Battle of Le Cateau, 26 August 1914

liverpool annie · May 8, 2009

The battle of Le Cateau took place during the retreat of the BEF in the aftermath of the battle of Mons (First World War). Both British and German troops were moving at impressive speeds, with some units marching more than twenty miles in a day. On 26 August both I and II Corps were forced to stand and fight against German troops that were too close to ignore. II Corps, under General Smith-Dorrien, consisted for three infantry and one cavalry division. On the morning of 26 August they were attacked by six German divisions – three infantry and three cavalry.

The British front line ran along the road between Le Câteau and Cambrai. During the morning the British regulars were able to hold their own. As at Mons their fast and accurate rifle fire inflicted heavy losses on the advancing Germans, but when two more German divisions joined the battle, II Corps came close to defeat. Towards the end of the day the British line was in danger of being outflanked at both ends, while the German II Corps was approaching from the direction of Cambrai.

The threatened envelopment was prevented by the arrival of General Sordet’s French Cavalry Corps on the British left. Overnight II Corps was able to slip away, continuing their retreat south towards Paris and the Marne. The British suffered more casualties at Le Cateau than at any battle since Waterloo – 8,077 men and 38 guns. The heavy losses at Le Cateau and at Mons seriously demoralised Field-Marshal Sir John French. For most of the period between Le Cateau and the first battle of the Marne he was convinced that the BEF would need to be withdrawn from the line to recover

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_le_cateau.html

Details of the Battle of Le Cateau from the King's Own history:

Extract from “The King’s Own, The Story of a Royal Regiment, Volume III, 1914-1950,” by Colonel J. M. Cowper.

The battalion was in column of route with the Colonel and Adjutant at its head as it left Haucourt that morning. The rain of the previous night had cleared; bright sunlight, a pale blue sky and the thin mists rising from wet fields gave promise of a sultry day. The men marched along the Cattenières road, past the little church which looked cool and inviting, down the gentle slope to the Warnelle brook, then up the steep hill to the plateau beyond, which had been selected as the position they were to defend. After crossing the brook they passed some French cavalry resting by the roadside, with their horsehair plumes and shining breastplates, and felt greatly reassured for these were the men who were protecting their flank. When the top of the hill was reached the battalion wheeled left into a field and formed up in mass, facing right. In front of them the railway ran about six hundred yards away, disappearing on the left into a cutting. Part of ‘A’ Company had left the main road just short of Haucourt and had moved to the right up a winding lane which struck the main route of the battalion in a deep cutting a little in advance of a quarry. The lane went on parallel to the battalion position and behind it, sloping gradually up to ground level, so that although ‘A’ Company on the right had sunken roads on its right and rear and ‘B’ Company next to it had a sunken road behind, neither ‘C’ nor ‘D’ Company had adequate cover nearer than the Warnelle ravine.
The men were told that after breakfast they would dig in. The enemy was supposed to be some distance away; in the circumstances arms were piled, equipment was taken off; all the men and most of the officers lay down, making themselves comfortable in the stooks of corn. Most of the transport remained on the road behind ‘A’ Company in column of route, while battalion headquarters was on the other flank in the two to three hundred yard gap between ‘C’ Company and the Lancashire Fusiliers. The Brigade Commander and his Brigade Major rode up to speak to the Colonel, who was talking to ‘D’ Company officers in the left centre of the battalion. 2/Essex Regiment was on the left of the Lancashire Fusiliers and the remaining unit of the brigade, 2/Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was detached to 4th Division headquarters. This was the extreme left of the British position; 11th Brigade was on the right of the 12th, but there was a gap between the King’s Own and the left unit of that brigade; 10th Brigade was in reserve with one of its battalions, 2/Warwicks, in the village of Haucourt. Beyond 11th Brigade was 3rd Division in the vicinity of Caudry, and the 5th was on its right.
As the men waited for their breakfasts they watched some French dragoons moving on their left front about nine hundred yards away. Captains J. A. Nixon and Higgins were uneasily watching some movement which seemed to the suspicious. Then the dragoons’ scouts were seen to turn round and gallop towards the rear with the troop after them, the whole field riding a desperate finish to cover, in the ravine of the Warnelle. Colonel Dykes called for double-company-commanders, but none of them had time to move more than a few yards before a tremendous burst of machine gun fire opened on them. The whole battalion fell prone to the ground. The Colonel himself was killed; his groom made a valiant attempt to hold his master’s horse until it also was killed.
After a few minutes the German machine gunners seemed to run short of ammunition and their fire slackened sufficiently to allow ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies to extend their flanks. Second-Lieutenant J. H. Hardy, later Colonel of the Regiment, took his platoon of ‘A’ Company on to the high ground on the right, while Lieutenant C. G. S. Irvine of ‘C’ Company moved to the left towards the Lancashire Fusiliers, who had started to entrench. Almost immediately a German battery opened fire from about fifteen hundred yards or less, from the left front, the same direction as the original machine-gunning. At first their fire was short, but they soon found the range and the shells started to burst about thirty feet up thirty to fifty yards in front of the leading company.
The first burst of fire did not touch the transport and some of the drivers tried to turn their horses round and get them to cover, but the machine guns then appeared to lengthen the range and bullets began to drop amongst them. Then came the shells, and chaos ensued. The first shell hit the cooker; the mess cart was immobilised with the horses dead between the shafts; the remaining horses bolted and some of the vehicles got locked together; others, both horse and vehicles, galloped off in all directions; the jackets of the machine guns were reported to have been holed and therefore useless. The small dog, for which the men had made a coat out of a Union Jack, was killed as he stood next to the driver of a G.S. wagon.
One by one company commanders tried to get their men to cover, but ‘C’ Company was almost entirely wiped out. Nixon, himself wounded, and only two of his men reached Haucourt, where the Medical Officer had located his regimental aid post in the church and a neighbouring estaminet. The survivors of ‘D’ Company got back into the ravine of the Warnelle; the other two companies found shelter in the sunken road. Major Parker had been on his way back from visiting brigade headquarters when the Germans opened fire. On his return he immediately assumed command of the battalion and with complete calm established himself in the quarry behind it, whence he could control the situation
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liverpool annie · May 8, 2009

Continued .......

In the sunken road behind Hardy’s platoon a number of officers and men of all companies had collected. Soon after the shelling started Higgins was painfully wounded in the head, and on reaching this lane to get first aid he found one of his subalterns, D. C. Robinson, already there, so he posted Robinson and some thirty men on the right of the lane to form a defensive flank. From here Captain L. I. Cowper went back to the ridge behind the ravine in search of men; he collected number, but they were mostly Lancashire Fusiliers who returned to their own unit. The King’s Own tried to reform in the lane. Most of the men had recovered their arms and about half had their equipment. Those who had none were given ammunition and carried it slung over them in cotton bandoliers. The whole battalion was now behind the crest of the hill; in front lay only the dead, dying and wounded, still aligned in their ranks.
2/Warwicks were ordered up from Haucourt at about 6.30 a.m., but when they reached the lip of the plateau they were greeted by such withering fire that they were forced to withdraw. The position on the crest was untenable, and at 8.45 a withdrawal was ordered to the main Ligny-Haucourt-Esnes road. Covered by the fire of 14th Brigade, R.F.A., the King’s Own was withdrawn first and entrenched behind the road, the battalion front extending three hundred yards on either side of the village of Haucourt. 11th Brigade held the line to Ligny on the right while the rest of 12th Brigade continued it to the left as far as Esnes. The King’s Own casualties already amounted to some four hundred.
The only transport saved was a water-cart and a machine-gun limber, both of which were drawn by horse trained by the battalion in peace time, and the Medical Officer’s Maltese cart which never crossed the stream. The machine-gun was found to be serviceable and was brought into action by Lieutenant L. S. Woodgate, nephew of the General. Another machine-gun belonging to the Lancashire Fusiliers was posted near the cottage where Major Parker had established his headquarters, and yet another belonging to the Rifle Brigade came up on the right.
The battalion continued to be heavily shelled in its hastily dug trenches, scratched out as they were with any available tool and largely with bayonets. About 10 a.m. the firing died down and the Adjutant, Lieutenant W. A. T. B. Somerville, went forward again to see if he could bring in any men who had been left behind. On the way back he met a party advancing in a an attempt to recover the high ground on the right which the Germans appeared to have abandoned. Captain C. W. Grover was wounded almost immediately after the two parties joined up, and Hardy took charge, continuing as far as the quarry. But as the rest of the battalion did not come up on his left he was forced to withdraw to his original position on the road on the extreme right. By noon the enemy pressure had so far slackened as to allow of a strong party drawn from several units, including the King’s Own, to be made up for the purpose of recovering wounded. This party crossed the Warnelle and succeeded, before it was compelled by enemy fire to withdraw, in collecting a considerable number. Many of them, including Lieutenants Irvine and A. S. D. Baird-Douglas, were taken to the regimental aid post at Haucourt. The old parish curé was there, giving absolution and blessing and doing his job calmly and well. Farm carts and other civilian vehicles were impressed and in this way Nixon and many others were sent back. Higgins recovered sufficiently at about noon from the shot of morphia he had been given to collect up some eight to ten others and persuade a British civilian car driver to evacuate them. Not long afterwards the wounded collected from the battlefield arrived. Some of these also managed to get away, but a large number, including Irvine and Baird-Douglas, were too badly hit to be moved.
In the afternoon another advance was made by all three units involved, the Warwicks, King’s Own and Lancashire Fusiliers. On the right machine guns of 11th Brigade had been posted on the high ground and were constantly in action, engaging and stopping the enemy. But even under cover of these guns no progress was possible. On the extreme left, on the other hand, where Second Lieutenant R. C. Matthews was in command of a mixed collection of Essex Regiment, Lancashire Fusiliers and some of 10th Brigade in addition to his own platoon, there were no signs of the enemy. Matthews was out of touch with battalion headquarters and received his orders direct from brigade; just before he reached the place where the battalion had been in the morning he was ordered to withdraw to his former position, which he reached at about 4.30 p.m. His party picked up no British wounded, only a Uhlan whom they found at the top of the hill.
Shortly after that the withdrawal began and the main body of the King’s Own moved off towards Selvigny, but the message to do so did not reach either of the extreme flanks. It was not until 8 p.m. that Matthews was told to fall back. He joined brigade headquarters just before dark, where he found the Essex Regiment and the Lancashire Fusiliers, neither of which had been heavily engaged and were consequently more or less intact. Then the party went on for another couple of hours before going into billets. No message reached Hardy and Woodgate on the extreme right until about 8.30, when they were told to go to Haucourt where Major Parker was waiting for them. Woodgate’s machine-gun had been knocked out by a shell, so as he had no transport he dumped it into a well in a garden and led the way back to Haucourt. As they approached the village Hardy received a message from Clutterbuck, who wanted him, as he could speak French, to come and tell him what was going on. To his dismay it was German and not French that he heard. At that moment the church door opened and light streamed out to reveal on the other side of the street C.Q.M.S. J. Linton, Sergeant H. Sinker and other men of ‘A’ Company in the hands of the Germans. Sergeant called out to stop the King’s Own party from shooting. A man who was about to fire through the spokes of the wheels of a G.S. wagon near the church door lowered his rifle. The Germans called on Clutterbuck to surrender. He shouted “No” as the whole party jumped for a wall. Clutterbuck and two men were killed, but the rest, who now included Lieutenant R. A. C. Aitcheson, found themselves in a garden. The Germans fired over the wall but with no success and in the darkness they soon moved off. The King’s Own men found another way out, collected a few more wounded and put them in the church, where the old curé was still doing all he could for them. Then they went on to join Major Parker and Woodgate. It was now approaching 11 p.m. Major Parker had collected about fifty King’s Own men and was in danger of being cut off. The senior officers of other regiments in the vicinity were in the same predicament and they decided there was nothing for it but to leave the wounded in the church and hope that any unwounded stragglers would rejoin. Most of the troops moved off in a body, but Major Parker and his party proceeded independently at about midnight. Following a country track they slipped past one village in which there were Germans, skirted round several others, and halted at a farm where the farmer showed them much kindness and gave them food.
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liverpool annie · May 8, 2009

Continued ........

At that time the main body of the Regiment, under the command of Major J. H. Morrah, had found shelter in Gouy, in the neighbourhood of which the division was concentrating. Neither officers nor men knew anything of the fate of Major Parker, nor of those who had been on the extreme wings of the battalion. They could not make any estimate of their losses, nor did they realise that their effort had been part of a vast engagement in which the B.E.F. had achieved the seemingly impossible. With little reliable intelligence, both flanks in the air and few machine guns, it had beaten off more than double its number of cavalry and infantry, supported by an even greater superiority of artillery. It had inflicted such loss on the enemy that he hesitated to follow up; in fact so excellent was the British rifle fire that he greatly overestimated its strength. The casualties in 4th Division, except in the King’s Own were not as high as in the 3rd and 5th, on which the weight of the enemy attack had fallen, but when it was later possible to discover the losses in the battalion they were found to be five officers killed, six wounded, of whom two were taken prisoner, and one missing; no less than four hundred and thirty-one other ranks were killed, wounded and missing, a total which, even in the bloody battles of Ypres and the Somme, was never reached again in a single day by the 1st Battalion. This introduction to war was a rude shock to the majority who had never previously a shot fired in anger. Even those who had served in South Africa were unprepared for anything of the sort, and Grover declared that Spion Kop was “child’s play” in comparison.
It was a long time before the fate was known of the wounded in Haucourt church. They were there for five days. The men who could walk went back to the battlefield for emergency rations, and when these came to an end they asked the Germans where they could get more food. They were told that the villagers would provide it. The curé, who had extended his help from wounded to unwounded men, had been discovered by the Germans and arrested and was later condemned and shot. A memorial to him stands in the village to this day
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Battle of Le Cateau, 26 August 1914

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