Mons and after

The 4th Battalion Royal Fusiliers resting in Mons before the battle. I've often wondered who the hatless guy near the middle looking at the camera was and what happened to him. These guys look tired already and they're about fight a battle and then walk almost all the way back to Paris!

The French army is still retreating and the BEF still moving forward. However, it looks as if the BEF is going to have to handle Mons and the retreat without me. I'm off to the UK tomorrow and will have few chances to blog. Should be back for the Marne.

Interestingly, Mons on August 23 is probably the battle with the most mythology associated with it. The Angels and ghostly Agincourt bowmen were obviously created some time after the battle, but the idea that the Germans thought every British soldier had a machine gun is tougher to deny. The British did have fewer machine-guns and they did have the "Mad Minute", 15 aimed rifle rounds fired in a minute, which decimated the packed ranks of advancing German soldiers, but it's easy to tell the difference between machine-gun and concentrated rifle fire, so it's probably likely that the myth was put forward in the newspapers to make the British soldiers seem even better than they were.