1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  Tons of steel and high explosive fell with shattering force upon the forward positions and the Battle Zone. As the men crouched deafened and dazed in their trenches or staggered drunkenly towards control points, the ground rocked and heaved under them, the surrounding fog coiled and twisted, then sweetened suddenly with the sinister taint of lethal and lachrymatory gas. Shocked, cursing with anger yet sick with fear, those who survived the first few seconds pulled on their gas masks and listened despite themselves for the sound of their own deaths rushing near.

  In the Battle Zone, gun positions, battery and brigade headquarters, telephone exchanges and road junctions collapsed or split apart under the weight and volume of fire. Ammunition dumps blew up in towering mushrooms of flame and destruction, the laboriously laid signal wires were ripped apart, and cannon were pounded into unrecognizable masses of bloodstained metal – some before they had fired their first rounds. For forty miles the eastern horizon was a line of leaping red flame, with a dulled reflection beneath the sheet of fog which covered the British positions.

  Soon a pattern emerged. Trench-mortars only were bombarding the front trenches and after twenty minutes their fire slackened – but never ceased. The guns plastered the Battle Zone and were to do so for two hours. Heavy shells hurtled overhead and crashed to earth amid the camps, the artillery horse-lines, the billets and casualty clearing stations of the rear areas; howitzers and the lighter field-guns pounded the redoubts, the wireless and power-buzzer installations, the communication trenches. It was evident that the attackers had marked down their targets with considerable accuracy.

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  And everywhere gas drenched wide areas, and lines of coughing, vomiting and blinded men congregated at the aid posts.

  At times the fire grew so intense that the very laws of nature seemed in abeyance. The air vibrated with shock, black layers danced in the fog, fixed objects flickered to and fro, and in the light of mounting flame and fire the mist became a crimson, yellow-shot effervescence. The thunder and crash of explosion became a norm which was heard no longer, as senses numbed and violence and horror increased.

  Then, after fifty minutes, the barrage abruptly shifted to the front line and the known infantry positions were systematically swept for ten minutes. Trenches caved in, machine-gun posts were obliterated, wire belts blown apart, men blown to fragments.

  Ten minutes later the main weight of fire was switched back on to the Battle Zone and once again the destruction of communication and control centres began, the systematic gassing of artillery and reserve formations. This continued until 6.40 a.m., then it slackened as one third of the German howitzers and field-guns fired again in turn upon the British front-line infantry – registering now, for the wrath to come.

  By now daylight was growing, dimming the brilliance of the shell-bursts, whitening the scenes of desolation – but adding little to their visible areas for the fog was still dense. In front, the British lay in the remains of their trenches or in shell-holes, desperately watching for signs of enemy movement, shivering with shock, with anticipation, with dreadful tension. At isolated places along the front, German infantry appeared out of the smoke, and bitter hand-to-hand fighting took place, generally in no-man’s-land with the bombardment as fitting backcloth. But these attacks were exceptional – mostly the infantry of both armies lay waiting with mingled hope and terror for the moment of mass assault.

  And those British who could still distinguish phenomena beyond the radius of their own immediate danger realized that the main weight of the barrage, which had fallen behind them up to now, was gradually concentrating along the forward edge of the Battle Zone and creeping back across the intermediate area towards them.

  It was all done systematically, accurately, and inexorably. By 8.20 a.m. all German guns with the exception of the long-range and counter-bombardment batteries were firing on the British front-line infantry positions on the entire length of the Fifth Army front north of the Oise, and along that part of the Third Army front which extended from the northern flank of the Flesquières Salient up to the Sensée river. The Salient itself was at this time almost an oasis of peace within the holocaust – for Ludendorff’s plan was to pinch it out, not to annihilate it.

  For eighty minutes this bombardment on the forward positions continued – murderous, remorseless, devastating, rising to a climax at 9.35 a.m. when every trench-mortar along the German line came into massed action again and German engineers added to the uproar by firing the charges they had laid in the tattered remnants of the British wire.

  And at 9.40 a.m., the German infantry rose to their feet and stormed forward.

  The main assault troops moved fast as they had been trained to do. Generally they raced ahead with their rifles slung – relying for effect upon ample supplies of the stick-bombs they all carried, and upon the light machine-guns and flame-throwers which accompanied each section. Aided by the fog, they passed quickly through the forward positions, evading the known isolated posts and redoubts, jumping across the trenches when they came to them, finding their way by compass and memory of well-conned maps or often of the ground itself when they had fought across it before. Behind them, the second and third attack waves mopped up – sometimes by merely directing dazed and bleeding prisoners to the rear, sometimes completing the havoc of the guns with bayonet and rifle butt. Where organized resistance remained, they encircled it, but if its reduction proved too difficult or too lengthy, the task was handed over to the follow-up divisions and the artillery. Then the attack waves followed the Storm Troops on into the Battle Zone.

  Their fortunes on the Fifth Army front varied inversely with their distance from the Oise, and the resultant density of the concealing fog; for it was in the valley of this river that the fog was thickest and so the slowest to disperse. It did not do so here until the early afternoon, and by this time the Storm Troops had fought their way under its cloak deep into the Battle Zone, and in one place south of St. Quentin were practically through it.

  Around St. Quentin, however, and to the north, the British were holding on to the forward edge of the Battle Zone for some miles. This was in part due to the earlier clearing of the fog which allowed the emplaced machine-guns to fire upon the advancing enemy before they were actually close enough to bayonet the crews, and in part to the tenacity of the front-line battalions, some of whom were still fighting in forward redoubts and were to continue to do so until early evening. Some idea of their ordeal may be gathered from the fact that of the eight battalions in the front line of XVIII Corps, only fifty men survived to retire to the Battle Zone (and half of them quickly became casualties there) and no indication of the fate of two battalions of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps was found until months later, when a few survivors were found recovering from their wounds in German hospitals. But this happened everywhere along the fronts, especially where bombardment had sealed the avenues of escape or the exhortations by the Staff to fight on to the last man and the last bullet had been obeyed perhaps too slavishly.

  Fortunately this did not happen everywhere, for some of the front-line commanders were quick to realize that the enemy were following methods of attack similar to those they had themselves been urging upon the Staff for several years. With all the communications to the rear now cut, these men gathered together what forces remained to them, and either struck overland in a series of vicious, desperate flank attacks against the German waves, or raced back through the winding communication trenches towards the strong-points of the Battle Zone. Often they came across the deserted or annihilated remains of their own battalion or brigade headquarters; sometimes they avenged the deaths of their commanders in bloody hand-to-hand clashes with the overtaken Storm Troops.

  Further north still, up towards the Flesquières Salient and the point of juncture of the Fifth and Third Armies, some penetration of the Battle Zone had occurred where the fog had persisted in dense pockets in the Omignon valley. Two miles north of the valley, however, a
redoubt had been formed around the ruins of a village named Le Verguier and into it had retreated the survivors of the 3rd Rifle Brigade and the 8th Queens, who had been holding forward positions during the bombardment. The survivors had, moreover, brought their Lewis guns back with them, and when, shortly after their arrival between 10.30 and 11 a.m., the sun broke through the mist and dispersed it, they saw in front of them and well within their fields of fire, German troops swarming like ants from a disturbed nest across towards the Battle Zone. Few of the Germans reached it. Once visibility was granted to Fifth Army defenders, no training or tactics by the attackers availed: they were mown down in hundreds by troops with vivid and lacerated memories of the morning’s carnage, and no mercy for those who had thought to benefit from it.

  From this position northwards, the British were fighting in trenches which had been their own responsibility for a considerably longer period than those to the south. They were better dug, better sited and better protected – and this was as well, for here was delivered the main Michael 2 attack of the German Second Army under General von der Marwitz. It was designed to cut deep across the line south of the Flesquières Salient, join hands with the Michael 1 attack smashing down from the north – thus cutting off the British divisions facing Cambrai and Marcoing as a first objective – then to sweep westwards to Péronne and Bapaume preparatory to the wheel up through Albert to the north.

  Immediately south of the Salient, Scottish and South African divisions clung to the forward edge of the Battle Zone from morning till night with grim determination. They had been forced back out of Gauche Wood by a combination of bombardment and infiltration, but possibly the wider horizons of the Springboks’ birthplace had given them a more natural appreciation of country and manœuvre: attacked from the rear, they had retreated rapidly from a position obviously soon to become untenable to a redoubt on the heights of Quentin Ridge. From there they were not dislodged – indeed early attempts by the enemy to storm the redoubt proved so costly to them that the assault waves, true to their training, quickly turned elsewhere to probe for easier penetration.

  But not to the Flesquières Salient. Here, the Royal Naval Division – composed originally of seamen for whom no ships were immediately available, but since established as a permanent division – and their immediate neighbours of the southern corps of the Third Army had beaten off early morning attacks, and then been subjected to a heavy bombardment of mustard gas shells which caused them many casualties and extreme discomfort for those who survived. But no main attacks smashed through the positions of the Forward Zone – although the outposts were withdrawn – and for the whole of the first day the Salient formed the hinge upon which the British front to the south slowly turned, as it was pressed back at its farther edge in the Oise valley, opposite la Fère. So in the late afternoon, the Hawke, the Drake and the Royal Marine Battalions were still holding the support trenches of the front line and listening with awe and some bewilderment to the sounds of gigantic conflict on each side. It was not until midnight that some inkling of the situations there reached them, and they received orders to retire to their Intermediate Zone and hold themselves in readiness for further and speedy withdrawal to their Battle Zone in case of necessity.

  For immediately to the north, von Below’s Storm Troops of the Michael 1 offensive had smashed through the front of the 51st Highland Division on each side of the main Cambrai–Bapaume road, encircled the main redoubts and reached the rear edge of the Battle Zone. In the afternoon their support divisions swept up with artillery which blasted the centres of resistance over open sights, while additional assault sections mopped up with their light machine-guns and flame-throwers. Small parties of Seaforth and Gordon Highlanders, of the Argyll and Sutherland, and the Black Watch, bitterly defended isolated positions; but they had suffered severely in the opening bombardment and the German infantry fought with a fierce determination which won them an ever-growing control of the Battle Zone.

  In the centre of the Third Army front, too, Storm Troops reached the last line of the Battle Zone, shouldering their way forward on an ever-widening front. Here most of all their tactics paid, for the corps commanders of the British Third Army had been tempted by the strength of their own forward defensive positions into packing them too tightly with their troops. There had been, for instance, twenty-one battalions in the front line on the ten miles across which Michael 1 had been delivered (against eleven battalions on a similar length of the Fifth Army front) – and although this offered in theory an immensely strong protective casing to the corps areas, in practice it had merely provided densely packed targets for the German bombardment.

  In the forward posts and the front line, the slaughter during the opening hours of the offensive had been horrific. Entire platoons had been wiped out in seconds, men had been killed by the flying fragments of their friends’ bodies, buried in collapsing trenches, trodden to death by those seeking room to dodge their own. And not only had there been more troops compressed into the Forward Zone, but the reserve battalions had been held far back, and there were relatively few battalions holding the main Battle Zone.

  Once the Storm Troops broke through the corps fronts, they therefore faced a far easier task than their compatriots to the south. Still infiltrating past centres of resistance, they struck deep into the Battle Zone, while behind them their support waves tore open gaps in the blood-soaked forward positions, and widened them to let through the full flood of the German Seventeenth Army.

  Even these troops still followed the same tactics of by-passing resistance and working around behind it. Time after time during the day’s fighting, Third Army runners dispatched to battalion or divisional headquarters found them already in German hands, gun-crews were attacked from the rear and fought hand-to-hand with enemy infantry under the barrels of their own guns. During that afternoon – for the first time for many months – artillery duels took place between batteries which could see each other.

  As the few battalions in the Battle Zone were outflanked or pressed back by the weight of enemy attack, a number of unlikely place-holders found themselves forced to learn again the arts of infanteering which they had fondly hoped they had put behind them. Mess waiters, cooks, quartermasters and office clerks fought – and fought well, too – to beat off the German attack upon the last line of the Battle Zone; a Special Duties Gas Unit of the Royal Engineers literally raced a platoon of Storm Troops across open ground for possession of an unoccupied section of trench, and the instructors and pupils of a Divisional Bombing School aided a counter-attack in the Hirondelle valley, during which legend recounts that a pupil was heard remarking aggrievedly to an NCO, ‘I thought you told us yesterday that so long as we did as you said, we wouldn’t come to no harm on this course?’

  On the ridge above the Sensée valley, Lieutenant-Colonel Deneys Reitz – who had ridden with Boer Commandos against the British sixteen years before – was now commanding a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Despite their casualties during the bombardment, despite the fact that he himself was twice badly gassed, the battalion held the crest through the entire day and lent support to the battalion on their left front, to such effect that between them they formed the left flank of the British defence. There was no encroachment north of them, and Arras was therefore never – during the first day – in danger.

  As dusk fell, the fighting died. Each side licked its wounds and made what preparations it could for the morrow. For the German army commanders it was mostly a question of moving up their reserves and endeavouring to ensure that they were in the most advantageous positions for the next stage of the attack: for the British commanders, it was a question of discovering what they had left, for there were virtually no reserves available.

  Gough telephoned GHQ and was answered with sympathetic reassurance by the soft voice of the Chief-of-Staff. To Gough’s assertion that the Fifth Army had done magnificently to hold the enemy along the front of the Battle Zone, with the exception of two breaches in t
he valleys of the Cologne and the Omignon and the wider and more serious penetration south of St. Quentin and in the Oise valley, Lawrence answered with enthusiastic agreement and the suggestion that they would certainly do even better tomorrow. But when Gough pointed out that there was always the possibility that the Germans instead might do better tomorrow, he was assured that after the severe losses the enemy had suffered that day, they would be far too busy clearing the battlefield and treating their wounded, even to consider another attempt at an advance.

  ‘I found it difficult’, Sir Hubert wrote later, ‘to get the full gravity of the situation understood.’

  He persevered however, and in due course obtained permission to withdraw his severely mauled right flank back during the night behind the protection of the Crozat Canal, and also to reinforce it with some units from the 2nd Cavalry Division. The left flank of this withdrawal would be connected along the line of the St. Quentin Canal with the troops still in the Battle Zone. He also made adjustments to buttress the flanks of the two breaches in the more northern valleys and he was forced to order the reluctant retreat of the South African Brigade in order to conform with the withdrawal to their Intermediate Zone of the divisions in the Flesquières Salient.

  For the success of the Michael 1 attacks on the Third Army had undoubtedly rendered necessary the partial evacuation of the Salient – and from midnight on the men of the Royal Naval Division slowly filtered back through their communication trenches, full of puzzled anger and frustration over a situation which has bedevilled so many soldiers in so many wars. They had fought hard and held their positions all day while the battle had raged: now it was over they were retreating. ‘It was enough,’ as they bitterly remarked to each other, ‘to make you wish you hadn’t volunteered to go to sea.’

  Other – sometimes almost incredible – movements of troops took place during that night.