At that date there was a proposal that the XVII Corps should attack Orange Hill and Chapel Hill, and the 56th Division was to take part in this attack. Days, however, were spent in moving about.
On the 20th Sir Douglas Haig visited Gen. Hull. The same day the 169th Brigade moved to Avesne-le-Comte area, and the 168th to Lignereuil. At mid-day on the 21st the 56th Division was transferred from the XVII Corps to the VI Corps, and the whole division moved to the Bavincourt area, when an entirely new scheme of attack came into being.
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In his dispatch covering this period Sir Douglas Haig writes:
“The definite collapse of the ambitious offensive launched by the enemy on the 15th July, and the striking success of the Allied counter-offensive south of the Aisne, effected a complete change in the whole military situation.”
This first big operation of Marshal Foch had inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. Ten divisions were broken up and the remnants used as reinforcements to others. The attempt to make the Entente Powers sue for peace before the arrival of the Americans had failed—not only were a million troops from the United States in France, but the English divisions had been largely made up to strength. Between May and June ten English divisions had been reduced to cadres—seven of these were reconstituted during July and August. And German General Headquarters had been forced to take momentous decisions. They had to withdraw from the salient between Rheims and Soissons, and
also abandon their idea of a new offensive in Flanders. “By the beginning of August,” says Ludendorff, “we had suspended our attack and reverted to the defensive on the whole front.”
At a conference, held on the 23rd July, it was arranged by Marshal Foch that the British, French, and American Armies should each prepare plans for a local offensive. The objectives on the British front were the disengagement of Amiens and the freeing of the Paris-Amiens railway by an attack on the Albert-Montdidier front. The rôle of the French and American Armies was to free other strategic railways farther south and east.
There seems a suggestion in his dispatches that the British Commander-in-Chief was somewhat perturbed by this decision. He had the safety of the Channel ports and the danger of a fresh German offensive in that direction ever in his mind, and we know that it was Ludendorff’s plan. There is an indication that Sir Douglas Haig was urging a counter-stroke in the north. “These different operations,” he says, “had already been the subject of correspondence between Marshal Foch and myself.” Ultimately he came to the conclusion that the tasks assigned to the British forces east of Amiens should take precedence “as being the most important and the most likely to give large results.”
The attack opened on the 8th August on a front of over eleven miles from just south of the Amiens-Roye road to Morlancourt. On the right was the Canadian Corps, in the centre the Australian Corps, and on the left the III Corps. The attack of the First French Army was timed to take place an hour later between Moreuil and the British right. By the