naval division was able to do little to prevent the fall of Antwerp on October 9th and when it changed hands Doyle and his colleagues were safely back in England after a stay of about six weeks. ‘We never seen [sic] a German … We were in the trenches for about a fortnight and then they withdrew us … we got out in the dark, back into Antwerp and from there we docked in Dover.’56
The stasis along the Aisne and the British race to the sea secured a front which hardly varied for the next three and a half years. The opposing war machines were like stricken dinosaurs, unable, through their own sheer weight and lack of formidable brainpower to push each other far beyond the countryside where the fighting started. One of Neville Woodroffe’s last letters reflected the reality of what life held in store for the Irish Guards for the next fifty-two months of attrition.
Things look very much the same, and it is comparatively monotonous after our previous adventure. We had a small patrol out in front of our trenches yesterday and it was awful to see the massacre and refuse which a wood to our left disclosed. Dead Germans and a few of the Wiltshire regiment which had been there fully a fortnight ago and in terrible conditions. Legs stuck in boots lay out in the open and corpses shattered from shell fire lay at short intervals. Kits and rifles, ammunition, helmets, tools etc. all lay in heaps. The stink was awful. We buried what we could, but the most one could not touch. However, enough!57
Less than a month after sending that letter Woodroffe himself was dead, he had failed to survive the first 100 days of the war. In a photograph taken of him in his Irish Guards uniform he looks more like a pre-pubescent drummer boy than a soldier, but the conflict was to claim younger lives than his. He had barely been a year out of school, and had experienced little of what life had to offer when he died.
An indication of the haemorrhage which was taking place even at this relatively early stage in proceedings was that the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment, to maintain its complement, was sent seven drafts of new recruits or fresh soldiers between the flight from Mons and the ‘Race to the Sea’. A draft of six officers and 353 men arrived on 15 October, in time for an attack on Le Pilly a small town on the spine of a ridge near the Ypres sector, a low-lying area of fields, dykes and muddy streams. The town was taken in the afternoon of 19 October. The failure of a French attack, however, left the 2nd Royal Irish, under its acting CO Major Daniell, exposed and vulnerable. Early on the morning of the 20th the Germans, who had only retired about 400 yards from the town, countered and surrounded the isolated Irish battalion. According to John Breen, Major Daniell offered them the choice of capitulation, so hopless was their situation. ‘He gave us the option. Would we fight through or would we surrender. We said we’d fight through and we’d get through some way or another.’58 Some did, including Breen, but most died or were taken prisoner. Daniell himself was shot and killed along with six other officers and 170 other ranks.