The March Push
Their next front-line turn—6th to 10th March—was utterly uneventful, and on the 12th they, being then in Stirling Camp, were ordered to “stand to” for the expected German offensive. It proved to be no more than a light shelling. So the still fine days, in line or in support, ran out till the dawn of the 21st March when the great shells suddenly descended on Arras, and rumours, worse than any shelling, followed their tracks. Says the Diary: “The German offensive has begun.”
The evacuation of the town, during the next two days, was a nightmare of flying masonry, clouds of dust, the roar of falling brick-work, contradictory orders, and mobs of drifting civilians, their belongings pushed before or hauled after them; and no power to order them where to go. Arras, always in the front line, had been safe so long, it was inconceivable that there should be real danger now. Might they not camp out and return to-morrow? But the enemy were reported almost in sight, and ready to open on the town with their field-guns. They had broken through, men said, under cover of the heavy morning fog—broken through everywhere along the line of all our old gains from Lens to St. Quentin, and their whole strength was behind the blow. No one could understand it, though all men argued; and while the refugees fled forth, expostulating, blaming, but seldom weeping, that sunny day, eight hundred shells fell purposefully on the dishevelled town. By evening word came that our Somme line had not only broken but gone out—infantry, artillery and uncounted stores—between Chérisy and Demicourt in the north. South of that, the old Cambrai Salient, which had not been hardly tried, was standing but would have to withdraw or be cut off, because, from Gouzeaucourt to La Fère, ten miles and more south of St. Quentin, the German tide had swept in from one to three miles deep, and was racing forward. It is not difficult to imagine what manner of reports the mere truth gave birth to, while the Battalion waited on in the Communal College where it was billeted, and was not encouraged to wander about the rocking, sliding streets.
By the evening of the 22nd March men began to understand it was no mere break-through but a collapse such as had never befallen British arms in the history of her people. Officers were sent out in the morning to reconnoitre the support-line of a third system of defence between Wancourt and Hénin-sur-Cojeul. But Hénin-sur-Cojeul was already under the hand of the enemy, who had gained three more miles in a few hours and, left and right, were widening the breach.
The morning of the 22nd March had been foggy again till noon and, under that cover, the Germans had again broken in on our surprised or withdrawing divisions. Report said that whole battalions and even brigades had been cut off by the flood; their wireless working faithfully so long as it stood, and the sound of their small-arm fire continuing for a while after their last words had ceased. Late that evening orders came for the Battalion to move at midnight from Arras to Boisleux-St. Marc, some six miles due south of the town on a line more or less prepared against eventualities, and, with their brigade, to give what help they could to the divisions who might be falling back on that front. This was all that could be made out of the mass of contradictory orders that afflicted them, and the growing crop of rumours and alarms that upset men almost more than any countermanded orders.
The Battalion set to work on the 23rd March to dig a support-line in rear of what was called the Army Line which ran in front of Boisleux-St. Marc while the evacuation of Arras was being completed and “all details and drummers marched to the Reinforcement Battalion at Agnez-les-Duisans,” on the Scarpe well to the west of Arras. (“In those days we was throubled the way a man is disthressed in dhreams. All manner of things happening, ye’ll understand, and him the only one able to do nothing. But I wisht I’d been a musicaner.”)
The Diary for the 24th March merely says, “remained in same positions,” and refers to “repeated rumours.” They sent their first-line transport back out of harm’s way, and went on digging. Yet the 24th was a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux, the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise below La Fère. Two thirds of the hard-bought ground of the Somme campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of hours.
Next day saw Béhagnies, Grévillers, Irles of the wired bastions, Miraumont, Pys, Courcelette, Contalmaison, Thiepval and its myriad dead, and Pozières of the Australians—the very hearts of the deadliest of the first fightings—overrun; and the question rose in men’s minds whether the drive would end, as was intended, in the splitting apart of the French and British armies. For what was happening north of the Somme was play to the situation south of it. There the enemy’s swarms of aeroplanes harried the Amiens hospitals, driving the civilians into the broadside of the country behind, where the moonlight nights betrayed them to fresh hosts in the air.
By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime, our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the enemy’s hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter year’s effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time that best suited himself, with seventy-three divisions against thirty-seven British divisions, and the outcome was appalling defeat of our arms.
It would thus seem that no amount of inspiring statesmanship at home, or anxious readjustment of divisions at the front, will make troops where troops are not. Therefore the battalions and batteries in the full blast of the onset perished or were taken prisoners; and of the stores captured or destroyed, lest they should benefit the enemy, we may look to receive no account. Not the least depressing of the sights that adorned the landscapes were the dumps lit by our own hands, flaring to heaven when, as turned out afterwards, there was really no need. Divisions were being raced up to reinforce the fluid front as fast as might be, but no one knew for certain when or where they would arrive, and Camp Commandants acted on their own judgments. The battalions in the line swayed to conflicting storms of orders.