Month: October 2014

Unlucky Dorsets join the 13th

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16th October 1914

As ever, the Dorsets were not left to rest. At 6am they rendezvoused along the Rue de Béthune and were put under orders of the 13th Brigade as Divisional Reserve with the West Riding Regiment. They marched into Festubert and went into billets.

I’m not sure being attached to the 13th Brigade would have been a popular decision among the tattered ranks of the Dorsets. After all, it was the failure of the 13th Brigade to get along the south side of the canal that had ultimately led to them getting cut up so badly in the beet fields.

I have been researching on the day I write a post. I want this blog to feel like a voyage of discovery rather than an authority on the subject, which I will never be. The learning experience for me is what’s keeping me going. Some days I get more time than others and mistakes have and will continue to be made. But it’s only when you turn thoughts and ideas over and over in your mind that patterns begin to emerge.

I didn’t want to spoil the narrative, but we’ve now reached a short gap in the action, and so I thought I would share my thoughts on the last few days of Frank’s war.

When I was writing the post for the 13th it was pretty depressing. I knew vaguely what had happened beforehand, but it’s hard to visualise these battles until you actually pull the facts apart and piece them back together again. Not all so-called facts are accurate. I keep going back to the strange reasons given for their failure of the attack on the 13th October. In the back of my mind is the idea that tremendous errors were made by the Dorset officers and they didn’t go unnoticed.

It’s easy to be an armchair general and I can’t for a second imagine what these men went through a hundred years ago. But I don’t think the truth is in the war diaries or the stories that came back with the men who survived the Battle of La Bassée.

Tomorrow I am going to try to see what really happened by looking at a higher operational level.

Relief but for how long?

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15th October 1914

A Company once again held the factory. They were shelled all day but their experience in Missy had made them expert troglodytes and no casualties were reported.

At 7:20pm the Dorsets were relieved by the Devon Regiment. The bedraggled battalion marched via the canal to a location marked as Loisne. There’s a river Loisne but no indication of a village on modern maps. I’ve seen it marked on a later trench map and have marked its rough vicinity on the map.

The Dorsets went into billets for a period of rest and reorganisation.

The Dorsets left behind a killing zone. The 15th Brigade was to continue to try to occupy La Bassée over the coming days. The British were to remain in this spot for the next four years. Oceans of blood were spilled. The industrial landscape had insurmountable obstacles: the factories along the canal, the canal itself and the infamous brickstacks; a series of seemingly indestructible brickworks in which the two sides fought over with grenades, with mortars and hand-to-hand. The living eked out their miserable existence in trenches layered with the dead.

Robert Graves, in Goodbye to All That, recalls in 1915:

Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company… When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

 

 

A Bols from the blue

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14th October 1914

The only good news anyone had experienced for a couple of days crawled back through the battlefield during the night. Lieutenant Colonel Bols had dragged himself back to the Dorsets at Pont Fixe. His escape is a story straight out of the pages of Boys’ Own. The Germans had let a great prize slip through their hands.

Bols lay injured on the ground as the Germans surged over their position. Any immobile British wounded were taken prisoner. The German stretcher bearers soon arrived to pick among the wounded and Bols was told to wait for an ambulance. So he waited. And waited. Dusk came and so he began what much have been an agonising crawl back to the British line. Agonising because of his wounds, but also mentally as he crawled through the fallen heaps of his once proud Battalion.

Sadly there’s no first person account of his adventure, nor is there any more information about this other than the story above. We’ll catch up with Bols in the future but for now the Dorsets were in the capable hands of Major Cyril Saunders.

One more officer crawled back to the lines. Captain Francis Hans Bunbury Rathborne had been assisting the 18-pounders by the spoil heap when he was severely wounded. I’m happy to say that he survived the war and lived a long life, dying in 1976 aged 87.

First thing in the morning the sad remnants of the three Companies, B, C and D were merged into, what the war diary calls, a Composite Company. They were led by Captain Henry Beveridge who must have been an officer from the previous reinforcements as he’s not on the original list sent out from Belfast. They were sent away along the canal to the west out of the action.

Meanwhile the battle continued for a third day. The British continued to try to push through to La Bassée. The 15th Brigade was trying to move on, so that the 3rd Division to their north could swing round into the gap. Again the 13th Brigade was held up and the Dorsets couldn’t get forward without experiencing the dreadful enfilade fire from the Germans hidden behind the raised bank on the south side of the canal.

Gleichen’s hand drawn map shows the situation in more detail. Some of the positions aren’t the same as they stand today; Cuinchy is now more to the left directly south from the Pont Fixe.

Map of Cuinchy and environs 14th October 1914
Gleichen’s map showing the situation on the 14th October 1914

Frank and the rest of A Company hunkered down in the factory at Pont Fixe and soon came under withering shellfire. A message came fro Gleichen. “Pont Fixe must not be given up. I know I can rely on you to stick to it with the help of the Devons”. Two more companies from the Devons arrived to support the skeleton 1st Battalion Dorsets.

At 2pm the French attacked at Vermelles to the south. At 5pm A Company got the orders they must have been dreading. They were to support an attack by the Devons along the same line north of the canal they had tried for the last two days. But they weren’t to move until the 13th Brigade advanced on the south bank of the canal.

Luckily for A Company, the Germans attacked the 13th Brigade and pushed them back. By 8:30pm the Germans were now attacking the north side of the canal. A Company and the Devons held on and only three men were wounded, although three deaths are listed on CWGC, presumably they died from wounds sustained over the last couple of days.

Frank had survived another day.

Overwhelmed

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13th October 1914

The 15th Brigade resumed their attack along the canal at 5:30am. B and C Companies were sent into the firing line. D Company was put in support and A Company was held in reserve. A single machine gun was positioned in a cottage near to the lock.

The Dorsets moved along the canal bank keeping in line with the Bedfords to the north and the K.S.O.B. to the south of the canal. The early morning mist helped their movement and progress was good.

The German opened up a tremendous bombardment on Givenchy using heavy artillery. Smoke and mist and brick dust from the falling buildings drifted across the battlefield.

Bols couldn’t get in touch with either of the supporting units and it appears that the Dorsets then halted and prepared defensive trenches.

The situation became even more dangerous as the mist cleared. Rather than finding the K.S.O.B. on their right, the Dorsets found the enemy. Like yesterday, the Germans had excellent cover from the high bank which ran along the canal. They poured fire into the exposed troops. At the same time enemy artillery started shelling them from the north east.

The Dorsets’ single machine gun couldn’t help them. As it responded to the German rifle and machine gun fire it rapidly received return fire. The gun’s main operator was quickly killed. Any attempts to get the gun firing again were quickly extinguished by enemy snipers.

B Company were really catching it now and they quickly lost several of their officers. At around midday they began to withdraw. At this time the Germans found D Company in support with a Field howitzer battery. Some of 15th Brigade’s 18 pounders which had been moved up in support were also targeted.

Captain Ransome, seeing the severity of the situation, took the initiative and moved A Company back to a sunken road by the lock near Pont Fixe to form a rallying point. Major Saunders had been sent back to organise this and to ask for artillery support.

At this point things went from bad to worse for the Dorsets. The Bedfords withdrew from Givenchy, unable to withstand the bombardment that had reduced the village to rubble in a matter of hours, burying many of their men in the process. The Germans advancing, then immediately launched an attack on the left hand flank of the Dorsets.

At around 1:45pm C Company reportedly saw men approaching carrying lances. Nothing was done as they apparently thought they were French cavalry. Then more Germans, about a battalion’s worth, were seen approaching, some of them reportedly holding their hands up. Thinking they were surrendering, the Dorsets paused for a fateful moment. The Germans charged. These two strange mistakes proved to be disastrous, but it was a day where a series of events led to the Dorsets putting themselves into an untenable position.

The Dorsets had dug such deep trenches that they couldn’t get out quickly enough. The men of the left hand flank of C Company were totally overwhelmed. In the adjacent trench, men fought to the last man, Lieutenant Pitt was killed and Battalion Commander Bols went down injured, shot through the back and the arm. The remainder of the men tried to withdraw over open ground. They were quickly cut down by the German rifle and machine guns on the south bank of the canal.

The survivors ran back to the position held by A Company, helped in some part by defensive machine gun fire. The Germans overwhelmed the 18 pounder battery, one of the machine guns and pushed up to Pont Fixe. A Company held the line. Gleichen pushed two Companies of the 2nd Bn Devons into support them. They held onto this position for the rest of the day, under heavy bombardment.

Major Saunders assumed command of the Battalion. What was left of it.

The Dorsets’ losses were severe. The war diary reports 51 killled, 152 wounded and 210 missing. The official history reports 18 killed, 126 wounded and 284 missing. The CWCG lists 87 men killed on 13th October 1914.

They had lost 12 officers, killed or wounded. It was a dark day for the Dorsets.

The beginning of the end

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12th October 1914

II Corps, of which the Dorsets were part of in 1914, were the first British troops to be sent into the gap on the left hand edge of the French. To the north lay Flanders. The 7th Division had recently landed at Zeebrugge and was now moving south in a race with the Germans. They were moving towards a small town in Belgium called Ypres.

From the Dorsets at Béthune to Ypres in the north the land was flat and dotted with industrial activity, much as at Mons before. Into this gap poured the BEF and the Germans. This was known as the race to sea.

The British were attempting to pivot from Vermelles in the south and wheel around to the right, thus simultaneously relieving the French in the south and attacking the Germans to the east. The Germans had other ideas.

The 15th Brigade set off along the road to Festubert in heavy fog. Their ultimate objective was to take the town of La Bassée, which had just fallen into German hands, but their immediate concern was to hold the line between Festubert and the canal to the south.

At some point just before they reached Festubert shellfire caused them to halt. Gleichen detached the Dorsets from the 15th Brigade and sent them south to defend the canal as he had just been informed that the French Cavalry unit covering the canal was going to be withdrawn. The 13th Brigade were replacing the French south of the canal.

Heading along the tow path on the north side of the canal, the Dorsets arrived at Pont Fixe, a bridge between Givenchy on the north and Cuinchy on the south. Some books claim that there is a village called Pont Fixe here but I cannot find any mention of this. I think it simply comes from the geographical name on a map. Pont Fixe just means a fixed bridge. I’ve included a later British trench map which clearly marks Pont Fixe as the same as the existing bridge.

Image of a map of Cuinchy showing Pont Fixe
Map of Cuinchy showing Pont Fixe

It was immediately obvious that the French had left too soon and the Germans were now attacking along the canal, trying to squeeze between the French and British lines. Bols ordered Frank’s A Company to cross to the south and move eastwards along the canal. D Company were to move along the north edge of the canal. Bols positioned one machine gun in an unfinished factory by the north side of the bridge which began strafing Germans gathering in some brickstacks and railway lines to the south east. B and C Companies were held in reserve.

A Company made good progress at first. A high bank immediately to their right shielded them from the advancing Germans. The war diary reports that they “inflicted severe loss on Germans north of Cuinchy.”

D Company, more exposed as they moved along the open fields north of the tow path, were suddenly sitting targets. Accurate fire poured into them from Cuinchy village in the south west, from the high bank to their south and also from the brickstacks and a large railway junction to the south east. Several men fell in the crossfire. At a farm just 180 metres east from the bridge their CO, Major Reginald Trevor Roper, was shot in the head. He died shortly afterwards.

The Dorsets didn’t get any further. B and C Companies entrenched in a rise by the farm where Major Roper had died. A Company returned to Pont Fixe with D Company and Battalion HQ and billeted for the night.

The Dorsets were in a precarious situation. They were in touch with the 1st Bn Bedfords to the north, but to their south the situation was uncertain. The 15th Brigade were massively overextended, occupying a 2 mile line above the canal from Festubert. An untroubled sleep that night would have been very difficult.

The Dorsets’ war diary reports 11 killed, 30 wounded and 3 missing. The CWGC reports 13 dead for that day, but only 11 of them are buried in the vicinity of Pont Fixe.