The Greatest Battle of the War
Second Month of the Desperate Fighting in Flanders and Picardy
By Philip Gibbs
Special Correspondent With the British Armies [Copyrighted in United States of America]
The May issue of Current History Magazine contained Philip Gibbs's story of the great German offensive up to April 18, 1918. At that time the Germans were seeking to break the British lines in front of Ypres, as part of their drive for Amiens and the British Channel ports, generally known as the battle of Picardy. The pages here presented are a continuation of his eyewitness narrative of the most sanguinary battle in history.
April 18.—The arrival of French troops on our northern front is the most important act that has happened during the last three or four days, and it was with deep satisfaction that we met these troops on the roads and knew that at last our poor, tired men would get support and help against their overwhelming odds.
Beside the khaki army of the British has grown very quickly an army in blue, the cornflower blue of the French poilus. They are splendid men, hard and solid fellows, who have been war-worn and weather-worn during these three and a half years past, and look the great fighting men who have gone many times into battle and know all that war can teach them in endurance and cunning and quick attack.
As they came marching up the roads to the front they were like a streaming river of blue—blue helmets and coats and blue carts and blue lorries, all blending into one tone through these April mists as they went winding over the countryside and through French market towns, where their own people waved to them, and then through the villages on the edge of the Flanders battlefields, where they waited to go into action under shell-broken walls or under hedges above which British shellfire traveled, or in fields where they made their bivouacs, and fragrant steams arose to one's nostrils as cuistots lifted the lids of stewpans and hungry men gathered around after a long march.
The attack this morning from Robecq, below St. Venant, down to Givenchy, is a serious effort to gain La Bassée Canal and form a strong defensive flank for the enemy while he proceeds with his battles further north and also to get more elbow room from the salient in which he is narrowly wedged below Merville.