Battle of the Sambre begins

On 4 November 1918, at dawn, three British armies set off on the last great battle of the war. On a front running from the Sambre–Oise Canal near Oisy to the area of Valenciennes, about 50 kilometres long according to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the Fourth, Third and First Armies attacked the German second Hermann position, which rested on the canal, the canalised Sambre and Mormal Forest. On the right flank, in the Oise valley, General Debeney’s French First Army attacked. By evening the British had crossed the canal along a stretch of about 24 kilometres, fought their way through most of the forest, taken the fortress of Le Quesnoy and captured about 10,000 prisoners. It was also the day on which Wilfred Owen was killed.

Before dawn

The British had been standing on the canal since the end of the Battle of the Selle, ten days earlier. In that time the sappers had prepared footbridges, floating bridges on empty petrol tins, rafts and collapsible boats, while the artillery had been brought into position quietly and camouflaged. The canal was over a dozen metres wide at the water surface, with a muddy bottom, and at Ors the Germans had flooded the meadows, turning them into a swamp. The night of 3–4 November was dark and rainy. After midnight a thick fog settled in the valley, lifting only at about nine in the morning. For the infantry, who had to get right up to the canal, it was an ally. In Mormal Forest and in the thick hedges in front of it, it made keeping direction difficult.

Among the soldiers waiting on the canal at Ors was Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen of the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment. He was 25. After treatment for shell shock in Scotland, where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, he had returned to the front at the end of August, and for the fighting on 1 October on the Beaurevoir Line he was recommended for the Military Cross. His company spent the last night before the attack in a forester’s house near Ors. A few days earlier Owen had written his last letter to his mother from there.

The canal: 5.30–9.00

At 5.30 a.m. the Third and First Armies moved off, at 5.45 IX Corps of the Fourth Army and the neighbouring French corps, and at 6.15 XIII Corps and the right wing of the Third Army. The barrage over the canal advanced slowly, a hundred yards, about 90 metres, every six minutes.

Furthest south, the 1st Division crossed at the lock near Fesmy. German shells hit the bridge-carrying parties, and the planks for the footbridges over a side stream proved too short, but men of the Royal Sussex Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Johnson ran to the bank and pinned down the defenders with their fire. At 6.10 the bridge was across the lock and the battalions began crossing to the far bank, fighting hand to hand in the houses by the lock. A little further on, battalions of the 1st Brigade threw four light bridges across and were also over the canal before 6.10. At Catillon a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment caught the Germans as they came out of their cellars after the barrage had passed and took 450 prisoners for the loss of four killed.

At Ors the crossing went much worse. An attempt to plug the gap in the bridge in the village itself with a floated span failed, as did a crossing in collapsible boats. South of the village the sappers of the 206th Company built a floating bridge on petrol tins under rifle fire, and a battalion of the Dorset Regiment crossed by it. North of Ors, where Owen’s battalion and the 16th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers attacked, the sappers of the 218th Company threw two light bridges across. One was smashed by shells after two platoons had crossed it, the other was held under fire by German machine guns. Lieutenant-Colonel James Marshall, an Irish Guards officer commanding the Lancashire Fusiliers battalion, personally led the repair of the bridge under fire until he was killed. Second Lieutenant James Kirk of the Manchester battalion paddled across on a raft with a machine gun to cover the bridge-building, and he too was killed. Both were awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. The same decoration went to two sappers of the 218th Company who built bridges under fire and survived. In the same fighting, in the early hours of the morning, Owen was killed while helping his men with the crossing. The attack north of Ors cost the two battalions more than two hundred killed and wounded.

Further north the 25th Division attacked towards Landrecies. One of the sapper sergeants jumped into the water and cut the leads of the charges under the bridge over the old bed of the Sambre, and the Germans, frightened by the barrage, left several bridges intact. A company of the Worcestershire Regiment ran across the canal by one of them. The main bridge into the town was blown at the last moment by a German officer who galloped up to the charge on horseback.

The forest and the fortress: 9.00–16.00

At about eight air observers reported that the Germans were withdrawing their guns. When the fog lifted at nine, Royal Air Force aircraft appeared over the battlefield, strafing the retreating infantry and artillery from low level. At 9.37 the 1st Division moved on from its bridgehead, almost unopposed, and at 10.45 the last German post at Ors fell, the fortified, water-girt post of Le Donjon. At about 11.00 the 25th and 50th Divisions stood on the objectives set by the army. At Landrecies the British crossed on rafts made of petrol tins, and by 12.45 a battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment was already clearing the town. Here the 75th Brigade took 838 prisoners and 27 guns. A few Germans even surrendered to two supply tanks, which they took for fighting tanks.

In Mormal Forest and in the orchards in front of it resistance was uneven. A battalion of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment of the 17th Division lost 13 of its 15 officers and 226 of its 583 men in the hedges in front of the forest. Elsewhere the Germans surrendered in large numbers, and their machine-gunners ran before the infantry could reach them. The village of Preux-au-Bois, set in a maze of orchards, held out longest: only at noon did the 18th Division take it with the help of tanks, surrounding it on all sides. After that the battalions moved along the forest rides in column, almost unhindered.

The best-remembered episode of the day took place at Le Quesnoy. The little town was surrounded by ramparts and moats in the Vauban system, and about 1,600 French civilians were still inside, so the artillery could not batter it. The New Zealand Division was only to surround it. At 5.30 the Rifle Brigade set off behind the barrage, and 300 drums of burning oil fell on the ramparts, blinding the defenders. By about 7.15 the New Zealanders stood on the railway embankment in front of the fortress, and before 10.30 they had gone round it to the north and south. Their 1st Brigade pushed on and before 12.30 was on the edge of the forest. At about eight a sergeant and three riflemen crossed the moat and climbed the rampart, but had to withdraw. During the day the New Zealanders several times sent prisoners into the town with a call to surrender, and one was dropped from an aircraft. The German soldiers wanted to surrender, but their officers refused.

At about four in the afternoon mortars silenced the machine guns on the western ramparts. Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill, intelligence officer of the 4th Battalion, found an unmanned stretch of the inner rampart and climbed to the top by a ladder about nine metres long, the only one they had. After him came a platoon commander, his men and then the whole battalion. From the north a party of the 2nd Battalion broke into the town over a partly demolished bridge. The garrison capitulated, and 711 Germans went into captivity in the town itself. According to the British official history the New Zealand Division took more than 2,450 prisoners and several dozen guns that day. For the New Zealanders it was one of the best days of the whole war and their last great battle.

Evening

At 2.30 p.m. a battalion of the Essex Regiment of the 18th Division reached its objective deep in the forest, and at about 6 p.m. the division’s reserve brigade reached the Maroilles–Locquignol road. The 38th Division of V Corps took its fourth objective in the forest before 5.15 p.m., and during the night its companies stood on the eastern edge of the forest, from where a patrol entered Berlaimont without a fight. In the north the Guards Division and the 62nd Division took Frasnoy and Preux-au-Sart, and XVII Corps both villages of Wargnies. Only on the front of the First Army, beyond the Aunelle and near Onnaing, did the Germans stop the British and Canadians with counter-attacks and fire from buildings. Near Fesmy, on the right flank, the 1st Division failed to make contact with the French, who had not managed to get footbridges across the canal on the first day. They entered Guise only the next day.

The day’s balance was very favourable for the British. According to the figures given by Edmonds, author of the British official history, the Fourth Army alone took more than 4,000 prisoners and 80 guns, and IV Corps about 3,500 prisoners and 110 guns. The canal crossing cost the most: the 32nd Division lost about 700 men, and the 1st and 32nd Divisions together, according to some studies, about 1,150. The reports of one German regiment recorded that “a swarm of low-flying aircraft” accompanied the attack and fired on the retreating infantry and artillery.

In the evening the right wing of the German Second Army was ordered to retreat, and on the night of 4–5 November the whole army began falling back to the Antwerp–Meuse position. On the same day, at 3 p.m., the armistice with Austria-Hungary came into force on the Italian front, and in Kiel mutinous sailors were taking over the city. Owen’s family learned of his death on 11 November, as the bells were ringing in Shrewsbury for the armistice.