First Battle of Champagne

The First Battle of Champagne was the first great French offensive against fortified German positions on the Western Front. For almost three months, from December 1914 to March 1915, the French Fourth Army of General Fernand de Langle de Cary attacked the trenches of the German Third Army on the chalk plains east of Reims. The fighting took place in rain, mud and frost around a few small villages: Souain, Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Mesnil-lès-Hurlus and Massiges. At best the French advanced 2–3 kilometres, and they paid for it with losses counted in tens of thousands of men.

Name and dates

On this page we use the dates 20 December 1914 – 17 March 1915. This is how the battle is dated by the British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based, as well as by the Polish and English Wikipedia. On 20 December the main attack of the Fourth Army began, and on 17 March General de Langle de Cary halted the offensive.

The sources agree on the end of the battle, but its beginning is dated in different ways. The British site greatwar.co.uk gives the dates 10 December 1914 – 17 March 1915, counting from the first small attacks near Perthes. The French Wikipedia and some more recent studies begin the battle on 14 December, when the first attacks were launched on the Fourth Army’s front. The Germans, in turn, use the name “Winter Battle in Champagne” (Winterschlacht in der Champagne) chiefly for the second and heaviest phase of the fighting, from 16 February to about 20 March 1915. It is called the first battle to distinguish it from later great offensives on the same ground, above all from the Second Battle of Champagne in the autumn of 1915.

Background

In mid-September 1914, after the Battle of the Marne, the Germans halted in Champagne on the hills north and east of Reims. When the fighting at Ypres died down at the end of November, the Western Front already ran as an unbroken line of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland. In the middle of this line was a great salient, driven deep into France around Noyon, less than a hundred kilometres from Paris.

On 15 November the operations bureau of French headquarters presented the commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, with a plan for a winter offensive. The staff officers judged that the German offensive in the west was over and that the Germans were transferring several corps east, against Russia. They had to be attacked before they dug in, and not be allowed to weaken the French front further at the expense of the Russian ally. The plan provided for a two-sided blow at the Noyon salient: from the north, in Artois, the Tenth Army was to attack towards Cambrai, and from the south, in Champagne, the Fourth Army from Suippes towards Rethel and Mézières. If both attacks succeeded, they would threaten the railways supplying the German armies and force them to retreat. Joffre knew that heavy artillery and ammunition were lacking, but considered the offensive necessary. On other sectors, from Flanders, where an attack was made at Wytschaete on 14 December, to the Vosges, subsidiary attacks were to be launched.

The German Third Army in Champagne was commanded by General Karl von Einem. His divisions, though numerically weaker than the French, had had several weeks to develop their trenches, barbed-wire entanglements and machine-gun positions.

Course of the battle

December 1914. After the first local attacks in the middle of the month, the main attack of the Fourth Army began on 20 December. XVII Corps attacked on the sector between Souain and Perthes, and I Colonial Corps against the hills around the Beauséjour farm. The gains were small. On 21 December the attack of XII Corps broke down, because the gaps in the German wire were under machine-gun fire. The infantry began digging mines and saps, and the artillery shelled the German trenches. By 24 December the French had held Hill 200 near Perthes, which they had captured, despite German counter-attacks. General de Langle de Cary shifted his main effort to the area of Perthes and Massiges, and on 27 December Joffre sent him IV Corps as reinforcements. On 30 December the Germans struck the right wing, II Corps, and took several lines of trenches. The next day the French recovered most of the lost ground, but further German counter-attacks disorganised their attack.

January 1915. On the night of 7–8 January French infantry occupied the village of Perthes-lès-Hurlus, abandoned by the Germans. On 9 January the French captured a German fort by the Beauséjour farm, but the Germans retook it. Frost, rain and mud increasingly hampered operations, and on 13 January the offensive was halted. At the same time the Germans counter-attacked on other sectors, among others north of Soissons, though with small forces, as reserves were needed on the Eastern Front.

16 February – 17 March 1915. After a month of preparation and the bringing up of reinforcements, the Fourth Army resumed its attack on 16 February, on a much narrower sector of roughly eight kilometres between Perthes and Mesnil-lès-Hurlus. According to some studies, de Langle de Cary now had over a dozen infantry divisions and nearly 900 guns at his disposal. On the first day I and XVII Corps broke into the German trenches, but could not get any further. The Germans patched the gaps with reserves, and from 20 February the 1st Guards Division arrived at the front. For the following weeks the French attacked again and again against individual hills, copses and trenches, and the Germans counter-attacked almost immediately. In the last phase, in mid-March, the fresh XVI Corps joined the attack. On 16 and 17 March the French took Hill 196 and the Jaune-Brûlé copse. On 17 March de Langle de Cary concluded that the German front had not been broken and that new troops were needed for further attacks, and halted the offensive.

Losses

Casualty figures vary from source to source. Most often it is stated that the Fourth Army lost 93,432 killed, wounded and missing in the course of the whole battle. German losses are usually estimated at about 46,000 men. The German official history of the war put French losses much higher, at as many as 240,000 in February alone, but these figures are considered inflated. The German Wikipedia gives for the Winter Battle in Champagne, that is for the fighting from mid-February, about 45,000 French killed and wounded and 15,000 Germans.

Significance

The offensive achieved none of its objectives. The French did not break through the front, did not get near Rethel and did not threaten the German railways. Their gains were limited to a strip of land 2–3 kilometres deep, a few hills and the ruins of Perthes-lès-Hurlus. Nor did they manage to stop the Germans from transferring troops to the east.

After the battle de Langle de Cary defended his method of successive, limited attacks on important points of the terrain, which in his view achieved more than attempts to break the front with a single blow. Joffre saw the causes of the failure in too little artillery support and too few infantry. The attacks were made on sectors a few hundred metres wide, so the attacking units drew upon themselves the fire of all the German artillery in the vicinity. Joffre admitted to President Raymond Poincaré that a return to a war of manoeuvre was still a long way off. At the same time the French command became confirmed in its conviction that infantry well supported by artillery could break through the German lines. The further offensives of 1915, in Artois and again in Champagne, rested on this belief.

The fighting of the winter of 1914–1915 left a lasting mark on Champagne. The villages on this sector of the front, among them Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Mesnil-lès-Hurlus, Hurlus and Tahure, were completely destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. After the war their land became part of the Suippes military training ground, and their names survived in the names of neighbouring communes, such as Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus and Minaucourt-le-Mesnil-lès-Hurlus.