Saturday, my second day in Mons, dawned damp and drizzly but
cleared up as the morning drew on.
After checking out of my hotel, my first stop was a return
to the Grand Place to say hello to the Guard House Monkey, who I’d missed the
previous day.
For those unfamiliar, this little bronze scamp has crouched
outside the city’s town hall for centuries. Tradition holds that anyone passing
has to rub the top of his head with their left hand for good luck.
After paying my due respects to the monkey, my next stop was
St Symphorien Military Cemetery, on the eastern outskirts of the city. This, as
it turned out, was comfortably the most moving site I was to visit during my
time in Mons.
Wary after getting lost more than once the previous day, and
unable to find a bus route that seemed to be heading in that direction, I took
the easy (and lazy!) option of hailing a taxi for the couple of kilometres out
to St Symphorien.
The cemetery had been the scene of international media
coverage a fortnight earlier, when dignitaries like our own President Michael D
Higgins and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had attended a sunset ceremony to
mark the British declaration of war on Germany on 4 August. I’d watched the
live coverage of the event at home on that Bank Holiday Monday, and had been
struck immediately by just how beautiful a place the cemetery seemed to be. The
reality was even more so.
St Symphorien was originally established by the Germans
while the war was still in progress, being inaugurated in 1917. A local Belgian
landowner, Jean Houzeau de Lehaie, granted the land to the occupiers on the
condition that the dead of both sides would be interred on the site with equal
respect.
Most of the burials in the cemetery date to August 1914 and
the battle of Mons itself; casualties of both sides originally interred in
local civilian cemeteries and plots. Some, however, are from the other end of
the war, when the great Allied advance at the end of 1918 had just liberated
Mons when the Armistice came into effect.
Although now administrated by the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, St Symphorien’s unusual origins made it utterly different from any
other CWGC site I’d previously visited in Europe, not least in the fact that
both British and German casualties are buried together in almost equal numbers
– in some cases literally side by side in the same row:
Rather than walking through neat and orderly ranks of headstones
standing against immaculate lawns, entering St Symphorien is almost like stepping
into a forest glade. The cemetery is designed on Germanic ideals: set on
multiple levels, with small wooded hillocks rising and falling.
On a sunny August morning, with birds singing in the trees
and shafts of sunlight piercing through the branches, it was a heartbreakingly
pretty and poignant place.
I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that some deaths are
more important than others, but St Symphorien does contain a number of burials
with particular historical significance.
Lieutenant Maurice Dease of the Royal Fusiliers, posthumous
Irish receipient of the First World War’s first Victoria Cross.
Private John Parr of the Middlesex Regiment – missing
believed killed on 21 August 1914, and generally considered the first British service
fatality on land of the First World War.
Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th (Royal
Irish) Lancers, killed on the morning of 11 November 1918, the last known
British fatality of the First World War. Only a few metres separate Parr and
Ellison’s graves, facing each other.
Private George Lawrence Price of the 28th
Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force – killed at approximately 10.58 on the
morning of 11 November 1918, and the final Commonwealth fatality of the war.
Musketier Oskar
Niemeyer of Infanterie Regiment 84, a
German hero of the Battle of Mons. From Lower Saxony, Niemeyer was killed on 23
August in the vicinity of the Nimy railway bridge while attempting to move a
swing bridge across the canal so his comrades could cross.
Quite a number of the British graves at St Symphorien bear
the grenade badge of the Royal Fusiliers, the feathers and laurel of the
Middlesex Regiment, or the crowned harp of the Royal Irish Regiment – telling
evidence of the desperate fighting that battalions from these regiments
experienced in and around the Nimy Salient.
One large group of Middlesex casualties were interred
together by the Germans in the cemetery, together with a memorial commemorating
the ‘Royal’ Middlesex Regiment. The misnomer apparently stems from a German
belief that the stubborn defence displayed by the unit during the battle must
have been carried out by a prestigious royal regiment, rather than an ordinary
infantry regiment of the line.
The respect and care of a gesture like this, like the cemetery
as a whole, is quite remarkable when considered in the context of St Symphorien
being established by the Germans while hostilities were still very much
ongoing.
Earlier that morning, I’d picked up a small cross of
remembrance in the tourist information office at Mons, which I decided to leave
at the grave of an unknown casualty of the Royal Irish Regiment killed on 23
August. There’s something uniquely sad about graves like this, where the dead
lack even their identities for posterity.
Leaving St Symphorien and walking back towards Mons, I was
able to visit a site with special significance for Irish involvement in the
BEF.
On the afternoon of 23 August, with German pressure against
the salient at Nimy becoming unbearable, the British units holding the sector
were beginning to withdraw back into Mons. Advancing enemy infantry pressed
hard at their heels.
At this critical moment, Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant
Thomas Fitzpatrick of 2nd Battalion Royal Irish Regiment gathered
together a scratch force of some forty to fifty rear line personnel like cooks,
musicians and orderlies and led them in defending the crossroads of La Bascule,
on the eastern outskirts of Mons. Fitzpatrick’s unlikely rear guard succeeded
in holding their positions until late in the evening, before slipping away to
rejoin the retreating BEF.
To commemorate the action, as well as the wider service of
the Royal Irish Regiment during the First World War, a large Celtic cross now
stands at the busy junction of La Bascule. Across the road is a memorial to the
BEF as a whole, which I stupidly neglected to photograph while I was at the
site.
Visiting Mons was a fantastic experience, and one which I
won’t soon forget.
Although I didn’t cover anything close to the entire
battlefield, I was still able to gain a very good flavour of the key locations
from that fateful August day a century ago. Two sites which I had planned on
visiting, the location of the very first British skirmish of the war at
Casteau, north of Mons, and the nearby NATO SHAPE complex, proved impossible
due to time and transport constraints.
St Symphorien in particular has left a huge impression on
me, and I hope I can revisit the entire area again in the future, perhaps
before the centenary of the Armistice in 2018.
With the afternoon drawing on, I prepared to leave Mons and
retune myself by 99 years to the last major British land battle in Europe
before the First World War: Waterloo...