"The sacrifices willingly made have not been in vain. All have been able to take part in the common task. The present is a sure guarantee to us of the future.
"The Commander in Chief is proud to command the finest troops France has ever known."[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER IX
THE BRITISH FRONT IN ARTOIS
Ever since August 16, 1915, a persistent and almost continuous bombardment of the German lines had been carried out by the French and, to a less extent, by the British and Belgian artillery. The allied gunners appear to have distributed their favors quite impartially. There was nothing in the action taken to direct attention to one sector more than to another. The Vosges, the Meurthe and Moselle, Lorraine and the Woevre, the Argonne, Champagne, the Aisne, the Somme, the Arras sector, Ypres and the Yser, and the Belgian coast where the British navy had joined in, all were subjected to a heavy, deliberate and effective fire from guns of all calibers. As in Champagne, the rate of fire quickened up on September 22, 1915. Great concentrations of guns had been made at various points, and enormous quantities of shells had been collected in readiness for the attack. But the artillery preparation which immediately preceded that attack in the west was of a most terrific description. Shortly after midnight and in the early hours of Saturday morning, September 25, 1915, the German positions were treated to a bombardment that had rarely been equaled in violence. From the Yser Canal down to the end of the French line the Allies' guns took up the note, and soon the whole of the allied line was thundering and reechoing with the infernal racket. The German lines became smothered in dust and smoke, their parapets simply melted away, their barbed-wire entanglements disappeared. Those sleeping thirty or forty miles away were awakened in the night by the dull rumbling. The whole atmosphere was choked with the noise, and so it continued throughout the day with hardly an interval. As if in anticipation of the coming onslaught the German artillery had also raised the key of its fire to a higher pitch several days before.
Simultaneously with the attack in Champagne, Sir John French assumed the offensive on the British front. The main British attack was directed in the neighborhood of Lens, against Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. While the French troops were rushing the German first line in Champagne, the British troops executed a precisely similar movement south of La Bassée Canal to the east of Grenay and Vermelles. With the first rush they captured the German trenches on a front of five miles, penetrating the lines in some places to a distance of 4,000 yards. They conquered the western outskirts of Hulluch, the village of Loos, with the mining works around it, and Hill 70. They lost the quarries northwest of Hulluch again, but retook them on the following day. Other attacks were made north of the La Bassée Canal, which drew strong German reserves toward these points of the lines, where hard fighting occurred throughout the day with fluctuating success. The British also made another attack on Hooge on either side of the Menin road. The assault north of the road yielded the Bellewaarde Farm and ridge, but the Germans subsequently recaptured this part. South of the road the attack gained about 600 yards of German trench. The British took 2,600 prisoners, eighteen guns and thirty machine guns in the first day. The Fourth British Army Corps, under Sir Henry Rawlinson, had thus taken Loos and overrun Hill 70, a mile to the east, and even penetrated to Cité St. Auguste. The Fifth Corps, under Sir Hubert Gough, on the left, had stormed the quarries, taken Cité St. Elie, and occupied a portion of the village of Haisnes. But the First Army, in its attack, had not kept adequate reserves on hand; and those at first at the disposal of the general in chief, which had to serve the whole front and to be kept in hand in case of unexpected events, came up too late to enable the British to hold and consolidate all the ground they had won. The Ypres-Arras sector had been more formidably fortified than any other portion of the German front. It is an extremely thickly populated neighborhood, and the terrain is full of difficulties. It could not be expected that an advance here, at least from the outset, could be as rapid as that in Champagne. Whereas in the latter it was a fight for rivers, ridges and woods, in the close country north of Arras the struggle raged in and around villages, houses, and for some particular trench that had to be taken before the French and British could enter the great plain that stretches down to Lille. Every house along that part had been converted into a fortress. When the superstructure had been blown to pieces by shell fire, pioneers burrowed thirty or fifty feet below the cellars and thus held on to the position.
To the right of the British in Artois, the French infantry attack was directed toward the forest of Hache. Only eighty or ninety yards separated the French from the German trenches, and the French infantry, which attained its objective in a few minutes, found the trenches a mass of ruins and almost deserted, and the Germans retreating into the wood. The first wave of attackers followed in pursuit, but they reached the second line of trenches, situated in the middle of the wood, without meeting any Germans in considerable force. They pushed on to the eastern edge of the wood, but the Germans again put up no defense, and their third-line trenches, on the fringe of the wood, were likewise taken. Then came a halt in the advance. The German commander pulled his men together and, with the reserves which had come up in the meantime, launched a counterattack against the French, who had quickly established themselves in their newly captured positions. Heavy shells, high explosives and shrapnel were raining in the trenches occupied by the French, and but for the new steel helmets which had recently been supplied, the casualties would have been enormous. One man's helmet was split clean across the crown by a shell splinter, but the man escaped with merely a scratch. The Germans came on in close formations, hurling grenades as they marched. The atmosphere of the wood became almost insupportable with the smoke. Finally, the French hurled a veritable torrent of grenades, which drove the Germans back and compelled them to withdraw across the River Souchez. Boise Hache was entirely won.
The British attack between La Bassée and Lens and the French attack on the Souchez side were admirably coordinated, and were directed mainly to assist the French to gain the heights west of Vimy, which were the unattained object of their efforts during May and June. By September 27, 1915, the French had all Souchez in their hands, and were advancing upon Givenchy. The capture of the Vimy heights was an item of the highest importance, for to the eastward of them all the ground was commanded by their fire, and the chances were that the Germans would fall back on Douai and on the line of the Lille-Douai Canal, once they were pushed off the high ground. In the Argonne the German Crown Prince carried out desperate attacks against the French first-line trenches at La Fille Morte and Bolante. These the French repulsed with heavy losses to the Germans, whose dead lay piled in heaps in front of the positions.
One result of the British attack was the hurried recall of the active Corps of Prussian Guards from the eastern front—an important relief to the hard-pressed Russians. This famous corps was at the time split up into three groups; the active corps was with Mackensen in Galicia and in the advance upon Brest-Litovsk. It was transferred to the Dvina after the fall of Brest, and had since been engaged before Dvinsk. The Reserve Guard Corps was in the central group of the German armies, and the other, the Third Division, was still in Galicia. The British and the Prussian Guards had made each other's acquaintance in the Battle of Ypres.