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von Kluck what he wanted to hear: that the British were landing to the north at Belgian ports. He had absolutely no idea that he was about to march into massed numbers of them whilst he moved in the opposite direction. Germany’s first clash with the British Army was about to be centred upon a grim little Belgian mining town named Mons and it was here too, on a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon, in a haze of factories and amongst ugly slag heaps from the mines, that the first Old Etonian to be killed by the enemy was about to suffer his fate.
    On 21 August patrols, including men of the 9th Lancers, became the first British troops to enter Mons. Whispers reached them of the fall of Brussels and massive numbers of German troops heading straight for them. The locals were quick to give them information and as battle approached they would give British troops food, tools to dig trenches and would even help building barricades from wagons, furniture, anything bulky that they could get their hands on. The day that the cavalry entered Mons they sighted the enemy: ambiguous, ghostly figures moving in and out of the dawn mist. Uhlans: a nightmare of a word. One minute they were there on their horses, hovering by a bridge and then they were gone. General Allenby, commanding the entire cavalry division, offered a medal to the first officer or NCO to stick an enemy patrol leader with a lance.
    The strain of the heat on the men, especially the unfit reservists, who formed a large percentage of the BEF was already beginning to tell. With the Irish Guards, Aubrey Herbert and one of his fellow officers had taken to loading his horse with as many rifles and items of kit as he could to lighten the load of those walking alongside, whilst the tired men with their blistered feet clung to his stirrups. Francis, Rivy, Lennie and Douglas, riding with the Ninth, were exhausted. Since Maubeuge, like the rest of the BEF, they had been making their way in stuttering fashion north towards the first British clash of the war.
    The Harvey brothers had managed to fashion a single wash out of a local stream, although it turned out to be more of a mud bath. George Fletcher was feeling quite sorry for himself too, not least because a ‘disgusting little man’ of the Intelligence Corps had refused to give him a horse and sent him off to war on an unglamourous and unreliable motorcycle. ‘I have been exceedingly despondent about this business ever since we crossed the sea,’ he wrote. ‘I felt that a red herring had been drawn across my path.’ Had he waited he would have probably received a commission into the Special Reserve of officers but by running off and joining the Intelligence Corps he remained a Territorial. He was suffering many a sleepless night, in the main not because of conditions but because he could not bear the thought of the army fighting the Germans and he himself not being in the infantry. On 22 August, after he and his smell, which was already rapidly diminishing in his estimation had spent a backbreaking day shuttling messages, he had thrown himself into a makeshift bed at ten o’clock. Less than an hour later he was dragged out of it again to find a wandering battalion that was needed for the now imminent clash. ‘I spent four hours looking for it,’ he bemoaned. ‘Being challenged by sentries every half mile, my headlight lighting up their faces and glittering bayonets pointed straight at my nose.’
    It had been a trying week for all. In the seven nights since leaving Tidworth one of the Ninth’s officers had slept for four of those on a table, in a pub, outdoors on an iron staircase and on the deck of a ship respectively. Their plight was still not over. Having spent 22 August lounging by the side of the road and in fields, as night fell the bulk of the cavalry had orders to switch their position from the right flank of the BEF to the vulnerable left where it would meet the worryingly weak