In the German territory beyond the Fifth Army front, the British soldiers captured during the day’s fighting had been rounded up and several thousands of them were herded into St Quentin. Before the battle began, the Germans had wired off certain fields to serve as makeshift prisoner-of-war camps until the captured Tommies could be shifted to the rear, but for the moment no one but the sentries had time to bother about the prisoners. They had arrived in such numbers that there was no time to search each man individually, so, although they had lost their kit and most of their possessions, some still had a bite or two of food in their pockets and a pipe or a few cigarettes to smoke. It was a crumb of comfort – and the only crumb of any description they were likely to receive for some time to come. In the circumstances it was impossible to feed such numbers, still less provide them with any shelter.
The Tommies had been dressed in battle order when they were captured, so there was not a greatcoat nor a blanket among them, and they stretched out, shivering and despondent, on the bare ground. It grew cold after the sun set, and would grow colder still as the night wore on, but it was thirty-six hours since most of them had slept and, despite chill, hunger and acute discomfort, some men did manage to drop off through sheer exhaustion.
But the cages were full, and prisoners were still streaming in. Although the flow slowed to a trickle after dark, hundreds were still crowding the streets of St Quentin, and their unfortunate German escorts had no idea where to put them. They were very much in the way. The town was full of second-line troops weighed down with battle equipment, ready to move forward to pursue the advance. There was no need now for silence or discretion, and the night rang with voices, shouting orders, occasionally cursing, as line after line of supply vehicles tried to carve a path through the press of waiting troops. In the main square where some battalions were congregated there was room enough for them all, but the passage of wheeled transport was hampered by the residue of rubble, only hastily swept aside.
In streets near the square, British prisoners had been pushed close to the battered walls to let the vehicles pass, and it seemed to their astonished eyes that the Germans had requisitioned anything on wheels to get supplies forward. Lorries were few and far between. There were horse-drawn farm wagons, carts pulled by mules or donkeys, ancient cabs and carriages, even milk floats drawn by bewildered dogs – and there were countless hold-ups when horse-drawn ambulances stuck fast while attempting to cross the tide of traffic, and brought it to a dead stop. Horses whinnied, donkeys brayed, drivers cursed, and dismayed officers, trying to restore order, bellowed torrents of malediction. But, for all the delays and despite the apparent chaos, the supplies, like the troops, were inexorably moving forward, and it seemed to the dejected prisoners, dazed by the overwhelming assaults of the day, that the German Army was unstoppable.
They were not alone in this assumption. Some thirty miles away, on board his Imperial train, the Kaiser was exultant. This was a battle he had been reluctant to undertake, but the evidence of his own eyes had converted him to his own cause. He had watched his troops advancing far and fast, and what he had seen had convinced him that the battle they called ‘the Kaiser’s Battle’ was a glorious success. He was happy now that it had been fought in his name. He had no doubt that his Army would continue bowling forward, that the British would be smashed, the French would be scuppered, and the Allies would soon be ready to make peace on German terms. In the elation of the moment he lost no time in telegraphing the jubilant news to Germany. ‘Victory is complete,’ he crowed.
Ludendorff’s impressions of the day were not so sanguine as those formed by the Kaiser, and the communiqué he issued took a less triumphant line.
From south-east of Arras to La Fère we attacked the British positions. After a heavy bombardment of artillery and trench mortars our infantry assaulted on a wide front and everywhere captured the enemy’s first lines.
Ludendorff was of the opinion that the Kaiser’s shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Victory!’ had been decidedly premature. The reports that reached him during the evening clearly showed that, while in certain places the British outpost positions had been overrun, the British were holding out and fighting hard. Only at four points had their front been substantially penetrated. Ludendorff’s intention to break through the British defences on a wide front and to surge on to capture the artillery positions behind them had not been achieved. Although many field guns had been captured, the British artillery had inflicted huge casualties and frequently brought the assault to a standstill. Even in the sectors where it had succeeded, some isolated strongpoints were still holding out and tying down far too many of Ludendorff’s storm troops, who were obliged to stay behind to deal with them. It had not been a clean sweep.
In Ludendorff’s initial plan, once the breakthrough had been achieved, he had intended to shift his heavy artillery northward, to support a second hammer-blow that would crush the British while they were still reeling from the first. Weighing up the reports that were still coming in from the field, he did not yet feel justified in doing so. The heavy artillery must remain where it was, to assist the troops to renew the attack next day, and the question of launching a fresh onslaught would have to wait until they succeeded.
The matter of reinforcements also placed Ludendorff in a quandary. He had plenty of them – at least in the short term – and they were even now awaiting orders. Should he send them to the north, where the German troops who had not quite broken through could certainly do with their help, or should he send them to the south, where the front of the British 14th Division had given way and where the 18th Division on its right would consequently be in difficulties?
In later years, with all the clarity of retrospective vision, some analysts of the battle concluded that Ludendorff’s decision on this momentous night was so ill-judged that it cost the Germans the battle and even affected the outcome of the war. But, in the immediacy of the moment, weighing up the situation from a confusion of reports, Ludendorff was swayed by one overriding consideration. He knew very well that the right of the British front adjoined the front held by the French Army, and that, given the circumstances, it was now all too likely that reserve troops of the French Army would soon come to the assistance of their British allies. He therefore decided to throw the bulk of his reserves behind General von Hutier’s force south of St Quentin, and having come to this decision he gave the order that would set them on the march.
The Crown Prince and the Kaiser passed the evening in a euphoria of self-congratulation. ‘Little Willie’, as the Kaiser’s son was derisively nick-named by the British, was no strategist and certainly no tactician, but he was in titular command of the German Eighteenth Army and he had shared his father’s elation at what he believed to be a triumphant achievement. If General Ludendorff had expressed his reservations, they carried no weight with the Crown Prince. Early in the evening he issued his personal orders in a communiqué to his troops:
The Eighteenth Army will continue attacking – even during the night. North of the Somme it is important to cross the road Tertry–Beauvois–Le Hamel as soon as possible. The task of the Army, to facilitate the advance of the Second Army by attack in the flank and rear of the enemy still in front of that Army, remains good in its widest sense.
If the order to continue attacking during the night reached the weary German fighting troops, they ignored it – and they ignored it because there was no possibility of obeying. They had been on the alert or on the move for thirty-six hours, few of them had slept, they had been fighting all day, and they had strained themselves to the limit. They had done their utmost for the Kaiser, and for the moment they had nothing left to give.
Just outside Essigny-le-Grand, where the 7th Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, had been overrun by the Germans that morning, the 2nd Battery of the 5th [German] Artillery Regiment had pulled into position, and within half an hour the men were slumped asleep round their guns. They had fired all through the bombardment, and later in the day they had trailed slowly forward to this new site in captured territory. Leutnant Herbert Sulzbach lay there with his men. Next morning they would be on the go again, but for the present they were dead to the world. Not far away Reinhold Spengler, wrapped in his waterproof sheet, was also slumbering in the open. In the small hours of the morning, frost settled on the ground, but even the bitter cold did not arouse them.
Hermann Wedekind was safely tucked up in bed. He was luckier than many of his German comrades, for he was well behind the line in a field hospital at Bohain, but he passed a painful and uncomfortable night. Early in the evening, while a doctor was removing the bullet from his wounded arm and making good the damage, Wedekind vomited spectacularly under the anaesthetic. He brought up what appeared to be a large quantity of blood – a clear sign to the flustered surgical team that he also had internal injuries. Although they could find nothing which might account for a haemorrhage, nursing orderlies were instructed to keep a close eye on the patient during the night, and Wedekind was frequently disturbed by their solicitous attentions. He had no idea why, nor was he in any condition to explain, or even to realize, that the cause of the ‘haemorrhage’ was the quantity of red wine he had consumed during the battle.
It was past eight o’clock in the evening of 21 March before General Gough was able to sit down to a hasty meal. On the whole he was satisfied with the results of the day and with the praiseworthy performance of his army. With the concurrence of the Commander-in-Chief, withdrawal to the reserve line in the event of a powerful assault had been envisaged long ago, and the plans had been carefully worked out. In the early part of the evening Gough confirmed his provisional orders, and repeated the instructions he had given verbally to his Corps Commanders that afternoon. Above all there must be an orderly retirement, and the moving line must be gradually adjusted to present an unbroken front to the enemy. The key was ‘keeping in touch’ and, as Gough reiterated to his staff, the importance of this could not be overstated. Corps Headquarters would move back to selected localities already equipped with the vital telephone lines and communications which would enable them to direct the efforts of their troops. Divisions would swing back in conjunction with those on their flanks. At all costs ‘touch must be maintained’, so that, in theory, even a single platoon would know the whereabouts of its neighbour.
General Gough was too much of a soldier to think that it would be easy – but he believed that it could be done. Obviously it was not yet possible to ascertain how many men had been killed or wounded, captured or cut off, but the number was clearly many thousands. What remained of his force was critically weak, his front would be fragile, but judicious retirement would buy time until reinforcements arrived to strengthen it. Until they did, he believed, without undue optimism, that the Fifth Army could hang on. But Gough needed support and reinforcements – and he needed them fast!
Immediately after dinner, when he reported to GHQ by telephone, he found to his consternation that his view was not shared by the General Staff. Nor, it seemed, were his misgivings. In the course of a heated conversation with Field-Marshal Haig’s Chief of Staff, it became clear that no reinforcements would be immediately forthcoming. General Lawrence’s response to Gough’s request that reserves should be promptly sent to assist him was, it seemed to Gough, a distinctly patronizing attempt to reassure and encourage him.
General Sir Hubert Gough, GCMG, KCB, KCVO, Fifth Army Commander
I told him of the number of divisions which the Germans had brought into action against us and the masses still in the rear. I then went on to express very considerable anxiety for the next and following days. The Germans would certainly continue to push their attack on the next day, Friday, and it would undoubtedly continue with unabashed fury for many days. Could our tired and attenuated line maintain the struggle without support? That was the question, and it was a grave one. Lawrence did not seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation. He thought that ‘the Germans would not come on again the next day’. ‘After the severe losses they had suffered,’ he thought that they ‘would be busy clearing the battlefield, collecting their wounded and resting their tired troops.’ I disagreed emphatically, but I failed to make much impression. It has always been my opinion that G.H.Q. did not fully grasp the magnitude of the assault on the Fifth Army or the desperate odds it had to contend with …1
Since General Lawrence was Sir Douglas Haig’s Chief of Staff, it could be presumed that his attitude reflected Haig’s own. Gough was both worried and baffled. He sent for Paul Maze, who had just returned, exhausted from the exertions of the day, and handed him a message with instructions to deliver it to French Army Headquarters away to the south. Maze had ‘gathered from General Gough that the French reserves were not coming up as he had hoped, and that beyond the two divisions of reserves which he had at the start, no others were forthcoming’.
Puttering southward on his motorbike, Maze felt limp with weariness and dazed by lack of sleep, but it needed no exercise of wit or imagination to guess that the sealed envelope in his pocket contained an urgent request for help.
It was close to midnight when a priority signal from GHQ arrived at Fifth Army Headquarters. It was signed by the Commander-in-Chief himself. In view of the strength of the attacking force and the determination of the foe, Sir Douglas Haig considered that the performance of the British troops was ‘highly creditable’. He sent his personal congratulations and his thanks for their efforts – and he instructed that this appreciative message should be ‘communicated to all ranks’.
It was kindly meant and intended as encouragement, but it did not encourage General Gough. With much of his scattered force in a state of disarray or engaging in a difficult withdrawal, how, when and even where Haig’s message could be communicated ‘to all ranks’ was not, for the moment, apparent.
All along the front – ragged in many places where the enemy had penetrated – battalions had been split, companies had fallen back piecemeal, and stragglers were adrift in the night. There were small groups, often a mere handful of men, who had been cut off or left behind when the order to retire had come too late or not at all. But there was safety, of a kind, in numbers. It was far worse for solitary wanderers with only a hazy idea of the whereabouts of their comrades, trusting to luck and fearful of stumbling into the Germans while they searched for their own lines. Harold Howitt was particularly anxious to avoid them, for he had had quite enough of their company for one evening and he was only too thankful to have given his captors the slip.
Sitting despondently on his shell-dump between two watchful guards, he had felt both angry and ashamed, cursing the ill luck that had thrown him into hands of the enemy, and speculating miserably on the indignity of a bleak future as a prisoner of war.
Gold and silver star-rockets soaring above their front gave the signal for the Germans to continue their advance, and it was obvious that the presence of their reluctant prisoner was an embarrassment. They had no idea what to do with him. As it was impossible to sent him back, there was no alternative but to take him with them. Howitt had not the smallest objection to being marched towards the British lines. Urged on by his guards, he trailed along at the end of the column, shoulders hunched in a semblance of meek compliance, but inwardly preparing to leap at the first opportunity of escape. Dusk was closing in when luck, assisted by some obliging British gunner, gave him his chance.
Brigade-Major Harold Howitt, 184th Bde., 61st Division
Looking ahead I saw a dip in the road full of mist and smoke, and, as luck would have it, when we were at the bottom, one of our shells dropped unpleasantly close and, looking over my shoulder, I noticed that both my guards had ducked into a shell-hole behind. I had no plan in my mind, but I instinctively leapt at the first man to get up, seized him by the revolver wrist and the throat, and started shaking him. By this time the other man was up and, as I didn’t have another hand, all I could do was to throw one man against the other and roll them both into the ditch at the side of the road. For a moment I wondered what to do next; however, I recovered my wits and ran for it.
They were soon up and emptying their revolvers at me, but they missed and I kept running. I decided that I would make across country to where I could see a burning ammunition dump on the roadside at Beauvois. I think I was right to do this, though the dump was an unpleasant neighbour as I ran beside it, and I must have showed up against it, because several pot-shots were also taken at me. But somehow or other, after hours of dodging about, I got through safely to Beauvois. It was quite empty except for some dead casualties, because we had been driven out of it by gas-shells earlier in the day. It was not nice to go through it, but I had to, so I did, and managed to get on to the Ham road beyond.
Beauvois was well behind the rear line of the battle zone, and the Ham road on the other side of the village was not a healthy place. For all Howitt knew, a detachment of German soldiers might come marching along at any moment; but he had to risk it. It was now pitch dark, and since he had no idea of the whereabouts of the enemy – or of the British for that matter! – it would be even more dangerous to strike across country. The road led south-west, and he followed it cautiously, hoping for the best. He bitterly regretted the loss of his revolver, now the property of the Germans who had captured and disarmed him. It had cost Howitt the tidy sum of three guineas, but in his present situation he would have paid ten times as much for the reassurance of its trusty grip. He had never felt more exposed.
In normal circumstances, even on quiet nights, there were always star-shells shooting above the lines, which provided a pointer to their general direction. But tonight they were few and far between. Nor were there many ‘lines’ as the Army normally understood the term. Here and there a burning cottage threw a lurid glare across a nearby field, but the fires were haphazard, and the light they cast was of no assistance to a fugitive whose sole desire at present was to escape the notice of a sharp-eyed enemy.
As he walked on, listening hard, he picked up the sound of footsteps on the pavé. Guessing that a patrol was coming towards him, he dived into a field on the left-hand side of the road. He started to crawl slowly forward, hoping to pass unseen, but when he reached the edge of the field on the left-hand side of the road. He started to crawl slowly forward, hoping to pass unseen, but when he reached the edge of the field he almost ran into a manned post. To make matters worse, it proved to be one of several posts strung out along a ditch. Slowly, and with infinite caution, Howitt retraced his painful progress on hands and knees, and when he was at a safe distance he slipped across the road and tried the same manoeuvre in the field on the other side. And with the same result!
Howitt was desperate now. Lying close to the ground between two of the posts, he decided to make a run for it, to dash between them, and pray that the men who held them would not be extra vigilant or that the disturbance might be mistaken for the scurry of a nocturnal animal. He was tensing his muscles to spring when he heard a sharp expletive. It was a single familiar Anglo-Saxon syllable, uttered in a tone of deep disgust, but it was music to Howitt’s ears for it could only have come from the lips of a British Tommy. He could have wept with relief.
Brigade-Major Harold Howitt
I knew then that I had got through the German patrols and had bumped up against our own rearguard line.
My next problem was how to give myself up. I began to call to them in English, and gradually showed myself, with my arms up. A Jock of the Gordons came at me with fixed bayonet, and luckily stopped with it very close to my abdomen. I told him I was an escaped prisoner, which he did not believe, so I asked him to take me to one of his officers. Thus I was marched through our lines! Within the hour orders came to retire beyond the Somme and blow up the bridge at Ham. So I had a narrow escape in many ways.1
Major Ward was also out in the night, but he knew exactly where he was going. He was making for the front, where he had been forced to leave his guns, and if it were at all possible he was going to do his damnedest to get them back. He was well aware that the venture might be as pointless as it was dangerous: the Germans had been so close and advancing so rapidly that it was more likely than not that the guns had been captured hours ago. All in all, Ward did not feel particularly hopeful.
Major Ronald Ward, C 293., Royal Field Artillery
Lieutenant Ogilvie had moved up all the limbers and firing wagons during the afternoon and set up an advanced wagon line, so I got together five teams and gun limbers, with five gunners, Ogilvie and myself. (I would gladly have had a few more men, but none were available and there was no other officer.) At 11 p.m. we started forwards. We pushed on to Vélu, avoiding roads as far as possible, for they were now impassable for wheeled traffic in many places, and got to the village and on to the one road Cleater and I had galloped along. Now all was quiet.
Beyond Vélu the road was difficult, for there were many new trenches and a good deal of barbed wire. But a more serious and unexpected difficulty was the mist, which now settled down again, very thick and white, so that one could only see two or three yards. For a mile and a half I had great trouble in maintaining direction through it, whilst finding a way in and out of trenchlines. We moved very slowly forward, the teams keeping well closed up, passed through a gap in the main trench, and arrived at the battery position. There stood the three guns just as we had left them, faintly seen in the hazy light that pierced the mist from the low-lying moon, looking very lonely and forgotten.
Now was the most anxious time. The trench 200 yards in rear of the guns was manned with scattered infantry. This was good, but it showed that this trench had definitely become our front line, so the guns were now in No Man’s Land. I knew that the enemy was close by and doubtless all ready to prevent us from saving the guns. (I did not know until later that during the evening the 19th Division had made a counter-attack towards Doignies. It failed, but it had no doubt checked the enemy’s advance for the moment.)
From now on all instructions were in whispers. In silence I led three teams forward to the three right guns. The drivers did their work beautifully, and in almost complete quiet we limbered them up and then moved them back about fifty yards. Then Ogilvie and I took teams to the other two guns, 400 yards away from the main position over the hill to the left. Any moment I expected a burst of machine-gun fire or shelling, but during the hour we were on the position everything remained wrapped in complete silence, which was made even more intense by the deadening effect of the heavy mist. No gunfire. No rifle fire. It was as peaceful as a night on Salisbury Plain – a strange contrast to the noise of the day just past.
Removing the other two guns was a much more difficult job. They had been in that position for two months, and the effect of the enemy shelling and their own firing had caused the heavy roofs of the pits to sink, so that there was not enough overhead clearance to run the guns out from the back. After a lot of hard work and some digging we were still no nearer clearing them, when fortunately I found an officer and about thirty men in the trench behind and they came to help. With all this manpower we hauled the guns out of the front of the pits on to level ground in a few minutes.
The intensity of the silence about us made our movements sound terribly noisy, and I have never in my life been so anxious as I was then. I expected to see the enemy appear through the mist at any moment. But the worst work was completed, and I led these two guns back to the other three.
We were all delighted with our success!
A little over a mile away, Dick Gammell and his signallers were also getting out, taking advantage of the stillness, the darkness and the mist to make their way back with the weary infantry and to carry on, if they could, in a new position. Apart from a couple of signal lamps, there was no hope of salvaging any of the equipment, so painstakingly constructed, and Gammell was loath to leave it for the benefit of the enemy, or even to leave the dugout intact for his convenience.
They smashed up what they could and climbed up the steep stairway for the last time. Gammell was the last man out. When he reached the top of the steps he emptied the contents of a can of petrol down the stairway and set it alight. It ignited with a satisfactory bang. The walls of the stairway and the rooms below were lined with boards of timber and, although it was twenty feet below ground and far from damp-proof, there was just a chance that the dugout would burn. Then he turned away, thankful to have escaped the rigours of the day with a whole skin and with nothing worse to complain of than scorched eyebrows.
All along the road weary men were plodding westward through the mist, some in a semblance of platoon formation, others in twos and threes. After a while Gammell noticed that his own party had been augmented by a number of waifs and strays who were happy to place themselves under the orders of an officer in the innocent belief that he would lead them home. He marvelled at their confidence, for he himself had no idea where ‘home’ was to be found. But he kept them together and, by and by, when they came to a small quarry by the roadside, he led them into it, and as the dawn approached he set about organizing some kind of defence. It was all he could do.
Although it had been pushed back on part of its front, the Third Army seemed to be in a more secure situation than the Fifth. But the position on the Flesquières salient where the two armies met gave some cause for concern. The force defending it was seriously diminished by casualties and, although no ground had been given, the troops could hardly be expected to withstand a fresh assault. They could easily be cut off if the Germans continued to advance on their left – as they showed every intention of doing. It seemed only sensible to withdraw them – not, initially, as far back as the battle zone at Havrincourt, but to an intermediate line which would shorten their front and enable them to keep in touch with the neighbouring 51st Division to the north. General Sir Julian Byng, in command of the Third Army, had also been in touch with GHQ, and the Commander-in-Chief had agreed that this was the sensible course. The intermediate line was ready-made, for it was nothing less than the strongly fortified Hindenburg Line, which, less than four months previously, had been so gloriously captured by the British Army.
The news of the withdrawal from the front line of the Flesquières salient on the northern hinge of the Fifth Army caused General Sir Hubert Gough to reappraise his position, for there was no alternative but to order the withdrawal of his own 9th (Scottish) Division to conform to the new line. The warning order was issued during the night, and when it filtered down to the men in the line they were far from pleased. They had give little ground. They had saved their flank, fought hard, and stuck it out. They had suffered much, but they knew that they had done well, and it was hard to come to terms with a retiral that would leave the field to the enemy. But orders were orders.
The private sentiments of General Gough were similar. Despite the precarious position of the 21st Division on its right flank, he had hoped to swing back on the hinge of the 9th Division line, to readjust the front of his army, and to hold on until reserve troops arrived to strengthen his weak, attenuated force. He had not envisaged a wholesale retreat, and he did not do so now. He intended to fight a battle in retreat, and that was a very different matter.
Although Gough had good reason to suppose otherwise, the Commander-in-Chief was not so insensitive to the difficulties of the Fifth Army as Gough himself believed. Haig had already ordered the 8th Division to go to Gough’s support, and after Gough’s telephoned report that evening he had decided to dispatch the 2nd Division too. But, since it was now behind the Flanders front, it would be a little while before it reached the Fifth Army.
Field-Marshal Haig was obliged to take a broad view of the situation, and he was not convinced that the day’s events showed beyond doubt the main thrust of the German assault. He had always believed that this was more likely to fall on the fronts of the Third and First Armies, or even astride the Franco-Belgian frontier, where the Second Army held twenty-three miles running from the left flank of the First Army to a point north of Ypres. These three armies were the guardians of the Channel ports on which the fortunes – even the fate – of the British Army depended, for through them stretched the lifelines across the English Channel which linked the Army to its home base and kept it active in the field. Every transport carrying drafts of reinforcements, every shipload of food for its men, forage for its horses and ammunition for its guns, every plank of timber and every small necessity, from stone for repairing roads down to the last nail and horseshoe, reached the Army through the bottlenecks of Calais, Dunkirk, Boulogne or Le Havre. Le Havre was inconveniently situated a long way to the south, and Calais so close that it could be shelled by the enemy’s long-range guns, but the ports constituted the only lines of communication. By comparison, the French Army was abundantly endowed, with a sprawling network of roads and railways running from the French front through the deep hinterland of unoccupied France to the coast of the Mediterranean.
The ground behind the British front was narrow – the fronts of the Third and First Armies were roughly fifty miles from the coast, and on the left flank of the Second Army less than thirty miles lay between Ypres and Dunkirk. If the enemy succeeded in breaking through this lightweight front with a crushingly superior force and managed to leap forward, a hop, a step and a jump would take him to the coast, the British Army would be pushed into the sea, and the war, so far as Great Britain was concerned, would be lost. It was this danger, and this consideration more than any other, which had influenced Sir Douglas Haig in planning the disposition of his denuded force to meet the German assault – and the force at his disposal was far far weaker than he desired.
The reorganization of divisions in January had brought their component battalions if not to full strength then at least to something approaching it, but, with one battalion fewer in each brigade, each division had been diminished by a quarter of the peacetime force. Reserves were few, even though it was an axiom of military strategy that assaults on weak forces could be repelled only if fresh troops could be thrown in to reinforce, and to counter-attack to recapture lost ground. The question which had perplexed Haig and his Staff was, Where would the assault be launched? And how should they dispose their fragile force to meet it? The Germans’ show of preparation across many miles had strengthened Haig’s conviction that the enemy strike would be aimed directly at the Channel ports.
To the British General Staff, trying to deduce the German plans, the distribution of a slender force to best advantage across 126 miles had been the subject of deep discussion and much perplexity. In the final allocation the vulnerable armies closest to the coast had come off best.
On the left of the line the Second Army, with Dunkirk at its back, had twelve divisions to dispose along its twenty-three-mile front. South of it, the First Army, holding thirty-three miles between Armentières and Gavrelle, slightly north of Arras, had fourteen, which included two divisions supplied by the Portuguese. General Byng’s Third Army continued the line with another fourteen divisions across his twenty-eight-mile front. The Fifth Army, with the longest front of all and which was known to be the weakest, was allotted only twelve divisions to defend it. It was forty-two miles long.
The First Army had two divisions in local reserve, and the Second Army had three. The Third and Fifth Armies had four apiece, and this in General Gough’s case was less generous than it seemed, for three of them were cavalry divisions, whose strength in manpower was only that of an infantry brigade. When these arrangements had been made there remained only eight unallocated divisions in General Reserve. The best that could be done was to place two behind each army, ready to move at a few hours’ notice to any part of the front where they were needed.
Even with luck and the recently improved communications, even by using every available train, every bus and every lorry, the movement of a whole division of 9,000 men, with its horses, wagons and stores, with its guns and ammunition, could not be speedily accomplished. But, remembering the slogging progress of previous campaigns, Haig had banked on the belief that, even in a successful offensive, any German advance would be slow, giving his troops time to withdraw so gradually that there would be days or even weeks of grace in which reserves could be sent to assist them.
It is only fair to say that his opposite number, General Ludendorff, had taken a very similar view. But he, at least, had ample resources with which to exploit the situation, while the British commander could not easily draw on the few resources at his command in order to contain it. It would be the height of folly for Haig to strip his other fronts of their all too meagre reserves when it might conceivably be part of the enemy plan to trick him into doing so. Who could say that the attack on the southern sector of his front was not a feint, and that soon another, even stronger, blow would not be struck elsewhere?
Haig was very conscious of the weakness of the long Fifth Army front, but he had not intended to present its commander with an impossible task. For one thing, since the Fifth Army was much further from the coast, the extent of the territory behind him would give Gough room to manoeuvre if the worst should come to the worst. In the event of an assault on the Fifth Army, the General Staff had counted on two things: that the obstacles of the River Oise, with its marshlands and tributaries, and the proximity of the dense forest of St Gobain would compensate for the sketchy defences at the southern extremity of the front, and that General Pétain would honour his agreement to send French troops to Gough’s assistance.
Pétain had every intention of doing so – albeit with the same qualms and doubts as Sir Douglas Haig. He too had the security of a front to consider – the long, bitterly contested French front that ran from the right of the Fifth Army to the mountains of the Vosges. With the prize of Paris always in the Germans’ sights, as he believed, might not the main thrust of the enemy onslaught be directed at the French? One division was already preparing to set off to assist the British, but could he afford to part with more reserves which might soon be badly needed elsewhere? During the day, despite General Gough’s urgent entreaties, Pétain had hesitated and pondered. But honour was at stake, the danger was on his flank, and General Humbert’s reserve divisions were close at hand. At nightfall he finally issued the order that would release them. Like the British reserves, they could not be moved in an instant, but the wheels had been set in motion and they would soon be on their way.
All evening the wires behind the British front in Flanders had hummed with urgent signals from GHQ. By midnight, the colonels of most reserve battalions had received the curt preliminary order: ‘Prepare to move.’ It was the first indication that a great battle had begun in the south, and that soon they would be in it.