British retake Mons

Early on the morning of 11 November 1918 soldiers of the Canadian 3rd Division took Mons, a Belgian mining town in the province of Hainaut. It was here, on 23 August 1914, that the British Expeditionary Force had fought its first battle and from here that it had begun its long retreat to the Marne. After more than four years of occupation the town was retaken by soldiers of the Canadian Corps, a few hours before the armistice came into force.

After breaking the German line on the Sambre the Canadians, advancing on the left wing of the British First Army, were passing through the densely built-up coalfield west of Mons. On 9 November they stood before the town. The German divisions were falling back to the Antwerp–Meuse position, but their rearguards were to defend Mons and its surroundings for as long as possible. The town was surrounded by canals to the south, west and north-west, and German machine guns in the houses on the edge of the town covered all the approaches. The corps commander, General Arthur Currie, forbade the shelling of Mons, even of the German machine-gun nests, in order to spare the town and its inhabitants. He decided to encircle it: the 2nd Division was to go round Mons from the south and take the hills to the east, and the 3rd Division was to enter the town centre. Throughout 10 November the Canadians tried in vain to break into the town. The 2nd Division took the village of Mesvin, but the Germans held on to the wooded hill of Bois la Haut until nightfall.

At about 11 p.m. platoons of the 42nd Battalion (Royal Highlanders of Canada) crossed the tracks of the railway station, where there was a gap in the water obstacle, and began to clear the town of Germans, moving east. A second company, together with a company of the Royal Canadian Regiment, crossed the canal on a makeshift bridge of planks, and at two in the morning another company of that regiment entered the town from the north-west. Another company occupied the suburb of Nimy, where the British had fought in August 1914. The last German company left the western part of the town before dawn. According to the British official history Mons was free at dawn, and at about seven the pipe band of the 42nd Battalion marched into the town, greeted enthusiastically by the inhabitants. Later the two battalions argued over which of them had reached the main square first. The mayor and councillors leaned towards the version of the Royal Canadian Regiment, whose officer was the first to sign the town’s Golden Book.

At 6.30 a.m. word reached corps headquarters that hostilities would cease at eleven, but some units in the front line received it only at about nine. Beyond Mons the Canadians and British cavalrymen continued east. By eleven they had advanced a few kilometres, and a squadron of the 5th Lancers, which had fought at Mons in 1914, reached Saint-Denis. At about 9.30 a.m., near Mons, a private of that regiment, 40-year-old George Ellison, who according to his biography had already fought at Mons in 1914, was killed by a German rifleman’s bullet. He is regarded as the last British soldier killed in the war. At 10.58, two minutes before the armistice, at Ville-sur-Haine on the canal east of Mons, a German sniper mortally wounded Private George Price of the 28th Battalion, who was searching houses on the far side of the canal with a patrol. Price is traditionally regarded as the last soldier of the British Empire to be killed in the First World War. Both lie in the military cemetery at Saint-Symphorien near Mons, not far from John Parr, the first British soldier killed in the war, in August 1914.

The capture of Mons cost the Canadians little compared with earlier battles. According to the Canadian official history, in the last two days of fighting the corps lost 18 officers and 262 other ranks killed, wounded and missing, and the 3rd Division lost 116 men on 10–11 November. On the afternoon of 11 November Currie made a ceremonial entry into the town and took a parade in the main square. Nine years later a newspaper in Ontario accused him of having needlessly sacrificed soldiers’ lives at Mons in the last days of the war. Currie sued the publisher for libel and won in 1928: the court found that the corps had been ordered to press the Germans until the moment of the armistice, and that Mons had been cleared several hours before eleven. For the British and Canadians Mons became a symbol: the war on the Western Front ended for them exactly where it had begun.