Category: The Great War

Sacks and Violaines

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20th October 1914

The Dorsets spent another day in reserve. In the morning A Company occupied a small rise near the Rue D’Ouvert and began to dig trenches. They swapped with the Composite Company at 7pm and at 11pm the Battalion was withdrawn and went into billets in Rue de Marais about half a mile to the east.

All this sounds perfectly routine but this was definitely not the case. The front was incredibly volatile and unpredictable. The Dorsets dug these defences under constant fire from the south east and the east, according to the 13th Brigade’s diary. All units were in danger of being over extended or outflanked. The Cheshires had been told to hold Violaines but they were being attacked all the time. The 5th Division had been in combat for several days under extreme pressure. They were short of men, especially experienced officers, were fighting across open flat ground, and had very little artillery support. The strain on everyone was beginning to tell.

 

Bring up the bodies

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19th October 1914

The Dorsets repeated the same routine as yesterday. On this day, or possibly the day before (it’s not clear which day in the History of the Dorsetshire Regiment 1914-1919) Major Saunders sent Lieutenant Woodhouse, the machine gun officer, with a party of men to recover the bodies from the battlefield on the 13th. Under fire from the Germans, they recovered 130 bodies and brought back twenty wounded men who had been trapped out on the field.

Gleichen met General Morland, the new CO of the 5th Division, and explained to him the difficulty of the situation facing the 15th Brigade.

Generals Morland and Franklin turned up in the afternoon. We were perpetually being urged to advance and attack, but how could we? There was nothing to attack in front of us except La Bassée, a couple of miles off, and we could not advance a yard in that direction without exposing our right flank to a deadly enfilade fire from across the Canal, for the Germans were still strongly holding that infernal railway triangle, and nothing availed to get them out of it. General Morland wisely, therefore, ordered me not to advance in force.

We’re on the rue to nowhere

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18th October 1914

General advance was sounded at 6am but no one was going very far. The Germans still held a position south of the canal that allowed them to enfilade the British and so any attacks quickly came to nothing. Gleichen showed the new CO of the 5th Division, Major-General Thomas Morland, the lie of the land. The enemy had also occupied a railway triangle just behind the brickstacks. Hiding in among the wagons and rails made them difficult targets for the British artillery, even their howitzers.

The Dorsets were moved with the West Riding Regiment to the Rue D’Ouvert and here they spent some of the day in reserve, dodging high explosive shells and then hiding behind a bank further south. By 6pm they returned to billets in the Rue D’Ouvert.

 

Cuthbert, seedy

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17th October 1914

The Dorsets remained in and around Festubert all day in billets.

I wonder if I detect some of resentment towards Cuthbert and the 13th Brigade in Gleichen’s memoirs? Comments such as “but Cuthbert was not there, so it was a little difficult to combine any action”, “we met the Headquarters of the 13th Brigade, minus their Brigadier” and “Cuthbert eventually turned up from somewhere” don’t exactly sing his praises.

Perhaps I am looking too hard. But certainly Cuthbert, CO of the 13th Brigade did not seem to be a popular man. A martinet with old fashioned views, his leadership of the 13th Brigade came to an abrupt end on the 1st October due to “illness”. Gleichen puts it succinctly. “Cuthbert, seedy”. This illness was pure fabrication. Cuthbert was fired. The 13th Brigade war diary states “Cuthbert ordered to England” and “Cuthbert left by motor for Paris”.

His replacement was Dublin-born General William Bernard Hickie. He was popular but he was also very unexperienced. His leadership of the 13th Brigade lasted just 11 days. He was carted off in an ambulance in the afternoon of the 13th October. Another “illness”. Smith-Dorrien, commander of II Corps, says in his diary that Hickie “had to go sick”. Hickie had refused to push his men forward along the south side of the canal. This refusal made it into the 5th Division’s war diary: “General Hickie considered open ground so unfavourable between his right and enemy’s position that he declined to co-operate without orders from superior authority.” This decision not to move forward had a huge impact on the failure of the French and the Dorsets’ attacks. But I don’t think we can blame the 13th Brigade.

Nikolaus Gadner, in his book Trial by Fire: Command and the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, follows the same line of enquiry. Although some of his assessment of the day is a little unfair (he claims the Dorsets retired in disarray due to lack of officers) he argues that a lack of experienced officers was really starting to tell in the 5th Division, leading to the replacement of senior officers, and ultimately Fergusson, commanding the 5th Division, on 18th October. Sacking experienced commanders was incredibly damaging to the BEF. There were few replacements available.

Gadner goes on to argue that all these sackings stemmed from Sir John French’s own insecurity as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF. He despised Smith-Dorrien of II Corps so it was easy for him to pass criticism from London his way. Smith-Dorrien did what managers do all over the world. He passed the blame down the line. And down it went. All the way to 13th Brigade. Ultimately, this power struggle led to the Dorsets dying in droves on the 13th October 1914.

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.