Armies of Occupation: Part II: The British in Germany 1918-1929
J. Garston describes how for eleven years, amid political and economic storms, first from Cologne and then from Wiesbaden, the British Army kept watch over the Rhine.
At seven o’clock on the morning of November 11th, 1918, Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. H. C. Alexander,1 commanding the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, reported to the commander of the 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade on the outskirts of Mons. He was told that a Canadian battalion had already entered the town and that a squadron of the 5th Lancers was to pass through the town and seize the high ground around St. Denis, north-east of Mons.
By eight o’clock, the British squadron was struggling through streets crowded with hysterical Belgians, the Curé greeting the squadron commander with the words—“We saw you going; but we knew you would be back.”
It had been at St. Denis that the first cavalry skirmish of the war had taken place in August 1914, and it was there on the high ground overlooking Mons that “A” Squadron of the 5th Lancers received the news at 10.45 a.m. that an Armistice would take effect from eleven o’clock. To the 5th Lancers had fallen the honour of being the first British troops to enter Mons, although it had been the Canadians who had captured the town.
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