General Haig
and the British Expeditionary Force in the Battle of the Marne
From the first battles in Belgium at the end of August to the Battle of the Marne, the British Expeditionary Force, led by General Haig, took part in the early stages of the First World War.
At 21 ter boulevard Jean Rose, behind a gate at the end of the park, stands the imposing "Maison Villeboisnet" (Villeboisnet House), which was the headquarters of General Douglas Haig's British General Staff until 2 September 1914.
On 3 September 1914, British troops had completed their retreat to the left bank of the Marne and were preparing to destroy the bridge, the last link between the two banks of the river. At 3pm, at the insistence of Mayor Georges Lugol, the British were content to blow up just one arch of the old Pont du Marché. Its paving stones damaged neighbouring buildings as far as the cathedral, but the mills on the bridge survived the explosion intact.
Douglas Haig (1861-1928) was a British field marshal.
He first served in the First World War as a lieutenant-general and was appointed head of the 1st Corps. He took part in the battles of Mons, the Marne and Ypres. Thanks to these successes, he was promoted to general and made second-in-command of the British forces in France, which placed him under the command of Sir John French.
He was appointed to lead the British Expeditionary Force in France in December 1915 until the end of the war.
During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, his troops lost 400,000 men with very little success; it was the deadliest battle in British history. 1 July 1916 was the ‘bloodiest day for the British Army’!
The campaigns of Passchendaele and Poelkapelle earned him a reputation as an "inhuman" general, and his troops nicknamed him "The Butcher".
In 1917, he was promoted to Field Marshal, and then everyone thought he had done the best he could given the circumstances he had to face.
For the American General John J. Pershing, Haig was ‘the man who won the war’.
He remained Commander-in-Chief until his retirement in 1921.
The British Expeditionary Force in the Battle of the Marne.
War broke out on 4 August 1914, the date on which the United Kingdom mobilised its army of professional soldiers.
On the 5th, the Foreign Office issued the following statement: ‘In view of the German Government's refusal to accede to Her Majesty's Government's request that the neutrality of Belgium be respected, ... Her Majesty's Government have declared to the German Government that a de facto state of war has existed between Great Britain and Germany since 11pm on 4 August’.
For the first time in 99 years, since Waterloo - with the exception of the Crimean War (1853-1856) - the British were ready to engage in combat on the European continent.
The start of the war prompted a vast campaign to recruit volunteers. Motivated by the desire to fight, and under strong social pressure - British women did not hesitate to give a white feather to men who did not enlist - the number of volunteers reached the impressive figure of 1,190,000 by the end of 1914.
Under the command of Sir John French, the British troops embarked for France, with orders (given by the War Minister Lord Kitchener) not to respond to the orders and requests of the French generals and to prioritise the defence of Belgium... It was not until the Battle of the Marne and the subsequent defeats in the Battles of the Frontiers (August 1914) that genuine cooperation was envisaged and established.
The various colonial operations carried out, both in Africa and Asia, had definitively revealed all the unpleasant and fatal disadvantages of wearing traditional scarlet tunics and confirmed the unsuitability of the various items of equipment supplied to its infantrymen.
In 1902, the Second Boer War had barely ended when the British Crown took the right decision to provide a new, but above all modern, field uniform.
SBut while the British Empire was a military power at sea, it was nothing of the sort on land, no matter how strong the Empire's professional soldiers and how modern their equipment. When war broke out, the 100,000 or so soldiers of the professional army were no match for the two million German soldiers pouring into Belgium and France. It very quickly became necessary to mobilise the entire Empire using volunteers, and to stir up patriotism in British society in order to avert disaster. A war economy was soon established and the massive dispatch of troops to the European continent became a major issue!!
The arrival of the British troops, with the dispatch of the first contingent of professional soldiers known as the B.E.F. (British Expeditionary Force), marked in itself the diplomatic defeat of Great Britain against the German Empire and, at the same time, a political success against France. It was, however, a humanitarian disaster, as is the case with every army.
The first major battle fought by the contingent took place at Mons, on the Walloon plains in southern Belgium, on the border with France. The battle, which lasted only about 6 hours, pitted 80,000 British against 160,000 Germans in a terrible confrontation in which the small professional army demonstrated its military superiority, but also its undeniable numerical inferiority. The battle was made famous by one of the last great cavalry charges of the 20th century (on the Western Front), in which the finest British cavalry were swept away by the future terror of the battlefield: the machine gun.
At the end of August 1914, the left wing and centre of the French and British forces were forced to retreat to the Somme, then the Oise, the Aisne and finally the Marne...
The German right wing, which was making extraordinary headway towards Paris, was now advancing very rapidly, sometimes up to 40 km a day!!
German troops were now threatening Paris.
On the morning of 2 September, the first British troops entered the town of Meaux from the north of the Seine-et-Marne department, arriving by road from Senlis. General Haig's British General Staff set up their Command Post in a vast property opposite the town's ramparts: Villa Villeboisnet.
In Meaux, during the night, more British troops, particularly artillery, arrived from the north of the Seine-et-Marne department, via the Senlis and Varreddes roads. They crossed the Marne, then moved up towards Nanteuil-lès-Meaux, in the direction of Coulommiers and Melun.
On 3 September, in Meaux, to delay the crossing of the Marne, the British Royal Engineers blew up an arch in the Market Bridge. Fortunately, the old mills built on the bridge were spared.
By the end of the day, from Lagny-sur-Marne to Meaux, from Trilport to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, the entire British Army, in retreat, had crossed the Marne. As a rear echelon, the Great British Headquarters withdrew from Lagny-sur-Marne, to set up camp near the Seine, in Melun, at the Collège Jacques Amyot.
At 2pm on 5 September 1914 Joffre went to the Château de Vaux-le-Pénil to convince Field Marshal French to take part in the full-scale offensive planned for the morning of 6 September. He succeeded in winning his support, which had been uncertain until then... ‘England's honour is at stake, Field Marshal!'
The B.E.F. therefore took part in the counter-attack planned for 6 September..
On 7 September, the British rushed into the breach between the First and Second German armies.
On the same day, near the village of Frétoy, in the hamlet of Montcel, to the south of Coulommiers and La Ferté-Gaucher, 50 British cavalrymen of the 9th Royal Lancers, on reconnaissance, twice charged victoriously against the rearguard of a patrol of cavalrymen of the 1st Dragoons of the German Guard (1st Cavalry Division, General Von Richtofen). This was one of the last classic cavalry charges in France during the 1914-1918 war.
They reached the Marne valley on 9 September in the region of La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre.
On 10 September, von Molkte ordered the retreat of the entire German army along the Aisne and Oise rivers. This marked the beginning of the Race to the Sea.
4 months after the declaration of war, and when the conflict was expected to be over by December, the men buried themselves in networks of trenches. The British volunteers, who had expected to fight a war of movement, as had been the case for centuries before, very quickly found themselves bogged down in an environment that rendered conventional infantry training obsolete. These men, who had answered the call of the Crown, soon realised the absurdity of the situation and in some places, against the orders of their commanders, celebrated Christmas and the New Year with their adversaries during the festive season. These sporadic Christmas truces were harshly repressed by the General Staff... The conflict, bogged down, promised to be endless.
La Ferté-sous-Jouarre British Memorial
This memorial bears the names of 3,888 British soldiers and officers who fell between August and October 1914, and who either were never given a final resting place, or whose graves remained unmarked (50 soldiers' graves were identified after the names were engraved).
The names of the regiments in which they served are also inscribed. An inscription recalls their memory:
To the glory of God, and in lasting remembrance of 3,888 officers and soldiers whose graves are unknown, belonging to the British Expeditionary Force, which mobilised on 5 August 1914, landed in August 1914 and fought at Mons, Le Cateau, on the Marne, on the Aisne, until October 1914.
The monument was inaugurated on 4 November 1928 by General Pulteney, who in September 1914 commanded the British 3rd Corps at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, in the presence of Marshal Foch, Albert Gilquin, the town's mayor, Georges Lugol, senator, François de Tessan, member of parliament, and a host of civilian and military dignitaries.