The Moerbeke Affair

By the second week of October 1914, the situation at Antwerp had become untenable. The German heavy artillery, brought steadily closer to the city, was methodically reducing the outer forts, while the Belgian field army, shattered by weeks of fighting, was already in full retreat towards the coast. The Royal Naval Division, holding a sector of the inner line alongside the Belgian defenders, found itself increasingly isolated as the enemy pressure mounted and the prospect of relief faded.

On the evening of the 8^th October, orders were issued for the Division to withdraw. The movement was necessarily piecemeal, carried out by night and under constant shellfire, with different brigades and battalions taking divergent routes in the hope of reaching the coast or making contact with Allied forces believed to be moving up in support. In the confusion and urgency of that retreat, the Hawke Battalion and attached parties of Royal Marines, exhausted by days of marching and fighting, made for the railhead at Stekene, intending to escape westward by train.

What followed in the early hours of the 9^th October was one of the most controversial episodes in the short history of the Division. The train carrying Hawke, the Royal Marines, and a large number of Belgian refugees was halted at Moerbeke and diverted into a siding, where it came under sudden and devastating fire from German guns and machine-guns. In darkness and chaos, with civilians and soldiers alike caught in the killing ground, a large part of the force was compelled to surrender. A smaller party, refusing to lay down their arms, broke away and, after a perilous march, succeeded in reaching Selzaete and eventual safety.

Boarding the last train out of Antwerp

The scale of the losses, the presence of refugees on the train, and, above all, the circumstances in which surrender took place, gave rise to grave concern. Rumour and recrimination followed swiftly. In order to establish what had happened, and whether any blame attached to those involved, the Admiralty convened a Court of Inquiry, which sat at Forton Barracks later in November 1914. Its task was to reconstruct the events from the Antwerp withdrawal to the ambush at Moerbeke, and to examine the conduct of officers and men during those critical hours.

What survives in the contemporary record is a substantial body of evidence given by those who took part: senior officers, company commanders, and eyewitnesses whose perspectives, taken together, allow the affair to be followed almost hour by hour. Alongside this official testimony stands the vivid personal account of Lieutenant Ivor Fraser of the Hawke Battalion, whose narrative conveys, with stark immediacy, the exhaustion, confusion, and terror of the retreat and the ambush itself.

Evidence to the Court of Inquiry

The key evidence presented to the Court is summarised in the following pages, each dealing with the testimony of one of the principal witnesses. Together, they form the backbone of the inquiry’s attempt to unravel the Moerbeke affair.

Lt-Colonel Frank W. Luard	RMLI, Officer in Charge	Portsmouth Battalion
Major Arthur H. French	RMLI	Portsmouth Battalion
Major Norman O. Burge	RMLI	Portsmouth Battalion
Lt-Colonel Edwin G. Lywood	RMLI	Portsmouth Battalion
Captain Henry F. H. Stockley	RMLI	Portsmouth Battalion
Captain Arthur E. Syson	RM Reserve of Officers	Portsmouth Battalion
Captain John C. J. Teague	RM Reserve of Officers	Portsmouth Battalion
Lieutenant David J. Gowney	RMLI	Portsmouth Battalion
Lieutenant Ivor Fraser	RNVR	Hawke Battalion
Further testimonies	Others whose evidence bears directly on the retreat and ambush

Note - These summaries do not reproduce the evidence verbatim, but seek to draw out what each witness said happened, where accounts agree or diverge, and how their individual positions and experiences shaped their view of events.

The Findings of the Court

After hearing the evidence, the Court reached conclusions that, while acknowledging the tragedy of what had occurred, found no grounds for attaching personal blame to the officers or men involved. It accepted that the situation in which the Hawke Battalion and Royal Marines were placed was the product of extreme fatigue, confused communications, and the rapidly changing tactical picture following the fall of Antwerp’s defences. The ambush at Moerbeke was judged to have been the result of enemy preparation and deception rather than any deliberate neglect or misconduct on the part of the train’s escort.

The Court further recognised the efforts of those who attempted to organise resistance under impossible conditions, and of the party that refused to surrender and fought its way clear to Selzaete. At the same time, it acknowledged that, once the train was trapped and surrounded, with refugees exposed to heavy fire, surrender was, for the majority, the only means of preventing an even greater loss of life.

In that sense, the findings offered vindication rather than censure. Yet they could not erase the human cost of the affair, nor the enduring questions that naturally arise when men are forced, in the chaos of war, to choose between hopeless resistance and submission. It is those questions, illuminated by the voices of the witnesses themselves, that this section of the site seeks to explore.

The information in this section of RoyalNavalDivison.info is a summary of that in Len Sellers' RND Journal issues 9 and 10 compiled from the document Proceedings of a court of inquiry assembled in Forton Barracks ref ADM/137/3112.