When firm information finally reached the intelligence service it came not from the air, not from raiders on the ground, but by an indirect route from a small town in southern Germany. In late January fighter planes of the German Army Air Service took off from an airfield behind St Quentin to intercept an RFC patrol, and a young German pilot, shot through the chest, crashed behind the lines of General Gough’s Fifth Army and died in a British casualty clearing station. He was given a military funeral. Four officers of the Royal Flying Corps carried his coffin, and four of its ground crew fired a volley over his grave.
When a prisoner died in captivity it was usual to notify the German authorities through the International Red Cross – a long and tortuous process which could mean months of suspense for the anxious relatives of missing men. But the fraternity of the air made up their own rules, which owed nothing to the Geneva Convention, and they had their own means of communication. Braving the barrage of anti-aircraft shells, swooping low at the last minute with a conciliatory wag of its wings, an aircraft of the RFC dropped a weighted message bag on the German base. It contained the dead pilot’s personal effects and confirmed, with regret, that he had died of wounds and had been buried with full military honours.
The news of her son’s death reached his widowed mother in Baden long before the official notification, and she also received a letter of sympathy which spoke of her son’s sacrifice in glowingly heroic terms. It was written to a standard formula, but she could not have known that, and she was deeply impressed by the fact that it was signed by an officer of high rank – her son’s Army Commander himself. The signature was certainly a facsimile, and the letter was one of many, but it was a comfort to the bereaved mother and she proudly passed it on to the local newspaper.
German newspapers were freely available in neutral Switzerland, and this particular copy of a Baden news-sheet was read with some interest by a French intelligence officer. It was his task to scrutinize German and Austrian newspapers, and he paid particular attention to provincial publications from obscure country districts where the censorship was likely to be less vigilant. He had picked up nuggets of useful information in this way before, but this time he had a greater scoop than even he realized. The letter, tucked away on the obituary page of a humble local rag, was signed by General von Hutier. The information travelled to Paris and on to General Pétain’s headquarters, where its significance was speedily grasped.
General von Hutier was held in high esteem. He had risen rapidly from command of a Guards’ Division in 1914, to the command first of a corps and finally of the Kaiser’s Eighteenth Army. He was the architect of the Austrian victory which had routed Cadorna at Caporetto; he was the victor of the Battle of Riga, which had sealed the fate of the Russians on the Eastern Front. It was his first appearance on the Western Front since he had been a lowly divisional commander in 1914. Now he was back, trailing clouds of glory, and he was standing opposite the British on the Fifth Army front – not replacing but in addition to the two armies which were already there. The conclusion was inescapable and, when it was passed to him by French Headquarters, it did not escape General Humbert, now in command of the French Third Army.
When the Fifth Army was obliged to extend southward, it took over General Humbert’s line running south to the Oise. It was unfamiliar ground, and when the two generals met they spent a long time poring over maps. General Gough received several unpleasant surprises. The area north of the river, which cartographers had so liberally spiked with symbols denoting marshland, was no longer anything of the kind. It had almost completely dried out in the course of a remarkably dry winter. Even the River Oise was unusually low, and the barrier which might have impeded an attack in this sector no longer existed. Worse, the French, thinking themselves secure, had constructed only the sketchiest of defences, and the all-important rear line, the fail-safe that would finally halt a breakthrough, had not even been pencilled in on the map. The very place where the attack was thought to be most unlikely was now the most vulnerable of Gough’s overstretched line and, with the unwelcome news of von Hutier’s presence, it seemed a virtual certainty that the German plan was to attack on his front. General Humbert made no bones about it. Tracing the line south of St Quentin, he said, ‘They can deal you a nasty blow here!’1
‘A nasty blow’ was an understatement. Later, when Gough visited French General Headquarters at Compiègne, General Anthoine spelt it out. Von Hutier’s victories had been studied, and his tactics had a similarity which could not be dismissed as coincidence. He banked heavily on the element of surprise. Not for him the classic preparation for battle – the days, even weeks, of slow bombardment of enemy defences which gave ample and unmistakable notice of an impending attack. And not for him the massing of assault troops and reserves close to the line, where they could be bombed and shelled by the enemy. It was von Hutier’s practice to fan out his troops in a great arc that swung over many miles, as if round the rim of a wheel, with pre-planned routes along the spokes which would converge on the narrow battlefront and set his troops at the hub of the action on the very eve of battle. Reinforcements kept three marches away and, moving forward according to a strict timetable, would be fed in just when they were needed to pursue the advance. And von Hutier fully intended that there should be an advance. His policy was to maintain a skeleton force – of guns as well as men, for the batteries too would pull into position only at the eleventh hour, and for a mere five or six hours before the assault would fire a hurricane bombardment of such force that resistance as well as obstacles could not help but be smashed before the troops surged forward sweeping all before them. It had worked before. He had no doubt that it would work again.
Even if he had had a sufficient number of men and reserves, unlike General von Hutier General Gough would not have been able to dispose them over a wide area well behind the line. It was true that some seventy-five miles lay between his line and the coast, but it was far from virgin countryside. The British line now ran across ground which had been vacated by the Germans not quite a year earlier, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, when they had withdrawn to the Hindenburg Line. This had naturally been construed as a victory for the Allies, but it was nevertheless a clever move, for the Germans had killed several birds with one stone. They had escaped from the ravaged Somme battlefield and vastly improved their position. By shortening their line they had saved much needed manpower, and by reducing the huge salient which swooped round from Arras to Soissons they had dislocated the Allies’ spring offensive, whose objective was to attack this salient from two sides.
The retirement had been anything but haphazard, and the rearguards were not the exhausted remnants of a defeated army. They were fresh, efficient troops who fought brisk actions to delay the Tommies or the poilus as they filtered forward on their heels. They were fighting for time, most often at places of their choosing, while at their backs the bulk of their own army retired, slowly and methodically, to its new position.
They left devastation in their wake. Whole villages were dynamited, young crops destroyed, animals slaughtered and left to putrefy, orchards devastated, trees chopped down, telegraph poles uprooted, railway tracks torn up, bridges destroyed, buildings booby-trapped with delayed-action explosives, roads mined and cratered to block the passage of troops and transport. The Germans were determined to leave nothing behind that could be of any possible use to an army in pursuit – not a shelter that might serve as a billet, not a road or a bridge that would afford them passage, not a blade of grass or a wisp of hay that would feed the horses. It was vandalism on a gargantuan scale, and it was a monumental task to repair the damage. In a little under a year the British had done the best they could to restore communications, to patch up the roads, to build camps to shelter troops in reserve or behind the battle zone. All this in addition to constructing some sort of defensive line to face the enemy in his new and formidable position. But even with sufficient labour and manpower five years would hardly have been long enough to complete the task.
North of General Gough’s line, where General Byng’s Third Army held the sector north of Gouzeaucourt to Arras, the conditions, and the difficulties, were similar, and behind the devastated country lay the turmoil of shattered ground where they had fought the Battle of the Somme. Only three years ago it had been a smiling countryside of gentle hills and rolling farmland, scattered with woods and copses, with quiet villages in hidden valleys where the water ran clear and the fish were plentiful. Now it was hard to credit that it was part of the same planet. More than four months’ bitter fighting through the dust and heat of summer to the first snows of winter had changed the Somme to a desolate wilderness, mutilated by miles of abandoned trenches, pitted by mine-craters and ravaged by shell-holes, which in some places touched lip to lip. Houses, farms and villages had all but vanished, and mangled tree stumps were all that remained of the pleasant woodlands. Since the German retirement the land had lain fallow but for crops of wooden crosses slowly growing as the Army Graves Service moved across the battleground gathering in the dead. Already the casualties were legendary. Some bodies had disappeared and would never be recovered; some had been buried by shell-fire deep in the chalk or mud; and in the northern sector, where successive attacks had failed, the bodies of many soldiers killed on the first day of the battle had been exposed to the elements under continuous bombardment until the enemy had abandoned his line in the spring. Not many of them could be identified.
Now that the Germans were fifteen miles east of Bapaume, communications of a kind had been restored. The main roads had been mended, and a local train even ran from Amiens to the ruined town of Albert behind the old British front line, and civilians who pressed hard enough for a pass were allowed to travel on it to rummage for lost possessions in their ruined homes. The Graves Registration Department had set up its local headquarters in one of the least damaged buildings, and on 12 March it had an unexpected visit from Brigadier-General Ludlow.
The General was not on official business. He had strictly speaking no right to be there, or indeed to be in France at all, for he was close to seventy years of age. It was more than forty years since he had joined the 1st Volunteer Battalion of the old 6th Foot – the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – which he eventually rose to command. When the Territorial Force was formed from the old Volunteers and Militia six years before the war began, their commanding officer (then Lieutenant-Colonel) was given command of the newly formed 1/8th Territorial Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was immensely proud of his command, and after he had reluctantly retired it pleased him hugely that his son, Stratford, was carrying on the family tradition as an officer of the 1/8th Warwicks.
He had anxiously followed the fortunes of his son’s battalion since it had left for France, and he always had news first-hand, for the old Colonel, like many another retired officer, had been ‘dug out’ in 1914 and sent on regimental duties to the Royal Warwicks’ depot. A short time ago he had been promoted to Brigadier-General, and there was no doubt that the red tabs on his tunic collar had eased the difficulties of reaching France in wartime, and smoothed the path of officialdom once he arrived. By pulling a few regimental strings, he had booked accommodation in Amiens, obtained a pass, and engaged an interpreter. That morning, at an unearthly early hour, they boarded the solitary civilian train that rattled once a day to Albert. The General was going in search of his son’s grave.
Captain Stratford Ludlow had been ‘Missing believed killed’ since the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Even before the official telegram reached his home, the first casualty list had come through to the depot. The 1/6th and the 1/8th Royal Warwicks had attacked together. Only one officer of two battalions had survived unhurt, and, of the 600 men who had gone over with the 1/8th Royal Warwicks, 573 had been killed, or wounded, or captured.
In the agonizing months that followed the battle the General had incessantly searched for information. He toured local hospitals to meet wounded survivors, talked to officers and men who came home to convalesce, and more than a year later he was still seeking out the men of the reserve company who had witnessed the slaughter from the support trench and were now home on leave. Some survivors of Captain Ludlow’s company remembered seeing him go down as they went forward to the fourth German trench, and had even produced a rough sketch of the spot. The General brought it with him, carefully folded in an envelope, and an officer of the Graves Registration Department pinpointed the place on a large wall map.
Brigadier-General W. R. Ludlow, CB, VD, 1/8th Bn., The Royal Warwickshire Regt.
Through the kindness of the Graves Registration Department, a motor and a guide were placed at our disposal, and after a few miles we got beyond to the old battlefield of Beaumont Hamel, Serre, Auchonvillers, Hébuterne, Foncquevillers and Gommecourt. These were only names upon the map, as there is nothing to denote that they have ever been occupied as human habitations. Having located the village of Serre, we worked our way back along the road to the point where the old British line of 1916 crossed. Beyond this village, of which only the outside walls of a few houses remained standing, the country was a complete waste, a series of rolling plains covered with thick, coarse, brown grass. Every tree, hedge and pollard had disappeared, and only mounds covered with grass showed where villages had been. A few cabbages or broccoli struggled through the matted surface, and stumps of apple trees denoted what had once been gardens and flourishing orchards. The trenches were grown over or had fallen in, or filled with water in places, while the whole area was a mass of old shell-holes. It was here that the 8th Battalion consolidated the fourth-line German trench. Several of the officers, including my son, were seen shouting out to their men ‘That’s our objective’, smoking cigarettes, and waving them on.
In the subsequent fighting and the German retreat from Serre, the whole country has been so badly shelled that it was extremely difficult to get about the area. This part of the field had not been fully explored, and here and there one came across piles of equipment, coats and tunics, rusty rifles, bayonets, bully-beef tins not opened, shells, hand-grenades, and boxes of Mills bombs unopened – all the usual debris of the battlefield. Along the line occupied by the 11th Brigade there were the remains of skulls, and bones, and shrapnel helmets, in all directions. A number of officers’ tin hats were lying about, and one grave, with a cross upon it and no inscription, had a tin hat attached to it. Another grave was marked by a harrow, but the majority of them were hidden by the tall, rank grass or were destroyed by subsequent shell-fire.
Within the old German lines is the Serre Road Cemetery No. 1, a little square of about one acre, crowded with graves of our gallant regiments. A great number of these were nameless and inscribed to ‘An unknown British officer’ or ‘An unknown British soldier’, but there were a great many names of old friends in the rank and file, although I could find very few officers.
As this part of the battlefield has not been thoroughly examined or cleared, there were only approximately one-tenth of the number who fell in that battle who had been identified and buried within the area of these cemeteries.1 The many hours I was on the battlefield I never saw a single sign of life of any kind or description, or traffic, nor were there any signs of large bodies of troops anywhere within the immediate neighbourhood.
I sat on the edge of a shell-hole opposite to the German position in No Man’s Land, and I wondered how it was possible that any troops in the world could attack such a position in broad daylight on a lovely July morning.
It seemed inconceivable that any army would attempt a breakthrough in a region which not only included the devastated zone but also encompassed on its northern stretch such a difficult obstacle as the old Somme battlefield, which the enemy had gone to such trouble to quit. For a long time few but General Gough believed that this was the Germans’ plan. He wrote to GHQ, giving a long, detailed and sober assessment of the situation on his front, pointing out that three German armies now faced him where one had stood before. He reminded GHQ of the paucity of his own forces, of his line so thinly manned, of his defensive positions as yet so incomplete. He sketched out von Hutier’s tactics and the danger of a sudden pounce that would take his army by surprise. He stressed that he needed men – soldiers certainly, but also large numbers of labourers, and above all sappers of the Royal Engineers to plan and supervise the construction of defences. Stores would be needed, and there was a desperate need of raw materials: railway sleepers and road metal, pickets, barbed wire, corrugated iron.
The reply from GHQ laid more emphasis on the need for a considered plan of withdrawal, in the event of an attack, rather than on facilitating a spirited defence. The memorandum was drawn up by Major-General ‘Tavish’ Davidson. ‘From what has been said,’ he wrote, ‘it would appear that the whole question is one of communications …’ Since they simply did not have the means to improve them to any great degree, he implied that a withdrawal to the line of the Somme would make sense. The memorandum stated baldly:
The principles on which the defences of the Fifth Army front should be conducted should, it is considered, be similar to those laid down for the other Armies. That is, we should be prepared to fight for the Battle and Rear Zones. It may, however, at any period of the defensive battle become inadvisable to employ large reserves to re-establish either of these zones, in which case a withdrawal to the line Crozat Canal–Somme–Péronne bridge-head – or even to the line Crozat Canal–Somme–Tortille – should be carried out. The possibility of having to execute a withdrawal should receive the careful consideration of the Fifth Army, and detailed plans should be worked out.1
It was not an order, but it was a strong hint that not much assistance would be forthcoming.
What was to be forthcoming, however, was labour – up to the middle of March the number of labourers almost doubled, but there were still not enough to complete the defences of the battle zone, still less carry out the construction of the bridgehead to protect Péronne on the River Somme as GHQ required. All in all this bridgehead amounted to fifty miles of fortifications along the banks of the River Somme and of the River Tortille, which ran into it from the north.
But it was not a bad plan. They would be able to abandon the difficult terrain that lay between the line and the rivers behind. Given the time and the circumstances in which to prepare a strong defensive position, it would be a good place to make a stand, and, despite the fact that the old Somme battlefield would lie directly to the rear, there was no doubt that the all-important question of communications would be eased. But General Gough was not a happy man. ‘When it is remembered that the Hindenburg Line was about seventy miles and the Germans took some six months to construct it, under what might comparatively be called peace conditions and with a vast army of civilian labour, it was not possible for these defences to be in a forward state in the time at our disposal.’2 By the middle of March it had been possible to do no more than mark out the site of the fortifications.
On the question of manpower, GHQ itself was in a dilemma. Haig’s pressing demands for reinforcements had fallen on stony ground, and he could not conjure soldiers from thin air. The Staff were agreed that such reserves as there were must be sent further north, where the British line ran nearer the coast, and where the lifeline to England through the vital Channel ports would be in real peril if the Germans broke through. Sir Julian Byng’s Third Army front was clearly threatened, but it was reasonably safe, for it had almost as many troops as General Gough to defend a front of only half the length. But, it was felt, Gough had rather more room to manoeuvre, and, although the Versailles plan for a large mobile reserve had come to nothing, Field-Marshal Haig and General Pétain still had their private agreement to support each other in case of need. Sir Douglas took the trouble to visit the Fifth Army front to remind General Gough that, if the need arose, he could draw on seven French divisions as reserves. Meanwhile a few more batteries could be spared to strengthen Gough’s artillery, and another squadron of aeroplanes would be sent to assist with observations. No one was satisfied, but it was the best that could be done. The French were on Gough’s right, not far away, and if the Germans attacked they would hasten to his support.
By mid-March the Germans had 192 divisions on the Western Front – thirty more than the British and French combined. They added up to a grand total of more than 3½ million men, and the officers alone outnumbered the entire British Expeditionary Force of 1914. But the old professional armies which had served both Great Britain and Germany in 1914 were no more, and the new German Army was, in Ludendorff’s own words, ‘more of a militia – but experienced in war’. Sixty-three divisions were earmarked for the assault and, so far as it was possible at this late stage in the war, they were handpicked troops. All men over thirty-five had been left behind on the quiescent Eastern Front, and men of the same category had been taken out of divisions in the west, or from home garrisons, and sent east to reinforce them. Eleven additional divisions were sent in to hold the line while the shock troops were withdrawn to train for the assault.
The training was all-important, for the success of the campaign, and perhaps the outcome of the war itself, would depend on it. It was hard and intensive, and a little too realistic for some tastes. In the latter stages only live ammunition was used, and the infantry did not much enjoy running across rough ground not far behind a screen of bursting shells while gunners perfected the technique of firing a creeping barrage. They also practised limbering up and rolling forward fast, advancing across fields of shell-holes created by their own efforts.
But these were mere mechanics. Much more arduous was the work required by another part of the plan. It had been devised by Colonel Bruchmüller, in command of the Eighteenth Army artillery, who had brilliantly orchestrated the artillery programme that smashed resistance in the east. Now guns as well as men had been released from the Eastern Front, and batteries had been withdrawn from other sectors in order to play a part in the coming battle. They would take up position only at the eleventh hour, and it was obvious that the weapons would have no opportunity of ranging on their targets before joining in the hurricane bombardment that would ring up the curtain on the great day.
In normal circumstances it would have taken days to range each individual gun on the field of battle, and the concerted firing of so many would have given the Allies ample notice that the Germans were on their way. Instead, the skeleton batteries dug in along the front had to register the ranges for them all, and they had been doing so for weeks, under the guise of desultory firing or short, sharp bombardments followed by long periods of reassuring tranquillity. The snag was that no two guns were the same, and after years of hard service and wear and tear of the bores and even the mountings of guns, many – even most – were inaccurate. Bruchmüller had decreed that every gun must be tested over fixed distances for its own errors and idiosyncrasies, and that an individual table of adjustment must be drawn up for each of them. In this way, working from artillery maps which Bruchmüller insisted should be faultless, it would be possible to tell exactly how much to add or subtract from the elevation of any given gun in order to pinpoint a target. It sounded simple, but it involved the gunners, and particularly the officers, in an immense amount of work, and some battery majors complained wearily of lack of sleep.
By comparison the machine-gunners got off lightly, although their training schedule was punishing enough. They had to travel fast, humping their gun and its ammunition, sweating and panting in their clammy gas masks. All the time they were learning new tactics, training for open warfare and the breakthrough that would bring the trench-bound stalemate to an end.
Despite the tough training, young Reinhold Spengler was enjoying himself. He was proud of his new rank of Leutnant, which dated only from 1 March, and proud of his position as commander of a light-machine-gun platoon. He was twenty years old. The countryside around the training area near Vervins was lovely and reminded him with pleasant nostalgia of his home in upper Bavaria. His company were billeted in private houses in the sizeable village of Prisches, now cleared of its inhabitants, and sleeping like kings on feather beds. It would be a long while before they would be able to enjoy such luxury again.
Leutnant Reinhold Spengler, 2nd Coy., 1st Bavarian Infantry Regt., 1st Bavarian Division
The 1st Bavarian Division was part of General von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army and we were assigned to be in the first line as a storm division. On 17 March we left Vervins and headed again towards the front and the greatest battle in history. Our destination was St Quentin. Endless columns of light and heavy artillery pieces, as well as ammunition wagons, passed alongside us on their way to the front. They were drawn mostly by teams of four or six horses. All of these guns were concealed from the enemy until the last moment. This display of military power made us hope that the long depressing years of war would soon come to a swift and victorious end. Perhaps now we would have the upper hand! But all of us were in great suspense, uncertain of the outcome. To avoid the enemy observing our movements, we always marched at night, but even at night enemy fliers flew above the roads, and every so often they would drop magnesium parachute flares to illuminate the countryside.
General Ludendorff with his Headquarters Staff was also on the move. Early in March they had moved from Kreuznach to new headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, where the administrative offices were housed in the spacious premises of the Hôtel Britannique. It was the second time the hotel had been taken over by the Germans, and Ludendorff himself had been billeted there when the German Army was marching through Belgium in the autumn of 1914. He was struck by the coincidence, and regarded it as a good omen. Spa was closer to the front than Kreuznach, but Ludendorff was a man who liked to keep his finger on the pulse of events and see things for himself. The day after the Eighteenth Army began its long march to battle he moved forward to Avesnes with his operations branch and into the old Eighteenth Army Headquarters. Telephone communications were already in place, so Avesnes was a convenient location, but that was the only thing in its favour, and the billets occupied by General von Hutier and his staff did not suit General Ludendorff and his. They were cramped and spartan and unpleasant – good enough for soldiers, but certainly not good enough for illustrious company – and the Kaiser was on his way. By the time he arrived, on the following day, Avesnes had been scoured for more agreeable premises and a small chateau had been commandeered on the outskirts of the town. It was not luxurious and the furnishings were shabby, but that was easily put right. A message was flashed to Spa, and within hours a lavish collection of elegant furniture, removed from the Hôtel Britannique, was rolling towards Avesnes, together with a generous supply of linen, fine glassware and silver from the same source. Ludendorff was delighted. Next day he was on the platform to greet the Kaiser when the Imperial train steamed in, and, although the Kaiser and his court would live on board, he had the pleasure of receiving him for dinner that evening in his lavishly appointed mess. It was 19 March.
General Gough was well aware that the German Army was on the move and converging on his front. Open railway stations had been canopied over to conceal the movements of troop trains, and large bodies of troops were not allowed to show themselves in daylight. But, although the troops marched by night and were forbidden to sing when passing through villages, night fliers could see the tell-tale signs. They spotted fires behind the line, the glowing exhausts of a line of tanks or supply lorries shining faintly like fireflies in the dark, the faint, bobbing progress of half-dimmed lanterns swinging behind wagons when a line of transport was on the move, a sudden trail of sparks from the chimney of a field kitchen trundling in front of a company of soldiers. Raiding parties were sent off to rush the German outposts in search of prisoners, and shortly after midnight, as the Kaiser was retiring for the night after his excellent evening with General Ludendorff’s Staff, two of his soldiers were being persuaded by British officers to divulge the time and place of the attack. As early as 18 February it had been fixed for 21 March.
There was a real possibility, even at this late date, that the attack might have to be called off, and in his fine bed, purloined from the Hôtel Britannique, General Ludendorff did not enjoy a restful night. The weather was not favourable for the bombardment. As well as using high explosives to shatter the British defences, it was intended to fire a large proportion of gas-shells to knock out the men behind them, and for the gas to be effective they needed a good strong breeze blowing in the right direction. For days past the wind had obstinately refused to oblige, and light breezes fluttering steadily from west to east towards the German lines showed no sign of changing direction. And there was the fog. As Ludendorff’s meteorologist, Leutnant Dr Schaum, had explained, warm spring days followed by frosty nights invariably resulted in foggy mornings. In the half-light of dawn, from Ludendorff’s bedroom window, the mist seemed thicker than ever.
Although there were a thousand matters to attend to, the waiting seemed interminable as the clock ticked towards mid-morning. Promptly at eleven o’clock Dr Schaum arrived with the morning weather report and forecast. It was not entirely good, but it was not all bad and it seemed that an attack would be possible. Just possible.
General Ludendorff called a meeting of his staff officers. The possibility of fog was the main problem, for without visibility the advance of the troops would be difficult, and without observation their leaders would be unable to direct them. But a few of them thought that a concealing fog might possibly be an advantage. Ludendorff was in a quandary. Already the assaulting troops were uncomfortably squeezed together behind the line and in the trenches themselves. Finally he made up his mind, and at twelve noon a message was sent to the Army Group Headquarters to inform them that the attack would take place as planned.
On 20 March between 8 and 10 p.m. the regiment moved to Itancourt, a few kilometres south-east of St Quentin. There we readied ourselves for the attack. Just behind us the guns of the 1st Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment were in position and a number of mortars were set up in the trench. Each gun and mortar was spaced some ten to fifteen metres apart – and this on a total front of seventy-five kilometres!
The decision was made. The die was cast – and there could be no turning back.