Who won the Battle of Mons?
Germany, strategically. On 23 August 1914 the outnumbered British Expeditionary Force held the Mons canal for a day, losing about 1,600 men while costing Kluck's First Army more. But with the French Fifth Army falling back on its right, the BEF had to retreat, and it did not stop until the Marne.1
On Sunday 23 August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force fought its first battle of World War I. Along a canal north of the Belgian town of Mons, about two divisions of regular soldiers held off the leading corps of General Alexander von Kluck's German First Army for most of a day, then slipped away into a retreat that lasted almost two weeks. The battle gave the British their first heroes of the war, the name “Old Contemptibles” and, by accident, its most famous legend, the Angels of Mons.2
Mons opened the British part of the war described in our guide to the Western Front in World War I, and it was one of the Battle of the Frontiers clashes that also included the French offensive in Lorraine. For the armies behind it, see the military histories of Britain and Germany; our 23 August page tells the day in brief.3
Why was the British Expeditionary Force at Mons?
When Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914, Britain declared war and sent the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to fight beside France. It was small by continental standards: four infantry divisions and one cavalry division at first, later six infantry divisions, around 90,000 men in the National Army Museum's count. But it was a professional army of well-trained regulars, with many reservists recalled to the colors only weeks before.4
Its commander, Field Marshal Sir John French, carried a delicate brief. Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, told him to cooperate with the French Army, but also that the BEF's numbers were strictly limited and that “the greatest care must be exercised towards a minimum of losses and wastage.” Nick Lloyd calls this a somewhat paradoxical set of instructions, and it weighed on French in the weeks that followed.5
Under the prewar Anglo-French plans, the BEF concentrated around Maubeuge on the left of General Charles Lanrezac's French Fifth Army. On 22 August it moved up to Mons, ready to join an Allied advance into Belgium. That put it squarely in the path of the German First Army, the outer edge of the great German wheel through Belgium toward northern France.6
The German side: what did Kluck think he faced?
Alexander von Kluck's First Army marched on the far right of the German armies, at the outer edge of their wheel through Belgium. Its tasks, as Kluck later described them, were to cover Antwerp and to protect the right of the whole German advance against the Belgian Army and any British force that landed. He wanted room to swing wide to the west, past Maubeuge toward Tournai and Douai, so that he could turn on the British wherever they appeared.7
He did not get it. From 17 August the First Army was placed under the orders of General Karl von Bülow, commanding the Second Army to its left, and Bülow, fighting the French on the Sambre, insisted that Kluck keep close to him. Kluck protested and was overruled. In his memoir he blames that decision for embarrassing his plans against the British for days.8
Nor did Kluck know where the British were. The German Supreme Command told him on 20 August that a British landing at Boulogne and an advance from Lille had to be expected, but that no large disembarkation had yet taken place. On the morning of the battle, 23 August, a report of troops detraining at Tournai led him to halt three corps for about two hours and prepare to wheel west; the troops turned out to be two French territorial battalions (his own memoir dates the report to the 22nd). In the words of the British official historian, Kluck advanced to the canal “in complete ignorance of the strength of the British.”9
How did the British hold the canal line?
On 22 August the BEF took up a defensive line along the Mons-Condé canal, after its cavalry patrols had warned of the German advance. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's II Corps held the canal west of Mons and the loop around the town; Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig's I Corps faced northeast to the right. Britannica compares the line to a broad arrow with its tip at Mons. Lanrezac's army, checked on the Sambre on 21 August, asked for British help, and French agreed to stay on the canal for twenty-four hours to cover his left.10
The ground favored the defender only in part. The canal was a ready-made obstacle and the crests south of it gave the British gunners good positions, but slag heaps from the coal mines limited observation, and the loop of the canal north of Mons formed an obvious salient. Smith-Dorrien had a second, more defensible line prepared through the villages of Frameries and Boussu.11
The first British soldier killed in action in the war had already fallen. Private John Parr of the 4th Middlesex was fatally wounded on 21 August, two days before the battle, in what the Commonwealth War Graves Commission describes as an encounter with a German patrol. According to the same source, he lies today in St Symphorien Military Cemetery just east of Mons.12
How was the Battle of Mons fought?
The morning of Sunday 23 August was misty and wet. At dawn the 4th Middlesex drove off German cavalry trying to cross the canal bridge at Obourg, and German horsemen approached the Royal Fusiliers at the tip of the salient. As the mist lifted, German batteries on the high ground northeast of the salient opened fire, and from about 10:30 the bombardment spread westward along the canal as battery after battery came into action against II Corps.13
Kluck's IX Corps attacked the salient around Nimy and Obourg, the III Corps came on against Jemappes, and the IV Corps against the canal farther west. Again and again the German infantry advanced in close order and was stopped by the fire of riflemen with a high standard of training, and by the British field guns. The National Army Museum says simply that the Germans blundered into the BEF and suffered heavy casualties. A German General Staff account quoted in the British official history speaks of an enemy “well entrenched and completely hidden” whose “murderous fire” brought the whole advance to a stop.14
Numbers told in the end. By midday German infantry were getting across the canal; after their first losses, the British official historian notes, they gave up massed formations for extended order. By early afternoon the German guns had won a clear superiority, and by mid-afternoon the infantry was crossing in force. The 4th Middlesex and the Royal Irish Regiment in the salient took the worst of it, and the British were pushed back east and southeast of Mons.15
At the railway bridge at Nimy the 4th Royal Fusiliers held on with their machine guns until every man of two crews was killed or wounded. Lieutenant Maurice Dease kept the guns in action though wounded several times, and was mortally wounded. Private Sidney Godley went on firing for two hours after he was wounded, while the rest of the section withdrew, and was taken prisoner. Both received the Victoria Cross, among the first of the war, Dease as its first posthumous recipient; Godley survived captivity and received his from King George V in 1919.16
The Germans were cautious about entering Mons and only did so after seven in the evening. By nightfall II Corps had fallen back to a new line about three miles south of the canal, while Kluck's IX Corps held the southern edge of Mons.17
How many died at the Battle of Mons?
The British official history puts British losses on 23 August at just over 1,600 killed, wounded and missing. All but about forty were in II Corps, and practically half fell in two battalions in the salient: the 4th Middlesex lost over four hundred men and the Royal Irish over three hundred. Britannica gives the same figure of some 1,600.18
German losses were higher, though no exact total exists. Britannica estimates that as many as 5,000 Germans were killed or wounded in the one-day engagement. Guillaume Blondeau of the Mons Memorial Museum, counting both 23 and 24 August, gives about 4,200 British and around 4,900 German casualties, which he calls the most reliable figures. Kluck himself wrote that both sides suffered heavy losses in the fighting for the canal crossings.19
Britannica notes that these totals were on the scale of a 19th-century battle in the Crimea or in 1870, and gave little hint of what the Western Front would cost. By the end of 1914 the BEF had suffered over 90,000 casualties, and the original force had been almost wiped out.20
Why did the British retreat from Mons?
Not because of the fight on the canal. That evening French still meant to stand on the same ground. But news from the French late that night showed that Lanrezac's Fifth Army on his right was falling back after heavy attacks by Bülow, which left the BEF far forward and alone. French decided that his position was strategically untenable, and in the early hours of 24 August his staff ordered a general retreat.21
It came just in time. Kluck, expecting the British to stand again south of Mons, had ordered his army to envelop their open left flank the next day and cut off their retreat to the west. Instead the BEF fell back with rearguard actions, while General Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, ordered a general withdrawal toward the Marne on 25 August.22
What followed was the retreat from Mons: some 150 to 200 miles on foot in about ten to twelve days of summer heat, with holding actions at Landrecies, Le Cateau, Néry and elsewhere. At Le Cateau on 26 August Smith-Dorrien resolved to stand and fight a rearguard battle, a decision Nick Lloyd calls undoubtedly correct, though French held it against him. French himself, in the National Army Museum's judgment, seems to have suffered a temporary loss of nerve and wanted to pull the BEF out of the line to rest. Kitchener overruled him: the official history records that he came to Paris on 1 September and kept the BEF in the fighting line.23
On 5 September the retreat ended. The Germans had wheeled east of Paris, exposing their flank, and the BEF marched into the gap between Kluck's First Army and Bülow's Second in the First Battle of the Marne, which drove the Germans back to the Aisne.24
Who won the Battle of Mons?
On the day itself, the British could claim the better of it. They had held a long canal line against a much larger army, inflicted heavier losses than they took, and gone back in good order. The official history records that the men were in high spirits, and that the action delayed the German advance by a whole day. Kluck wrote that the BEF “fought excellently.”25
But the campaign was going Germany's way. Britannica calls Mons a strategic victory for Germany: the stand slowed but did not stop the German advance into France, and the BEF was swept back with its French allies to the Marne. Kluck, for his part, had lost the chance to envelop the British, partly because of the delay over the phantom force at Tournai and, in his own view, because Bülow had kept him on a short rein.26
Why are they called the Old Contemptibles?
According to an order of the day attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II and dated 19 August 1914, which the National Army Museum quotes, the German army was to “walk over General French's contemptible little army.” The British regulars of 1914 took up the insult with pride. Westminster Abbey, which has a memorial to them in its west cloister, notes that every soldier of the BEF who served within range of the enemy's artillery in the first months of the war was entitled to call himself an Old Contemptible.27
The British official historian, writing in 1922, answered the jibe on the Army's behalf: the BEF was not “contemptible,” he wrote, but it was almost negligible in numbers beside the armies of the continent, even those of the smaller states.28
Were there really angels at Mons?
No. The Angels of Mons began as fiction. On 29 September 1914 Arthur Machen, a writer on the London Evening News, published a short story, “The Bowmen,” in which a British soldier at Mons calls on Saint George and the ghostly archers of Agincourt rise to strike down the Germans.29
Machen insisted from the start that the tale had no foundation in fact. When the editors of occult and spiritualist papers asked for his sources, he replied that he had none; when parish magazines reprinted the story and a priest asked for its authorities, he again called it “pure invention.” By the spring of 1915, he wrote, versions of his story were being told as true, with Saint George, then a protecting cloud, and finally “shining” figures that readers took to be angels.30
Occultists, spiritualists, churches and the popular press took the legend up, and accounts said to come from soldiers of the retreat multiplied, though Machen said he had never received a jot of real evidence. The historian David Clarke, the leading scholar of the legend, traces it to literary invention, propaganda and folklore working together. It is a story about Britain in 1914 and 1915, not about the battle.31
What happened to Mons after the battle?
Mons, the capital of the province of Hainaut, was occupied by the Germans from the day of the battle and stayed in their hands for more than four years.32
The war ended where it had begun for the British. Canadian troops of Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie's Canadian Corps fought their way into Mons in the last days of the war and liberated it on the morning of 11 November 1918. At 10:58, two minutes before the armistice, Private George Lawrence Price of the Canadian infantry was killed by a sniper near the town; he is thought to have been the last Commonwealth soldier killed in the war.33
St Symphorien Military Cemetery, where the Germans buried British and German dead of the battle, among them many of the men killed at Nimy, now holds both ends of the story: according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Private Parr and Private Price both lie there. The Hundred Days campaign that brought the Canadians back to Mons is told in our article on the Hundred Days Offensive.34
Where was the Battle of Mons fought?
Along the Mons-Condé canal around the town of Mons in the Belgian province of Hainaut, close to the French border, from the bridges at Obourg and Nimy northeast of the town westward through Jemappes and Saint-Ghislain, a landscape of mining villages and slag heaps.35
