Battle of Bailleul begins

On 13 April 1918, the fifth day of the Battle of the Lys, the German offensive in Flanders struck with full force at the left wing of the British front, on the low hills between Bailleul and Neuve-Église (Nieuwkerke (PL)). They were defended by General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon’s IX Corps of General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army, made up largely of brigades that had been fighting without a break since 9 April, and some of them since March on the Somme. Against them advanced six divisions of the II Bavarian Corps, including the fresh Alpine Corps, and several divisions of the German Fourth Army. All day the British repulsed attacks, but in the evening, when the Germans broke into Neuve-Église and began to outflank their left wing, they abandoned the exposed salient in front of Bailleul and fell back to the Ravelsberg ridge. So began the battle that the British Battles Nomenclature Committee later named the Battle of Bailleul.

The hills above the Lys

After four days of the offensive, called Operation Georgette by the Germans, the British front in Flanders bulged into a great pocket about 20 kilometres wide and a dozen or so deep. On 9 April the German Sixth Army had broken the front of the Portuguese Corps, the next day the Fourth Army took Messines, and on 11 April the British gave up Armentières and Merville. On 12 April the Germans advanced on Hazebrouck, an important railway junction behind the British lines, and in these days Field Marshal Douglas Haig called on his soldiers to fight with their “backs to the wall”.

On the northern side of the pocket the front now ran at the foot of the hills that close off the flat, marshy Lys valley to the north. To the south they end in knolls on which lie Meteren, Bailleul, the Ravelsberg, Crucifix Corner and Neuve-Église. Bailleul, a town of more than 13,000 inhabitants before the war, had since October 1914 been one of the most important British centres behind the front at Ypres, full of headquarters, depots and hospitals. Behind it rose the range of the Flanders hills, from Mont des Cats to Kemmelberg. Whoever took them commanded the whole plain as far as Ypres and could threaten the rear of the British troops in the Ypres salient.

The IX Corps front, more than 20 kilometres long and facing south, had in its centre, between Bailleul and Neuve-Église, a large curved salient. It was held by General Cecil Nicholson of the 34th Division, with five tired brigades from various divisions under his command, including General Bernard Freyberg’s 88th Brigade with the Newfoundland battalion. To their right the 19th Brigade of the 33rd Division covered Meteren, and to their left, near Neuve-Église, stood the brigades of the 25th Division. According to British intelligence, further German divisions from Russia reached the Western Front that day, and the whole pocket was being attacked by 23 German divisions in the front line, with 9 more behind them. Facing them were 14 British divisions, four of which were by now mere skeletons.

A mistake at the junction of the armies

The day was cold and grey, and in the morning thick fog hung over the rivers and canals. Low cloud made flying almost impossible, so the British infantry had no air support, but German aircraft hardly appeared either. The Germans, however, had trouble with their artillery. Over the sodden, shell-pocked ground the heavy guns and ammunition reached the front with difficulty. Some field batteries were brought up under cover of hedges to as close as 250 metres from the British lines, but the British artillery broke up many German attacks before they had properly begun.

The attack on Bailleul was to be a joint effort of two armies. The Alpine Corps and the 117th Division of the Sixth Army were to take the town in a pincer, enveloping it from both sides, while the X Reserve Corps of the Fourth Army was to strike at the hills west of Neuve-Église. According to the Fourth Army’s war diary, co-operation between the staffs at the junction of the armies failed. The II Bavarian Corps moved off at 6.30 a.m., half an hour before its neighbour, and its right-hand division, the 117th, advanced almost at right angles to the direction of attack of the neighbouring 214th Division. It came under the fire of that division’s artillery and of British machine guns, halted “very shaken”, and the Bavarians postponed the attack until the afternoon. When the 214th Division moved off at 7 a.m., unaware of what had happened to its neighbours, it reached the hills west of Neuve-Église, but under fire from its exposed flank and counter-attacked, it was thrown back almost to its starting positions. The rest of the day, as the diary recorded, was filled with an “acrimonious discussion” between the staffs of the two armies, and several caustic remarks by General Erich Ludendorff came down from Supreme Headquarters.

Neuve-Église

The heaviest fighting was for Neuve-Église, a village on a hill through which four good roads ran. At 5 a.m., still in the fog and without artillery preparation, the Germans assembled just in front of the 75th Brigade and pushed it back to the north. The German 214th Division poured through the gap. One part of it turned against the flank of Nicholson’s troops, another struck the rear of the 100th Brigade south-east of the village, and a third broke into Neuve-Église itself. There sappers of the 49th Division and a reserve company of the 2nd Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment drove the Germans out of the village in a counter-attack, and men of the Hallamshire Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, who had turned round the parapets of the trenches, took fifty prisoners, among them a battalion commander. The Scots of the 9th Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders) held out until evening and then stretched a thin line across the Bailleul–Neuve-Église road. Scattered groups of the 100th Brigade defended themselves on their own initiative, and the last survivors did not get back to their own lines until 15 April.

The forward companies of the 2nd Worcestershire held on until 6 p.m., although the Germans were already in their rear. Then the commanding officer ordered a withdrawal. Battalion headquarters with half a company shut itself up in the town hall (mairie) in the middle of the village and prepared it for defence, and the Germans soon surrounded it. In the evening fresh German forces entered the village, including the 11th Bavarian Division, which, as an intercepted message showed, had been sent with orders to “take quickly” the hills east of Bailleul. Before dawn the Germans held most of Neuve-Église, and west of the village, where the 75th Brigade had stood in the morning, a gap almost two kilometres wide yawned. It was closed by the 71st Brigade of the 6th Division, brought up by bus from Ypres in the afternoon.

At about midnight General Hamilton-Gordon conferred with his divisional commanders. General George Jeffreys of the 19th Division, which had hardly been attacked that day, urged that the village be retaken and offered a battalion for a counter-attack. The corps commander decided, however, that further fighting for Neuve-Église would cost more than it was worth, and at 2.40 a.m. he issued a conditional order: if the village could not be held, the troops were to fall back, fighting, to a line from the Ravelsberg through Crucifix Corner towards Spanbroekmolen.

Withdrawal from the salient before Bailleul

At Bailleul Nicholson’s brigades had a better day than anyone had expected. They fought on the slopes of the knolls, from where the artillery could see the whole plain, and ditches gave cover from the fire of the German field guns. The morning attacks were beaten off within half an hour. At 3.30 p.m. the Germans launched a general attack and suffered heavy losses from machine guns and rifles as they crossed the fields between the hedges. Even so, the two brigades on the right wing fell back 200–500 metres, and the left wing more than a kilometre. Reinforcements for that wing, fewer than two hundred men, were killed almost to a man, and the Newfoundland battalion stopped the Germans with its fire when they were barely twenty-odd metres from its trenches. Meanwhile the enemy was working ever deeper round the left wing from the direction of Neuve-Église, until part of the 102nd Brigade was fighting facing north, to its rear.

At 9.20 p.m. Nicholson ordered the troops to stand fast, but the brigade commanders, who had conferred among themselves in the afternoon, believed that five weak brigades could not withstand the pressure of at least four divisions. With the corps commander’s consent the 34th Division ordered an immediate withdrawal to a previously prepared line from the southern outskirts of Bailleul through Mont de Lille and the Ravelsberg to Crucifix Corner. The Germans were so exhausted that they did not interfere. By dawn all the brigades were in their new positions. It was not without loss: a shell hit the cellar that housed a headquarters and killed General R. C. Gore, commander of the 101st Brigade, and the 102nd Brigade was so depleted that it was withdrawn from the line. Reinforcements gathered behind the new front: two brigades of the 59th Division, brought from Ypres to Locre, and the first regiment of the French 133rd Division, which reached Flêtre west of Meteren in the evening.

Evening at headquarters

In the evening Haig had it checked whether the Second Army was preparing to defend the range of hills from Mont des Cats to Kemmel, which was to cover the flank of the troops in the Ypres salient. His chief of staff argued with Plumer by telephone that the front must be shortened and the salient abandoned, because the army would receive no more British divisions. Plumer very reluctantly agreed to a withdrawal to a line from Kemmel to the Pilckem ridge, but since he and the corps commanders in the salient were confident that they could hold their positions, he did not yet issue orders. The gunners meanwhile began removing ammunition from the forward dumps. General Henry Horne, commander of the First Army, issued an order of the day expressing confidence that at a moment when “the fate of the Empire” hung in the balance, everyone would do all in his power.

The night was quiet, too misty and dark for an air raid, and many soldiers could sleep for the first time in five nights. The Germans were disappointed too. An officer of the Alpine Corps wrote to a British officer after the war: “For us 13 April 1918 was a disappointment. We were used to reaching our objective everywhere, in Serbia, at Verdun, in Romania and in Italy. For the first time, on that 13 April, we gained only a few hundred metres of ground. I think I may say that the defenders on the British front in April 1918 were the best soldiers of the many with whom we crossed swords in four and a quarter years of war.” In the morning, as the British knew from the statements of prisoners, the Germans were to renew the attack on Meteren, Bailleul and Neuve-Église.