Even when they straggled into position the previous night, the South Africans were a brigade in name only. Their prodigious stand at Gauche Wood and Chapel Hill, and their casualties during the retirement of the 9th Division, had reduced the entire Brigade to a skeleton force of some 500 men – barely the strength of a single weak battalion. In normal circumstances, on completion of a move, the divisional rearguard should have moved into support, but the circumstances were so far from normal that every man of the Division was needed to form a line – and a line, moreover, which was more than five miles long. When the Germans attacked on the morning of 24 March it was inevitable that gaps should appear between the brigades. Inevitable too that the enemy should press forward between them.
The position of the South African Brigade was not an enviable one. The left flank of its fragile line was soon ‘in the air’. On the right, although at first the Springboks had been in tenuous contact with the 21st Division, it was soon apparent that the enemy had encroached, that the right flank was also open to the wide, and that the enemy was attacking from three directions: the south, the east and, disturbingly, also the south-west, almost at their backs. They had very little to fight back with, and the ground was difficult to defend. There was one stretch of decent trench, a few others which were little more than token scrapings, plus a considerable scattering of shell-holes. The men each had 200 rounds of ammunition, and there were a number of Lewis-guns with a reasonable supply, but the four Vickers machine-guns had only four belts of ammunition apiece. During the night, General Dawson sent three of them back and told the teams to link up with the transport, if they could find it. The last remaining gun and the weary men who manned it would have to do the job with all the ammunition there was. And it was little enough.
In the three days since Gauche Wood, hardly a man of the surviving Springboks had slept for more than an hour at a stretch, but they were as stubborn as the enemy was persistent. They held out for far longer than even the most sanguine would have thought possible – husbanding their meagre supply of ammunition, making every shot tell and, by the same unerring marksmanship that had baulked the Germans at Gauche Wood three days earlier, repeatedly holding off a force ten times their number. Even when the enemy crept forward under a smokescreen, even when field guns were manhandled forward, the Lewis-guns dispatched their crews before they could come into action. But defeat was only a matter of time, and by two o’clock in the afternoon the South Africans were surrounded. By four o’clock only a hundred exhausted men remained. Now trench mortars were bombarding at close quarters, their ranks were thinning fast, and their ammunition was almost exhausted. Half an hour later, when the last shot had been fired, the few who remained were engulfed in a sea of enemy soldiers and made prisoner. As they were marched back behind the German line, their captors helped to carry the wounded and treated their prisoners with a respect which was close to admiration. Brigadier-General Dawson was at the head of the ragged band which was all that was left of his brigade. Leutnant Rudolf Binding met them as they went.
Leutnant Rudolf Binding
Out from the lines of our advancing infantry, which I was following, appeared an English general, accompanied by a single officer. He was an extraordinary sight. About thirty-five years old, excellently – one can almost say wonderfully – dressed and equipped, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street. Brushed and shaved, with his short khaki overcoat on his arm, in breeches of the best cut and magnificent high laced boots such as only the English bootmakers make to order, he came to meet me easily and without the slightest embarrassment. The sight of all this English cloth and leather made me more conscious than ever of the shortcomings of my own outfit, and I felt an inward temptation to call out to him, ‘Kindly undress at once’, for a desire for an English general’s equipment, with tunic, breeches and boots, had arisen in me, shameless and patent.
By way of being polite, I said with intention, ‘You have given us a lot of trouble; you stuck it for a long time.’ To which he replied, ‘Trouble! Why, we have been running for four days and four nights!’ It appeared that when he could no longer get his brigade to stand he had taken charge of a machine-gun himself, to set an example to his retreating men. All his officers except the one with him had been killed or wounded, and his brigade hopelessly cut up. I asked for his name, to remind me of our meeting, and he gave it. He was General Dawson, South African Brigade.
It was almost dark as they marched through Bouchavesnes and up the hill beyond, but it was light enough to distinguish the mass of St Pierre-Vaast Wood on the left and the ground that swept down to the village of Moislains in the valley. It was also light enough to see troops and guns and transport in a continuous double line that stretched far to the east, jamming the road for miles. General Dawson had the satisfaction of knowing that for more than seven hours his tiny force had dislocated the immediate plans of the German Army and kept it from moving forward.
In the confusion of the previous evening, as the South African Brigade moved back to Marrières Wood, Lieutenant Geoffrey Lawrence had been caught up with the stragglers, too late to catch up and rejoin his unit, and much to his annoyance he was ordered to join up with the ‘details’ at the makeshift transport line at Bray. Here, to his pleasure and profound relief, he found his brother Reg. Both boys had been in the thick of fighting for three ferocious days, and it had seemed to each of them almost too much to expect that the other had survived. In the wake of the day’s debacle it seemed doubly miraculous that they had, and they embraced as if they had not met for years.
When the wounded had been accounted for and sent off, of the entire South African Brigade there were barely 300 survivors, mostly non-combatants. Later, when it became clear that no one else would be coming back from Marrières Wood, they were split into groups of a hundred men, each representing a regiment, and with the rest of the 9th Division they set off on the next stage of the retirement through Combles. At least they were retiring as a body, but it was a body which could be better described as the ghost of the South African Brigade.
Not all their comrades were so fortunate. The three brigades of the Division had been so split up that there were crowds of stragglers. Harry Atherton and his friend Higgins of the 28th Field Ambulance were cold and wet and uncomfortable, for they had not properly dried out in the three days since they had been rushed to the line at the start of the battle. It was unfortunate that the Field Ambulance boys had been taking the opportunity of a brief rest in an abandoned farmhouse to do their laundry, and had hung their clothing out overnight to dry. But it had not dried, there had been a keen frost, their garments were still frozen stiff when their unfortunate owners were obliged to put them on, and three days of warm sunshine and unremitting exertion had not sufficiently penetrated the layers to thoroughly dry them out before another night of fog and frost struck chill into their bones.
Private Harry Atherton, 28th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps, 9th (Scottish) Division
We could tell by the sound of the gunfire that the Germans were getting very near, and we didn’t have long to wait, for in the distance we could see a line of our infantry coming towards us. They turned round and lay flat on the ground, fired a few quick rounds, got up, crossed the road, and shouted to us, ‘Come on, mate!’ Then another line came in sight and did the same – a few quick rounds before crossing the road. They were fighting a rearguard action. We couldn’t see anything else in the distance, but now we seemed to be alone between two armies, and Higgie and I decided it was time to go, so we followed the infantry, but keeping well to the right of them so that we wouldn’t be in their line of fire. We were lost, and we didn’t know where our new headquarters were, so we kept on walking. It was moorland, with not a building in sight. The area was around Combles, and it was suddenly so quiet that one couldn’t think there was a war, yet it was so near. Two soldiers of the Signals who had a post there asked us what was happening. We told them to get moving, because Jerry wasn’t far away.
We’d been going on for a while when we saw someone coming towards us. We could see he was an airman, and he asked us what was happening. We had dropped on an airfield, and it was my brother George! We were very glad to meet each other so far from home. It’s a small world! He didn’t know me in my tin hat. We had a few minutes with him, and before we parted I told him I would tell mother, who would be very pleased. He asked us if we had any cigarettes, so we gave him a packet before we said our goodbyes and we were on our way again.
In the distance there was a crowd of soldiers, and when we got nearer there was a notice chalked up: ‘Stragglers Post’. The Regimental Traffic Officer told us the way, and also that we had another six miles to walk! Before we started we were given some tea and bread and jam, and it tasted good – we were ready for it! It was almost dark when we finally arrived, and we had to report on what we had been doing and to explain our absence. They simply said, ‘Very interesting. Dismiss!’ Some of the boys had found a few bottles of wine in a house that had been evacuated, but the CO confiscated them. They ought to have kept it dark!
In the course of that same evening, 24 March, an unexpected visitor arrived at GHQ in the person of Lord Milner, en route from London to Paris to confer with Monsieur Clemenceau. In view of the seriousness of the situation in France – more serious even than the War Cabinet yet realized – Lloyd George had sent this trusted senior member of the War Cabinet to confer with the French Prime Minister. Lord Milner had been travelling all day, but he broke his journey at Montreuil to pay a courtesy call on the British Commander-in-Chief. But Sir Douglas Haig had already left for Bernaville, where General Byng had now set up Third Army Headquarters and where, for convenience, Haig was also to meet his own Chief of Staff, General Lawrence, whom he had sent to visit General Gough earlier in the day.
Lawrence had found Gough in good heart. General Fayolle had been with him, for now that the Fifth Army was technically under the command of the French the two men were working closely together and they had arranged for a joint counter-attack to take place the following morning. They had outlined the details, which Lawrence now passed on to the Commander-in-Chief, and it was reasonable to believe that this would re-establish at least part of the line along the Somme. The right wing of Byng’s Third Army was falling back, but, where the situation appeared to be most precarious, newly arrived divisions had been ordered piecemeal into battle to plug gaps which might appear as the troops retired. Byng could only reiterate the orders he had issued on the instructions of the Commander-in-Chief, in the confident hope that they would be carried out.
Even so, there was cause for anxiety – so much so that, before leaving his headquarters at Montreuil, Haig had telegraphed urgently to London to request that Sir Henry Wilson, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, should come to France. His message read, ‘Situation is serious. Morval Ridge lost so Third and Fifth Armies are separated. Junction with the French can only be re-established by vigorous offensive action of French while I do all I can from the north in conjunction with them. I meet Pétain tonight.’ He was unaware that Lord Milner was already speeding to Paris.
At this juncture Haig badly needed backing, and he needed it particularly in his relations with the French. A staff car was standing by, and immediately after dinner Haig was to set off to drive to Dury, south of Amiens, to confer with General Pétain, who was driving north from Compiègne to meet him at eleven o’clock that night. Before Haig left Third Army Headquarters he impressed on General Byng that ‘at all costs’ he must maintain the left wing of his army where it met the First in the north, and stand fast in front of Arras. They would not be alone, he assured him. General Plumer had agreed to thin his line in the Belgian sector, and, by taking some divisions from the First and Second Armies, it was the intention of the Commander-in-Chief to concentrate a reserve line behind Arras. Meanwhile, he added, it was of the most vital importance that the Third Army should cling to its ground.
Apart from necessary adjustments to maintain contact with the retirements on its right, the Third Army was indeed clinging to its ground, but further south, where its right wing was swinging back in a wide arc, things were not going quite in accordance with the orders which had been issued by Third Army HQ. Although the retirement had been carefully plotted on the map so that the line would remain intact, replicating those theoretical movements on the ground while being harried by an unco-operative enemy was another matter. In the tumult of attack and counter-attack, of piecemeal withdrawal and haphazard infiltrations by the foe – and, above all, in the unremitting shell-fire – the signals services had virtually collapsed. Even when orders reached a divisional headquarters, despite valiant individual efforts they seldom got through to the brigadiers whose task it was to orchestrate the movement of the troops. Telephone lines were smashed; runners could not cover the long distances from divisional headquarters; and, in the absence of conventional communications, mounted staff officers sent off to search frantically for brigades in the ‘line’ did not always succeed in finding them. When they did, more often than not the position in the so-called line had altered so drastically that the orders were no longer relevant. Divisions were retiring less in accordance with instructions from Army Headquarters than by improvised arrangements between individual brigadiers as circumstances demanded. They were not running, but they were fighting as they went, and it was hard to know what was happening. No matter how brigades and battalions tried to ‘keep in touch’, it was no wonder that gaps appeared. As darkness fell, they grew wider.
Even in daylight, moving across the old Somme battlefields had been difficult. There were few landmarks. A few haphazard heaps of rubble or a trace of brickdust among the old shell-holes was all that remained to show the location of a village pulverized in the fighting of 1916, and here and there a skeletal cluster of jagged stumps marked the site of a wood. A maze of old trenches littered the wasteland. They were deep and treacherous, festooned with barricades of rusting barbed wire – formidable obstacles in the path of troops trying to take up a line or to make their way across country. But the enemy, endeavouring to thrust forward, was encountering the same difficulties. Here and there, fighting patrols of fifty or a hundred, pushing blindly into strange terrain, were actually moving parallel to some British battalion as it withdrew, unbeknown to either. The going was slow. Although the roads had been patched up, they were frequently blocked by a line of transport wagons or guns moving back to new positions.
Sergeant A. Dunbar, A 236 Bty., Royal Field Artillery, 47th Division
After we had fired all our ammunition we were ordered further back and into another field for the night and to replenish our ammunition. A couple of dozen wagons of live shell had been ordered from the divisional ammunition column, and our CO had also asked for a dozen empty wagons to recover the piles of empty cartridge cases that we had left on our last gun position in our hurry to get away. The empty wagons duly arrived, and I was detailed to act as guide back to the old position. I was not amused. At the time we got our guns away we thought that at least a whole battalion of German infantry were in the next field, and it seemed madness to try to recover those cases. However, orders is orders, so we started back.
I was tired out and half-asleep most of the time. Also it was dark, and we were on unfamiliar ground. More important, we did not know where the Germans were or how far they had advanced since we left the gun position. I really didn’t know just where I was, and it was strangely quiet. The only sound was the rattle of our horses’ harness and the clatter of their hooves. I didn’t like it one bit. I was leading a column of twelve wagons, thirty-six drivers and seventy-two horses, to say nothing of a DAC officer (and his horse), and I was leading them straight into the arms of the Germans for all I knew. It was a shattering thought!
After about an hour, and more by luck than by my judgement, we found the position. The cases were still there, scattered about the field, and we got them loaded into the empty wagons as quickly and as quietly as possible. All the time I was sure that we were being watched by hundreds of German eyes the other side of the hedge! There were a few cases left over when our wagons were full, but I advised the officer in charge that we should get away as quickly as we could and not push our luck. He led the column this time, and I brought up the rear. All the time my eyes and ears were working overtime. I could almost feel Germans all round us. But our luck still held, and the further we went the better I felt. I rode up and down the column once or twice to see that all was OK. This was standard practice, but on the last occasion I counted the wagons. There were only eleven! I checked again. Still eleven! I rode up to the officer in front and reported. ‘You must have left one on the position,’ he said. ‘You’d better go back and find it.’ My heart sank, but it was an order and I had no option. I turned back alone, and this time I was quite certain that I would end up a prisoner of war or, worse, dead in a ditch at the side of the road.
We had come back a few miles, and my horse didn’t like leaving the others. Come to that, neither did I! After a time we came to a fork in the road, and, although I was quite sure the left fork was the one we should take, my horse badly wanted to take the other. I had my way, however, and off we went again. Half a mile further we turned a bend, and fifty yards away there was a group of men in the road. Without thinking, I rode up to within a few yards and saw that there were six or seven men sprawling and sitting on the road and one held out what appeared to be a mug to me. Suddenly I realized they were in field-grey uniforms and not khaki! I whipped my horse round and shot back at the gallop. I dropped the reins on his neck and he got the message. For the next hour he went on and on without hesitation. Turnings, crossroads, forks in the road made no difference – he knew the way all right. We finally caught up with the column and I reported to the officer that I had found no trace of the missing wagon. ‘Oh, that’s all right, sergeant,’ he said, ‘I remember now – we only had eleven wagons to start with.’
The men I saw were undoubtedly a German patrol. Probably they had raided a British canteen somewhere and were all too drunk to recognize me or to fire. Thanks to my horse, I got away with it that time, but for hours I was in a cold sweat!
More than twelve miles to the south, where von Hutier’s Eighteenth German Army was on the heels of the 58th British Division and the French who had come up to assist, the 1st Bavarian Infantry Regiment had reached Guivry and had rested there all day. The terrain was easier going than on the old battlefield of the Somme, but they had now been marching and fighting with little sleep for three days and nights, and they were thankful for the respite. They had also had little food since their feed at Montescourt three days earlier, but in Guivry they once again struck lucky.
Leutnant Reinhold Spengler, 2nd Coy., 1st Bavarian Infantry Regt., 1st Bavarian Division
Shortly after arriving, we found a French provision depot. It was not as assorted as the English one we left in Montescourt, but to us it was a hungry man’s paradise. The depot was stocked with all kinds of meat, sausages, mountains of white bread, real coffee, cocoa, canned milk, tea, cheese, chocolate and candied fruits. We stayed here the rest of the day, and had plenty of time to feel like guests of the French.
One man of my light-machine-gun platoon delighted us with a juicy roast. He loved to cook, and an hour after settling down in Guivry he served a delicious baked chicken. That night we had pork roast and bread dumplings – a feast so well loved in Bavaria. All of this proved too much for my stomach, which was not used to such delicacies (not by my own choice). Soon I was sick, and the next morning I looked like a living corpse, barely able to stand on my legs. During the next several days I took my place in the baggage wagon that followed the company.
Sated for once with good food and the pleasant sensation of full stomachs, the Bavarian boys gave little thought for tomorrow as they settled down for the night. Things were going well. A little way to the south the sky glowed and flickered above the burning town of Noyon. Behind them their guns were still firing, and ahead, where the dull thud of other explosions sounded along the Oise, engineers were blowing up the bridges that crossed the river.
Noyon was on the road to French Headquarters in the town of Compiègne – and Compiègne was almost halfway along the main road to Paris. The Staff at GQG1 in Compiègne were used to hearing the drone of German bombers following the line of the River Oise as they flew towards Paris. They had learned to ignore them, and even to disregard the din of anti-aircraft guns in the forest firing salvoes at the raiders overhead. But now Compiègne was the target, and for the last three nights a series of violent air raids had driven the Headquarters’ Staff to shelter in the deep catacombs beneath the palace where they were based. Emergency telephone lines had been installed, and tables and chairs had been carried down from the galleries above, but, although the subterranean passages ran so deep that the sound of neither the bombs nor the guns could be heard, working under these conditions was not easy, and in the present critical circumstances GQG was working round the clock. The catacombs were as cold and clammy as the grave, the emergency lighting was far from adequate, and a constant invasion of soldiers and even civilians seeking shelter during raids made it almost impossible to concentrate. General Pétain had already decamped with his most senior officers to a villa on the edge of the forest.
On the third night the raids began earlier and were more violent than ever. Parts of the town were already badly damaged, most civilians had now been evacuated, and, as the gravity of the military situation increased, the Staff at GQG fully expected to be ordered to move. The fall of Noyon was to be the signal for their departure. It had always been anticipated that, in the event of an emergency, GQG would go back to Chantilly, where suitable premises had already been prepared, but now the plans were changed. During the afternoon of Palm Sunday, Colonel Valentin, who had been at Chantilly since the previous day, making final arrangements, was ordered to proceed to Provins. The enemy had advanced too far, and Chantilly was far too close to the line for safety. Provins was well to the south, near the forest of Fontainebleau to the east of Paris. Although Pétain himself proposed to remain at Compiègne with his advanced headquarters, the news of GQG’s departure did not reassure Sir Douglas Haig when he learned of it at Dury late that evening. Provins was a long way from the area where the threat was greatest and where the crisis was deepening all the time.
The order to pack up came as no surprise to the French Staff at Compiègne, but they had hardly expected to receive it at 10.30 in the evening in the middle of an air raid and to be told that baggage must be ready for removal by six o’clock in the morning. In seven sleepless hours the Staff, their clerks and orderlies, and the officers’ servants, hastily summoned from billets in the town, were now obliged to accomplish a task they would have been hard-pressed to complete in seven days.
There were mountains of paper to be packed and removed to safety, for every department had its own irreplaceable archives. These ranged from the plans for the reorganization of divisions to the transport schemes of the Railway Department, which would not only be of inestimable value to the enemy if they were to fall into his hands but would paralyse the Army if they were lost or destroyed by fire or shelling. It was clear that it was going to be a long night.
For almost a year French Army Headquarters had been installed in the sprawling palace which dominated the town of Compiègne and the forest beyond. GQG was the last of a long line of occupants, for the chateau had originally been built in the time of the Merovingian kings who ruled Gaul after the fall of the Roman Empire, and had been enlarged and rebuilt a thousand years later by Louis XV. He liked it best of all his residences, and his favourite hunting ground was the lush forest outside its walls. A balustraded terrace overlooked the sandy avenue – then the King’s private thoroughfare – where he had once ridden out to meet the carriage that brought the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette to her unhappy destiny as the bride of his grandson, the Dauphin. Here too, at Compiègne, the Emperor Napoleon had held court (and married another Austrian princess), and the chateau had been refurbished in his own distinctive style. Napoleon’s marble statue still brooded in the salon where, a century before, in the throes of another war, he had laid vainglorious plans to invade and conquer England.
In 1914, in the first hectic days of the present war, before the battles that threw them back and the start of the long stalemate, German uhlans had briefly occupied the chateau of Compiègne as they swept through France on the heels of the Allies. Now that the stalemate was broken, in the flurry of preparation for departure through the long hours of the night, it seemed perfectly possible that the Germans would soon be back.
Travelling to Dury to meet the British Commander-in-Chief, General Pétain was not in the happiest frame of mind. He struck Sir Douglas Haig as being ‘very much upset, almost unbalanced, and most anxious’. It was hardly surprising. The rapid advance of von Hutier’s army southwards and the deliberate bombardment of Paris by the German long-distance gun weighed heavily on Pétain’s mind and was drawing him to the inexorable conclusion that the threat to the French capital outweighed all other considerations. He was convinced that the Germans’ attack in the British sector was intended to push the British Army aside before launching a major thrust against the French in the Champagne, there to break the line, sweep on to Paris and, in effect, conquer France as they had done in another war half a century before. The falling back of the southern wing of the British Army adjacent to his own did nothing, in his view, to inspire confidence. Nor did it incline him to accede to Haig’s desire that he, Pétain, should extend his forces northwards to keep in touch with Haig’s own force, and to make a stand at Amiens. Pétain had already fulfilled his initial obligation by sending such troops as he could spare. How could he further denude his own army of men who might be badly needed to thwart another German blow which would strike at the heart of France? He strongly suspected that it was part of the machiavellian German plan that he should do so.
In Sir Douglas Haig’s view, Amiens, at the hub of the vital rail communications in the north, was the Germans’ main objective. The prising apart of the French and British armies would enable them to capture it. Moreover, if the British Army were driven back to the coast, and consequently out of the war, the Germans doubtless hoped that the French themselves would collapse.
The midnight meeting was not a happy one. Both commanders were tired, and, despite Haig’s competent command of French and the presence of bilingual liaison officers during their discussion, misunderstandings arose – or so it was subsequently said.
Each man, the other later claimed, had gained a false impression of the intentions of his opposite number. It was probably true that, when challenged to speak plainly, General Pétain admitted that, in the course of unforeseen events, he might ultimately be forced to retire southward on Paris. It was probably equally true that Sir Douglas Haig hinted at the possibility of being forced to retire northward to the Channel ports. In retrospect, neither commander’s recollection of the meeting entirely matched the recollection of the other. Nevertheless, Pétain had revealed his thinking in an order to the French Army, and he handed a copy to Haig. After an assessment of the military situation, it went on:
INTENTIONS OF THE GENERAL COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF
Before everything to keep the French Armies together as one solid whole; in particular, not to allow the Grande Armée de Reserve to be cut off from the rest of our forces. Secondly, if it is possible, to maintain liaison with the British forces.
The words ‘if it is possible’ reinforced the suspicion of the British Commander-in-Chief that the French were not to be relied on. Although the French Commander reiterated his wish to assist Haig to the limit of his ability, he made no secret of the fact that his orders from the French Government were ‘to cover Paris at all costs’. But Haig himself, despite his declared conviction that only the combined force of the British and French armies could meet the crisis and repulse the German assault on Amiens, had conveyed the impression that his own position was ambivalent, if not directly to General Pétain then certainly by his instructions to the Third Army.
General Byng had undoubtedly received that impression, and early the previous day he had informed his corps commanders that it was not yet certain whether retirement would be made towards the west to keep in line with the French, or north-west to cover the Channel ports. On the Commander-in-Chief’s instruction, he had also made arrangements for the construction of a new line to which the Third Army could fall back, running north from Dernancourt south of Albert, to link up with the Arras defences. As soon as sufficient men could be found, work would begin on a further system of trenches which would extend from west of Doullens to cover the ports of Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk. If the worst came to the worst, it was there that the British Army would make its last stand.
To find sufficient labour, they would have to scour the bottom of the barrel, and every man who could be spared from the lines of communication was detailed for this task – the Royal Engineers, the personnel of camouflage parks and factories, the staffs and officers of the Army schools of instruction, the men who had operated the forward light railways, whose task of carrying supplies to the old front line was redundant now that it was no more. Drivers and transport troops were co-opted, along with men employed at salvage dumps and base camps, and every man who could be spared from any branch of the unwieldy administrative machine that supported the Army in the field and who was not capable in the last resort of fighting in the line.1
It was thought to be a necessary precaution.
General Pétain’s journey on the main road to his headquarters took him through Montdidier and the area where the troops of his reserve army were assembling to form a line. Nearing Compiègne, his vehicle was forced to slow down to a crawl. Despite much blowing of the horn and the voluble imprecations of his driver, the big staff car had great difficulty in squeezing past the cavalcade of lorries streaming across the river and inching up the narrow streets towards the chateau, where the preparations for departure were in full swing. Capitaine Jean Pierrefeu was hurrying through one half-emptied gallery, where the marble eye of Napoleon seemed to glare with cold displeasure at the feverish scene below. The great man had chosen to be immortalized, larger than life, in the robes of a Roman emperor, and Pierrefeu was now struck by the thought that he looked uncannily like a commander abandoned by his troops.
It was three o’clock in the morning by the time Sir Douglas Haig reached his quarters near Montreuil. Until tomorrow, there was little he could do. General Byng had his orders, and the Commander-in-Chief was hopeful that the Third Army north of Péronne was even now forming a flank along the straggling westward course of the River Somme. But south of Péronne, where the Fifth Army had already passed into French command, it was now up to Pétain to save the situation.
But ultimately it would not be up to Pétain. It would be up to General Foch.