I
About March 14 the 3rd and 5th Armies were warned by their aerial reconnaissance that a new and ominous concentration was taking place behind the enemy’s lines.
These two Armies, to which the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Tank Brigades were, it will be remembered, attached, held the line which lay between Bullecourt to the north and St. Quentin to the south.
Behind them lay the old Somme battlefields, and about them was a dry, rather bare, downland country with few woods and divided up by broad valleys that ran east and west across it. It was a part of the line upon which we had long considered the blow might probably fall.
The 3rd and 5th Armies, now on the alert, immediately set about raiding the enemy and, having captured the desired prisoners and examined them, were consistently told the same story.
Thursday, March 21, was to be the day of attack.
The weather, which had been clear and bright for a week or two, broke on Tuesday, the 19th, and all day it rained heavily. On the night of the 20th a thick mist came up and lay densely over the downs. Such weather conditions only made an attack the more certain, and all along the line Tanks were moved forward into their allotted positions.
At two o’clock in the morning of the 21st the British line was warned to expect an attack. The forward zone was already fully manned, but at 4.30 an order was sent out to man the battle zone. Nor was the order premature. The mist still lay heavily over the lines, and under its cover the Germans had secretly pushed up their troops until all along the front between Bullecourt and La Fère, they had massed thirty-seven divisions on a line little more than a mile from our outposts.
The drama was about to begin. At a quarter to five every German battery from the Marne to Dunkirk opened fire. Such a bombardment had never been known before, and it reached its zenith on the fronts of the 3rd and 5th Armies.
Torrents of gas shells and high explosives were poured out upon our forward and battle lines, upon our Headquarters, upon our artillery positions, and upon all our lines of communication.
The batteries of the 3rd and 5th Armies replied as best they could, but owing to the mist our artillery observers were helpless. It was impossible to see fifty yards ahead, and the German fire seemed to crash upon us out of some alien planet.
By 8 or 9 o’clock the first parties of Germans had begun to advance, to cut our wire here and there along the front of attack, and to filter unobtrusively through our outpost line.
We began to perceive that the enemy was behaving in a most unaccountable way. Even by 10 o’clock—as far as we could learn in the confusion—he seemed in some places to have made no attempt at an infantry attack at all. In others compact but apparently isolated little parties of Guards or Cockchafers, or men from some other picked regiment, had pushed right through our forward zone and were away beyond the places where the cross-fire from our machine-guns was to have checked them, before the men in the redoubts, half-blind amid the clouds of gas, had realised that any Germans had crossed No Man’s Land. Again and again the garrisons were overwhelmed from the rear before they could send back any warning to the men behind in the battle zone. When they did endeavour to signal, the S.O.S. would be blanketed in the mist.
Only too often the first news of the attack to reach our batteries was the appearance of German infantry on their flank and rear.
There would be nothing left but to mow down the enemy at point-blank range, till finally the gun crews were overwhelmed by the in-flooding tide.
As at Ypres, we had begun amazedly to feel that we were up against a type of tactics against which we had never fought before. Our conjecture was perfectly right. It was a system of surprise, and of the theory of Sturmtruppen carried to its extreme conclusion. Mr. Buchan has likened the new method to the advance of a hand whose finger-tips are shod with steel pushing its way into a soft substance.
In practice the assault was conducted as follows: The infantry attack was preceded by a short but extremely intense bombardment in which a large proportion of gas was used.
This was followed by the advance at irregular intervals of clusters of highly trained assault troops, carrying light trench mortars or machine-guns (each cluster really constituting a kind of human Tank. It was well, indeed, for us that they were no more than mere flesh and blood, and neither armoured nor engined.) These clusters, which were closely followed and supported by the field batteries, made gaps through which the line troops poured, guided by an elaborate system of flares and rockets.
Each section of the defence might thus find itself caught between the “fingers”—outflanked and encircled.
Each body of the advancing enemy was under the command of a specially trained officer, whose leadership generally proved a model of skill and initiative; each detachment was instructed to push on as far as its strength allowed, and every man carried iron rations for several days.
When a regiment had advanced as far as it was able, another took its place, the waves of the advance thus leapfrogging over each other in an endless chain.
The dangers of such tactics are obvious, but on March 21 the system was portentously successful.