Part 16

The Allies on the Western front were meantime forced to remain on the defensive until such time as the American reinforcements should arrive in sufficient numbers to enable them to regain the initiative. Since April, 1917, the British army had borne the chief burden of the war in the West, and "the bloody struggles to conquer the Flanders ridges"--the words are those of Sir Douglas Haig himself--as well as the prolonged fight at Cambrai, "had left the army at low ebb in regard both to training and numbers". In view of the expected German offensive, it became imperative to fill up the ranks as rapidly as possible, and place the line in a sound state of defence. Late in Jan., 1918, Sir Douglas Haig took over a new stretch of French line, extending the front of the Fifth Army to cover the village of Barisis, 7 miles south of the Oise. The additional line, taken over somewhat against Haig's judgment, and giving the Fifth Army, which stretched on the left as far as Gouzeaucourt, no less than 42 miles to guard, extended the British front, all told, to 125 miles. The whole of this had to be greatly strengthened and supported by prepared positions to which the troops could retreat when the expected German drive took place, for it was regarded as inevitable that some dent must result in the Allies' line where the colossal blow was dealt. This constructional work called for every man who could be spared for the task, and seriously interfered with the necessary training of the troops in new tactics of defence.

The months preceding the 'hammer blow' were marked by intense raiding

## activity on both sides, chiefly undertaken to procure information, but

sometimes to secure useful positions for subsequent events. The most important of these included the sanguinary struggles for Bullecourt in the early days of January, in which the Australians greatly distinguished themselves, and Germans attacks at Dixmude (6th March), and in the region of Houthulst Forest and the Menin road (8th March), for positions destined to play their part in the new attempt to reach the Channel ports. By the middle of February, when 28 additional German divisions had arrived from the Russian front, and 6 from Italy, and great supply dumps were springing up in all directions behind the German lines--but particularly opposite the British Third Army at Cambrai and the British Fifth Army to the south of it--Sir Douglas Haig had no doubt as to what was to come. The only questions were "Where?" and "When?"

All strategical considerations pointed to an attack on the Fifth Army south of Arras, with the object of separating the British and French armies and seizing the centre of communications at Amiens. Neither the British nor the French Head-quarters Staff, therefore, was taken unawares when the great offensive began on 21st March. Both had worked out plans to meet it. More than half Sir Douglas Haig's infantry and the whole of his cavalry were allocated to this sector's defence, and General Petain had arranged to send a French army corps to their assistance in case of need. The final dispositions of the Germans were carried out with the utmost secrecy: sunken roads, bivouacs, and every device of camouflage being employed to conceal their last stages of concentration. Even so, Sir Douglas Haig learnt from his Intelligence Department on 19th March that the enemy was putting the finishing touches to his impending attack, and that it would be launched by the 21st, if not before.

It was heralded, in fact, at 5 a.m. on the 21st by an intense bombardment in a thick mist which made it impossible for the British batteries to render effective aid to the battered first-line trenches. The onslaught was organized in two parts, the northern advance being directed against Byng's Third Army from the Sensee River to the Cambrai road, and the southern attack from the Flesquieres salient opposite Cambrai to St. Quentin. No fewer than 40 German divisions--nearly half a million men--specially trained for the new offensive, were launched against this southern half, and of these more than half were directed against the 16,500 yards of front held by Gough's Fifth Army nearest St. Quentin. All told, the German drive consisted of 64 divisions on the opening day of the offensive. To meet it the British had but 19 infantry divisions in line and 10 in reserve, with cavalry. From first to last the Germans employed in this attack some 78 divisions--exceeding in numbers the total fighting strength of the whole of the British armies in France. By the 9th of April, when the Germans, foiled in the opening move of their supreme offensive, had shifted the spear-head of their assault to Flanders, the total number of British divisions employed both in cavalry and infantry did not exceed 46.

Some part of the line was bound to give before the terrific impact of the infantry attack which followed the bombardment on 21st March. The plans made for repairing the breach in co-operation with the French broke down for a time because the British Fifth Army, attacked by a far greater force than had been anticipated--23 German divisions having been massed as secretly as possible in order to bring them into position at the critical hour--had been forced back sooner than was expected. There was no time either for the British reserves or the French reinforcements to repair the breach before the assaulting divisions under von Hutier, who had established his reputation for this form of operation on the Eastern front, were through it and extending it in all directions.

There were, in point of fact, two serious breaches along the 42-mile front held by the Fifth Army. One, the less dangerous of the two, was south of the Oise, where the line was held more lightly than elsewhere, owing to the marshes, which had been relied on to make any considerable attack at this point unlikely. As ill luck would have it, a long spell of dry weather had made the ground easily passable, and the Germans, well aware of the position, swept across it in overwhelming force, like a tidal wave. Heroic stands were made for the forward redoubts and battle positions, but the whole of the ground south of the St. Crozat Canal was so submerged in the flood that by nightfall there was nothing for it but to withdraw the divisions of the 3rd Corps, which had been defending it, to the line of the Somme Canal. Nevertheless, though the Germans made their greatest progress on the 21st at this point, it was not their most dangerous thrust, being nearest to French reinforcements.

The chief danger-point was farther north, on the Fifth Army's left, below the Flesquieres salient. By noon, with the fog still so thick that it was impossible to see 50 yards ahead, the Germans had advanced as far as Ronssoy, inside the second zone of the British defensive positions, together with Hargicourt and Villeret to the south. This opened a gate to the third line 3 miles wide, and before the day was over the enemy had pushed towards this as far as Templeux-le-Gerard. But for the stubborn defence of Epehy, to the north, and Le Verguier, to the south, the breach would have been perilously widened on the following day, but at both these points the German advance was temporarily checked. It could not be stayed long. Supplied with an overpowering weight of men to crush through anywhere, von Hutier was ready to pay the price exacted for every success by British artillery-fire at short range, and British machine-gun posts held to the last: and when St. Emilie and Hervilly finally fell on the 21st, Epehy and Le Verguier could only hold out long enough for the general line of defence to be withdrawn from them. The retreat thence, hard-pressed as it was, left the Fifth Army's centre with a sagging flank to the south, of which the on-coming Germans did not fail to take full advantage. Thenceforward the tide swept on for days in ever-increasing volume, all the reinforcements that Sir Douglas Haig or Petain could send serving only to stop gaps here and there. Ham, Bapaume, and Peronne had fallen by the 24th, and about two-thirds of the territory wrested from the Germans in 1916 regained by them. Germany was announcing to all the world that the 'Kaiser's Battle', as the emperor himself had caused it to be named, had already been won. To drive the news home, the enemy, on 23rd March, began bombarding Paris with long-range guns capable of firing 70 miles. Nesle and Noyon were the next to go, and by 26th March--save at Albert, which held out until the following day--the Allies were back beyond the line from which they started in 1916.

Elsewhere the enemy's progress along the 60-mile battle front had been slow and costly. He had least success in the north against the British Third Army, partly because the positions held were stronger, partly because his heaviest and most persistent blows had been reserved for the Fifth Army. Some isolated gaps were made on this front, but nothing beyond repair, and the ground lost was not vital. It is impossible in the space at our command to follow all the complications of attack and counter-attack in the fateful days which followed, until, by 26th March, the Germans were within a dozen miles or so of Amiens, with the British Fifth Army still retiring before them in a state of disintegration. At this critical juncture, when the reserves had all been thrown in, General Gough adopted a suggestion made by General Grant, Chief Engineer of the Fifth Army, that a last line of defence--a forlorn hope to save Amiens--should be formed from stragglers, army school personnel, tunnelling companies, Canadian and American engineers, anyone, in short, who could be roped in. The command of this heterogeneous force, after being organized by General Grant and posted according to General Gough's instructions, was handed over to General Sandeman Carey. 'Carey's force', as it came to be called, aided by the 1st Cavalry Division, which was rushed across the Somme from the north at the same time, earned a special tribute from Mr. Lloyd George in the House of Commons for the magnificent fight which it put up in this last line of defence.

[Illustration]

The German effort was becoming spent, though by broadening out the salient the enemy continued to press back the French as well as the British. The French Third Army, sent to the assistance of the British Fifth Army, played a lion's part in preventing him from extending his gains too dangerously in the south. On the 28th he concentrated his main energy against the stubborn British Third Army, which, conforming to the retreating line of the Fifth Army on its right, had fallen back to new battle positions, but in good order. Fresh shock-divisions were brought up to break this northern pivot of the British defence, and, after the usual full-dress bombardment, were launched as before in continual waves of assault. This time, however, there was no fog to handicap the British gunners, who were given the opportunity of a lifetime when they opened fire from hidden positions on serried ranks of German infantrymen, marching shoulder to shoulder at point-blank range. Six times the advance was renewed, and as many times mowed down, and when a final attempt was made, after a second bombardment in the afternoon, it met with similar failure. The Germans had shot their bolt. Their appalling losses on the 28th told on all their subsequent efforts in this first and greatest of Ludendorff's offensives in 1918.

It was on the 28th that General Gough relinquished the command of the British Fifth Army, General Rawlinson (Fourth Army) succeeding to the task of extricating its shattered divisions. Two days earlier the long-needed decision had been made by which the command of the Allied armies passed into the hands of General Foch as Generalissimo, who thenceforward, until the end of the war, held supreme control. Though several anxious days were to pass before the Allies could breathe freely again in the Amiens area, the position hourly improved as reinforcements, French and British, arrived on the scene. Counter-attacks recovered some of the ground on 30th March, and when the Germans resumed their advance towards Amiens on a more limited scale on 4th and 5th April, their losses were out of all proportion to their gains.

_Second Phase of Ludendorff's Offensive_

It is probable that the operations of 4th and 5th April were designed chiefly to pin the British armies to the southern area, while Ludendorff, finding his road barred to Amiens, prepared to strike a fresh blow in the north in a decisive bid for the Channel ports. Though well aware of a possible thrust in this direction, Sir Douglas Haig had been compelled to draw heavily on his Flanders front for reinforcements during the exhausting battle for Amiens, in which as many as 46 out of his total 58 divisions had been engaged. By the end of the first week in April the bulk of the British troops holding the Flanders line had passed through the furnace of the southern battlefield and were sadly in need of rest and reinforcement. Had the ground been in its usual condition of slush and mire at this season of the year they could have been relied upon to hold up any advance, but a dry spring had prepared the path for a German advance, and as soon as this was seen to be imminent it was reluctantly decided voluntarily to evacuate the Passchendaele salient, won at such frightful cost in the closing months of the previous year. Steps were also taken to relieve the Portuguese troops[3] who, though not seriously engaged, had been too long in the trenches south of the salient. Before either of these plans could mature the Germans upset both by launching their great attack at 4 a.m. on 9th April.

As in the opening move against the Fifth Army on 21st March, the assault--launched by the army of General von Quast in the direction of Festubert-Armentieres against the northern portion of the front held by the British First Army (General Horne)--was favoured by an impenetrable early-morning fog. Through it came five columns of troops like the prongs of a fork, with an army corps as the central point to thrust into the weak spot where the Portuguese were sandwiched in between the British 40th and 55th Divisions. Bursting through the Portuguese sector, the attack spread swiftly to north and south--especially to the north, where the 40th Division, feeling the thrust which pierced the Portuguese line, was forced back on its right flank to the line of the Lys, 3-1/2 miles in its rear. The rest of the 40th, with reinforcements from the 34th Division, formed a new line between Fort Rompre and Bois Grenier, covering Erquinghem and Armentieres from the south, and held it the rest of the day. Had the southern pivot also given way when the Portuguese sector was broken the consequences would have been fatal to any hope of checking the German onrush. But the 55th Division never budged after its left flank, borne back by the first assault, succeeded in forming a defensive flank between Festubert and Le Touret, and the importance of its stout defence through the battle, as Sir Douglas Haig bore witness in his dispatches, could not be overestimated. This line was strengthened later in the day by the 21st Division, which, together with the 50th Division--both just relieved from the Somme fighting--had been hurried up as soon as the attack developed.

Next day the battle spread to the north, blazing up along the right of the British Second Army (General Plumer), the army of General Sixt von Armin attacking in another early-morning mist between Armentieres and Hollebeke. The two German armies now acted in concert, and together pushed their advantage until the Lys was crossed in the south and the Messines Ridge carried in the north, with Laventie, Ploegsteert, and a dozen other historic landmarks in between. Outflanked on both sides, Armentieres had perforce to be evacuated. Messines was recaptured by the South Africans, but had to be abandoned when the enemy's advance in the south pushed almost as far as Neuve Eglise. On the 11th, when the enemy continued to extend his gains with seemingly endless reinforcements, and had crossed the Lawe, a tributary of the Lys, Sir Douglas Haig issued his famous Order of the Day to his troops, which, while it reflected the gravity of the situation, inspired them to fight it out:

"Every position must be held to the last man.... With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment."

The appeal, with its promise also of speedy reinforcements from the French army--"moving rapidly and in great force to our support"--heartened the battle-worn divisions when they sorely needed its encouragement. The pressure was still too great to prevent the Germans from taking Neuve Eglise on the 14th--after a struggle lasting two and a half days, from house to house--or Merris a day earlier, which brought them within 4 miles of Hazebrouck, where the 1st Australian Division, just detrained, kept them at bay; or Bailleul on the 15th. At midnight on the 15th the British line fell back to the defences between Meteren and Dranoutre, a move involving the simultaneous withdrawal from the Passchendaele Ridge.

These were the darkest hours of the last great battle for Ypres. There were already signs that the German advance, having again failed to break a way through by sheer weight and numbers, was slowing down, and the promised French reinforcements were close at hand. These took over the sector from Meteren to Wytschaete, where, on the 25th, before they had consolidated their positions, they were made to bear the brunt of a fresh German blow, delivered with 9 fresh divisions, from Bailleul to the Ypres-Comines Canal. The French fought desperately to save Kemmel Hill, commanding Ypres some six miles away; but in five hours the Germans had captured both the village and the crest of the hill. With the Ypres salient now dominated both from Kemmel and Messines it became necessary still further to shorten the line round Ypres. This was accordingly redrawn on the night of 26th-27th April through Pilkem, Wieltje, Zillebeke Lake, and Voormezeele.

One more effort was made by the Germans to push right through before the end of the month--on the 29th, when, in a fresh attack in force on the Franco-British front, they succeeded in reaching as far as Locre, behind Kemmel. But the French, who were in no mood to repeat their experience at Kemmel, flung the enemy back with sanguinary losses. The heaviest casualties of the Germans that day, however, were against the British 21st, 49th, and 25th Divisions, whose artillery--like the gunners of the Third Army on 28th March--had the range of them as they advanced in mass formation, and blew them to pieces. Only one of the waves of German infantry succeeded in reaching the British positions, where bomb and bayonet completed its destruction. This marked the last serious attempt on Germany's part to seize the Channel ports.

Though Ludendorff had failed to reach his objectives either on the Amiens or Flanders front he still had a sufficient superiority of force to retain the initiative. With every incentive to compel a decision before the new American army, which was now arriving at the rate of something like 150,000 a month, could enter the field in full strength, Ludendorff had either to throw up the sponge or strike again at the earliest moment in one final effort to beat the Allies to their knees. Meantime the obvious policy on the Franco-British part was to maintain an active defence until their own and American reinforcements made a counter-offensive possible. In the minor operations which marked this period of waiting, the Australians added Villers-Bretonneux to their battle honours. Villers-Bretonneux, which lies on the edge of the ridge facing Amiens--only 8 miles away--had been rushed and captured by the Germans in a surprise attack in thick fog on 23rd April. Before daybreak the next morning the Australians had surrounded the German garrison, and the end of a fierce house-to-house conflict left the place in British hands again, together with nearly 1000 prisoners.

[Illustration: Germany's Last Bid for the Channel Ports: approximate positions of the Allies' line before and after Ludendorff's offensive in April, 1918]

_Third Phase of Ludendorff's Offensive_

Though every day added to the danger of delay, it was not until the end of May that the German army, its plans disorganized by its unexpectedly heavy commitments in the Amiens and Flanders battles, was launched on the third and final phase of Ludendorff's great offensive with a sudden attack on the Aisne front in the direction of Paris. It was along this front that the 9th British Corps (General Sir A. Hamilton-Gordon), consisting of the 8th, 21st, 25th, and 50th Divisions, and subsequently reinforced by the 19th Division, had been sent to the French armies under General Petain for much-needed rest after sharing to the full the honours and sacrifices of the earlier battles. By their side were crack French divisions which had also earned the rest which it was felt they could count upon along the main stretch of the Chemin-des-Dames. holding as it did some of the strongest natural defences along the whole battle front. The French had taken months in the previous year, and spent countless lives, to recapture these positions.

The very unlikelihood of choosing such a formidable sector decided Ludendorff to select it for his dramatic attack on 27th May, moving up his specially trained divisions of shock troops at the last moment--with all possible secrecy, accompanied by other surprises in the vast number of guns and aeroplanes brought into action, as well as the largest fleet of German tanks which the enemy had ever employed. Only on the very eve of the new advance did the French learn of the impending blow--too late to avert disaster. Outnumbered by 6 to 1 the Allies, British and French alike, were borne back by the onrush of picked troops as soon as the preliminary bombardment ceased. Helped as usual by a thick early-morning mist the armies of von Boehn, von Hutier, and von Below--all nominally under the German Crown Prince--had carried the whole of the Chemin-des-Dames ridge by nightfall, and were fighting on the Aisne. Within two days they were not only across the Aisne on an 18-mile front, but had swept on to the Vesle, and were even across that river west of Fismes--a depth of 12 miles from their starting-point.