Battle of La Malmaison begins

At 5.15 a.m. on 23 October 1917, in darkness, the French Sixth Army of General Paul Maistre attacked the western end of the Chemin des Dames ridge, between Vauxaillon and the farm of La Royère, about 15 km north-east of Soissons. Six divisions of three corps, supported by more than sixty tanks, advanced behind a dense creeping barrage fired by about 1,800 guns. Before 6.30 a.m. Zouaves had taken the ruins of Fort La Malmaison, and in the afternoon the French came down from the plateau to the villages of Vaudesson and Chavignon above the valley of the Ailette. In the evening General Philippe Pétain announced that more than 7,500 prisoners had been taken. It was the most successful day of the French army in 1917, achieved on the same ridge on which the Nivelle offensive had collapsed half a year earlier.

The night before the attack

The attack was the second major limited-objective blow, after the August Second Offensive Battle of Verdun, ordered by Pétain after the mutinies in the army. It was meant to take from the Germans the salient of the front at Laffaux and the plateau with the fort, from which they observed the French rear in the Aisne valley. From 17 October the French artillery bombarded the German positions without a break. Because of fog the bombardment was extended by two days, and the attack was put back from 22 to 23 October. The valley of the Ailette, through which the German supplies came, was shrouded in a cloud of gas, and the heaviest guns pierced the roofs of the underground quarries in which the German reserves were sheltering.

The French intended to attack at 5.45 a.m., at dawn. On 22 October, however, they intercepted a German radio message which showed that the enemy knew the hour of the attack and was preparing a bombardment of his own for 5.30 a.m. The chief of staff of the Sixth Army summoned Maistre, who was touring the corps, and the hour of the attack was brought forward by half an hour. The order had to be passed to the units that same evening. At midnight the French fire rose to a hurricane bombardment. From three in the morning the German heavy artillery shelled the jumping-off positions on the right wing, where the 4th Zouave Regiment was waiting, and inflicted serious losses on it.

The assault

At 5.15 a.m. the creeping barrage began, and rockets calling for artillery support rose above the German trenches. The German defensive barrage was quick but weak, because many batteries had been destroyed by the bombardment or had run out of ammunition. The French barrage moved forward in 50-metre lifts, and the infantry followed close behind it. At Allemant, by German calculations, 16 shells a minute fell on every 100 metres of front. Most of the surviving defenders were still sitting in their dugouts, stunned after the bombardment of many days. Soon after six it began to rain.

On the left wing General Marjoulet’s XIV Corps broke through both arms of the Laffaux salient. The 28th Division took Moisy farm and the Laffaux mill at the tip of the salient, and the 27th Division surrounded the Fruty quarry and entered the ravines towards the village of Allemant. In the centre General Degoutte’s XXI Corps crossed the Soissons–Laon road, where the entanglements and trenches had been levelled. At about six the 31st Chasseur Battalion stormed La Malmaison farm. On the right wing a Zouave battalion of the 38th Division, guided by artillery firing incendiary shells, fought its way under machine-gun fire to the moat of the fort and broke into its ruins. Grenadiers and flamethrower teams searched the underground galleries. According to a British account of 1918 the battalion’s flag was raised over the fort at 6.05 a.m.; French accounts say more generally that the fort fell before 6.30. Soldiers of the Moroccan Regiment and African light infantry surrounded the Bohéry quarry, whose garrison fought to the end.

At about nine the units reached their first objectives and halted for three hours to consolidate the ground they had taken. According to prisoners’ statements, the Germans concluded that the attack was over and began to prepare a counter-attack. At 9.15, however, their troops came under a second barrage, opened by batteries that had until then been silent, and scattered. The French moved down the northern slopes. In the Saint-Guillain wood the advance of the 140th Regiment was held up by machine-gun nests until tanks came up and destroyed them. At about eleven the last defenders of Allemant, from the German 14th Division, surrendered, and at 10.30 the 1st Chasseur Battalion forced the surrender of the garrison of the Montparnasse quarry, whose galleries stretched for almost a kilometre. In a downpour the French took the German switch trenches on the Allemant plateau. The 21st Infantry Regiment with tanks took the village of Vaudesson, and the 109th Regiment captured 18 guns in the Belle-Croix wood. At about two in the afternoon the chasseurs entered the western part of Chavignon, and an hour later the 38th Division entered the eastern part.

Not everything went so well. On the extreme left wing the 129th Division was thrown back to its starting positions. On the right the 66th Division, made up of Chasseurs Alpins, attacked at a point where no man’s land was too narrow for the heaviest guns to be used, and ran into intact entanglements. It fought hand to hand with the Prussian Guard near Panthéon farm and, although it took many prisoners, could not get down towards Pargny-Filain. The 67th Division beside it was repulsed. The tanks, too, did not fulfil all hopes: many of them got stuck in the mud while still behind the French line or in shell holes in no man’s land.

On the German side

The German Seventh Army of General Max von Boehn, which had decided to defend its first line, did not know for most of the day what was happening south of the Ailette. Communications had been cut by artillery fire, and only single runners got out of the valley, whose reports showed that the situation was hopeless. On the road to Chavignon the German 13th Division held out for only an hour. West of the fort the 2nd Guard Division repulsed part of the attack with machine-gun fire, but at La Malmaison farm the French captured one of its batteries in hand-to-hand fighting. At noon the army command decided that after the loss of Allemant, Vaudesson, Chavignon and La Malmaison the artillery had to be withdrawn from the Pinon wood. In the evening a counter-attack briefly recovered the north-eastern edge of Chavignon. The German line now ran from the plateau east of Vauxaillon along the switch line at Pinon, north of Vaudesson and Chavignon, towards the old positions at Pargny. According to the German official history roughly seven infantry regiments and a considerable part of the artillery were lost that day.

Balance of the day

By the evening the French had taken the Allemant plateau, the heights above Pinon and the La Malmaison plateau with the fort, and in several places their patrols reached the Ailette. According to the French Wikipedia more than 7,000 Germans were taken prisoner, among them three colonels with their staffs, and the French captured more than a hundred guns. Pétain gave more than 7,500 prisoners in his evening communiqué. Heavy losses were suffered above all by the 66th Division. After the first news the French press even began to write of a breakthrough towards Laon, although Pétain had no such intention.

The next day the Germans began to abandon the heights at the western edge of the battlefield, and on 25 October the French reached the Ailette. The French success was, however, quickly overshadowed by news from Italy, where on 24 October the Austro-German offensive on the Isonzo began.