My grandfather the WWI general: a hero, not a donkey

One hundred years ago today, my grandfather, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow, led the retreat from Mons. It was the last time in history that the British cavalry charged.

Effectively Tom Snow’s tactics were those of Wellington’s wars 100 years earlier. But the circumstances were worse than anything Wellington faced.

On the flat northern French plains, Snow’s 4th Division, was never sent its signals regiment, had no communications whatever, was starved of information from headquarters, had been marched endlessly since the war’s beginning three weeks earlier, and had no idea of where precisely the French or German forces were.

But General Snow managed to hold his ground at the town of Le Cateau for long enough against the increasingly mechanised and much larger German force, to allow British forces to regroup and move on to save Paris.

I have been to the battlefield with my cousin Dan Snow, the TV historian. Using the general’s own diaries (now housed in the Imperial War Museum), we have pieced together what happened that day 100 years ago today.

I never knew my grandfather. I found being on the land where he fought, and where so many died, very moving. I felt a connection with a man I once thought was probably a bit of a “donkey”.

I discovered instead a heroic figure who understood his own shortcomings, but was candid too about the terrible failures of those directing the war from Whitehall.

The music you hear in the  report above is Elegy for Strings In Memoriam Rupert Brooke by Frederick Kelly, a composer who was himself killed in action at the battle of the Somme in 1916.

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