Ypres The First Battle 1914 Ian Beckett by Ian Beckett 9781317865339, 1317865332 instant download after payment.

IntroductionIt was early October 1914 and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was finally moving forward again. Bathed by bright autumn sunshine, the men of General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps (3rd and 5th Divisions) were marching up the hard, granite-blocked pavé roads of northern France towards the Belgian frontier, which they had last crossed during the great retreat to the south in August 1914. Trains had brought them north from the River Aisne to detrain at Abbeville on 8 and 9 October, and motor buses found by the French had helped speed them to Béthune by 11 October. Ahead of them moved the patrols of Major General Beauvoir de Lisle’s 1st Cavalry Division and Major General Hubert Gough’s 2nd Cavalry Division, together comprising Lieutenant General Edmund Allenby’s newly designated Cavalry Corps, which had marched up from the Aisne in stages starting on 3 October. When Allenby’s Cavalry Corps had been instituted, Allenby had picked up the list of new appointments, muttering to his assembled subordinates, ‘I see you have become a brigadier. My God, you have been made a brigadier’ and so on, until he reached Noel ‘Curly’ Birch, a gunner who had acted as his GSO1 and who would later be Douglas Haig’s CRA: ‘Curly, they have actually made you a brigadier too: seems to me they make every bloody fool in France a brigadier nowadays.