Chapter 22
North and south of Amiens, not every soldier on the Allied front was aware that the Germans had slackened their offensive, for General Ludendorff had ordered his divisional commanders to keep up the pressure. They were to attack wherever possible, to keep the enemy busy while he brought up troops and guns, and to improve the line where it was awkwardly situated, to give them a good start on the race to Amiens.
But the fighting was isolated and intermittent, and in some places there was a noticeable lull. It encouraged an aged pair of civilians to climb out of a cellar near Dernancourt beneath the astonished gaze of a patrol of Australians. Private Stanley Sutcliffe’s company had just moved up to the front line, and they regarded it as a pleasant change after their stint in reserve trenches directly in front of the guns. The firing in support of the fighting at Dernancourt had never seemed to stop, and, although the Aussies of the 12th Brigade relished abundant feeds of roast pork, chickens, and even geese, their stay in the reserve line had been far from peaceful. They were thankful to escape from the constant din, and their comrades of the 13th Brigade were equally thankful to quit the front line when the 12th came up to relieve them. They had undoubtedly had the worst of it, but by the time Sutcliffe and his companions took over the line the fighting had temporarily died down.
Private Stanley Sutcliffe, 51st Bn., 4th [Australian] Division, AIF
Things were so quiet we hardly knew the Germans were there at all. At night we would go up to the outposts with rations and come back to Edgehill Clearing Station, which had been evacuated. Here we salvaged cases of surgical instruments and plenty of clothing and blankets, and we also got a lot of tinned food of different kinds and big jars of extract of malt. We had nothing to do, only a little bombing in the streets of Dernancourt. Then this old Frenchman and his wife came wandering into our lines. They were both about sixty years old and, from what they told us, they had taken cover in their cellar immediately the first bombardment opened up and had been there for six days without any food. All that time the 12th Brigade had been fighting like fury, and their house was being blown to bits above their heads. They could hardly walk! We gave them a good feed and the old man got some cigarettes, and then they were escorted back behind the line and taken out of it altogether.
No matter how humble his abode, how meagre his plot of land, a French countryman was not willingly parted from his property, and not many miles away another French civilian who had been clinging tenaciously to his roots had also been ‘escorted back and taken out of it’. But he had been taken by the Germans and escorted back behind the enemy line. Émile Goulieux was particularly unhappy, for it was the second time he had been uprooted and sent far into the hinterland of occupied France, where life was not easy under the restrictive rule of the Germans. It was hard enough for the local population trying to sustain normal life, but it was a thousand times worse for the incomers evacuated from places close to the fighting fronts and dumped willy-nilly in districts far from home. Deprived of their means of livelihood, billeted on reluctant local landlords, they had to shift for themselves as best they could, working in the fields when there was work to be had and depending on the charity of the Germans when there was not.
Jean Dignoire, who had been the stationmaster at Bapaume, had been evacuated with his wife and daughter in the early summer of 1916, when the Allies had launched their offensive on the Somme, and Émile Goulieux had been in the same batch of evacuees. They had been sent to the village of Vertain, twelve miles east of Cambrai and some thirty miles from home. It was no great distance measured on the map, but it seemed so far away from France that it had become almost a matter of course to call it ‘Germany’. Then, as the war tightened its grip, as food grew scarce, the Germans themselves began to feel the pinch and were anxious to rid themselves of the burden of feeding useless mouths.
Mme Flora Verdel (née Dignoire)
Early in 1917 the authorities in the village of Vertain offered to allow a certain category of refugee – the oldest and the youngest – to be repatriated to unoccupied France via Switzerland, which was neutral of course. So a lot of them decided to go, including this little old chap, Monsieur Goulieux, whom we had got to know well. Quite a number of people went, and we waved them off a little enviously when they started for the east. I remember seeing Monsieur Goulieux carrying his belongings in a small suitcase. He was very happy to go!
After a long journey, which took him through Belgium and Germany to Switzerland, and then back into France to Lyons, on to Paris and then eventually to the north, he managed to get back to his own district, which had been liberated by the British in March 1917, because it was given up by the Germans when they went back to the Hindenburg Line. It took him many, many months. It was the end of 1917 before he got there, and even then civilians were not encouraged to go back. But he had managed it, and he settled down not far from his village. It had been completely destroyed (I have an idea that it was somewhere round Suzanne, or Bray-sur-Somme), but he built himself a hut from material he recovered from the debris, and he even started to lay out a little garden. He was there only one or two weeks when the Germans advanced again, and they advanced so rapidly that the poor man didn’t have time to get away. He was caught again, poor Monsieur Goulieux!
One day, just about the beginning of April, we saw a new batch of refugees trailing into the village, and we were amazed to see Monsieur Goulieux carrying the same little suitcase – just as we had seen him leaving nearly a year before! He was actually sent back to Vertain – the very same village! We were in the street at the time, and he saw us and called out to us. He had to travel at least fifteen hundred kilometres to get away, but he only had to go a few dozen kilometres to get back. He called out to us, ‘Next time I go to France, I’m telling you, I’d rather go by tram-car!’
Fritz Nagel was also on a leisurely journey through ‘Germany’, but it was leisurely by his own choice. To Nagel’s delight, he had been ordered back to attend a course at the German Artillery School at Lille, and he was taking his time about getting there. It was a justifiable indulgence, for the course was not due to start until 6 April and he felt that he had earned a holiday. The last few days at the front had not been pleasant and, with the change in the weather and few aeroplanes to be seen, Nagel’s anti-aircraft gun crew had had nothing to do but stay put and shelter from the insistent shelling of British guns.
Leutnant Fritz Nagel, Anti-Aircraft Gun Bty. K Flak 82
Albert was crumbling under heavy bombardment, so we tried to find some reasonably safe position in the fields. It was cold, rainy, wet and misty, we were in little slit trenches, hastily dug for protection, and the idea of remaining there made us shiver. Everything was peaceful – no small-arms fire could be heard anywhere. Then out of the fog came a major, all wrapped up in a cloak, and he stalked towards us through the mud, swinging his cane as one would at a trespasser. He began shouting, telling me to go away. What could we do with that silly little gun? His men had suffered enough, and when the fog lifted the enemy would zero in on us and hit his men in the trench. He threatened that they would take pot-shots at us if we didn’t disappear right away. I tried to reason with him, but the man was hysterical. We left.
I saw a tidy-looking dugout about forty metres away from us, so I went over to take a look. I had entered many of these enemy dugouts and they were poorly constructed compared to ours, but this one looked good – and it even had a small window in the rear. Although the light was so dim, I was shocked to see two English officers at a table, one sleeping with his head on his arm and the other sitting straight up, both with their caps on. This stupefied me, and I stood there wondering if they would say ‘Hello.’ Then I realized they were dead. To see those men so motionless and rigid made my heart pound.
After his initial shock, Nagel had been sorely tempted to rifle the contents of the dugout, and even the bodies, for he coveted the dead officers’ leather boots, but, remembering rumours of booby traps, he had refrained. There was nothing for it but to remain in the open and shiver in the rain. It had been some comfort when he received a message signed, to his astonishment, by a full general.
Command of 23rd. Reserve Corps
Headquarters April 1, 1918
In the name of His Majesty the Emperor and King I am decorating Leutnant der Reserve Nagel of K Flak 82 with the Iron Cross 1st Class.
Nagel had been delighted by the honour, but he was even happier when, shortly afterwards, he was ordered to leave his battery and proceed to the Artillery School at Lille.
Hans Schetter was also informed that he was to receive the Iron Cross (in his case second class). As long as the inclement weather lasted, Schetter’s observation section had as little to do as Nagel’s anti-aircraft crew, but they were not lucky enough to be relieved. Two had been wounded by shrapnel and evacuated, and the others were still crouched in their wet bivouac in the rye field, waiting for the rain to go off, for the shelling to abate, and for notice of the next attack.
Now that the German offensive appeared to have been checked, the question of the next attack was also uppermost in the minds of the Allied commanders. It was clear that Ludendorff would make another strike, but no one could be sure where or when. Sir Douglas Haig was convinced that the new thrust would come somewhere on the British front, and, in the front’s present state, he was doubtful if he could withstand a second major blow. He was pressing General Foch to launch an offensive from some part of the French front south of Amiens to pre-empt the enemy strike and draw Ludendorff’s forces away from his own dangerously thinned and weakened line. Foch had promised to do so ‘as soon as possible’, but, although his strength was steadily increasing with the arrival of reinforcements, there were as yet no concrete plans.
Foch was far from reluctant to fight but he was dissatisfied with his own position, which he regarded as ambivalent, for, while he had been given the overall task of co-ordinating Allied operations, he did not have the power of command that would enable him to control them or to orchestrate the strategy of future Allied initiatives. Without such power he could not count on the wholehearted co-operation of General Pétain, his equal in rank and seniority. Foch complained to Clemenceau that the authority he had been given by the delegates at Doullens was insufficient, and Clemenceau agreed to call another Allied conference with a view to appointing Foch to the de facto position of generalissimo of the Allied armies on the Western Front. It was hastily arranged to take place at Beauvais on Wednesday 3 April.
The British representatives left London late on Tuesday evening, spent the night at Folkestone, and sailed for France at 8.30 the following morning. They did not enjoy the crossing. Instead of travelling in the relative comfort of a destroyer, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Henry Wilson, Secretary to the War Cabinet Sir Maurice Hankey and a clutch of accompanying officials were squeezed into the narrow confines of a ‘P boat’. This pursuit craft was not much more than a glorified motor-launch, with little enough accommodation for a maximum crew of eight, and none at all for passengers. But no other craft was available, for every destroyer, every steamer, every escort ship, was engaged in ferrying reinforcements across the Channel to the front.
A convoy of staff cars was waiting on the quayside at Boulogne to convey the Prime Minister’s party on the four-hour journey to Beauvais. Sir Henry Wilson and Lloyd George entered the leading vehicle, and, although there had been no chance to stretch their legs, its spacious comfort was a welcome relief after the spartan conditions of the crossing.
At Montreuil, where they stopped to pick up Sir Douglas Haig with his Chief of Staff, Sir Henry Lawrence, Wilson gave up his place in the first car and invited Lawrence to join him in the second, while Lloyd George, with a show of geniality, ushered the Commander-in-Chief to the vacant seat in his own car. On the face of it this was a chance arrangement, but it had been carefully planned in advance. Lloyd George, ever manipulative, was not driven by the desire for convivial companionship on the journey, nor would he have found it in Sir Douglas Haig, whose icy courtesy did not mask the fact that he disliked and despised the talkative Welshman, so different in his views and in his personality to Haig himself. His dislike was reciprocated, and the two men had been at odds too many times in the past to have any mutual sympathy, but, as Prime Minister, Lloyd George had had the upper hand. He now wished to have a private conversation with Sir Douglas Haig on a topic which had none of the cosy connotations usually associated with a tête-à-tête. It concerned General Gough, and he launched into the attack as soon as they drove off. Gough must not be employed again. On Gough’s shoulders lay the entire responsibility for the present crisis. Gough was unworthy to command, and he must be sent home immediately. Gough must be disgraced, and seen to be disgraced. Public opinion demanded it, the Prime Minister alleged, and wounded soldiers of the Fifth Army, now at home, were wild in imprecation of their commander – or so he claimed. He ranted and raved. He wanted Gough’s head on a charger, and he ordered Haig to get rid of him for good and all.
Haig resisted furiously.
I pointed out that ‘fewer men, extended front, and increased hostile forces’ were the main causes to which the retreat may be attributed. He was much down upon Gough. I championed the latter’s case. ‘He had very few reserves, a very big front entirely without defensive works, recently taken over from the French, and the weight of the enemy’s attack fell on him,’ I said. Also that, in spite of a most difficult situation, he had never really lost his head. L. G. said he had not held the Somme bridges, nor destroyed them, and that G. must not be employed. To this I said I could not condemn an officer unheard and that if L. G. wishes him suspended he must send me an order to that effect. L. G. seems a ‘cur’ and when I am with him I cannot resist a feeling of distrust of him and his intentions.
The Prime Minister was unmoved by Haig’s defence. He hardly listened. By the time they reached Abbeville there was no more to be said and each man was too incensed to suffer the company of the other any longer. When the cavalcade halted briefly and Haig and Wilson changed places in their respective cars it was noticed that the face of the Commander-in-Chief, normally so imperturbable, was white with anger. But by the time they reached Beauvais and joined their French hosts for a late lunch Haig had recovered his composure.
Later, at the formal conference, at which General Pershing represented the USA, it was agreed that General Foch’s powers should be extended to enable him to exercise control over future Allied operations, and with only one proviso – if any Allied commander believed that his army was endangered by a decision of General Foch he would have the right to appeal to his own Government.1
No one was more supportive of Foch or more fulsome in declaring his acceptance of the proposal than Lloyd George, and he was as voluble in his insistence that the British public were united in their desire that Foch should be given real power as he had been in declaring their supposed condemnation of General Gough. Haig said little except to acquiesce with grace to the proposals put forward at the meeting. He was not looking forward to his interview with General Gough.
In accordance with Haig’s most recent instructions, Gough had already begun to set up a Reserve Army headquarters at Crécy, not far from Montreuil, but out of consideration for his Commander-in-Chief, and well aware of his discomfiture, Gough reacted with tight-lipped dignity to the news of his final dismissal. Haig made it clear that it was none of his doing. ‘I am sorry to lose you, Hubert,’ he said, adding that there would undoubtedly be an inquiry, at which Gough would certainly be vindicated. With this crumb of comfort, Sir Hubert Gough made his sad departure and left immediately for home.2
Haig had also hinted that his own fate was in the balance and that he himself quite expected to be sent home within the week. He had indeed offered his resignation over the Gough affair, and Lloyd George, who would have liked nothing better than to be shot of him, was sorely tempted to accept it. But Sir Henry Wilson dissuaded the Prime Minister from acting hastily. Haig was too popular. To replace him might shake the confidence of the Army and reflect badly on the Government. And, besides, there was no officer of sufficient rank more qualified to take his place – at least, at the moment. No one could fight a defensive battle better than Haig, and Wilson’s advice to Lloyd George was to wait a while. The time to ‘get rid of Haig’, as he put it, would be when the present crisis was over and the situation had calmed down.
It was after nine o’clock in the evening before Lloyd George’s party arrived back at Boulogne. As they paced the quayside waiting to board the ‘P boat’ for the return crossing to Folkestone, soldiers were streaming down the gangways of a Channel steamer, wallowing low in the water under the weight of a multitude of men. Sir Maurice Hankey was not much cheered by the sight, for in his eyes they were hardly men at all. They were ‘lads of 18 or 19 for the most part. They belonged to some Scottish regiment and in the glimmer of the dimmed arc lights looked pale and pathetically young.’ The scene, he admitted, ‘remains graven in my memory’.1
The Prime Minister’s party eventually reached London at 2.30 a.m. and, having been on the go for more than twenty hours, thankfully retired to bed. Long before they woke again, Ludendorff’s armies were moving to the assault in a final bid to capture Amiens. It was 4 April.
In the early hours of the morning the heavens opened and it began to teem with rain. By half past four, when the guns began to bombard the Allied lines, the Germans were already wringing wet, for they were working flat out to keep to the prearranged timetable and rain-capes would have hindered them. It was worst for the men who loaded the shells and slammed them home with wet hands, chilled red-raw, while their feet, shod in insubstantial boots, sank ever deeper into the wet ground. The earth, already drenched by two days of rain, rapidly became a quagmire, and with every shell and every recoil the trails of the guns in their ill-prepared positions drove further into the mud. But the firing continued, and the sound of the bombardment gave encouragement to the German infantrymen assembling for the attack beneath the streaming skies. But it was a far cry from the prelude to the battle just two weeks ago, with its certainty of victory. This time there was no stirring message from the Kaiser to spur them on, and the shallow trenches, rapidly filling with water as the hours dragged on, were no substitute for the fine shelters and trenches where they had assembled two weeks earlier to launch the Kaiser’s Battle. The weather then had been different too. Soaked and sleepless, the German soldiers now crouched beneath the rain, doing their best to cover the rifles that would save their bacon in the morning. Equally cold and wet and miserable, the Allied soldiers opposite, alerted by the bombardment, took what cover they could, and waited to meet the attack. SOS signals soaring above the Allied lines flared against glistening curtains of rain that streamed down without remission. The murky dawn was slow to break, and when the light began to crawl across the battlefield there was again a thick mist.
The 15th Bavarian Infantry Regiment were at Moreuil, and it was past four o’clock in the morning before their orders arrived. In four hours’ time they were to attack Génoville Farm. There was no time to brief the men, and hardly time to inform company leaders of anything except their bare instructions – nor was there time to give the men a meal before they went into action. There was nothing for it but to go ahead and do the best they could. It was ten past eight in the morning when they set off.
Inevitably, without detailed orders and the customary meticulous planning, things went awry from the start. It was true that they managed to burst beyond the borders of the small town of Moreuil, pushing back the thin line of French troops who had clung on to them, but the reserves, who should have awaited the signal to go forward to reinforce and exploit the advance, set off early and followed so closely that they were drawn too soon into the fight. French machine-guns, ripping through the clustered ranks, caused mayhem. The German machine-gun teams, moving across the fields to support the assault, were bogged down in the claggy earth. The infantry scattered and tried to shelter behind the trusses of straw that littered the farmland, but these gave little protection from the punishing fire. Leutnant Joseph Kübler was horrified. ‘This hillside of corpses and wounded,’ he said, ‘was one of the most horrible sights that I saw in this war.’
Those who survived pressed on. They pressed on towards the village of Rouvrel, but Rouvrel was a stronghold now. There were machine-guns in the houses and in the tower of the church, and they spewed such merciless fire that the Germans could make no headway.
Leutnant Joseph Kübler, 15th Bavarian Infantry Regt., 2nd Bavarian Division
Our own losses became ever greater, the battlelines ever thinner. One could detect enemy reserves moving up to the front at a distance of about eighteen hundred yards. The enemy’s artillery fire intensified. Our own was silent. At the front all was chaos and confusion – scrambled companies, scrambled regiments, even some people from another division.
They had advanced their line a little – a very little – but the cost had been enormous and the advantage was insignificant.
Ludendorff’s plan on the first day of the assault was to attack across the front which ran south from the River Somme as far as Grivesnes and to capture ground from which his heavy guns could fire northward to bombard Amiens. The line at Grivesnes did not budge, and the advance at Moreuil, such as it was, was not nearly enough to achieve his object. North of Moreuil, where the British joined hands with the French at Hangard, the attack fell across the front where Villers-Bretonneux stood on the Roman road that led directly to Amiens.
Although it was now destined to enter the history books with a certain aura of glory, Villers-Bretonneux had no previous claim to fame. It was a small manufacturing town, prosperous enough, and not unimportant to the peacetime economy of the region. It had nine cotton mills, three brickworks and a hat factory, which provided ample employment for its 5,000 inhabitants. Now the inhabitants had fled – except for one household, and the fact that this lady and her brood of children had remained was entirely due to a single, anonymous Australian soldier, who happened to pass as she was loading her household goods on to a wooden cart. He stopped and looked her straight in the eye. ‘You needn’t go, Ma,’ he said. ‘The Aussies are here. Best stay where you are.’ He even helped her to unload the cart and carry her possessions back into her house. She may or may not have understood the words, but his friendly grin and his stalwart frame must have been sufficient reassurance. For better or worse, and almost alone of the townspeople, she stayed. She perhaps had reason to regret her decision in the days that followed.
The towers of Amiens, less than ten miles distant, were clearly visible from Villers-Bretonneux on its shoulder of flat land astride the Roman road. The ground fell away on either side, to the banks of the Somme north of the plateau and to the River Luce to the south of it, and the dead ground – the clefts and gullies in the valleys – could only give advantage to an enemy creeping forward to fight for the high ground above. It was a commanding position. The battlefront ran across it, and across both valleys, and the British Army was disposed in depth behind it. But this was not an army as the military would once have understood it, for there was a brigade here and a brigade there, and divisions that were divisions only in name, reinforced by battalions, even companies, thrust haphazardly into the line – a conglomeration of units, growing all the time as troops arrived from the north and men who had retreated south with the French Army were brought back.
The fighting raged all day as the rain continued to pour down, and, although the line was pushed back in certain places, nowhere did it give way. The gunners did as much as anyone to repulse the attacks and hold the enemy back.
Lance-Bombardier Robert Ford, C 157 Bty., Royal Field Artillery
It was literally all hands on deck, so to speak. I mean, I wasn’t gunner. I was with the ammunition column, a driver. To be honest, I don’t know where we got the ammunition from, but we were taking it up to the guns and they were firing for the best part of the day. We had no signals, of course, no telephone lines or anything. About midday I was ordered to go on one of the guns as relief to one of the gunners. I’d never been on a gun in my life, and I had to take what they call No. 2. They all have numbers, you see. On a field gun you sit on the gun that’s firing – there’s a seat each side of the breech. Well, I had to sit on the right-hand side, and my job was to line up the range drum so that it registered 1,000 yards, and the bombardier in charge of the gun was on the left-hand side, and he did the gun laying, which was the actual aiming. When the gun fires it recoils, and, as the recoil recovers, the No. 2 puts his hand out, gets hold of the handle of the breech, swings the breech open, and out comes the old shell-case. The gunner standing there pops a new shell in and it’s ready to fire again. No. 1 does the firing as well, of course.
Well, I roughly knew what to do, but the first shell that went off nearly killed me. The noise! I thought someone had cut my throat! I got partly accustomed to it, but after about two hours my right ear was completely deaf, so I asked for permission to come off, and they let me go and put someone else on. That’s the first and last time I ever actually worked a gun. How those chaps can stand it for hours I don’t know at all! I was only too glad to get back to carting shells. I was completely deaf. My left ear came back after two days, but my right ear never recovered. Whether I did any good on that gun, whether I got the range right and they managed to hit anyone, I have no idea!
It was inky-dark night when the fighting died down. The rain abated and a watery moon appeared behind the scudding clouds, but it was a miserable night on the battlefield. The troops of both sides laboured through the mud, hauling up fresh supplies of ammunition for the guns and food for the men in front, carrying off the wounded, floundering back and forth with messages and orders, slogging through darkness and mud to take up new positions, or working to consolidate and strengthen the positions they now held. Two battalions of the 9th Australian Brigade, who were dissatisfied with their position and more than a little put out by the fact that they had been pushed back during the day, at one o’clock in the morning crept forward in the dark and took back the trench they had lost in the afternoon. The night was noisy with guns, but on the German side the firing was haphazard and desultory. The gunners were saving their efforts for the morning, when Ludendorff would play his last card.
Behind the German line the troops were already moving into position for the assault. In the early hours of the morning Hubert Schroeter marched through Albert and down the road where Fritz Nagel and the men of K Flak 82 had had their thrilling escapade as they had tried to help forward the last abortive attack. The Jägers moved into position behind the railway embankment and in front of the post which Alex Jamieson had so thankfully quitted a few nights before. The post was stronger now, for the Australians were there in force, and the German boys were well aware that, with new reserves and new defensive positions, the line was strongly held. In the morning, when the barrage lifted, it would be their job to storm it.
Ludendorff’s plan on the second day was to widen the attack to the north. After the lamentable results of the previous day it was apparent that there was nothing to be gained by pressing on south of Hangard on the French front. The full force of the attack was to fall on both sides of the road to Amiens and beyond the River Somme, up the valley of the Ancre where the line ran through Aveluy Wood, and over the Auchonvillers Ridge to Puisieux and Bucquoy.
George McKay and the Lewis-gun team were still in the line. In the absence of his corporal, who had been mildly shell-shocked, George had been in charge of the team moving to different parts of the New Zealanders’ front and helping to beat off local attacks as the Germans nibbled and probed at their line. Yesterday the corporal had returned, and George had handed over the gun with mixed feelings.
Private George McKay, 1st Bn., NZ Rifle Brigade
If they had put that gun completely in my charge quite a while before they did, it would have been a much better team. They corporal we had, he was not only half-pai, shell-shock, he was practically a nervous wreck before we finished.1 When he came back after his rest and I made him take charge of the gun, which I did against his will, I told him I wasn’t going to be in a position where they could say I had legs on my belly, crawling for promotion.
Well, here was a hill, La Signy Farm, and some fellows had dug a front-line trench there, and we had to keep men in it. We’d been up to the outposts for a week, and we came back for one night there on 4 April – that was the night before the big attack. I told this corporal, ‘I watched the shelling today and there was a German battery got the range of that sap that runs across the hill. They’ve got it lined up quite well and, if anything starts, that’s where the shelling will be.’ All right. When the attack started and the SOS went up I scrambled out of this front-line trench and looked back, and here was this corporal not making a move to come. So I went to grab the Lewis-gun, but when he saw me going for it he grabbed a hold of it and started off. Of course he was the wrong man to be shooting in his panic like that. He wouldn’t know whether he was hitting the mark or not, would he? No good in the firing line – just a menace. He would be just the wrong bugger in every way. Well, he’d just got up, and the bullets were flying, and a salvo of bullets whistled past and he ran back into the trench again. Well, that’s not the place for a Lewis-gun! I thought, ‘I’m going to take it off him.’ So I jumped back into the trench just as Major O’Shaughnessey came through. ‘McKay, take that gun out.’ Well, as soon as he said that, the corporal grabbed the gun and ran forward again.
You could see Huns everywhere! Best bit of shooting you ever saw. Would have been lovely! There were paddocks full of them, in threes and fours everywhere, just the idea for Lewis-gun work. They were coming forward, because they meant to take our trenches, but as soon as this silly bugger got a look at the field of Huns he ran back and put the gun in that sap again.
Well, I felt my blooming adrenalin boiling in my blood. The anger I had that he’d sacrificed everything just because his nerve was buggered! Then came bang, bang. Two shells. I said to McArthur, ‘We’re getting the next one, Steve!’ And with that up we went, up into the bloody air. I was standing in the middle of three – McArthur and the corporal, with myself in the middle, just shoulder to shoulder you might say. The shell must have landed right behind me, and I was blown straight over the top of the trench. As I turned over I saw first one and then the other in the air – we were all three of us in the air together. The other two were killed, but I was blown straight forward.
I tried to stand up, got up on the left leg, and then fell over as soon as I tried the right leg. There was no feeling in it. It could have been absent for all the good it was. I tried that twice, and then I went back into the front line on one knee and two hands, trailing the leg. I think what prevented me from getting shell-shock was that I was so angry with that bugger putting the gun where he did, because it was a sure target for the Hun. They registered on it.
One of the men who was in the first bay of the trench had been a Lewis-gunner – he was Sergeant Norris – and he took charge after I went. He said that our gun was the only one working at the finish. The others all had stoppages, but our gun kept on firing. Well, I know why that would be. I made every man clean his ammunition so there was no dust or mud on it. No mud or dust. The German attack stopped! Never got into our lines.
Not much more than a rifle shot away, the Jägers charging on the outskirts of Albert were equally unsuccessful, and Hubert Schroeter had not got far.
Jäger Hubert Schroeter, 3rd Jäger Bn., 3rd [German] Marine Division
At 8 a.m. we started. After a few hundred metres, when we crossed a road that led to Amiens, we were met by a terrific explosion of machine-gun fire. In the middle of the road I was hit by a machine-gun bullet which shattered my left upper arm. Both my legs were also hit slightly, just below the knees. Next to me my good comrade and friend Ludwig Krause was shot dead with a gaping wound in his chest. The other comrades of my section stormed forward and, as I found out later, all of them fell before they reached the English position.
I crawled into a deep furrow at the side of the road, seeking cover from the continuous machine-gun fire. I thought I was going to bleed to death, and I tried to bind my upper arm with a rifle sling. To do this I had to move about, and every time my helmet jutted up above the lip of the furrow the English fired their machine-guns at me. Due to a heavy loss of blood, I lost consciousness many times.
Outside Dernancourt, a little way to Schroeter’s left, the German attack at first had greater success as they stormed through to capture the village. After the comparative quiet of the previous day it was a rude awakening for the Australians.
At seven o’clock in the morning such a barrage started as I have never seen before or since. Jerry had his guns registered on all our batteries, and was even knocking guns out miles behind the line at Warloy. It was a very foggy morning and we couldn’t see much. He started this barrage on our front line and gradually lengthened his range until he got back on our artillery, and then he would shorten it gradually until he got on the front line again.
He did this three times until eleven o’clock, with the idea of killing every living thing in its way. He put three heavy shells within thirty yards of our post, but did no more damage than covering us with mud and giving us a good shaking up. Then he came over in full marching order, evidently with the idea of reaching Amiens without a stop. They say he had four divisions against only two of our brigades.
The first wave of Germans came in massed formation, and they were cut down by machine-gun fire just like a scythe cuts grass. But his second wave appeared, so the 52nd Battalion and our 12th Brigade hopped up and met it. That was the first time I experienced hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet, and it was heavy! But the Germans kept being reinforced, with the result that we were pushed back about 1,000 yards.
The Australians did not take kindly to being pushed back, and, but for a direct order, they would not have relinquished their positions willingly, for, despite the bitter hand-to-hand combat, it seemed even to the fighting men that, although the shelling was more intense, the German infantry lacked spirit. That was not surprising, for, although some fresh troops had reached the line, the soldiers who were up against the tough Australians of the 12th Brigade had sustained two weeks of campaigning.
Unfortunately, the position of the 12th Brigade, along the curve of the railway, was a bad one, and the Corps Commander himself had admitted that it would be untenable if it were strongly attacked. Hand-to-hand fighting was one thing, but standing fast against heavy bombs was another, and trench mortars were soon firing from the village at close range. They were aimed at the railway embankment, and the very curve of the line enabled the Germans to break in on the right flank and fire into the backs of the men defending it. It was fortunate that this situation had been partly envisaged and that a new line of posts and trenches had been set up on the hill behind. It was to this line that the 12th Brigade was ordered to retire. It hardly gave them a breathing space, for they were not intended to remain there for long.
In the afternoon we were ordered to move up to a jumping-off point. We came under some heavy machine-gun fire going over some hills. The 49th Battalion were all in extended order behind a hill, and my company was a little on their right, ready to make a counter-attack. Evidently Jerry knew we were there, and he shelled us heavy with instantaneous-fuse shells. They burst as soon as they touch the ground and the pieces fly level with the ground, with the result that they are very deadly. Our job was to start off with the 49th and move half-right to reinforce the 52nd Battalion in a cutting alongside the railway leading from Buire to Dernancourt. It seemed a strange thing that we should be fighting on the very same hill on which a year before we used to practise attacks in making ready for Bullecourt.
We started off, and the 49th went over just as calm as though they were on parade. As soon as they got on the skyline the machine-guns began to open up on them. We also started off, and we crossed one gully that was being swept by machine-gun fire and got up near a bank. We followed that for a way, but Jerry evidently knew we were there and he followed us up with shrapnel until he got us in full view on a hillside going down towards the railway. The machine-guns opened up from Edgehill Clearing Station, which was on our flank, and he was also firing point-blank at us with his artillery. The bullets were whistling past you in all directions and chipping the earth up all round you, whilst shells were bursting just in front of us all the way.
Through making it in rushes of a few men at a time and taking advantage of cover so that we had very few casualties, we at last got to where the 52nd were in the cutting. What a sight met us there! Men were lying dead all over the place, and the Germans seemed to be all around us. If you got up on the railway line they would fire into you from behind from Edgehill Clearing Station. Then if you got up facing the clearing station they would still fire into you from behind, from the other side of the railway. We soon found out which side the heaviest fire was coming from, so we settled down facing the CCS and blazed away at all the windows we could see in the huts. We hadn’t been there long when word came that the 49th could not connect up with the 52nd owing to casualties, so my company again had another little job of going out just after dark to clear them out of the clearing station and to dig in in front of it to establish a connection between the 49th and 52nd Battalions. We did this with nothing more than a bit of rifle fire.
There was also furious fighting in front of Villers-Bretonneux, where more Australian troops had moved up during the night to strengthen the line. The German troops attacking there were fresh; it was the guns that beat them back for most of the day. But the German guns were busy too. Late in the afternoon they launched a hurricane bombardment and, despite the rain, which had started to pour again, the Germans beat back the 55th Brigade more than a mile, and recaptured part of Lancer Wood.
Brigadier-General Wood did not take kindly to his brigade being scored over by the Germans. He was not a Regular officer, but pre-war service with the Brtitish South Africa Police had earned him a temporary commission with the rank of Captain at the start of the war. He had helped to train a new battalion of the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry and had gone with it to France. In the course of three years’ fighting and rapid promotion, Captain Wood rose to command the battalion, and eventually to command the brigade to which it belonged. He was as proud of it as he was of his original battalion, and he was not content to order its affairs at one remove from Brigade Headquarters – or certainly not today. Even as a Brigadier-General, Wood was first and foremost a soldier of the line, and, when a single battalion of his Brigade was ordered to attack with the Australians to recover the lost ground, nothing would deter him from leading the 7th Queen’s into the attack. He led it from the front, cheering on the men, regardless of the consequences. They recovered the ground, although they suffered many losses, but the Brigadier emerged victorious and unscathed.
All along the front the fighting continued well into the evening and after it grew dark. In front of the railway embankment where he had been wounded early in the day, Hubert Schroeter recovered consciousness.
Jäger Hubert Schroeter
When I finally came to it was night. I had lain there all day, and now I saw death before my eyes. I was in pain, and I started to call for help. I hoped that perhaps the English would come after me, since I was not able to help myself. But then the first miracle happened. A soldier of my company, Gefreiter Fehlau, had fallen back to the railroad embankment after our unsuccessful attack. He heard my cries and sneaked from tree to tree along the road until he reached me. Then he carried me back to the railroad, where he dressed my wounds by the light of the moon with his own first-aid dressing. Throwing me over his back, Fehlau carried me through Albert. The English artillery were shelling the town, and we were in great danger of being hit by falling debris. When we crossed a street to find shelter in a doorway, Fehlau told me he had noticed a light shining from a basement window. He was nearly at the end of his strength from carrying me.
Now the second miracle occurred. Fehlau left me in the doorway while he searched for the entrance to the basement, and there he found a doctor, several orderlies, and the equipment for a complete field hospital which was to have been built if our attack had been successful. An orderly helped him to carry me to the basement, and there I was treated. I was young and athletic, so, with great anxiety, I asked the doctor whether I would lose my arm. ‘Dear friend,’ he said, ‘that is possible. But at least you will stay alive.’1
George McKay had also been carried out of the line, but he was far less happy than Schroeter, because his present situation seemed to him to be a good deal more dangerous than in the forefront of the fighting. His wounded leg had stiffened up, he was weak from loss of blood, and, helpless as he was, there was nothing he could do about it.
Private George McKay
I went back on a stretcher to Mailly-Maillet, and the first place they put me in was in the estaminet. Well, with every terrific crash of a shell bursting in the village there would be a whole lot of bottles falling down. Then they came and picked our stretchers up and took us into a church. So I’m lying there in the church, looking at a wall of bricks forty or fifty feet high. Can you believe how I would feel under those bricks? Of all the bloody places to put a wounded man! One smack from a shell and there would be tons of them down on us. So I was very happy when they moved us out of there. The church didn’t agree with me. Too many bricks about. Well, one brick would have done it. Wouldn’t have needed a thousand, and that’s what would have come down.
Through the days and across the miles of the retirement, the medical services had made almost superhuman efforts to rescue the wounded. Stretcher-bearers risked death or capture rather than leave the wounded behind; orderlies in regimental aid posts and doctors in field dressing stations chose to be captured with the wounded rather than abandon them. Ambulances drove forward through hair-raising bombardments to pick up casualties and carry them back to safety. At the Casualty Clearing Stations, when every bed in every tent was occupied, when stretchers had been laid in every possible space, all that could be done was to lay the overflow of wounded men on tarpaulins in the open and to cover them with blankets to wait their turn for the operating tent, for a bed in a marquee ward or, at worst, for a place in a convoy of lorries when the clearing station itself was forced to evacuate. If a wounded man was lucky he was carried on board an ambulance train. Twelve trains a day shuttled non-stop on ever-shorter journeys to hospitals at the base.
The base hospitals stretched for miles across the hills above the sea between Étaples and Boulogne, but they were also swamped, and their frantic staffs were working day and night as convoy upon convoy of casualties poured in.
Sister Helen Boylston, No. 22 General Hospital, (Harvard Unit)
Nearly every case should have been a stretcher-case. Ragged and dirty; tin hats still on; wounds patched together any way; some not even covered. They came direct from the line and their faces were white and drawn and their eyes glassy from lack of sleep. Matron sent us to the D lines, and she asked if my friend Ruth, myself and Topsy Stone could clean up 500 walkers. We thought we could, though heaven knows how we thought we were going to do it. We made a small table for the medical officer, and then a large table piled with bandages, splints, boric ointment, sponges and a basinful of Dakins solution for wet dressings. There were two smoky lanterns and an enfeebled primus stove. Ruth, armed with a pair of scissors, stood in the doorway and beckoned the boys in, two or three at a time. Because there was so much to do it was impossible to try to take the stiff, dried bandages off carefully. The only thing to do was to snatch them off with one desperate tug. Poor Ruth! She could hardly stand it. She’d cut the dressing down the middle, the poor lad looking on with set jaw and imploring eyes. There would be a quick jerk, a sharp scream from the lad, a sob from Ruth, and he was passed on to the medical officer, and Ruth began on the next. They came much too fast for us, and within fifteen minutes were standing twenty deep around the dressings table. As the hours went by we ceased to think. We worked through the night until dawn.1
It was possible to keep only the most severely of the wounded at the base, and every man who could stand the journey – including those fortunate soldiers whose wound would not otherwise have been regarded as a Blighty – was sent directly to England by hospital ship, or even squeezed as a sitting case into an ordinary steamer bound for home. Charles Ruck was now a stretcher-case, although when he was first wounded as his company went forward to counter-attack at Aveluy Wood he had managed to crawl out of action.
304723 Rifleman Charles Ruck, 1/28th (County of London) Bn. (The Artists’ Rifles), The London Regt., 63rd Division
The machine-gun fire caught me as I was making my dash, and I went down out of action, hit through the right knee. There was no point in exposing myself to further wounding, so it was time to evacuate – a painful procedure! That completed my military experience. There was nothing I could do about it. All that expensive training and endeavour, to end like this, without honour or glory - just a casualty! I hadn’t even got into the attack with my section. Then it was dressing station, Doullens, Calais, Dover, where I lay on one of many stretchers on the Marine Station waiting to be shipped home. I knew I had a Blighty one, but I didn’t feel grateful that I’d been spared a worse fate. All the old magic had suddenly gone.
At General Ludendorff’s headquarters on the evening of 5 April the gloom deepened with the arrival of each fresh report from the front. They were bleak and disappointing. At the end of the day’s fighting the German gains were so paltry that they merely amounted to an adjustment of the lines that was barely visible on the largest of large-scale maps. The gamble had not come off. There had been no final breakthrough, and the glorious beginning of the great advance on which Ludendorff had staked so much had ended in failure. He was forced to face the fact and to report that ‘The enemy’s resistance was beyond our powers.’
Late that evening, Ludendorff called off the offensive. It had failed in its ultimate objective. The Allied line was holding. Amiens was out of reach, and the game was no longer worth the candle.
It was exactly 1,340 days since the start of the war that was meant to be ‘over by Christmas’. But as weeks became months, and months became years, as the roll of dead and wounded mounted, the names of the battles and campaigns that marked the course of the war rang ever more hollow in British ears. Mons. Ypres. Gallipoli. Loos. Somme. Arras. Passchendaele. Cambrai. And now the Battle of Amiens – or so it was later termed by the Battle Nomenclature Committee, whose job it was to date and designate every important action of the war for the sake of clarity and the benefit of historians.
But the Tommies were indifferent to historical niceties. To them, just as the Third Battle of Ypres would always be ‘Passchendaele’, the Battle of Amiens would be for ever ‘the March Retreat’. They were hardly aware that the battle was officially over, but they did know that the long retreat had finished and that they were fighting back.
The Army was weary. Its ranks had multiplied and, weakened though they were, at home or abroad there were more than twenty men in khaki for every one of the gallant men of 1914 who had fought their way through the legendary retreat from Mons. There were a very few officers and men now at the front who had been there since the beginning, for the old Regular Army had been all but wiped out in the first three months of the war. The survivors of the first Territorial and Kitchener battalions – the 1915 men – were now the ‘old sweats’, and those who had fought on the Somme and at Passchendaele were hardened veterans. They had left their mark on the face of France, where a forest of graves ran thick along the front among a trail of towns and villages hammered into ruins by the guns.
The air of glum acceptance among the troops, the philosophy of taking each day as it came, was summed up by a cartoon published in a troops’ magazine. Two battle-stained veterans are contemplating a shattered landscape. ‘Do you remember halting here on the retreat, George?’ asks the first. ‘Can’t call it to mind somehow,’ replies the other. ‘Was it that little village in the wood down by the river, or was it the place with the cathedral and all them factories?’
But the fact was that the deadlock had been broken. It was the end of the long beginning, of the campaigns and battles launched with high hopes that so frequently foundered in stalemate; the end of grinding drudgery in the trenches; the end of minuscule advances hailed as victories and of partial successes which were also semi-failures. The last people to realize this were the soldiers in the field, and they could hardly be blamed, for it was apparent only with hindsight that Ludendorff’s offensive had broken the mould and, in a sense, pointed the way to eventual victory. It would come a good deal sooner than most people expected.
The end was still a long way off, and there were critical days ahead – but the last lap would soon be in sight.