-
5. Tamines
- Leuven University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER 5 Tamines CROSSES “I have said that the worst of all was Tamines,” wrote the American minister to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, of the massacres of civilians during August. But perhaps it only seems the worst because it made such an impression on the minds of the young men of the C.R.B. [the Commission for Relief in Belgium]. They were always talking of it. “Yes, but have you seen Tamines?” they would say whenever the conversation, with a kind of fatal and persistent irrelevancy, turned on the atrocities. They knew Tamines only as they passed through it on their way to and from the Borinage, and all they had seen was the poor little cemetery there in the church yard, crowded with the new-made graves whose wooden crosses all bore the same date. Many of the young men of the C.R.B., whose experience of human kind had been as fortunate as their own natures were kind, came to Belgium with the scepticism that did so much credit to their natures, but somehow that little graveyard at Tamines was more potent as proof to them than direct evidence could have been. Tamines is a little mining town on the Sambre, down in what is known as the Borinage, the coal fields between Namur and Charleroi. The little church stands on the village-green overlooking the river, its facade all splotched where the bullets and the mitraille spattered against it. And in the graveyard beside the church there are hundreds of new-made graves, long rows of them, each with its small wooden cross and its bit of flowers. The crosses stand in serried rows, so closely that they make a very thicket, with scarcely room to walk between them. They were all new, of painted wood, alike except for the names and ages – thirteen to eighty-four. But they all bore the same date: August 22nd , 1914.¹ THE BATTLE OF THE FRONTIERS From the Olympian perspective of the military historian, the massacres at Tamines, like those at Dinant the following day, were insignificant episodes in the first great clash of arms between German and French forces, the Battle of the Frontiers. “It is a glorious and awful thought that before the week is over the greatest action the world has ever heard of will be fought,” Sir Henry Wilson wrote on August 22nd .² Millions of soldiers and civilians shared The cemetery beside St. Martin’s Church, Tamines. [3.237.178.126] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:50 GMT) Tamines 209 his excitement. The great armies of the two ancient enemies were about to collide and the outcome would decide the war. There had already been a series of engagements in Alsace and Lorraine . A French thrust in the extreme south by an auxiliary army under General Pau had captured Mulhouse on August 8th , but the general was forced to withdraw two days later. Launched on the 14th , the main French advance into the two lost provinces had proceeded methodically, if not spectacularly, for five days. Then it ran into the prepared German defenses, the machine guns and barbed wire that soldiers would come to know so well. On the 20th , the Germans counterattacked. The French were decisively routed by the German Sixth Army in Lorraine to the west of Morhange and at Sarrebourg. Dubail’s First Army pulled back in Alsace, its left exposed by the retreating Second Army under de Castlenau. But the commander of the French Army, Joffre, did not appear much perturbed. Still wedded to the doctrine of offense a l’outrance – offense to the limit – and acknowledging at last that a sizable “northern group” had crossed the Meuse and was rapidly descending on France, he sought to strike a fatal blow at the fulcrum of this pivoting wing with his Third and Fourth armies. The German forces that had repulsed his thrust into Alsace had been stronger than anticipated. The more troops now flooding the central plains of Belgium, the weaker the center. The fact that his two armies were to attack through the Ardennes didn’t faze Joffre. The quick-firing French 75s could be dragged through the dense woods much more easily than the heavy German guns. What Joffre did not yet realize was that the Germans had fully integrated their reserve units into the front-line army, effectively doubling its strength. (French Intelligence at the start of the war believed they were opposed by forty-five divisions. In...