"The best way to make the enemy more careful in his attempt to drive us bit by bit out of the outpost line and forward zone is to do active reconnaissance and carry out patrol encounters oneself. In this respect absolutely nothing seems to have been done. If the enemy can succeed in scoring a success without any special support by artillery or assistance from special troops, we must be in a position to do the same."
Our line in front of Villers-Bretonneux had for months run very close to the eastern outskirts of that town, a circumstance which cramped and embarrassed our defence of it. The enemy could peer into its streets and sweep them with machine guns. He had held in strength a locality known as Monument Wood, the ruins of a once prosperous orchard, and his possession of it had been a source of annoyance both to us and to the French, for it lay just opposite the international boundary posts.
The time seemed opportune for a set-piece operation designed to advance our line opposite the town by 1,000 yards, on a broad front, to dislodge the enemy from Monument Wood, gain valuable elbow room, and obtain mastery of the remainder of the plateau on which the town was built. I had actually completed the draft of a plan for such an operation, and had held a preliminary conference with my Staff to discuss it, when it became apparent that the nightly encroachments which the Second Division were effecting in this region would, in the course of a few days, achieve the capture of the whole of this territory without any special organized effort at all.
And so it proved; for before the middle of July, Rosenthal had succeeded in possessing himself, by such a process of "peaceful penetration," of the whole of the coveted area. It was a further evidence of the serious demoralization which our aggressive attitude of the preceding months had wrought among the German forces opposed to us.
The era of minor aggression by the Australian Corps was, however, about to draw to a close, and the situation was rapidly beginning to shape itself for greater events.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Staff-Sheet No. 218: "Operations of the Australian Corps against Hamel, etc.," published July, 1918.