Free Blood and Thunder by Alexandra J Churchill

Brigade. Aubrey Herbert watched a man fall to the ground holding a bayonet. Immediately concerned he reined in his horse to see if he could help him but the colonel stopped him. The middle of a chaotic retreat was not the time, he told him. It seemed to the Guards that there was an entire army rolling over them. The Germans were ghostly, flitting out from behind the trees and then back in amongst the greenery.
    Shortly after 1 p.m. one of the men coming back to join Aubrey and the colonel claimed that he had seen Hubert Crichton’s body lying in the road. Could they be sure? Aubrey was sent forward with directions to investigate. He galloped back through the forest. As he approached the body he realised that it was the man with the bayonet whom he had seen tumble to the ground earlier. A momentary lull had occurred in the firing but the wood was still full of lurking enemy troops. Aubrey jumped from his horse and knelt down. Hubert looked peaceful. Aubrey put his hand on his shoulder and spoke to him for a moment. He leant over his body, mindful of Hubert’s wife and two little girls, to check for any letters. Then, hearing German whispers coming from the trees, he fled.
    When the Irish Guards finally held a roll call at the end of the regiment’s first day of fully fledged battle, the battalion was missing not only its commanding officer, Colonel Morris, and his second in command, Hubert Crichton, but five more officers were unaccounted for, including Aubrey Herbert who was in German hands with a bullet in his side. Ma Jeffreys had assumed command of the Grenadiers and the situation was just as chaotic in both battalions of the Coldstream. The retreat continued, and the following morning the Guards moved on, forced to leave the forest of Retz littered with the bodies of their dead and wounded.
    A few days after the clash at Villers-Cotterêts, General Joffre made the landmark decision that would earn him his epitaph as the saviour of France when he decided to make a stand against the German advance. The Battle of the Marne followed. Four complete French armies with the BEF, over a million men, pushed the armies of von Kluck and von Bülow north-east and away from Paris. By 9 September the Allied forces had succeeded in turning the tide of the war. Retreat was inevitable and by 10 September it had become a reality; not a panicked fleeing on the Germans’ part; but a sustained retirement nonetheless. The Schlieffen Plan, and with it hopes for a swift, decisive western victory, had failed.
    The war moved back north towards the Aisne. Among the fallen Etonians left behind on the Marne was Bertrand Stewart who had indeed fulfilled his threat of coming back to haunt his German captors. Imprisoned under rigorous conditions in the fortress of Glatz he was released as an act of clemency when George V visited Germany in 1913. By the outbreak of war he had been promoted to the rank of captain in the West Kent Yeomanry and joined the cavalry as an intelligence officer, embarking immediately for France. On 12 September, as cavalry patrols pushed on towards the River Vesle, a patrol entering the village of Braisne was suddenly ambushed. The troops behind them retired quickly and Bertrand grabbed a rifle and at once assumed command, rallying the patrol and leading it down the slope towards the river to help the men that had been cut off.
    That afternoon a driver attached to the BEF walked the same road, over pools of fresh blood and dead horses. The view opened out in front of him, one long line of shell clouds puffing away. The rain came down in sheets: ‘the fight for Braisne was within earshot’. Lying up against a bank by the side of the road was 41-year-old Bertrand Stewart, his body not yet cold 1 .
    Aubrey Herbert had been a guest of the German Army for almost two weeks when the advance came back towards Villers-Cotterêts, liberated him and saw him evacuated home. Further to the rear George Fletcher