by Lloyd, Nick
Had the difficulties encountered by the Americans been replicated across the front then Fourth Army’s attack would have been deemed an expensive failure and, more likely than not, cost Rawlinson his job. It would be redeemed, however, only in the south, where Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Braithwaite’s IX Corps faced the canal at the village of Bellenglise. And it was here, of all the sectors of the front, where the Hindenburg Line would be breached. Braithwaite had assigned his main attack to 46th (North Midland) Division, but few of its officers thought it would be possible. Major H. J. C. Marshall, who served with the North Midlanders, had returned from leave only a few days previously and found his divisional headquarters a gloomy place. Although morale was generally high, there was no doubt in the minds of the divisional staff that the main attack was to be delivered on their left by the Americans and Australians. That meant that their task would be what he called a ‘sacrificial stunt’. ‘At the best we might get a foothold on the further bank of the canal, but at a cost which would leave us no longer a fighting force. The division was indeed well used to these affairs, having in past years been given attacks to carry out across belts of uncut wire, in which it had suffered severely.’ The divisional headquarters busied itself with getting everything ready for the attack, including making sure bridging supplies were available to cross the canal. If that failed, it was suggested that the infantry would just have to swim, so a lorry-load of life belts was taken from the cross-Channel ferries at Boulogne. Nobody wanted to do it, but it just had to be done.9
Undeterred, the division attacked an hour later than the Americans, pushing forward quickly behind the barrage, desperately hoping to be upon the enemy before they knew what hit them. Marshall was in the first wave. Under cover of ‘a cyclone of shells’ his company dashed to the nearest enemy trench only to find a hundred dead bodies ‘mostly from the fire of the 800 machine-guns, which had been arranged to rake these trenches immediately the attack commenced’. As at Amiens, the darkness and mist of the first few hours masked much of what went on, making it difficult to maintain direction, yet also blinding German observers. Indeed, the fog was so thick that one of Marshall’s friends, Captain Percy Teeton, ‘was much disgusted to find that he had swum across the canal, in ice-cold water, while a tiny footbridge existed within ten yards of him which had been invisible owing to the mist’.10 In this sector it was essential not just to cross the canal, but also to secure the road bridge at Riqueval that supplied German positions on the western bank. This task had been assigned to a party of nine men under the command of Captain A. H. Charlton of 1/6th North Staffordshire Regiment. According to Private George Waters (who was in Charlton’s company):
The bombardment was terrific as we went forward at 5.50 a.m. in a mist that started coming down. The companies had been told to move forward quickly. Captain Charlton [of] ‘B’ Company had to use his compass to get to the bridge. The men were on top of the Germans before they knew what was happening. A corporal, Crutchley, suddenly came to a German machine gun post protecting the bridge and he shot the German crew down before they could get their guns into action.11
The defenders had placed explosive charges on the bridge and were preparing for demolition when Charlton’s men turned up. Waters remembered that ‘The Germans at the other side of the bridge apparently heard the firing and two or three of them came forward to fire the charge to the mine which had been fixed on the bridge. Before they could get to it they were all shot down by Corporal Crutchley.’ With their bayonets fixed, B Company stormed across the bridge and started cutting all the charges they could find; doing everything they could to make sure that the bridge was not destroyed. Elsewhere the attack was also succeeding and men in life jackets were splashing their way across the canal, all the while under shells and machine-gun fire, and no doubt cursing the Kaiser all the way to the far bank. Within three hours the first and second objectives had been secured and over 5,000 prisoners were making their way to the rear. It had been a brilliant success. Rawlinson and Monash, anxiously awaiting news in their headquarters, were thrilled.12
By 6 p.m. it was growing dark. Fighting continued on most sectors, but in other areas relieved and exhausted British, Australian and American soldiers could remove their helmets, wipe their brows, and survey the scene. The detritus of war lay everywhere. Dead German and Allied soldiers lay in clumps across the front, feldgrau and khaki-clad bodies lying together on the shell-smashed ground that was littered with lost equipment, body parts, fragments of shell and spent cartridges. In the canal sector, corpses bobbed in the murky waters. For the scattered German units along the front – belonging to 51 Army Corps and IV Reserve Corps of Second Army – it had been a day of confused, somewhat inconclusive, fighting. The thick fog had masked much of the attackers’ preparations and meant that the infantry’s warning flares were not seen by their supporting batteries, leaving them to face the attack alone. Nevertheless, there was no dramatic collapse of German resistance on 29 September. Second Army may have been pushed off the canal, but its units fought with remarkable determination. Numerous tanks were taken out by concealed anti-tank guns and elite machine-gun teams had caused scores of British, American and Australian casualties as they crouched in their rifle pits and shell holes and tore into the advancing lines.13 Indeed, when 46th Division counted up the spoils of war after the battle, it collected over 1,000 German machine-guns, with as many as six in each shell hole. In this chaotic battle, with such an intensity of rifle, machine-gun and shellfire tearing the air apart, it is little wonder that casualties on both sides were heavy. At that time it did not feel much like a victory and several more days would elapse before this sector was, in military parlance, ‘mopped up’. Nevertheless, as the Allied soldiers tried to find some rest or shelter from the persistent shellfire, some would have noted with a smile when enemy artillery began pounding their long-evacuated forming-up trenches. The Germans, it seemed, had no idea Fourth Army had established itself on the canal.14
Several weeks later, His Majesty King George V would visit the tunnels at Bellenglise and pay tribute to the Midlanders who had stormed this great rampart of the German defences. It was somewhat fitting, poetic perhaps, that it should fall to 46th Division to cross the Saint-Quentin canal and break the Hindenburg Line. Its officers had thought their mission was a ‘sacrificial stunt’, but pressed on regardless with professionalism and good humour. It was not an elite unit; it was not a member of the powerful Canadian or Australian Corps; it was not even a fashionable British division. It was, on the contrary, a provincial Territorial division from the shires of England that had been present at some of the worst disasters of British arms on the Western Front.15 That the division managed to rebuild and become a competent fighting unit was testament to the abilities and hard work of its men and officers. Major Marshall never went back into the tunnel; he had seen too much death and horror in that gloomy, dark place to ever want to venture there again.
Streamers of the dry-rot fungus, descended from roof to floor, in six foot pendants. The timber supports appeared to be in imminent danger of collapse, and the weird aspect of the caverns, viewed by a flickering candle, made me chary of venturing very far into their dismal recesses. The very airs which came from them, dank and tainted by the fungus breath, seemed fitting to this tomb in which were interred the hope of the German World Empire.16
Here, in a dank tunnel north of Saint-Quentin, the dream of German victory ended. If the Great War was anything, it was a war of surprises.
The Hindenburg Line may have been pierced, but it took British and French forces several days of hard fighting to clear the deep belt of German defences that lay in front of them. By 1 October the furious attacks launched by Haig’s troops were slowing down. The usual factors were to blame: growing disorganization and lack of planning; stubborn enemy resistance; and logistical delays, which meant there would have to be a pause before pushing forward again. Casualties were not as heavy as had been feared, but units were worn down quick
ly in such intensive combat. After four days of brutal fighting, having outrun its supplies and beaten off innumerable counter-attacks, the Canadian Corps was exhausted. Sir Arthur Currie reflected in his diary: ‘Today we met nine German Divisions and must have inflicted very heavy casualties on the Boche. The Artillery never fired as much ammunition as today and many of the targets were fired on over open sights . . . The Germans have fought us here very, very hard, and when it is considered that this is one of their most important strategic flanks the reason for the violence of their counter-attacks can be appreciated.’ Currie estimated that since 8 August his corps had engaged forty-seven German divisions and captured 450 guns. It was little wonder its men thought of themselves as elite troops.17
On 1 October, after a risky and somewhat perilous approach march over pontoon bridges that had been hastily erected across the Saint-Quentin canal, Wilfred Owen’s battalion, 2/Manchesters, went into action. Its mission was to break through what was known as the Beaurevoir–Fonsomme Line – essentially the Hindenburg reserve line – a position that the battered German defenders had been told to hold at all costs. The ground in this area was open and broken with trenches and rifle pits, with scattered wire lying about. They had to move south of the village of Joncourt and take the German lines that lay along the ridge to the east. The battalion went over the top at 4 p.m. and, covered by the usual creeping barrage, managed to achieve its objectives and get astride the ridge. Nevertheless, resistance had been fierce and a further attack on the next village, Ramicourt, by 16/Lancashire Fusiliers, was unsuccessful and with that the attack bogged down. The few tanks that had been in support had been stopped – suffering the usual fate of being knocked out by German guns – and the tired, wet soldiers had to hold on, retrieving their gas masks as the inevitable retaliation of mustard gas shelling began.18
For Owen the experience was what he called ‘sheer’, and he would write to both his mother and Siegfried Sassoon of his endeavours, for which he would be awarded the Military Cross. During the day his company commander had been wounded and Owen had taken charge, successfully beating off several ferocious counter-attacks and capturing a machine-gun position, where he shot an enemy soldier with his revolver. ‘It passed the limits of my Abhorrence,’ he boasted to his mother. ‘I lost all my earthly faculties, and fought like an angel.’ More details were provided in a letter of 8 October.
All one day (after the battle) we could not move from a small trench, though hour by hour the wounded were groaning just outside. Three stretcher-bearers who got up were hit, one after one. I had to order no one to show himself after that, but remembering my own duty, and remembering also my forefathers the agile Welshmen of the Mountains I scrambled out myself and felt an exhilaration in baffling the Machine Guns by quick bounds from cover to cover. After the shells we had been through, and the gas, bullets were like the gentle rain from heaven.19
Owen may have been pleased at his performance, and aware of how useful his MC would be after the war, but he was left shattered by the loss of his servant, Jones, who was shot in the head while crouching next to him, and whose blood soaked Owen’s uniform.
That day news arrived that 15/Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the battalion that had suffered so heavily in the attack at Gouzeaucourt three days earlier, was to be disbanded. On 28 September the battalion – or what was left of it – had marched back to the village of Ytres, where it entered divisional reserve. Unfortunately, as it was leaving the trenches it got caught in a vicious mustard gas bombardment that caused heavy casualties, including the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Miller, and his Adjutant, Major Wilmot. The Medical Officer and his staff were also incapacitated. Rumours about the possible reorganization of the division had been circulating for some time, and now, with manpower at a premium, there was a growing recognition that it would make sense to ditch some battalions and use the men to bolster the remaining units. Major Wilmot had initially been told by his brigadier that ‘One battalion has to go, but I promise you it won’t be yours.’ Perhaps in response to the loss of almost the entire battalion headquarters staff, it was decided that, contrary to what Wilmot had been told, the battalion should go. When Wilmot was in hospital, he was visited by a staff officer from brigade, who told him that after a final inspection on 4 October the men of the battalion would be transferred to 14 and 16/Royal Warwickshire battalions.20
15/Royal Warwickshire was not the only battalion to be disbanded in the first days of October. Manpower was now stretched so thinly throughout the BEF that a number of battalions were being wound up and the men sent to reinforce other units. It was an unsatisfactory and unsettling thing to happen to soldiers who had grown to love their battalion, to feel at home with its ranks, and who felt they had done their time. To be suddenly moved into another unit, to be thrust into a new battalion with strange officers and unfamiliar routines, was a difficult and sometimes frustrating experience. Henry Wilson’s warnings to Haig about sustaining heavy losses at the Hindenburg Line may have annoyed the Commander-in-Chief, but they were a sensible and realistic appreciation of how exhausted the British were becoming. If the war continued at this intensity for much longer, Haig would be forced to disband more than single battalions – entire divisions would have to go. It was no wonder that many in the War Cabinet in London, including the Minister of Munitions, Winston Churchill, were planning for 1919 on the assumption that hundreds, if not thousands, of tanks and aeroplanes, and the mass employment of poison gas, would be required to offset the shortages of men that would increasingly afflict the British and French Armies.
Foch visited Haig’s headquarters the day after Fourth Army had crossed the Saint-Quentin canal. Haig was keen to keep pushing, but knew how tired his divisions were becoming. Debeney’s First Army had not attacked on 29 September, only supporting Rawlinson’s attack with artillery fire and the long-range shelling of German positions, leading to some unkind mutterings that the French were ‘hanging back’ when they should be attacking vigorously. Foch agreed and ordered Debeney to capture Saint-Quentin immediately. Although French patrols occupied its streets on 1 October, they went little further, with strong resistance from German rearguards on the canal slowing their advance.21 Other French forces were on the move to the southeast, but, as in the previous month, they were generally confined to following up retreating enemy forces and conducting small-scale operations. Mangin’s warnings about the fighting power of the French Army were now obvious to all. Foch, desperately trying to urge Pétain on, sent him a brusque message on 4 October, complaining about the lack of progress from Gouraud’s Fourth Army in the Argonne. ‘Yesterday, 3 October . . . we witnessed a battle that was not commanded, a battle that was not pushed, a battle that was not brought together . . . and in consequence a battle in which there was no exploitation of the results obtained.’22 It was absolutely essential that the enemy was continuously engaged.
For German soldiers, there was nothing but chaos, disorganization, shellfire and endless fighting at the grey, smoke-filled, shell-torn front. ‘We are in a daily battle with fate, with death, and it is a hard struggle, hopeless and sad,’ wrote one German soldier, Alfred, on 29 September. He had heard news that his brother, Richard, had been severely wounded and lost a leg in the recent fighting. ‘It is too miserable to imagine . . . that Richard must now return as a cripple from the heroic battle that we are fighting for our survival. We can only be consoled by the fact that it could have turned out even worse.’ He himself had only escaped ‘by a hair’s breadth in a gigantic artillery battle’ at the front. ‘When I was leaving the completely churned-up, smoky trenches, a small splinter injured me (though not seriously) in the knee.’ Alfred had been taken out of the line for a few days to recover, but knew that, soon, he would return to the battlefield. ‘War is everywhere, and there is no end in sight for this horrific struggle,’ he lamented. ‘No victory can be achieved by either side.’23
On the Hindenburg Line, divisions – now frequently no larger than regiments – were r
ushed forward, often given little direction other than to mount counter-attacks or to dig in. In one German unit, 34th Division, which defended the area southwest of Saint-Quentin, the average strength of its companies was now down to twelve men and those who had survived were completely exhausted. Reports described captured prisoners from 21st, 119th and 121st Divisions as being ‘quite ignorant’ and ‘hopelessly confused’, being hurriedly thrown into the line with no orders other than to hold on.24 A German officer from 13/Hussar Regiment, part of what had once been the elite 6th Cavalry Division, complained that his men were in a ‘dreadful state’, some of them having no rifles and others no packs. ‘We received seven machine-guns. Our regiment is an extraordinary sight as owing to the casualties, the strength of our transport was greater than the actual fighting strength of the regiment.’ It had received drafts from Potsdam, but half of these disappeared and the remainder called the infantry ‘war prolongers’ because of their loyalty to the High Command.25
On the evening of 30 September, Crown Prince Rupprecht gathered his officers together and tried to make sense of the situation. ‘The fighting in and around Cambrai was very heavy,’ he recorded in his diary.
The enemy managed briefly to advance through Cambrai northwards and penetrate into Ramillies but was then pushed back after Tillon. On the Second Army’s front, the enemy broke through southwards into the Siegfried 1 position. The breach points were blocked at the sides and we are putting up resistance in the less extensive Siegfried 2 position.26
Given the paucity of reserves and the grim international situation, there was little OHL could do other than shuffle tired and exhausted divisions from army to army. Hindenburg bluntly informed his commanders that ‘No further reserves can be counted upon’ and that an enemy breakthrough ‘must be prevented at all costs . . . In this connection it is of paramount importance to gain time, to inflict heavy losses upon the enemy, to constitute reserves, to transport our equipment to the rear, and to destroy thoroughly the railroad and telephone installations.’27 This was all well and good, but by 2 October Eighteenth Army reported that of its fifteen divisions, six were ‘completely exhausted’. ‘If battle is to be accepted in such a position,’ it warned, ‘then the army must be assigned to its 5 divisions equal in value to those still usable at the present moment . . . If that is not done, then the condition of the army, which recently has already given up 4 of its best divisions, will deteriorate to such a degree on moving into the HERMANN Position, that no responsibility can be assumed for even temporarily holding the position.’28