First and Last Shots
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8 - 11 November 2008 |
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This tour is now fully booked. Please call us on 0845 375 0430 if you would like to go on the waiting list or click here to e-mail us. |
It is one of the crueller ironies of the First World War that the first and last shots fired by the British army were literally within earshot of one another, although the circumstances could scarcely have been more different. On 23 August 1914 Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's II Corps held the line of the Mons-Condé canal against fierce German attacks, and on the 26th Smith-Dorrien gave battle along the Roman road connecting Le Cateau with Cambrai, administering what he termed a 'stopping blow' which checked the German pursuit. It was very much an old-world battle, with steel helmets almost two years away, officers wearing swords, infantry stopping masse attacks with long-range rapid fire, and field artillery taking a position in the open and paying the price accordingly.
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In October-November 1918 the British army fought its way across that same downland over which it had retreated in 1914. In the summer of 1914 it had put around 100,000 men into France: now there were ten times as many. The trim, almost gamekeeper-like warrior of 1914 had been replaced by a more workmanlike figure with leather jerkin and steel helmet, and the proliferation of machine-guns, mortars and artillery made many soldiers little more than the servants of machinery in the age of industrialised war. There were no dominion troops in France in August 1914, but in the autumn of 1918 it was the New Zealanders who stormed the Vauban fortress of Le Quesnoy, and the Canadians who entered Mons.
This tour, led by Professor Richard Holmes, contrasts the fighting around Mons and Le Cateau in August 1914 with the events, on much the same ground, just over four years - and so many lifetimes - on.
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