August, 1914A Personal
196
THE YPRES TIMES
By Brig.-General E. L. Spears, C.B., C.B.E., M.C.
OWING to the accident of having been sent to Paris on duty in July, 1914, I
was the first British officer to go to the front, reaching General Joffre's
Headquarters the day England declared war.
The French Army was then in full process of mobilizing. It was an amazing
sightendless trains, mostly made up of cattle trucks, packed to overflowing with
men, rolled towards the frontier, incredibly slowly but with clocklike regularity.
Over a million men, hundreds of thousands of horses and thousands of guns were
on the move.
Every level-crossing and bridge was guarded by Territorials, elderly men
generally not even in uniform, and often armed only with shot-guns. They took
their duties desperately seriously, and were rather disappointed if a car pulled up
as soon as they challenged, and thereby deprived them of the chance of shooting.
Their martial attitude was typical of the spirit of the whole French nation,
which immediately adapted itself to war conditions. The British troops, on the
other hand, totally ignorant of continental warfare, and not animated as were the
French by the feeling that they were fighting to repel a German invasion on their
own soil, took some time to realize that they were not engaged merely in particu
larly exciting manoeuvres.
It is on record that some units asked for permission before venturing to damage
houses when placing them in a state of defence, and I know of one case in which a
cavalry non-commissioned officer, when asked why he had not put out his post to
protect his flank, answered that he thought the enemy could not possibly come
through that way, because it was private property
The first Germans I myself saw were some Uhlans sitting on their horses,
silhouetted against the sky on the rugged hills to the east of the Meuse. It was
strangely exciting, but curiously unreal. Even a few bullets whistling uncom
fortably near gave an impression too much like being in the butts to lend more
than a sense of newness to the situation.
It is not that one was unaware of danger, but high spirits and expectancy
more than counterbalanced fear. This and other encounters with Germans at
that time were just fun, just splendid sport.
That feeling soon disappeared, never to be conjured up again. The hundreds
of thousands who came after us and made the enemy's acquaintance from a front
line trench, can never have had that sensation, which prevailed only at the very
beginning, during the first period of open warfare, before the guns had churned
the land into the semblance of a lunar landscape.
To this period belongs a picture I have not forgotten, although the occasion
was in itself quite insignificant.
It happened in Charleroi, to the east of Mons. Some French cavalry were
engaged in street fighting in a long slummy suburb. It was somehow very unreal
to me, perhaps because of the surroundings. It seemed incredible that cavalry
