I wrote the following piece some years back when I was researching men who had a connection with Chailey in East Sussex. Charles Sabourin, a favourite of mine over the years, was a regular soldier with the East Surrey Regiment. This is his story, 100 years to the day after he was wounded at Mons.
Opening Shots
Charles Sabourin, old sweat,
accomplished rifleman and Private in His Majesty’s 1st East Surrey
Regiment, the old 31st (Huntingdonshire) Regiment of Foot, crouched
low on the North bank of the Mons-Conde canal. It was August 23rd 1914 and only
eight days since the battalion had arrived in France from Dublin.
Already though, if Sabourin and his companions never had to see another
pave road in their lives, it would not be a day too soon. The long, straight cobbled avenues of Northern France and Belgium, coupled with new boots for
some of the men, had wreaked havoc on their feet. Now, to make matters worse, sprawled amongst
the slag heaps of unlovely Mons
on a hot Sunday afternoon, they were waiting for the might of the Kaiser’s
armies to fall upon them.
C Squadron of the 4th Royal Irish
Dragoon Guards had fired the first shots of the war the previous day. An hour later, patrolling along the Mons - Soignies road,
they had encountered a party of horsemen from the German 9th Cavalry
Division and given chase. At close
quarters, the Dragoons’ swords had proven to be more than a match for the
Cuirassiers’ unwieldy lances and C Squadron had come out clear victors; not a
single casualty and prisoners to boot.
An encouraging start for the British
Expeditionary Force it may have been but it was of little consequence to a
hungry Sabourin and the men of the 1st East Surreys. Whilst the Dragoons and other cavalry
contingents were engaging in minor skirmishes on the 22nd, the
battalion was sore-footedly marching towards Mons along Belgium’s unforgiving roads. It had already suffered its first casualty
four days earlier. Despite the rescue
efforts of two men who were almost over-powered themselves, and the Medical
Officer who rendered First Aid at the scene, 8108 Private A Walters had
ignominiously drowned during a platoon bathing parade before the East Surreys had even seen their first German. Now though, it would be a different matter. That they would soon be in the thick of the
fighting was inevitable. For even as the
men of the 3rd and 5th Divisions of the BEF’s II Corps
marched to take up positions around Mons, the massed ranks of Von Kluck’s First
Army and Bulow’s Second Army were sweeping down through Belgium towards them.
Arriving along the canal at around
three in the afternoon, the East Surrey’s had
immediately begun strengthening their positions. The canteens were still somewhere to the rear
and as they were without supplies, the order was given for the men to eat half
of their iron rations. It was a welcome
command.
The BEF at Mons
Along the length of the South side of
the canal, from Conde to Mons and forming a small salient facing Nimy and
Obourg, the East Surreys and the rest of the soldiers of II Corps, BEF were
holding a line twenty-one miles long and bisected by eighteen road and rail
bridges. Situated on the extreme right
of 14th Brigade’s two and a half mile frontage between the railway bridge of Les Herbieres and the Pommereoeul road
bridge, the East Surreys held the railway
bridge itself. Sabourin and the men of C
Company had been pushed forward to make up an advanced party on the north of
the canal and they were now busy building barricades. To their right, a company from the 2nd
Kings Own Scottish Borderers of 13th Brigade were doing the
same. All along the line, wherever a
bridge afforded the opportunity to fashion a defensive outpost - and still
provide a means of retreat - pockets of infantrymen scraped together as much
shelter as the slag heaps and waterways of the bleak Belgian landscape would
allow. The work continued through the
night.
To the east, desperately trying to
stay in touch with the extreme left of the French General Lanrezac’s Fifth
Army, I Corps BEF commanded by General Haig also prepared for battle.
The following morning at 5:30am, General Sir John French,
Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force called a conference with
his Generals and issued orders for the outpost line to be strengthened and for
the bridges over the canal to be prepared for demolition. In fact, Lieutenant General Sir Hubert
Smith-Dorrien, commanding II Corps, had already issued an order to that effect
some three hours earlier. Later he would
issue an order directing them to be destroyed if retirement became necessary
but for the time being, apart from sinking all the barges in the canal with
gun-cotton charges, all his men could do was improve what entrenchments they
had managed to construct, and wait for the attack which was expected the
following morning.
By 9am, well to the east of Sabourin’s position by the bridge
at Les Herbieres, the first German shells began bursting along the extreme
right of the line held by the 4th Middlesex and 4th Royal
Fusiliers. And as the southward wheel of Von Kluck’s Army progressed westward
along the canal during the course of the morning and early afternoon, what faced
the BEF were not the two enemy corps and a cavalry division that General French
had intimated to his generals earlier that morning, but two entire German
Armies.
And yet, as vastly outnumbered as the
British were, Von Kluck had little idea of either the composition or the
strength of the force opposing him.
Despite the encounter with the Dragoon Guards the previous day and
despite the fact that a British aeroplane had been shot down coming from
Maubeuge, south of Mons,
Von Kluck was convinced that the BEF had landed at Ostend, Dunkirk
and Calais. So convinced was he that the British force
would arrive on his flank rather than already be in position ahead of him, that
a sighting of troops detraining at Tournai to the west caused him to halt his
march southwards for two hours. In fact,
the soldiers were not British but French, yet even when it was clear that there
were enemy soldiers in and around Mons,
Von Kluck believed that they might be “only cavalry” and deployed only two of the six infantry divisions
at his disposal. He was soon to be
dispelled of his notion. Vastly
outnumbered by the eight German battalions advancing towards them, the four
companies of the 4th Middlesex and further to the west, the 4th
Royal Fusiliers, greeted the approaching formations with concentrated rifle and
machine-gun fire that cut swathes through the massed ranks of field grey.
Meanwhile Charles Sabourin and the 1st
East Surreys were still strengthening their
defences. In fact it was not until
around 1pm that the German
advance, still panning out westwards along the canal and meeting stiff
resistance from the British troops at every turn, approached the East Surrey’s positions.
At this point, the battalion war diary notes, “all work had to cease.”
The soldiers of the German 6th Division signalled their arrival at Les Herbieres by opening up with a machine
gun about a mile and a half from the barricade put up by the East
Surreys. Though the
Official History states that this was ‘instantly silenced’ by one of the East Surrey’s
machine guns, a deadly game of cat and mouse then commenced with the German
artillery directing its fire at the houses round the railway bridge in an
attempt to find it. This they followed
up with shrapnel and machine gun fire directed against the East
Surrey’s defences before launching an attack with two battalions
at around 1:30pm. “At this point,” The Official History
reports, “the Germans were decisively repulsed with heavy loss, at the cost of
trifling casualties to the East Surrey.” They
fought on for the rest of the day and it was not until 6pm when German guns finally destroyed the
barricade on the Les Herbieres road bridge that the advanced parties of the 2nd
Kings Own Scottish Borderers and the 1st East
Surreys withdrew south of the canal.
Wounded and captured at Mons
One of those "trifling casualties" was Charles Sabourin. A South
Londoner brought up amidst the dockyards of Bermondsey, he had joined the army
in 1900 and soldiered half way around the world. While Kitchener
was appealing for volunteers, Sabourin was sailing from Ireland for
Havre. While the lines outside
recruiting stations grew long, he was already shouldering his pack in France
and when the might of the German armies had fallen upon the little Belgian
village of Mons, Sabourin was lined up on the canal firing his rifle at the
ranks of Field Grey coming towards him as fast as he could.
By the time The East Surreys had retreated to Brigade Headquarters at Thulin and then marched south to Bois de Boissu where it bivouacked at 2am in a factory yard, total officer casualties for the action were listed as two wounded and three missing whilst other ranks numbered two killed, three wounded and 128 missing.
Sabourin was wounded and missing and
noted by name in the Battalion War Diary.
The shrapnel that finished his war either blew off his right leg at the
time or wounded him so severely that amputation of his leg in a Belgian or
German hospital became inevitable. It
would be a further five months however, before he would be repatriated to England. Limbless prisoners of war were of no use to
their captors. Fit men you could put to
work in the fields or factories but sick men were simply a burden. If they couldn’t fight again, better to send
them back to where they’d come from.
Where is Charles Sabourin?
Back in London though, all Charles Sabourin’s relatives had wanted was news and they were frantic with worry. Soon after the action at Mons in which he was wounded and captured, the letters from them started coming. “… since 11th or 12th August I have not heard anything of him. I am unable to get to the office to make enquiries so would be very grateful to you if you could let me know something. Yours…”
News had been conveyed to the family
that he was missing but then there had been nothing. On 6th October the war office
received an anxious communication requesting that they advise, “… anything more
about him at any time, his mother’s address is Mrs Sabourin, 26 Lacey Road, St
James Road, Bermondsey” Dutifully the
clerk filed the letter. The following
month there was another. “Dear Sir, I am
very sorry to trouble you,” it began, “but have you heard any more information
of Pte C Sabourin 6738 of The East Surrey Reg.
It is now two months or so since I heard anything…”
There wasn’t anything more to report but
that hadn’t stopped the correspondence.
In January 1915 there was a further enquiry. “I am very sorry to trouble you again,” it
began, “but have you heard any more of Private C Sabourin No 6738 of The East
Surrey Regt. I came down a month or two
before Xmas but I have heard no news about him…”
With customary efficiency, the letter
was stamped at No 10 District Infantry Record Office and filed for future
reference. There was nothing more they
could do. Within the month however, Pte
Sabourin would be repatriated and the letters would stop. On December 10th, the British Government had
proposed, through the United States Government, to the German Government, that
arrangements should be made for an exchange of British and German officers and
men who had been taken prisoner and who were physically incapacitated for
further military service. The German
Government had accepted this proposal on 31st December and the wheels were set
in motion. Charles Sabourin, his name
mis-spelled as “Sabairin” In The Times report that covered the event, was one
of two East Surrey men who arrived at Charing
Cross Station on Wednesday
17th February 1915, before being whisked away by ambulance to Queen
Alexandra’s Military
Hospital in Grosvenor Road.
Hickwells Convalescent Home, Chailey
After the trauma of his injury and almost six months
in captivity, what he needed most of all was a period of convalescence and
here, in the tranquillity of Chailey, a world away both from the battlefield
and Bermondsey, he found it.
Nurse Oliver approached him in his
chair, his right trouser leg sewn high at the hip. She had begun her album earnestly enough,
proudly drawing two British Red Cross Society badges on the opening page and
adding to them with a photograph of Margaret Cotesworth, Commandant of the Detachment. The other members of Sussex/54 had signed
their names around the borders and there were further photos of the Detachment
in action during the local Red Cross Field Day in 1913. Here they were unpacking their equipment. Here was another of them building a camp
fire; another one of them cooking and putting up the dairy. Friends had added
their own contributions and there was the pretty postcard of the clock tower at
Hastings which
she had bought on a visit to the seaside town some years earlier. When the first arrivals had been brought to
Hickwells she had taken some photos of them and pasted them onto a blank
page. Now it was time to ask those same
men if they would like to add a few words.
Charles Sabourin took the album that was offered to him and began to write:
Pte C Sabourin. 1st East Surrey Regt.
Wounded and captured at Mons.
I would like to meet the German who fired that shrapnel. I would certainly treat him.
Returned 17/2/15. Prisoner of W.
Charles Sabourin drew a line under his entry and handed the album back to Nurse Oliver.
Today, on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Mons, I remember and offer grateful thanks to Charles Sabourin and the men of the BEF.
Map reproduced from David Ascoili's The Mons Star.
