Battle of Soissons

The Battle of Soissons, fought from 8 to 14 January 1915, was one of the first large battles of trench warfare on the Western Front. It took place on the steep, ravine-cut heights on the north bank of the river Aisne, only a few kilometres from Soissons and about 100 kilometres from Paris. It began with a French success: troops of the French Sixth Army took Hill 132 above the village of Crouy. It ended, however, in a French defeat. The Germans, who were themselves preparing an attack in this sector, replied with a powerful counter-attack, and the Aisne, swollen by heavy rain, swept away some of the bridges behind the French. Within a few days the French lost not only the ground they had won but almost the whole bridgehead they had held on the north bank of the river since September 1914.

Name and dates

On this page we use the dates 8–14 January 1915. This is how the battle is dated by the British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based, and also by French and German studies. On 8 January the French attack on Hill 132 began, and on 14 January the French completed their withdrawal across the Aisne, while the Germans occupied the northern suburbs of Soissons and pushed outposts forward to the river.

The battle has several names. In Britain and in Germany it is known as the Battle of Soissons (German: Schlacht bei Soissons), after the nearest large town. The French speak of the Battle of Crouy (bataille de Crouy), after the village at the foot of Hill 132, where the heaviest fighting took place. In French politics and the press a third name also stuck to it: “the Soissons affair” (l’affaire de Soissons). This was used above all for the political consequences of the defeat, which provoked sharp criticism of the high command in Paris.

Background

After the First Battle of the Aisne in September 1914 the Germans dug in on the heights north of Soissons. The French, who had retaken the town in mid-September, held a bridgehead on the north bank of the river: a strip of slopes and valleys between Crouy and Missy, but without the crest of the plateau. The Germans had the advantage of height over it. From the heights they watched the French trenches, the bridges and Soissons itself, which their artillery shelled. The supply of the troops in the bridgehead depended on a few bridges and footbridges over the Aisne.

In December 1914 the commander-in-chief of the French army, General Joseph Joffre, began the winter offensives in Artois and in Champagne. The other armies were to carry out local attacks to tie down German reserves. The commander of the Sixth Army, General Michel Joseph Maunoury, entrusted the attack at Soissons to General Henri Berthelot. Berthelot, in August and September 1914 one of Joffre’s closest collaborators at headquarters, had commanded since 24 November the 5th Group of Reserve Divisions, made up of the 55th Reserve Division and General Klein’s mixed brigade, in which Moroccan riflemen, among others, fought. The objective was Hill 132, also called Montagne-Neuve, a spur of the plateau west of Crouy overlooking the road from Soissons to Laon. Its capture would give the bridgehead depth and observation points for the artillery. The first attempt, on 25 December, failed. The French then tried out carts with explosive charges that were meant to blow gaps in the German wire, but only one of them worked.

The Germans were also preparing to attack. At the end of December the German Supreme Army Command demanded an attack that would tie down French forces in response to the offensive in Champagne. The commander of the German First Army, General Alexander von Kluck, chose the sector north of Soissons. General Ewald von Lochow’s III Corps, made up of Brandenburg regiments, was to strike at the plateau near the village of Vregny and push the French back across the Aisne. The attack was prepared by the corps chief of staff, Colonel Hans von Seeckt. It was planned for mid-January. Forces were scarce, because the reserve infantry brigade intended for the attack had been taken away to another sector of the front. Kluck did not, however, abandon the plan. According to the German official history of the war, Lochow had at his disposal 19.5 infantry battalions, 32.5 batteries of field and heavy artillery and ammunition for one day of fighting.

Course of the battle

8 January. The French forestalled the German attack. After a short artillery preparation, which opened only four gaps in the German wire, the infantry advanced on Hill 132. A battalion of chasseurs à pied and a battalion of Moroccan riflemen, supported by units of the 55th Division, took the top of the spur and two lines of German trenches within a few minutes. They were defended by Brandenburg units of General Georg Wichura’s German 5th Infantry Division.

9–10 January. The French held the captured trenches despite German counter-attacks. On the afternoon of 10 January they attacked further east, towards the rocky promontory called the Dent de Crouy, and took further stretches of trench. It rained without a break, and the trenches and communication trenches turned into muddy channels. Berthelot asked for reinforcements. Because the Germans had had to use some of the troops intended for their own attack to plug gaps, Lochow decided on 11 January that he would first retake the heights above Crouy and only then strike at Vregny.

11 January. A French attack on the German salient at Crouy brought no decision. Meanwhile the Aisne, behind the French, was rising rapidly. During the night of 11/12 January it burst its banks, and the current began to tear away the pontoon bridges over which supplies and reinforcements were brought up.

12 January. In the morning the German artillery, including heavy guns and trench mortars, opened a heavy bombardment of the French positions. In one of the caves on the hill a large-calibre shell brought down the command post of the 60th Infantry Regiment, burying its commander and several officers under the rubble. Before noon the German assault troops of the 5th Division went in. Around noon the French lost Hill 132, and the Germans broke into their former trenches and took the northern edge of Crouy. The neighbouring German 7th Reserve Division reached, on the western side, as far as Cuffies. The French artillery was short of ammunition, and some of its batteries were destroyed or captured. That day the first units of General Faës’s French 14th Infantry Division arrived, and Berthelot sent them to the most threatened points.

13 January. During the night of 12/13 January two battalions of the 14th Division counter-attacked without success. During the day the French tried to retake ground on both sides of the road from Soissons to Laon, but their attacks broke down. Around noon, in the rain, the Germans struck at the plateau near Vregny, that is, where they had planned their attack from the start. The French had meanwhile moved their reserves to Crouy, so the attack, delivered frontally and from both flanks out of the ravines running down to the Aisne, took the defenders by surprise. By the evening the French held only the wooded slopes just above the river. Generals Maunoury and Berthelot concluded that the exhausted troops could not be kept on the north bank and decided to withdraw them across the Aisne.

14 January. The withdrawal took place during the night and in the early morning, under artillery fire, across the swollen river. The military bridges at Missy-sur-Aisne and Venizel had been swept away by the flood. The most important crossing remained the stone bridge at Venizel, on which the Germans laid heavy artillery fire. According to French accounts, some rearguard units failed to get across to the other bank, and a German attempt to force the river at Venizel was repulsed. That day the Germans took Vauxrot and the northern suburbs of Soissons, reached the line Crouy – Bucy-le-Long – Missy and pushed outposts forward to the river. According to French accounts, the French kept only a small patch of the north bank right by the town. Soissons itself remained in their hands.

The Kaiser at Soissons

According to contemporary accounts, which historians also cite, the course of the fighting was watched in person by the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who is said to have come for this purpose to the château at Pinon, a dozen or so kilometres north-east of Soissons. A French chronicle published after the war claimed that the Kaiser compared the fighting at Crouy to the storming of Saint-Privat by the Prussian Guard at the Battle of Gravelotte in 1870. German communiqués and the press presented the victory at Soissons as a great success, which in the French view was greatly exaggerated.

Losses

According to the German official history of the war, the Germans lost about 169 officers and 5,360 men, that is, about 5,500 killed, wounded and missing in all. They took about 5,200 prisoners and captured 35 guns and 6 machine guns. French losses are given variously, from over 11,000 to about 12,500 killed, wounded, missing and taken prisoner. Some studies give the figure of 12,411 men, or about 40 per cent of all the forces committed to the fighting. Some French regiments were almost completely destroyed. According to its regimental history, the 276th Infantry Regiment lost about 750 killed and 600 prisoners, and of its two battalions 5 officers and 475 men remained.

Significance

On the map the changes were small. According to French estimates, the front fell back by less than two kilometres on a sector about four and a half kilometres wide. A defeat so close to Paris nevertheless caused alarm in the capital and revived fears of a new German march on the city. The French command explained the defeat above all by the flood on the Aisne, which cut off the troops on the north bank from reinforcements and supplies. Critics accused the generals of throwing troops into an attack in winter, with a river at their backs and without sufficient artillery support. The Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, reprimanded Joffre for costly and fruitless attacks, and members of parliament took up the matter. Joffre shifted the responsibility onto his subordinates. Berthelot lost his command, and with him divisional commanders were removed, among them General Faës of the 14th Division. It was one of the first such sharp political criticisms of the French command in this war.

For the Germans the battle was an offensive success, rare in the west in 1915, a year in which their armies were mostly on the defensive against Allied attacks. A carefully prepared, limited attack, in which infantry, artillery and engineers worked to a single plan, became the model in the German army for local attacks in positional warfare. Lochow received the Pour le Mérite, and his chief of staff Seeckt caught the attention of the high command. A few months later, as chief of staff of the Eleventh Army, he helped to plan the breakthrough of the Russian front at Gorlice.

The battle also left a mark on literature. The writer Henri Barbusse fought at Crouy in the ranks of the 231st Infantry Regiment, part of the 55th Division. He dedicated his novel Under Fire, published in 1916 and awarded the Prix Goncourt, “to the memory of the comrades who fell beside me at Crouy and on Hill 119”.