595. The First World War: The Battle of the Frontiers (Part 2)

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The Germans were all around us.

One could see them in the wood, and they were shooting quite close.

The man who finally got me was about 15 to 20 yards away.

His bullet was like a tremendous punch.

Then everything was quiet, and a deep peace fell upon the wood.

It was very dreamlike.

After about an hour and a half, I suppose, a German with a red beard with the sun shining on his helmet and bayonet came up, looking like an angel of death.

I inquired in broken but polite German what he proposed to do next.

After reading the English papers and seeing the way he was handling his bayonet, it seemed to me that there was going to be another atrocity.

He was extraordinarily kind and polite.

He put something under my head, offered me wine, water and cigarettes.

He said, Viercend Kameraden.

Another German soldier came up and said, Why didn't you stay in England?

I said, We obeyed orders, just as you do.

That was the diary of the British officer and MP, Aubrey Herbert.

And he sounds a tremendous chap, Dominic, and exactly the caliber of man that I expect to be serving as an officer in His Majesty's forces in the First World War.

So he's like you, isn't he?

He's a Balliol man who did history.

Yeah.

He got a first in history.

He became a Conservative MP.

He's a great travel writer.

And splendidly, he was twice offered the throne of Albania.

There's a lot of British people who get offered the throne of Albania.

C.B.

Fry, the great cricketer and athlete.

The Albanians

just want to give it away.

So in 1914, this bloke, Aubrey Herbert, actually came quite close to accepting the throne of Albania.

But his family friend, Herbert Henry Asquith, said, no, I don't think that's a good idea.

God, I bet he's being prodded at with a bayonet.

He wished he'd done it.

Yeah.

So he joined the Irish Guards in August 1914.

He was sent with the British Expeditionary Force to France.

And what he's describing here is the Battle of Mons, which is the first British engagement of the war.

And he was wounded and he was briefly taken prisoner, but then later, I think, escaped or was rescued.

Anyway, he had an amazing war.

And we'll come back to that battle in today's episode.

Because last time, Tom, we looked at the German invasion of Belgium, didn't we?

And this time, at last, we come to our own...

beloved country and to the French and what the British and French are getting up to against the Germans on the Western Front.

Now, before the war, everybody had said it will be ghastly.

It's a complete myth that people didn't know how murderous it would be.

And we talked last time about how the Germans are quite pessimistic and apocalyptic going into the war.

Kind of Nietzschean despair.

Yeah.

But that's shared in London.

Asquith, it will be a real Armageddon.

Sir Edward Gray, it will be the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen.

Winston Churchill, who's very keen on the war, is keen on the war, despite the fact that he says it will be a calamity for civilized Europe.

So, you know, people know what's coming.

But maybe for Churchill, that's a positive.

Yes, exactly.

But I guess, so even Churchill, right?

Churchill knew what war was like.

He'd fought in countless little wars.

He'd fought in the Sudan.

He'd fought in the Boer War.

But these colonial wars, I mean, they're not comparable, are they, to the full unleashing of industrial Armageddon?

No, because the forces that will be at play in the next few months on the Western Front, 2 million Germans, 2 million Frenchmen, 100,000 Belgians, and then actually a much smaller contingent, only 80,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force.

I mean, these are vast numbers, colossal numbers by the standards of colonial wars.

You know, you could add many colonial wars together and you wouldn't come close.

The small size of the British Expeditionary Force reflects our proud island tradition of disdaining standing armies.

It's important to mention that early, isn't it?

Our love of liberty.

Exactly.

And what's also fascinating about this, especially for military historians, is, of course, it's technologically poised between old and new.

So all sides enter the war with tens of thousands of cavalrymen, people with kind of breastplates and swords and kind of plumed helmets.

But this will be a war of barbed wire and machine guns and shells and trenches, which change everything.

And to give you a sense of what we're, the sort of death toll that we'll be talking about today, on a single day in August 1914, the 22nd of August, more Frenchmen were killed than the British lost in the entire Crimean War or the entire Burr War.

And that's just in one day.

And might that reflect the fact that the British had actually fought in the Burr War and so were, to that degree, familiar with what could be done on a modern battlefield and they had adopted their khaki?

Whereas the French are still galloping around like it's Napoleonic Wars.

Yeah, well, we'll come to this.

I mean, this is a huge thing with the French.

They have these fantastic multicoloured Napoleonic kind of uniforms.

Breastplates and everything, yeah.

Exactly.

But let's begin in London.

So Britain's ultimatum to Germany had expired at 11 o'clock on the evening of Tuesday, the 4th of August.

Basically, you have to clear out of Belgium.

The ultimatum expires.

There's all people singing their national anthem and whatnot outside, Downing Street.

It's not till the next day, with his customary urgency, that Herbert Henry Asquith convenes his war council.

So there's four key ministers.

They're Asquith, Gray, Churchill, and Richard Haldane, who had basically been the war minister who had built up the army, and the first sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and 12 army generals.

And the question is, are we going to send an army to Europe?

Now, most people know because they know how the First World War played out.

But actually, at the time, it seemed obvious probably that we wouldn't.

Because just as you said, Britain has always been a naval power.

Britain is the only major European combatant that doesn't have a system of compulsory military service.

Britain is unique in having a minuscule professional army, only 250,000 men, and half of them are overseas, they're in Africa, or they're in India, or they're in, you know, their garrisons far flung across the globe.

So most people think, or indeed many people think, Britain probably will stay out of the land war, as we had done so often in the 18th century or in the Napoleonic Wars.

So the most powerful press baron in the land is Lord Northcliffe.

He owns the Times and the Mail.

He is arguably more powerful than 99% of politicians.

And he said to his editors that day, what is this I hear about a British expeditionary force for France?

We have a superb fleet.

which shall give all the assistance in its power, but I will not support the sending out of this country of a single British soldier.

Not a single soldier will go with my consent.

Say so in the paper tomorrow.

Actually, Northcliffe then changes his tune, basically because this war council agrees that they will send troops.

And one of the key voices in this war council arguing we have to send troops is a man we've had before in the rest is history at the very end of his life, Sir Henry Wilson.

So the guy who gets assassinated thereby precipitating the Irish Civil War.

Exactly.

So Sir Henry Wilson at this stage is a very important voice in Britain's planning.

And he says at this meeting, We have promised the French we'll send troops to help them.

We can't let them down.

And Sir Henry Wilson also points out, he says, you know, he knows that for the Germans, the clock is ticking.

He says the Germans are going to fall on France in the next few weeks, if not the next few days.

And the French will need all the help that they can get.

Because if Paris gets captured, then effectively the war is over for Britain as well.

He says we just have to, even though we've only got a small force, we just need to do our bit.

So they agree they will send this British expeditionary force known as the BEF,

one cavalry division, four infantry divisions, 80,000 people.

Is this more of a marker, though, to the French of commitment rather than actually, you know, hard kind of support?

I think so.

I think it's nice to have it.

And I think British historians, of course, talk a lot about the BEF and what it got up to.

And it's not inconsequential.

But compared with the gigantic numbers that we talked about earlier, I mean, we're talking about millions of men, 80,000 men.

I mean, it's nice to have them.

They're not nothing, but they're not that many.

But diplomatically, it's massive.

Yeah, diplomatically, it's really important, suggestion of support.

But on the battlefield, Tom, the German infantry outnumbers the British infantry by 20 to 1.

These are the kind of odds that we like in a war.

Yes, well, the odds that always favour the British, I think.

Enable us to show our pluck.

Exactly, because in the Burr War, we probably had too many men.

Yes, so we didn't know what to do, did we?

Exactly.

We were scrambled.

Exactly.

By European standards, actually, although there are very few of them, they're very well trained and they're very well equipped.

so there are the older men and some of the officers are veterans of the burr war and they have this these rifles lee enfield 0.303s which are seen as the best rifles in the world and vickers machine guns so actually they're a very modern kind of they're an elite force i think it's fair to say black squad of elite men hand-picked um and very good snipers aren't they as well they are they're brilliant shots the british i have to say and the germans admit this when they when they first meet them at mons now as for the officers the officers obviously get a terrible press for the rest of the century.

And everybody says, oh, lions led by donkeys, all of this kind of thing.

Everyone laughs at their moustaches and their public school slang.

And they're all called Biffo or something.

And they, you know, went to Radley or whatever.

I love the advert that gets posted in the first week of the war by a chap looking to set up his own private regiment.

Preference will be given to public school men of good appearance and address.

You'll know exactly what they'll look like because they'll have these very neatly trimmed moustaches.

And we talked in the previous episode how every nation, the the fighting men are defined by their moustaches but the british moustaches are neater i think barnage aren't they they're the best the officers are greatly traduced and caricatured however one officer who is a bit sub-ideal is unfortunately field marshal sir john french so field marshal sir john french is an anglo-irish cavalry commander now he had been a great hero he'd serve a great distinction in the burr war well dominant we've met him also in the irish yes of course he almost gets blown up um by an ira ambush.

Yeah, he didn't massively cover himself in Glorian Ireland, as I recall.

No, he's hopeless there as well.

Yeah.

So he is a huge womaniser, and he's a man of incredibly fierce opinions.

Now, I know you love the book by Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August.

It was the first book I read about this as a child, and I still hold a candle for it.

I know that historians of the First World War despise it, but it made it exciting to me.

I think it basically is a

brilliant work of fiction, I think, is how how most historians

would describe it.

She's very funny at these little pen portraits.

So she says of Sir John French, he was short, stocky, and florid.

His apoplectic expression, combined with the tight cavalryman's stock, which he affected in place of collar and tie, gave him the appearance of being perpetually on the verge of choking, as indeed he was emotionally, if not physically.

So he's a great cavalryman.

but he's never commanded a large, I mean, this isn't even a lot large an army by the First World War standards, but he's never commanded 000 men he's going to fight in france he doesn't speak any french so despite being called french there's no nominative determinism there not at all because he regards the french with absolute contempt so this is sir john talking about the french generals they're a low lot and one always has to remember the class that these french generals mostly come from it's brilliant that he's been appointed to this command, isn't it?

So his French collaborators is like your attitude, Tom, towards our French producer.

Respect and admire Theo.

No, no, no.

I've been very harsh, actually.

I know you hold Theo in high regard.

So on the 13th of August, the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, arrives in France.

So they land at Calais, Le Havre and Boulogne, and then they all entrain for Amiens, where they're going to march to Belgium.

And they're very excited.

There's a great sense of camaraderie and adventure.

It's summer.

They're abroad.

So the younger men have obviously never been abroad, a lot of them.

They're well trained, they're confident, and Aubrey Herbert, who we began with, has a lovely passage in his memoir.

He says, We arrived very early.

Actually, you do it, Tom.

We arrived very early at Le Avre in a blazing sun.

As we came in, the French soldiers tumbled out of their barracks and came to cheer us.

Our men had never seen foreign uniforms before and roared with laughter at their colours.

Stephen Burton of the Cold Stream Guards rebuked his men.

He said, These French troops are our allies.

They're going to fight with us against the Germans.

Whereupon one man said, Poor chaps, they deserve to be encouraged, and took off his cap and waved it and shouted, Vive l'Empereur.

He was a bit behind the times.

Great scenes.

Everybody's behaved precisely on brand there.

I think the poor French have got another four years of this.

So the British go, they go east.

At every station they come to, there are huge crowds.

Aubrey Herbert says, we were met by enormous crowds that cheered and would have kissed our hands if we'd let them.

They made speeches and they piled wreaths of flowers upon the colonel, who was at first very shy but driven to make a speech.

But another lieutenant, a guy called Guy Harcourt Vernon, records that when they're going through Amiens, he overhears rather ominously some old women talking about them.

And one of the old women says, Pauvre petit anglais, l'von bianto etr tuet.

Poor little Englishman, they will soon be killed.

So, what about the French?

So, France, historically, of course, Europe's greatest land power.

And it still is a really serious player.

So as under President Poincaré,

something of a warmonger, I think it's fair to say, they had built up their army.

With these Russian salads and everything.

You're right.

The Russian salad guy.

The guy had basically gone to St.

Petersburg and said, come on, this is the chance.

Let's have a crack at the Austrians and the Germans.

He had brought in this new law with more extended military service.

So France's army, even before the war, stands at 700,000 men.

Relative to population, they're the most militarized of all the great powers.

Their army, they don't have as many automatic weapons as the British.

They're not completely modernized.

But they've got great helmets, haven't they, with plumes on?

Yeah, they've spent probably too much time thinking about maintaining their old uniforms.

So they haven't adopted the khaki of the British or the grey of the Germans.

They've got these long blue over.

They look tremendous.

These long blue overcoats and red trousers.

And their cavalry have these fantastic plumed helmets and they will go into battle with drums and trumpets beneath waving flags and the commanders lead them in waving their swords and all of this.

Now the guy at the head of their army is a very different character from Sir John French.

He is Joseph Césaire Joffre

who's not aristocratic.

He's the son of a bloke who made barrels in the Pyrenees.

And so this is awful for French, isn't it?

For Sir John French.

Having to talk to the son of a barrel maker.

The class that these chaps come from, absolutely ghastly.

His British liaison officer said of Joffre, he was a bulky, slow-moving, loosely built man in clothes that would have been the despair of Saville Rowe.

He looks like a kind of aged obelisk, doesn't he?

He does.

He does exactly.

He looks very French.

Max Hastings calls him slovenly.

Barbara Tuchman says he looks like Father Christmas, which he does a little bit.

So he's got a massive white moustache.

He's got a tight kind of black tunic.

He has these massive red breeches and a huge...

huge even in hot weather sweltering weather he wears this colossal cape so he's just kind of dripping with sweat so his belly that is always kind of trying to strain against the the the belt i mean this is fueled isn't it by his very regular eating habits exactly so he has got his his headquarters in this little town called vitri and he lives with a um a retired engineer he's an engineer himself military engineer so he's lodging with this bloke and every day at 11 o'clock sharp no matter what is happening he goes back to this lodging house for lunch and lunch is a sort of proper French lunch you know starter then he'll eat a whole roast chicken bottle of wine all of this and he says to his men nothing nothing interferes with my routine he refuses to take telephone calls so president puancare rings him up i'm not going to waste my time talking to him you know he nothing like this he hates the telephone doesn't he yeah despises it so rather than telephone his subordinate officers, he will be driven there, even if it's kind of miles and miles through crowded roads.

In his cape.

He's got a guy who won the Grand Prix twice as his driver.

And so they hurtle along at enormous speed.

I just think it's commendably French.

So this guy's off-right.

He'll arrive.

He'll arrive every morning to meet his generals and whatnot.

And he'll go in.

And sometimes he will say nothing, like literally nothing at all.

He just sits there and listens.

The meeting ends.

He goes home to lunch and he hasn't said anything the whole time.

And yet his men think he's brilliant.

They call him papa Joffre, you know, sort of papa.

As we will see, he makes some pretty hideous mistakes.

But there is a commendable,

he's completely imperturbable, isn't he?

He's completely calm.

He never loses his cool.

In every sense of the word, he has bottom.

He definitely, yes, exactly.

But the weird thing is that this book who doesn't say anything and is just stuffing his face with chicken has developed the most reckless plan so we we alluded to this in the first episode the the germans have the schlieffen plan the french have a plan called plant dist plan 17 and it's a little bit more straightforward than the german plan it's basically you have to attack just go straight on

which is the napoleonic essence of dash and celerity i guess and actually i think we talked about this in the very first series about the road to the first world war before the war and the years leading up to it, there'd been a sort of revival of Napoleonic spirit in France, this sort of

yeah, this new patriotism.

And the head of the war college, a man who becomes very important in the war, is a guy called Ferdinand Fosch.

And he is their great strategist, and he helps to devise this plan.

Basically, we'll pile up all our forces and we'll just pile across the border into Germany.

It would be brilliant.

But the reason for that is that one of the reasons that France is so militarized and so hostile to Germany is that the Germanes have taken away Alsace and Lorraine in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.

And that must be fundamental to the French way of thinking.

And also it's fundamental to the German way of thinking, isn't it?

Because the whole Schlieffen plan is predicated on the fact that the French can be relied upon the moment war is declared to go charging into Alsace and Lorraine.

Dead right.

The Germans know that basically the French will concentrate their forces on their eastern border and try to pile across.

The Germans just need to block them and basically go around them via Belgium.

And the French plan, basically to simplify the French plan, they will make two big thrusts.

One is straight into Alsace and Lorraine and the other is a little bit further north, just south of the Ardennes Forest.

They will go through southern Belgium and Luxembourg.

However, when they make their first sort of preliminary efforts, the omens are not promising at all.

So French dragoons ride into Belgium and they're immediately driven back by withering German fire.

And a cavalryman later said, you know, we would charge and the German infantry would just blow us away.

And this, quote, this is what happened over and over again, perhaps 20 or 30 times.

It's the same story further south when the advance guard go into Alsace-Lorin.

Thousands of French soldiers go in and they're immediately driven back behind the river Mert and they're completely shocked and humiliated.

Anyway, reports of this come to Joffre and he says, well, this is this is tremendous news because this shows that the Germans have concentrated their strength on their flanks and their center will be weak.

Because if they're so strong in these first exchanges, that means they must be weak elsewhere.

So let's go for the center.

Come on, this is going to be brilliant.

And to reiterate, this is what the Germans are banking on.

This is how their understanding of French psychology is very, very astute.

Yeah.

So the French launched their main assault on the 21st of August.

Three armies, the third, fourth, and fifth French armies, go onto the offensive in the Ardennes forest.

It's complete and utter disaster.

It's a very misty day, day so they can't use their reconnaissance aircraft of course the first war in which you could even use reconnaissance aircraft at all so they go into the forests and they're effectively just walking towards 21 german divisions that are armed with machine guns and howitzers the french going through the mist they're wearing their long blue coats their red trousers the officers have kind of got shining swords in their white gloved hands they're singing the marseillaise and basically as soon as they come into view the germans say fire and they their machine guns rip through these guys.

I mean, what it is, it's, and we've used this comparison before of those kind of strategy games where the Aztecs end up fighting tanks.

It's a bit like that, that it's a Napoleonic

army fighting an industrial early 20th century one.

Well, there's an account, they've one engagement.

So this is called the Battle of the Frontiers.

There's one account that Max Hastings gives in his book, Catastrophe, a place called Vierton, on the next morning, the 22nd.

So yet again, it's very misty.

The French are singing their anthem and stuff to identify themselves to each other so they can stick together and they won't have friendly fire.

As they're advancing, some of the officers say to their commander, could we possibly be a little bit more cautious?

You know, maybe not make quite such a din.

What is wrong with you?

You know, keep going.

They keep going, the fog clears and they see that ahead is higher ground with this huge German force ahead of them.

And they're like, quick, bring up the guns, bring up the field guns.

They get there, they bring up their field guns and the commanders say to them, the field guns have these kind of shields that the gunners can hide behind while they're shooting.

And the officers say, don't bring out their shields, for God's sake.

A Frenchman must look the enemy in the face.

So they don't use these shields.

And then the officers say, there's some German machine guns up there, you know, to the infantry.

Up and at them, lads.

They fix bayonets.

The mist has cleared.

The sun has come out.

It's really hot.

Our men in full kits started running heavily up the grassy slope, drums beating, bugles sounding the charge.

We were all shot down before we got to them.

I was hit and lay there until I was picked up later.

And in this small stretch of the front,

basically we're talking about a field, 5,000 men were shot down.

That's five times more than the Germans lost.

And what happened at Virton was copied in sort of little engagements all the way across the front.

So in the next couple of days, again and again, you have thousands and thousands of Frenchmen just advancing recklessly towards the German lines with fixed bayonets, like in, you know, like they're fighting the Battle of Waterloo, walking straight into the German machine guns and the bodies just piling and piling up.

And one statistic, the one fact that captures this, which is just mind-blowing, is that on the second day of the offensive, the 22nd of August, the French lost 27,000 men killed.

It's the bloodiest day of the war, far bloodier, half as bloody again as the British lost on the first day of the Somme.

And all the time,

Joffre is sitting placidly having his chicken, eating his lunch.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, do you know, the guy who'd come up with the plan, who'd really come up with the plan is Ferdinand Foche.

He lost his son, his only son, and his son-in-law on the same day in this offensive.

And that's just one day.

This battle goes on for two weeks.

And across the two weeks, the French lost 75,000 men killed and 200,000 men wounded or captured, which basically is a tenth of their entire officer class.

I mean, it is one of the great military catastrophes.

And completely forgotten, essentially, certainly in Britain.

I mean, I'm sure not in France.

But it's amazing listening to that, that the whole French army doesn't just implode.

I was thinking that's actually...

I mean, incredible that they, you know, they'll be able to muster the

willpower and the the discipline to continue fighting for another four years well you just i mean just i was just thinking about that when i said oh this is one of the great military catastrophes in history i mean of course they win the war so you know it can't be that much of a catastrophe well do you i mean you you think of erdan as the kind of classic example of of yeah the french refusal to

to surrender to overwhelming losses, but this must rank up there as well.

But you know what?

I think in the English-speaking world, the French contribution to the First War is generally massively underestimated.

The importance of the France in the First World War, the fact that it's fought on French soil, the French lose so many men, and at places like Verdun, the sense of national mobilization, sacrifice, I think, far greater than anything in Britain, where of course it's not fought on British soil at all.

Yeah, and which obviously has huge implications for France after the war, leading right the way up to the Second World War, but must also

reflect

the incredible insularity of British approaches to the war, I guess.

And also, I guess, is drawing on traditions that were there in the early weeks of the war, where the British are all complaining that the French are hopeless and useless.

And the French, as we will see, are complaining that the British are refusing to do what they want them to do.

So this sense of mutual contempt of these two Allied forces, not very promising, really.

No, no, not at all.

Well, let's move slightly further north.

So in Belgium, as we've heard, the Germans have taken Brussels and now 600,000 men of the second and third German armies are basically sweeping south towards the French border.

And in their way, near the town of Charlerois, is the French Fifth Army and the little British Expeditionary Force, which has now just got into Belgium.

So the French and the British are outnumbered about two to one.

And the French commander is a guy called Charles Longrosac.

And he is a very interesting guy.

He actually came from Guadeloupe.

And he's seen as a great sort of military intellectual.

Now, his relationship with the British is absolutely atrocious.

He knew Sir Henry Wilson and he once said to Sir Henry Wilson, he said,

there are only three phrases in English that anybody should ever learn and they are beautiful woman, kiss me quick, and beef steak and potatoes.

But not all at once, presumably.

I think you could have a brilliant holiday with those three, those three words.

And just to remind people, Henry Wilson speaks excellent French, doesn't he?

Yes, exactly.

Now, Laurezac is a real Cassandra, as in, he's right.

He has been warning his fellow French commanders for weeks that the Germans are going to come through Belgium and they're going to come through Belgium in far greater strength than anybody thinks.

And basically, nobody has listened to him because they just think he's a massive doomster.

And they, you know, who cares what this guy thinks?

And a week before the Battle of the Frontiers, Lorizac had gone to see Joffre and he had said, please don't send your troops into the death trap of the Ardennes.

That's his words.

And Joffre had said, no way.

No, no, and by the way, I forbid you to retreat when the Germans come at you.

And Lorisac said, I left with death in my soul.

So now, a week on from that, the 21st of August, Lorosac realizes, geez, I was completely right, because he hears reports that the German second and third armies are coming right at him.

The Germans capture these bridges over the River Sombre.

He tries to retake the bridges.

He can't.

The Germans can't be dislodged and they keep coming.

The next day is the 22nd of August.

So this is the same that Joffre's men are being massacred in the Ardennes.

Norozac sends the 5th Army into the attack.

He almost says, we've got to recapture these bridges.

We've got to stop the Germans from getting across.

It's a complete and utter disaster.

So there's a British liaison officer who's watching who says, they went into the assault with the utmost gallantry, as if at manoeuvres, bugles blowing, drums beating, flags flying.

They were like eager children, as gay as if it were the dawn of a holiday and they were going to march down the road to make a day of it at the local fair.

And across the valley, German artillery, machine guns.

The result is a complete and utter bloodbath.

And Lorisac's army begins to break.

So he holds out for another day.

And then by the 23rd of August, he says, you know, sod my orders.

We just have to retreat now.

The army is going to be destroyed.

And he's right about that, isn't he?

He's totally right.

So he, in a way, his retreat enables in the long run the French army to hold the Germans off.

He's really hard done by because spoiler alert he ends up being fired but actually he was right about everything.

Anyway his men are retreating.

Now the British are kind of joining them and the British of course have been like drinking wine, kissing people at stations, you know, Mool and Freit and all that.

Exactly.

They've been having a brilliant time.

Have they been told that the French are retreating?

No.

They haven't been told A, that the French are retreating or B there are loads of Germans coming right at them.

So basically they have no idea what is what's about to hit them.

No.

So by the evening of the 22nd of August they have reached this little industrial town called Mons, which is about 20 miles west of Charlerois where Lorisac has been having his terrible sort of meltdown.

Now they think the Germans are still way ahead of them and they have no idea how many Germans there are.

But A few miles away in the darkness as night falls, the 160,000 men of Alexander von Kluck's German First Army are preparing to strike.

And Dominic, remind us how many men of the British Expeditionary Force are lying in their path.

There are about 80,000.

Outnumbered two to one.

These are the kind of odds that the British enjoy.

So unbelievable excitement.

And we will find out what happens next after the break.

Hello, welcome back to the Rest is History.

It's the 22nd of August, 1914, and for the last 10 days, the British Expeditionary Force has been marching east through the fields of eastern France and Belgium, following, I guess you could say,

you know, they've crossed the channel in the manner that the English did under Edward III and Henry V,

when English armies loved fighting against overwhelming odds.

So part of a continuum, you might say.

And Dominic, we've been hearing from Aubrey Herbert, this ballial man turned tory mp and we don't have that kind of person on gold hanger podcast do we um and he wrote the people threw open their houses their barns and their orchards they could not have been kinder everywhere corn was offered for our horses and wine for ourselves but there was a great fear underlying the quiet so it's not total ensouciance there is a sense of foreboding.

Oh, there definitely is.

I think as they get to Mons, which they do that afternoon, when they get to Mons, there is this sense now, okay, the, you know, the big clash is coming.

Something is up ahead.

Now, they are, I mean, they've been marching for, what is it, 10 days or so?

So they're foot sore, they're burned by the sun, but they're pretty confident, I think.

They know that they're excited, I think, rather than really apprehensive.

Their officers say that evening, okay, stop here.

We will hold the canal.

There's a canal that runs for about 15 miles west towards the French border.

This is where we'll stop.

They know that there are some Germans ahead of them, but Sir John French, their hapless commander-in-chief, says, I don't know,

there are not many Germans.

No, it'll be absolutely fine.

They hear that afternoon and that evening, the thunder of guns away to the east, and they don't know what it is.

Actually, what it is, is Lenrozac's men being pushed back at Charlois.

So leaving them exposed.

Exactly.

Nine miles away now.

So the British are now nine miles in front of the bloodied and battered French army to their right.

But Sir John doesn't know this.

And air reconnaissance reports to him and says, there's a load of Germans up ahead.

And Sir John French actually says, no, that can't be right.

You guys may mistake.

Which is amazing, isn't it?

Because the implication is that the whole British expeditionary force could be surrounded and wiped out.

I mean, the odds are very high that this is going to be their fate.

Right, exactly.

So late that night, he gets another message from Lorizac.

Lorizac says, you know, I'm in terrible trouble to your right.

Please wheel your army to the right and come and help us out.

And Sir John French, this is very much his vibe.

He says, no, we're absolutely fine where we are.

Like, I like our position where we are, actually.

You look after yourself.

And he goes to bed and he sleeps very soundly.

And nothing, he thinks nothing could possibly go wrong.

But in the night, the sentries, the British sentries, can hear gunfire in the distance and they're starting to get quite jittery now.

Anyway, dawn breaks on the 23rd of August.

So John, of course, is staying at a chateau, the Chateau de Sales.

He's in great form when he wakes up.

He says to his men,

there probably are some Germans ahead.

I think they've probably only got two divisions, which would be 40,000 men.

And he says, there's nothing to worry about.

And he says, here's the plan.

When the Germans come at you, I think you should do one of three things.

You could advance and fight them.

You could hold the line and stay where you are.

Or you could retreat.

Brilliant.

That covers all the bases.

and then unbelievably he says i'm gonna have a little tour and he drives off for the rest of the day like brilliant now actually of course as we said the approaching germans are 160 000 men of alexander von kluk's first army and at nine o'clock they start this artillery bombardment so there's kind of shells raining down on the british by the canal and then at about nine o'clock the germans launch their first attacks on the bridges over the canal so there's a bit of the canal called the mons salient that bulges out to the north now for many of the younger british troops this is their first experience of combat and i'm delighted to report tom did we do well they were very well trained they're very well equipped the germans actually were so impressed by the british rate of fire because so forget rate of fire has always been a british thing think about nelson's navy we're very good at firing and the germans are so impressed that they report back the british have machine guns lots of machine guns which we didn't we're just as good as a machine so that's nice but there are so many many Germans that in the hours that pass, they're fighting their way across this canal, across these bridges.

And it's one of these battles where there are basically tremendous stories of sort of boy's own heroism on both sides.

So the German, the top German hero, we should sort of doff our hats, the top German, who's a guy called Oskar Niemeyer.

So Oskar Niemeyer had been a gardener before the war.

And he swam across the canal.

He got a boat.

He got the boat back.

He took men back and forth.

And then he managed to open this swing bridge at Niemi that allowed loads of Germans to kind of pile across the bridge.

And then he was hit and killed.

And he was kind of decorated after the war.

And the Germans said, what a great man he is.

And he is a great man, I suppose, but not as great as Sid Godley.

So Sidney Godley, we've had a lot of public school men in this episode.

So it's nice to get somebody who perhaps represents the great majority of British soldiers.

Sid Godley was a decorator's son.

from London, I think, who had worked in an ironmongery store before joining the Royal Fusiliers.

He's part of this machine gun unit defending the railway bridge at Nimi.

And the first machine gun crew are all killed.

So that just leads two blokes, Sid and his lieutenant, who's called Maurice Deest, to take it over.

Then Maurice Deese is shot as well.

And the order comes to retreat, for everybody else to retreat across the bridge, but somebody has to cover them.

And Sid Godley says, oh, I'll do it.

And Dominic, has a top historian of the First World War, perhaps written about what then happens in amazing prose?

In an amazingly moving and I think profound way no shall I read it do read it I'd love that for two hours Sidney stayed at his post his aching finger pressed on the trigger giving his friends time to escape all the time the German shells rained down showering him with dirt and shrapnel but he never faltered one metal fragment flew into his back another into his shoulder a bullet punched into his thigh Then he felt a blinding pain in his head as another bullet thudded into his skull.

Still Sydney refused to give up, blazing away at the advancing grey ranks.

And that is from your adventures in time on the First World War, a thrilling read and godness.

I mean, it makes you proud to be British, doesn't it, to hear that?

When I go to

primary schools and people say, tell us an inspiring story.

And you can see the sort of

the school head thinks, please, Leppi Rosa Parks.

And actually, it's godly killing Germans.

That's what the kids want.

Anyway, he's captured by the Germans.

He's taken to a POW camp near Berlin.

And then everybody behaves splendidly because he's given the Victoria Cross.

The Germans find out about it.

The people running the camp organized a special dinner with Sid as the guest of honor.

And the Commandant came up and said, Well done, and shook his hand.

And basically.

Oh, lump in the throat.

So, so, I mean, huge kudos to Sidney Godley.

I mean, he's done very well, but it has to be said that actually

the reason that the British get away is not Sid.

It's the fact that ghostly archers from the Battle of Agincourt come to their rescue at this point.

And that's actually what happens.

So that's why I gave a little taster of the, you know, the Hundred Years' War.

that

that's actual historical fact isn't it dominic yeah they're basically ghostly archers returned from the dead to help their British friends in their hour of need, to help their descendants.

And yeah, that this is a sign, obviously, that God was on Britain's side and that the spirit world was on Britain's side.

And this becomes a massive story in the course of the war, the Angels Amongs, the idea of this sort of ghostly intervention.

And Tom, do we have a special episode prepared for members of the Restus History Club on this very subject?

We do,

because obviously this is, as I've said, this is the turning point of the entire First World War.

So we wanted to give it all the attention that it merits.

And there will be a special bonus for club members on this coming out next week.

And we'll be saying, you know, were they real?

If they were,

what were they?

If they weren't, how on earth did people end up thinking at all this?

And it's an amazingly interesting story.

Is there any way that, just quickly before we get back to the story, that people who want to hear that episode but are not members of the Restis History Club,

how could they get to hear it?

There is, Dominic.

They could go to this website and you just type in the restishhistory.com and then you kind of click your mouse and it'll take you there.

And it's amazing.

That's brilliant, Tom.

And the thing is, the great thing about all this is that

nobody minds the narrative being interrupted for advertising in this way.

Right.

Okay, so let's crack on.

Theo's gesturing wildly in the background, flailing around.

So actually, to get back to Earth, to the Battle of Mons, the British Expeditionary Force actually did do really well.

They ended up being outnumbered more than three to one.

They lost 1,600 men killed, wounded, and taken prisoner.

But by holding out, they had prevented von Kluck from outflanking and encircling the French.

And the Germans were very impressed by how the British fought.

So every single book on this battle mentions a quotation from a Brandenburg officer called Walter Blum,

whose battalion had suffered heavy losses.

And he said, it was a bad defeat.

There can be no gains saying it.

We were badly beaten.

And by the English, by the English that we had laughed at a few hours before.

What were they they doing?

Laughing at the English.

But the Germans aren't actually defeated, are they?

Because the British do have to withdraw, because if they don't withdraw, then they would be cut off.

Exactly.

So they do have to withdraw.

Now, Sir John French, right, who's gone on a nice drive that day, who's been so confident up to this point, at this point, he completely loses the plot.

So having been madly overconfident before, he now sinks into total and utter gloom.

At one o'clock that night, he says, okay, like we've lost.

Like, keep retreating.

Don't stop retreating.

Actually, let's go straight back to Amiens.

And if necessary, we'll go from there to the ports and go home.

And this is the big French worry all the time, isn't it?

That the British will kind of scuttle off and leave them in the lurch.

Well, because by now the French, too, have realised that something has to change, and they are now going back as well.

So the same day.

So this is the day after the Battle of Mons, General Joffre goes to a meeting in Paris and he says to the war minister, France's strategy has completely and utterly failed.

We must abandon all talk of attacking and we must retreat.

Basically, what we have to do now is to is to sort of hold on as long as we can and then we might be able to resume the offensive one day, but we'll have to rest and re-equip first.

And Paris is the key.

Yes.

They've got to keep Paris from falling.

They've got to, exactly.

So they're falling back towards Paris.

So retreating for any army.

It's the most, obviously the most depressing thing you can do, but it's also the most dangerous thing you can do because the terror is that you will lose all your discipline and cohesion.

And within a day of the retreat, so by about the 25th of August, at least one British officer is seriously worried that his units are going to fall apart, that the Germans are going to overwhelm them and destroy them.

And this is another terrific character.

He's called Sir Horace Smith Dorian.

So he's the commander of number two corps, which is about half of the BEF.

And he, I mean, he'd had an amazing life, sort of flashman-esque life.

He was one of a handful of men who had survived the terrible British defeat by the Zulus at Hisandalwana in 1879.

He'd been a comrade of great friend of the rest is history, General Gordon.

He fought against the Mahdi in the Sudan in the last battle where the British ever wore red coats.

He fought at Omdurman against the Khalifa.

He was in the Bur War.

What a life.

And at Omdurman had been commanded by General Kitchener.

And Smith Dorian is a great friend of Kitchener, isn't he?

And should we just mention at this point that Kitchener, this, you know, he's got the definitive British moustache.

He's been appointed Secretary of State for War and he hates French and French hates Kitchener.

So this is all adding to the mix.

Because Kitchener had said, don't go to Belgium.

Stay in Amiol.

You know, if you go to Belgium, you'll just be forced back.

And Kitchener had been right.

And so obviously French hates him all the more for having been right.

Exactly.

And Smith Dorian has no title for John French.

He despises him as a woman.

He famously once said to him, too many whores around your headquarters, Field Marshal.

Basically, it's all about French as mistresses.

And actually, before the war, Smith Dorian was invited to speak to, of course, the public school officers' training corps.

And he said to them, war should be avoided at all costs.

War would solve nothing.

The whole of Europe would be reduced to ruin.

And his public school audience were appalled by this, absolutely appalled, and complained afterwards.

But of course, he was quite, he was right.

Anyway, late on the 25th of August, Smith Dorian's men reached a place called Le Cateau, which is just inside the French border.

The home of Matisse.

No way, really.

Good fact.

Very good fact.

They're exhausted.

They're hungry.

They're really miserable.

And he thinks, we can't go on.

You know, if we try to keep retreating, the Germans will overtake us and destroy us.

And overnight, he consulted his senior officers.

One of the key voices is a man called Edmund Allenby.

who goes on to be the conqueror of Jerusalem and of Damascus.

And Allenby says, my horsemen, my cavalry, can't go on.

The courses can't go on.

Basically, we stand on fire here or the Germans will overtake us.

And there's a silence and then Smith Dorian says, of course.

Very well, gentlemen, we shall fight.

Now, there's a comic element to this.

Most of the other British officers are kind of in a state in a funk.

So at five o'clock in the morning, the news comes.

that Smith Dorian wants to fight.

And the British Chief of Staff, Sir Archibald Murray, who's with French's headquarters, he hears this and he has a fainting fit and collapses at the thought of Smith Dorian wanting to fight.

And somebody calls for a doctor and another man there, who of course is called Fido Childs,

shouts out, don't call a doctor.

I have a pint of champagne and pours this pint of champagne into Sir Archibald Murray to revive him.

This is tremendous behavior.

So that's been going on overnight.

Morning comes.

Sir John French goes off to talk to Joffre and they meet in this darkened room.

Obviously, neither of them speaks the other's language, so everything has to be translated, so it takes a week for the meeting to happen.

Joffre says, I think you should counter-attack.

French says, no, no, no, no, we're going to keep retreating.

And the mood is completely funereal.

So the liaison officer who's called Edward Spears said, everyone spoke in an undertone as if there were a corpse in the next room.

The sense of doom was as evident as when a jury is about to return a verdict of guilty on a capital charge.

I mean, who's right there?

Presumably, French is right.

French is actually right.

Yeah, Joffre is mad to think about trying to attack.

I mean, Smith-Dorian is not trying to attack.

He's just trying to kind of hold the stop here, hold the Germans off for a bit, hold the line, and then we can carry on retreating.

And this is what he does at Le Cateau.

And Le Cateau is probably the last Napoleonic battle in history, maybe.

I don't know.

So there are columns of troops.

There are people on horseback.

There's kind of horse-drawn artillery.

Yeah, Dominic, just to say, just to say, because we've talked about horses quite a lot, this is a terrible time to be a horse, isn't it?

Yes.

Because they're all kinds of lunatic cavalry charges where horses just get wiped out.

The French and the Germans both are very given to flogging their horses so that they just collapse.

So anyone who's read the Michael Mapurgo book or seen the drama of War Horse, I mean, it's based on horrendous cruelty to horses.

And we should remember them as well as all the men who die in this conflict.

So actually, in this battle, the British fight incredibly well.

They're holding out against overwhelming odds.

They all behave splendidly.

They have to retreat and eventually have to get their guns out under fire.

So that means men on horses getting them out.

Three men get Victoria Crosses, a guy called Douglas Reynolds, who's a captain, and two drivers called Frederick Luke and the excellently named Job Drain, who's 18.

And there's actually a statue of Job Drain in Barking.

Is there?

Yeah, there is.

You can Google it.

Oh, wonderful.

He's obviously a tremendous fellow.

So at Le Cateau, the British lost more men than they lost on the first day of D-Day, would you believe?

Goodness.

Now, it's a German victory.

If you look on Wikipedia, Wikipedia says it's a German victory, but

is it?

Because actually the British have done two things.

First of all, Smith-Doran has given the rest of the British Expeditionary Force time to get away, and the Germans are now never going to catch up with them.

And secondly, every day the Germans lose is vital to them.

They had six weeks.

They're already in week three.

So every day the British delay them or the French delay them makes it much harder for Moltke's plan to work.

So, actually, a lot of military historians say, sure, the British are going backwards and it looks like a German victory, but strategically in the sort of long-term picture,

it's kind of a win for the BEF.

A victory for British pluck.

Hurrah.

Well, anyway, now the Great Retreat is on.

So, you know, Smith Dorian, when he described the Great Retreat, said, oh, it's absolutely splendid.

Everyone was like walking away from a race meeting.

Everyone's smoking their pipes and chatting.

This is like complete romantic self-delusion actually they're they're marching 200 miles in 11 days they're sleeping about four hours a night they are absolutely shattered the roads are strewn with abandoned wagons with dead horses they're kind of basically sleepwalking by the end aren't they kept awake by the pain from their blisters they're really footsore they're passing refugees people who had cheered them as they went one way and now are glaring at them as they go the other because they basically feel they're abandoning them.

Morale is terrible.

They've all got terrible diarrhea.

They're all massively sunburnt.

None of them have any idea where they are.

There's no sense of a plan.

Gunner Sergeant William Edgington on the 26th, he says,

we're all feeling very much the want of sleep, no rations, all very much depressed owing to the total absence of any information.

We appear to be simply driven blindly back.

And Dominic,

do they blame their own inadequacies?

Or do they blame the French?

Of course they blame the French.

Of course they blame the French.

Captain Captain James Harper.

The damned French army never appears at all.

There's been a bad strategy somewhere.

Grenadier Guy Harcourt Vernon.

Personally, I don't believe the French have properly mobilized.

Whatever happens, the British army has done its duty.

For the last week, we've been fighting alone.

I suddenly can't believe in these Frenchmen.

Basically, they really wanted to have been fighting the French.

They're disappointed that they're not.

And when it goes wrong, they blame the French instead.

So now, Sir John French, ironically, of course, doesn't like the French.

He's now lost 15,000 men one way or another, which is tiny compared with the French losses.

But if you've only got 80,000 men, you can't keep losing 15,000 men a week.

You won't have an army left.

And he writes to Joffre at the end of August and he says, we're not going to be in the front line.

You know, don't expect to see us in the front line anytime soon.

We're going to have to rest for at least 10 days.

And in the same day, in his diary, he says, I have decided to retire behind the Seine to the west of Paris in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain.

Now, this is an incredible moment.

Sir John French is talking about pulling the British Army back behind Paris, effectively abandoning Paris to the Germans.

And the next day, he sends a telegram to London and he says, I'm washing my hands now of collaboration with the French.

I don't see why I should again be called upon to run the risk of absolute disaster in order a second time to save them.

So Max Hastings calls Sir John French a poltroon.

Do you think that's...

Would you agree with that?

Of course he does.

I think he is a bit of a poltroon, to be honest with you.

I mean, personally, I'd have been one of those people who said, don't send an army at all.

Let the French look after themselves.

Let's just rely on our splendid navy.

But once you've gone there.

I think once you've gone there, you've got to make an effort.

You can't just go dip your toes in the water and then say, okay, fine, I'm out of here.

Because the Angels of Mons haven't appeared to allow him to scuttle off back back to Dover.

No, for nothing, precisely.

Now, so the question now is, and we will pick this up in the next episode.

What does London think?

I'm happy to say that the great friend of the rest is history, Herbert Henry Asquith, has been managing the war

at admirable unconcern and general insouciance.

So while everybody's been fighting Asquith, Asquith has been,

he's still been having country house weekends.

So he spent one weekend, he went down to Kent.

On the way, the man in charge of running the war noticed that another driver had broken down and he gave him a lift to the garage.

Then on the way back, he saw some children from South London who'd been on holiday in Margate and he said, oh, would you like me to give you a lift back to London?

He gave them a lift as well.

And then when he's actually doing any work, to quote Max Hastings again, Asquith treated vital strategic issues as if he were discussing the tiresome inability of some guests to attend a garden party.

Now,

the cabinet have been discussing, are they going to pull out the British Expeditionary Force via Dunkirk?

But so far they've said no.

And now that Sir John French has sent this message, they have a crucial decision to make.

They have his telegram.

Are they going to let him wash his hands of the whole campaign?

So we'll pick up.

We'll find out what happens in the next episode.

But while they are deliberating, 31st of August, the news is at last filtering through to the British public.

So wartime censorship means that no one knows about this until now.

There have been little hints.

People writing in their diaries saying, I'm hearing reports of thousands of casualties, all of this.

On the 29th, the Times had said

for the first time, the situation in France is very grave.

And then on the 31st, the same day that Sir John French's telegram reaches London, the Times published a special edition with a report by its war correspondent, Arthur Moore.

And he wrote in this, this is a bombshell for the British public.

It's important that the nation should now realise certain things, bitter truths, but we can face them.

We have to cut our losses, take stock, set our teeth.

To sum up, the first great German effort has succeeded.

We have to face the fact the British expeditionary force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement.

Donald, just to mention, this is the report that plays a crucial role in inspiring the story of the Angels of Mormons.

Oh, that's interesting.

Right.

Well, if you think the mood is bleak in London, it is even worse in Paris.

The French capital, when the war had been declared, the mood had been one of great confidence.

They'd looked forward to regaining Alsace and Lorraine.

But now Paris is a city at bay.

On the 28th of August, for the first time, the French government issued a statement and they said, we can confirm there is fighting deep inside France from the Somme to the Vosges.

And when they said that, the public were stunned.

They thought the fighting was all in Belgium.

They couldn't believe it when the French government said it's actually deep inside France.

And then two days later, the first German monoplane flew over Paris and dropped five little bombs on Paris.

Now by this point, all public buildings in Paris have been closed, all the theaters have closed, most of the shops are shut because the you know, so many staff are away at the front.

There are thousands of refugees at the railway stations.

The roads are blocked with traffic.

And people have started building barricades at the entrances to Paris.

It's like sort of, yeah, it's like 1792 or 1793 or something.

The same day, so we're now the 30th, the first report that the government is preparing to flee south to Bordeaux.

They're going to take with them the gold reserves of the Bonque de France.

They're going to take all the masterpieces from the city's art galleries and museums.

And at the British Embassy, the staff are now burning their confidential papers because in just a few days the Germans will be at the gates of Paris and the fall of France is at hand

or is it

we will find out next time and if you want to hear that episode right now then you can join our very own expeditionary force the rest is history club at the restishistory.com and

not only will you be able to hear that episode and all the episodes in this series, you will also be able to hear us discuss the Angels of Mons, the

archers from Agincore, or perhaps they were literally angels who came to the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force and changed the course of history.

So, we'll maybe see you for that.

And if you don't want to sign up to that, that's fine.

We will be releasing the next episodes over the next couple of weeks.

So, either way, lots more First World War action to come.

Bye-bye.

Cheerio.