The Highland Division

by Eric Linklater

  The Highlanders and the men from the Pyrenees got on very well together, and the Camerons gave their Allies some anti-tank weapons to stiffen their resistance. That night, after a day of rain, of conference in the forest, and the news that Belgium had surrendered, the 4th Seaforths went forward to Le Transloy, three miles beyond the river, their Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel Houldsworth, having assembled his battalion and completed his reconnaissance between mid-afternoon and late evening. By the following day the whole Division had assembled on a front extending from Senarpont to Eu. On its right, at Senarpont, was the French IX Corps; on its left, at Eu, it was supposed to be in contact with French marines. The Division was to hold approximately twenty miles.

  The Germans had by this time crossed the Somme in the vicinity of Abbeville, and established bridgeheads—a smallish one at St Valéry-sur-Somme, a large one opposite Abbeville, where they held a triangular territory of which the apex was Huppy, and the river from Petit Port to Pont Rémy the base. In the early morning of May 29th a joint attack was made on the Abbeville bridgehead by our 1st Armoured Division and the French, under French command. The attack was not synchronised, and the Armoured Division suffered heavily and achieved none of its purpose; but the French won a partial success, and pushed back the apex of the German triangle to a point between Miannay and Moyenneville. The French tank-commander was General de Gaulle.

  Brigadier Stewart, commanding the 152nd Brigade, who was reconnoitring an area east of the battle, found himself without intention an intimate spectator of it. He was surrounded by its overflow. The tanks moving hither and thither, jerkily, with sudden rushes, were strangely reminiscent of insects darting across the surface of a pond. In spite of gun-fire, the éclat of bursting shells, the spectacle appeared curiously unreal. War, which had once been a solid thing, had become almost entirely fluid.

  On the following day the French again attacked, with infantry, tanks and bombers. Three squadrons made a determined assault on Abbeville, but met a dense barrage of light anti-aircraft fire, while the infantry and tanks failed to make any deeper impression on the bridgehead. “B” company of the 1st Black Watch—on loan from the 153rd Brigade—took part in this attack, and the men were exasperated by its failure. The battalion had spent the previous day moving forward, under orders repeatedly altered, to destinations which varied accordingly. Finally, in the early hours of the 30th, they relieved French cavalry at Miannay, Bouillancourt and Toeuffles; and at two o’clock in the afternoon “B” company was ordered to take the Grand Bois of Cambron at a quarter-past four. It went out and met machine-gun fire from the right; it destroyed this opposition. In the wood it met with no resistance and arrived at its objective on the north-eastern outskirts. But because the French attack on the village of Cambron was unsuccessful, the Black Watch was left with a flank in the air and had to retire to come into line with its neighbours.

  Shortly before midnight de Gaulle informed Brigadier Stewart that he was doubtful if he could hold the villages of Moyenneville and Bienfay, that he had won the day before. For some time, indeed, Moyenneville was very scantily occupied, though the French colonel who commanded the area walked up and down the streets, magnificently unperturbed by the near neighbourhood of the enemy and the poverty of his garrison. Stewart agreed to reinforce this pair of villages immediately, and sent up the 2nd Seaforths, who moved with so little delay that by six o’clock in the morning two companies were in Bienfay, two in Moyenneville; the remainder of the Brigade—4th Camerons and 4th Seaforths—being at Limeux and Béhen.

  The Line of the Somme

  On May 31st General Altmayer, commanding the French IX Corps, ordered the Fifty-First to hold the line of the Somme from Erondelle to the sea. The French had originally undertaken to eliminate the Abbeville bridgehead before handing over the sector to us. They had failed to do this, and General Fortune’s position was more difficult than he had anticipated; But the 152nd Brigade immediately relieved the French in the villages it had already reinforced; and on June 1st brigade frontages were allotted among the woods and hamlets on the south bank of the Somme, with the 152nd Brigade on the right, the 153rd in the centre, and the 154th on the left.

  Many of the French troops had already been in battle, and were short of equipment. The 5th Light Cavalry, for instance, whose sector was taken over by the 154th Brigade, had fought through the campaign in Belgium, where they had lost all but two of their armoured cars. But they had saved their guns, and with these salvaged weapons, after a hurried move, they had held their position on the Somme.

  The Armoured Division had withdrawn to the neighbourhood of Rouen to refit, leaving a support-group of one brigade which, with the Lothians and Border Horse, was placed in Divisional reserve. But within a few hours the Lothians had to take over a position from the French, and were in the front line, on the extreme right of it, from Erondelle to Tourbières. If it was to hold a front of twenty miles or more, the Fifty-First could scarcely afford the luxury of an adequate Divisional reserve.

  Preparation was made for a new attack on the Abbeville bridgehead. There was no certain knowledge of the strength of the German position, and though the enemy had been able to deal heavy damage to our Armoured Division, and wholly to repulse the second French attack, a report was current that so far the bridgehead was only lightly held. But the Germans were bringing up reinforcements, and their obvious intention was to continue their offensive from the salient they had created; if they were to be attacked, then the sooner the better.

  General de Gaulle’s command had now left the lower Somme for service elsewhere, but the infantry, tanks and guns of the French 31st Division had arrived on the Bresle. A considerable strength of artillery, French and British, was brought into position, and ammunition dumped on the battery sites. The attack would be supported by about two hundred and fifty guns of all calibres, and the conference to elaborate a fire-plan lasted for more than three hours. It was complicated by the fact that none of the French officers spoke much English, and few of the British officers had more than twenty words of French. Finally it was decided that the French attack would be supported by French artillery, the British by their own guns.

  Seventy miles away, while this battle of the rivers was being mounted, the last remaining fragments of the British Expeditionary Force were ferried home from the nightmare beaches of Dunkirk. …

  5. The Battle of Abbeville

  At five o’clock on the afternoon of June 3rd the road from Blangy to St Maxent was closed to the Fifty-First to allow the French to bring forward their troops, tanks and guns from the Bresle. The battle would begin at dawn; or so it was hoped. But ammunition for the French 75’s was late in arriving, and the attack, it seemed, would have to be postponed. All through the short night the road from Blangy was fearfully congested, but before daylight came it was clear again, and the 75’s had their complement of shells. At three o’clock on June 4th the Allied artillery opened intensive fire on the German positions, and half an hour later tanks and infantry, French and Scots, advanced towards their first objective.

  Their goal was about six miles of ground overlooking the water-meadows from Caubert on the right to the Cambron woods on their left. The 4th Camerons, on the right, would attack Caubert and the wooded ridge called the Hedgehog. In the centre the French with their tanks, and the 4th Seaforths under French command, would make for the Roman fort on the north end of the Mont de Caubert, and try to clear all the country between the two main roads that lead to Abbeville. And the 1st Gordons, on the left, would from Cahon attack the Cambron woods and the spur overlooking Cambron. The task of the 154th Brigade, on the extreme left, was to prevent the enemy from reinforcing his bridgehead. The Brigade was given no objective to capture.

  The Germans, by unlucky coincidence, had also mounted an attack for the morning of the 4th, and on their left—our right—their infantry moved out a few minutes before our barrage opened. When “B” company of the 4th Camerons advanced towards the Hedgehog, they enc
ountered, in a field of rye well in front of the hill, a German battalion quite unscathed by gun-fire. There was stern fighting there. The Germans had sited numerous machine-guns in the corn, and “B” company had many casualties. One officer survived, Second-Lieutenant Robertson, who led the remaining forty of the company into a wood north-west of Mareuil-Caubert, where “A” company was waiting. There he reorganised his command, and returning to Battalion Headquarters at Huchenneville asked for more ammunition that he might resume his attack on the Hedgehog. But when he revealed his strength, he was dissuaded of his ambition.

  “D” company, on the left, went forward against Caubert, and also met German infantry. The two right-hand platoons fought their way through and the fifty men who survived, under Second-Lieutenant David Ross, made good their objective. The other platoons, advancing along the Route Nationale, met intense machine-gun fire from the road ahead of them, and from the dominating ridge of the Mont de Caubert, where the French had failed to capture Cæsar’s Camp.

  In the centre the attack was led by a battalion of French heavy tanks and a battalion of Chasseurs portés. Most of the tanks were wrecked, either by mines in a previously undetected minefield, or by anti-tank guns which had not been observed until they opened fire. A few tanks reached their objective, but had to retire to refuel, or were driven off again: the Germans had dug their guns deep into the chalky vallum of the Roman camp, and only a long-continued, densely-concentrated bombardment could have silenced them. Some of the French motorised infantry got as far as Yonval, in the valley west of the Caubert ridge, but were unable to go farther or to hold their ground.

  The Seaforths Went On

  The second wave of the attack consisted of a battalion of French light tanks and the leading companies of the 4th Seaforths. Advancing from the wooded slopes east of Bienfay, they approached the naked rise of the Mont de Caubert. But the tanks endured no more than two or three hundred yards of open country. Mines blew them up, or gun-fire hit and disabled them. The French officers and tank-crews were cheerful, confident, and superbly brave. They saw their leaders hit and disabled, but without doubt or hesitation followed, steering their vehicles into the deadly fire of the German anti-tank guns, till they too were killed. Their tanks lay inert and useless, or burst into flame. They were all put out of action.

  The Seaforths went on without them. They ran into withering machine-gun fire, and were mown like grass. But those who lived went on, and the attack was carried a little farther. Some survivors reached their first objective, about six hundred yards up the slope. They were few in number. Sergeant Donald MacLeod was the only man left of his platoon. When his officer was killed, MacLeod led the platoon. Man after man fell to the clattering machine-guns that cut them down like a reaper. MacLeod himself, badly wounded, went on alone.

  When Major Simon Fraser, commanding “B” company, was last seen, he was making a forward reconnaissance. Though his company was almost annihilated, he was still intent on reaching his objective. He refused to admit the evidence of defeat that lay so abundantly on the ridge, and went on. But there was only a handful of men to follow, and on his left and below him were the French infantry at Yonval, incapable of advancing till the Mont de Caubert had been won. And of the tanks that should have led the way to Cæsar’s Camp, not one remained.

  The 2nd Seaforths were successful, taking one of the Bienfay woods, and on the left “C” company of the 1st Gordons advanced from Cahon in face of stiff opposition from enemy machine-gun posts, cunningly concealed, and the forty survivors of the company reached the edge of the Grand Bois west of Cambron by nine o’clock. “D” company encountered similar resistance; but two platoons, though hindered by the difficulty of making their way through thick undergrowth, reached their objective a little later, and by eleven o’clock the company was in position for the next phase of the attack, with the remnant of “C” holding the northern front of the wood. The enemy, they reported, had no great strength in that vicinity, but his machine-gun posts were well sited, and “they naturally hamper the attack,” said the Gordons apologetically.

  They were eager to go on, however. They pressed for permission to advance on their second objective, but General Fortune had to refuse them. The centre had not kept pace with them, and their right flank was vulnerable. Even their first objective was untenable, and they were ordered to withdraw. The defeat of the French 31st Division, and the annihilation of its tanks, spelt failure for all; and the Abbeville bridgehead remained.

  On the extreme left the 8th Argyll and Sutherlands—154th Brigade—had been cast for a quiet role in the day’s action, but their Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel Grant, had ideas of his own. He had suggested a local attempt to reduce the German bridgehead at St Valéry-sur-Somme; but the Division, under French command, was preoccupied with the Abbeville front, and Grant was disappointed. But with the help of Major Towers, R.A., commanding a battery of the 17th Field Regiment in St Blimont, he staged an interesting diversion. With an observation-post and a wireless-telephone truck at Le Hourdel, they shelled German machine-gun pits in the marshes west of the citadel of St Valéry, and Le Crotoy, across the river, where the enemy appeared to be concentrating. Though without immediate influence on the battle, the bombardment of Le Crotoy, at extreme range, had gratifying effects.

  The 152nd Brigade lost twenty officers and five hundred and forty-three other ranks in the day’s fighting. Its battalions had been exposed to close machine-gun fire, to mortars, artillery, and dive-bombing; and the Highlanders had not spared themselves. They had been signally unwilling to admit defeat, and when defeat could no longer be denied, they often retained a stubbornly independent attitude to it. Sergeant MacLeod, for instance, left wounded and alone on the Caubert ridge, eluded the enemy for two days and nights, and finally rejoined his battalion. David Ross, who had fought his way into the village of Caubert, was later reported missing; but on June 6th, forty-eight hours after the battle, he reappeared at Martaineville with another officer and sixty Cameron Highlanders whom he had led through ten or a dozen miles of country infested by the enemy’s mobile forces. And Lieutenant Hugh Macrae, 4th Seaforths, who was wounded in the assault on the ridge but reached the farthest forward position, lay there till nightfall, and then of his two and half score men, all of whom were casualties, painfully sought and collected the few who could walk, and led them to the nearest Regimental Aid Post, saving them from certain capture.

  6. The Germans Drive Forward

  The Germans, steadily reinforced, pushed their attack without delay, and it soon became apparent that the Division had no hope of holding its twenty-mile front against such forces as the enemy was able to concentrate. He renewed the battle at daybreak on the 5th, now thrusting most strongly against the 154th Brigade, which was thinly spread from Quesnoy to Le Hourdel and the sea: a front of eight miles or so. The 1st Black Watch had not returned from loan to the 153rd, and the 154th, with both battalions in the line, had no Brigade reserve.

  The three villages of Saigneville, Mons and Catigny were held by the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and these were vigorously attacked by infantry-carriers, motor-borne machine-guns, and some armoured vehicles. On the left of the 7th, between Catigny and the sea, were the 8th Argylls; they too were heavily assailed.

  “B” company of the 7th, with a machine-gun section of the Northumberland Fusiliers, repulsed a German attack on Saigneville, and directed artillery fire on a German concentration in a nearby ravine. At eight o’clock their telephone was cut, but they had sufficient peace and appetite to eat a quiet breakfast half an hour later. “C” company, at Mons, was surrounded soon after dawn by an estimated force of a thousand infantry, and “D” company at Catigny, having repelled an attack supported by light tanks, withdrew to St Blimont, which was held by a company of the 8th, leaving Second-Lieutenant Green—who had been with the battalion for one day only—to hold with his platoon the cross-roads at Arrest. Green was not heard of again.

  Touch was then los
t with these advanced companies, and Battalion Headquarters at Franleu were also surrounded.

  The German stream, by now, was driving the Division back along its whole front. As the incoming tide, advancing over flattish sand, comes in by sudden trickles or runnels—a channel here, a channel there—then, drowning the islets it has surrounded, goes on with never-deviating purpose, though still by unexpected sallies, so the Germans found gaps and entry in the twenty miles of hill, hedgerow, village, wood and rolling field from Limeux to the sea. The front was too long, its defenders too few. It was a physical, a numerical impossibility to hold so long a line with only one division; but nowhere was it abandoned without fighting.

  When the enemy by-passed or overran the forward companies of the 7th Argylls, the 1st Gordons on their right were left in an untenable salient between Saigneville and Gouy, with the Germans thrusting deeply past them towards Quesnoy. “A” company at Quesnoy was surrounded, and another company, going to its help from somewhere in front of Miannay, crossed a ridge and came under the fire of German mortars and infantry-guns. Some degree of control was restored, after fighting, and the Gordons were ordered to face left and occupy the high ground overlooking the railway from Cahon to Hymmeville.

  On their right, between Lambercourt and Toeuffles, the 1st Black Watch was holding a front of two and a half miles. They were well placed in natural cover, with, in many places, a thousand yards of open country before them, and Private McCready—whose correspondence has already been quoted—describes their defence: “Cpl. Spalding was killed in this position, which was the best the Battalion had, he was killed by a sniper who was spotted by one of the A/T Detachment. Cpl. Spalding was soon avenged. We held these positions for two days, and hand-to-hand fighting took place in “D” company area. The enemy had to cross a river and advance up hill over open ground, they evidently had no idea of our position. ‘C’ Coy. held their fire until they were 200 yards away, then let them have it. I was reinforcing one of the A/T guns at that time, as Martin was badly shell-shocked and another A/T man was killed. ‘D’ Coy. fire was terrific, the enemy had no chance at all. Nutting was badly wounded there in 5 different places, but he was very cheerful although he must have been suffering terribly. That same day Bn. H.Q. was shelled, the C.O.’s batman was killed, and the R.S.M. wounded in the hand. …”