Wetherall lost little time in making his mark on the battalion, which delighted Captain Geoffrey Rose who later wrote in the battalion history that ‘his emphatic direction and enthusiasm earned early reward in the increased efficiency of all ranks’.

Shortly before the battalion went into the front line 200 reinforcements arrived from the disbanded 6th Battalion which included 23-year-old Second Lieutenant John Cunningham and Captain George Rowbotham, both officers were posted to D Company. Once established at the Enghien Redoubt Wetherall deployed A Company to Fayet, B Company to the Dum Copse area and C Company to positions in front of Fayet along the line of the modern day D372. The 184 Brigade sector was very close to the German lines in the Fayet area, a factor that undoubtedly influenced the location of the successful raid carried out by the 2/6th Royal Warwicks from 182 Brigade on Cepy Farm on the night of 20/21 March. Fifteen prisoners were brought back from three different infantry divisions on a front usually held by one regiment, lending little doubt to the certainty that the offensive was imminent.

The Enghien story was written shortly after by Harry Wetherall while he was recovering from wounds in hospital. His account begins after the noise of the Warwicks’ raid had settled down and he had been given news of the origin of the German prisoners:

‘Without hearing any more I knew we were in for it. After the noise of the raid had settled down, the night was extraordinarily quiet, and it seemed impossible that a great battle was going to start in a few hours … I slept well, and on being called at 4.00am on the 21st not a sound was to be heard, and the line reported all quiet. On going upstairs out of the dug-out, I found there was a dense ground mist and a light northwest wind. I went back to bed again and at 5.40am I was awakened by a roar from a terrific bombardment, though I could hear no shells bursting in the redoubt.’²⁴

Although the extracts from Wetherall’s diary of events are focused on the redoubt, they do provide an insight into the nature of the bombardment and the confusion that other units were experiencing in the dense fog. He notes that within ten minutes of the opening salvoes from the German artillery all telephone lines to his front companies were cut with the exception of the buried line linking him to 184 Brigade:

‘6.00am. I go out of the dug-out and find the redoubt is full of gas, the Boches having burst their shells some distance over the redoubt and allowed the wind to blow it back on us. I order all men below, and have the gas blankets put down. Some of the men who were on sentry duty are pretty bad from its effects.

6.15am. Gas is very bad. We have orders to evacuate the redoubt if the place is badly gassed. I go out to see if this is possible, and although I know the place by heart, I have not gone 50 yards in the fog with my respirator on before I am lost. It took 15 minutes to find my way back to the dug-out and therefore I determined to stick where I am.

7.30am. We are now shelled by high explosive alone. I judge, together with a gunner officer, attached for liaison, that about three 4.2 batteries and one 5.9 battery are now shelling our quarry, a space of about 50 yards by 60.

9.20am. Very heavy shrapnel and high explosive shelling now taking place; also the noise of the bombardment of the line of resistance seems nearer. I expect they are attacking. I order all men to get ready to rush up.’²⁵

Wetherall was right, the German infantry were attacking and the men of A Company at Fayet were in the path of IR 109 – the Liebgarde Grenadier Regiment. From the account given by Gefreiter Reinhard it appears that the initial bombardment had knocked the fight out of many of the Ox and Bucks at Fayet:

‘We followed the creeping barrage quickly but, as soon as we appeared, the British threw away their weapons and surrendered. There was really no fight for Fayet. I think they were hoping for an opportunity to surrender. One of them gave me his razor. I think he wanted to thank me because he had been taken prisoner and not killed.’²⁶

Whether or not anyone from A Company escaped captivity is not known but a handful from C Company did get away led by Second Lieutenant Harold Jones and CSM Francis Liddell:

‘When the attacking infantry reached our trench, the fog was still very dense. A shower of stick bombs forced us to leave the trench and we climbed out onto the back to maintain a line but beyond the range of their bombs … I saw six or seven German officers or NCOs in the open looking at a map. They were only three or four yards away so I automatically came up with the revolver I had acquired and that was the only occasion in which I can honestly say that I shot any Germans in two and a half years of front-line soldering. After that I collected together about a dozen of my men and attempted to get back to Battalion HQ in the Enghien Redoubt.’²⁷

Jones and his party never reached the redoubt but did get back to brigade HQ which is probably just as well as the Enghien garrison was under attack from the Chemin de Fayt – the road that ran past the quarry – which in 1918 was a sunken road with high sides. The outlying posts had already been silenced and the main redoubt was now under threat. Wetherall’s diary records a group of fifty German infantry attacking from the road of which some twenty-five were shot down:

‘The rest run back into the road. The men are very steady. I asked Brigade for our last protective barrage, but only five of our 18-pounders answer. 9.50am. Captain Rowbotham reports to me that an important part of the redoubt, the sand-pit, has fallen. We organise a bombing attack, and he leads it, regaining the sand-pit, so now we hold the entire redoubt, with the exception of [the posts].

11.10am. The Boches made a big bombing attack from three sides which looks very ugly at one time, but the men fight well, and we drive them back, killing about 15.

11.30am. We are now practically surrounded, and I get an urgent message from Post 12, which is a rear post, [probably somewhere along Douai Trench] for help, which of course I cannot give. I go down to visit them and find them very happy, a Vickers Gun having killed, I should say 60 Germans, whose bodies I can see in the fog hanging on the wire.’²⁸

At 11.45am the fog was beginning to lift which added to Wetherall’s concern as to what might take place once the German infantry had the advantage of clearer visibility. If the artillery at Holnon could put down a barrage on Selency village where he suspected German infantry to be massing, it might disperse the attack, but first he had to be sure there was any artillery left to provide that support. Typically Wetherall decided to make the reconnaissance himself particularly as he felt John Cunningham ‘was doing so well’. There his diary of the redoubt ends as he is shortly afterwards captured at Holnon and despite making his escape, only regained the safety of British lines at 10.00pm that evening.

John Cunningham was acting adjutant and had been commissioned into the regiment in August 1916. An account of the action written by Captain Walter Moberly makes it is clear that Cunningham was the senior officer in command of the redoubt at the time of its capture and was responsible for the resistance made by the garrison in its last hours. Sadly there is little detail recorded of the remaining three hours in which the redoubt held out apart from conversations held between Cunningham and Brigade Major Harold Howitt at 184 Brigade Headquarters. Shortly after Wetherall had left for Holnon the tiny quarry was surrounded and German infantry began firing into the garrison from the quarry sides. Holding out until about 5.00pm Cunningham’s final message to brigade was to seek permission to withdraw:

‘The last message I received was “we are surrounded now, Sir, what are we to do?” It was an agonizing position, so I rang the divisional commander and, as the whole front had collapsed, I was told to give them permission to cut their way out if they could. It was five o’clock before I was able to get back to them, and after that I heard no more’.²⁹

With permission granted the remnants of the garrison attempted to escape, John Cunningham was wounded and captured but a handful were reported to have got away to the Battle Zone a mile to the rear. Cunningham’s award of the DSO was gazetted in January 1920 after his return to England. The casualty figures for the battalion vary depending which source is used, however a figure somewhere between 86 and 100 officers and men killed on 21 March is not far short of the truth. The battalion like so many others had practically ceased to exist as a fighting unit and as Walter Moberley wrote in April 1918, ‘I am afraid the battalion is completely smashed up. We always knew that whatever battalion happened to be in the front at the time of the German assault was bound to be done-in.’

The last redoubt in the 61st Divisional sector was at Fresnoy-le-Petit on the D57 which runs northeast from Fayet. The redoubt was held by the 1/5th Gordon Highlanders and constructed in and around the crossroads in the centre of the village, a fortified position which included the south western corner of Marronniers Wood. Battalion Headquarters and the counter-attack company were just to the west of the village while the right and left front companies held the forward trenches either side of Gricourt. The Gordons were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell McTaggart who was appointed in June 1915 having previously served with the 5th Royal Irish Lancers. McTaggart arrived after the fighting around Ypres in May 1915 with a newly-won DSO ribbon on his chest. Lieutenant Colonel W N Nicholson met him soon after he joined the battalion, which was then serving with 183 Brigade, 51st (Highland) Division:

‘He came to us from the 5th Lancers to command the 5th Gordons, a battalion that needed a leader, and he proved up to the hilt the value of a good Regular officer. The change in his unit in a short time was extraordinary; they caught his enthusiasm, stuck out their chests and rightly regarded themselves as a very fine body of men. How pernickety the little man was about the set of his kilt, the size of his Glengarry; I fancy he had never worn either before in his life. He might have posed for the Gallic Cock; a most gallant little man; all blood and thunder.’³⁰

As to exactly what happened on the morning of 21 March we can only assume it was similar to that of the other redoubts, no account of the battle by McTaggart or any other man who fought that morning that has so far come to light. Captain Thomas Davie, the battalion medical officer, is in little doubt the attack caught the battalion by surprise:

‘The first warning of the imminence of a German attack was the gas shell bombardment at about a quarter to five in the morning. As regards the actual attack later on, no knowledge of this was forthcoming from the various company headquarters owing probably to damage to the cables; but also to the fact that the enemy had made a lateral approach under cover of the heavy mist; and the first knowledge of this was a rapid enfilade fire on Battalion Headquarters.’³¹

When it became obvious the battalion had been overrun, Davie made his escape from the battalion aid post with two men and eventually caught up with what was left of the battalion near Marteville where he found a few men of A Company that had been collected together by Regimental Sergeant Major Park.³² Falls in his history of the regiment has only this to say:

‘There is little that can be said of the fate of the 5th Gordons except that they were overrun and thereafter existed only as a handful of survivors … At 12.20pm the 183rd Brigade headquarters received a message from the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel M F McTaggart, that his redoubt was surrounded and that he feared he would be unable to hold out for long … The number of survivors who managed to get back to brigade headquarters was not more than thirty.’³³

McTaggart and his second-in-command, Major Charles Robertson, were taken prisoner at the redoubt and were later joined by another twelve officers. As to the number of other ranks, we know that at least thirty-three were killed but the number of wounded remains imprecise; however, we can be sure that the fiery McTaggart and his men in the redoubt put up a stubborn resistance before the end came around 1.30pm.