Breaking of the Drocourt–Quéant Line

At five in the morning on 2 September 1918 the Canadian Corps of General Arthur Currie struck east of Arras at the Drocourt–Quéant Line, the strongest German position in the area and the northern extension of the Hindenburg Line. By evening the Canadians had passed through both its lines on a front of about 6.5 kilometres, taken the villages of Dury, Cagnicourt and Villers-lès-Cagnicourt and captured thousands of prisoners, while the British XVII Corps broke into the southern end of the position near Quéant. At about noon the German Supreme Army Command acknowledged defeat and ordered a retreat from the whole salient won in March. Currie wrote in his diary the next day that he was not sure whether 8 August at Amiens or this day had been the greater victory, but he inclined towards the latter.

The night before the assault

The Canadians had been advancing on this line for a week. On 26 August they attacked on the Scarpe, retook Monchy-le-Preux and broke the Fresnes–Rouvroy Line, but lost more than 5,500 men in three days. On 30 August General Henry Horne, commander of the First Army, and Currie decided that the Drocourt–Quéant Line should be attacked only when everything was ready, “and then go all out”. The First Army issued the final order on the evening of 31 August: the corps was to break the line and then quickly seize the crossings of the Canal du Nord between Sains-lès-Marquion and Palluel. It was given a tank brigade, an armoured car battalion and a cavalry regiment in support.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig had a disquieting telegram in his pocket. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Henry Wilson, had warned him that the War Cabinet would become anxious if the army suffered heavy losses in an unsuccessful attack on the Hindenburg Line. Haig showed it to no one and did not change his plans.

Fighting for the jumping-off positions went on until the last moment. On the morning of 1 September the 5th Battalion took Crow’s Nest hill, from which a large part of the German trenches could be seen, and beat off three counter-attacks. In the afternoon and evening the Germans, sensing an attack, struck at the junction of the 1st and 4th Canadian Divisions by the Cambrai road, trying to push their forward zone as far as possible from the main line. The battalions of the 12th Brigade had to fight simply to hold on to their start lines. The 10th Brigade, which at the last moment had taken over half the sector of the British 4th Division, marched about 16 kilometres during the night and relieved the British in the dark. Battalion commanders finished their orders after midnight, and by the time everyone was in place dawn was near. Aircraft circled over the front to drown the noise of the assembling tanks, and RAF night bombers bombed the villages in the rear.

The assault

The night was dark but dry. At 5 a.m., together with the dawn, the barrage of twenty field artillery brigades opened. On the right flank the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Canadian Division advanced uphill towards the wire with eight tanks. The German artillery replied weakly. The entanglements, though dense, had mostly been torn by shells or flattened by tanks, and where they had not, they were cut by hand under cover of smoke laid by the tanks. After brief resistance the Germans began to surrender in whole groups. By 7.30 a.m. the 13th Battalion had taken its section of the support line, and the 14th Battalion passed through it and took Cagnicourt, where so many Germans were sheltering in the cellars that they would have made up a full battalion. At about 11.15 a.m. it was already in the Buissy Switch, a switch position behind the Drocourt–Quéant Line.

On the extreme right things were worse. The British 57th Division was to pass only through the gap made by the Canadians, so the flank of the 16th Battalion was exposed and machine guns fired into it from the ridge on the right. Lieutenant-Colonel Cyrus Peck went forward alone under fire to assess the situation, had every available machine gun brought forward, turned back the tanks, which had busied themselves with mopping up trenches, and after nearly an hour of fighting led the battalion on. Lance Corporal William Metcalf, an American in Canadian uniform, walked ahead of a tank under fire and guided it onto the German machine-gun nests. Both received the Victoria Cross, which rarely happened in one battalion on one day.

To the left the 2nd Brigade, with tanks, passed without great difficulty through both lines and the northern end of the Buissy Switch. At eight o’clock the 10th Battalion took the lead. It was by now beyond the range of the barrage, and by 8.45 a.m. the Germans had knocked out five tanks. The Canadians pushed on with the help of a forward field battery and captured German guns and machine guns, outflanking pockets of resistance. Sergeant Arthur Knight three times rushed groups of Germans on his own near Villers-lès-Cagnicourt; he was killed and received the Victoria Cross posthumously. The long village, stretched across the valley, defended itself stubbornly. Between 4 and 5 p.m. it was in Canadian hands, but the switch south of it, defended by regiments of the 1st Guards Reserve Division, was taken only at 11 p.m., after hand-to-hand fighting.

The 4th Canadian Division attacked on both sides of the Arras–Cambrai road. Its tanks were late and the battalions of the 12th Brigade had to deal with the outposts on their own, but they took the trenches of both lines as planned. The worst lay behind them. When the 72nd and 38th Battalions came out onto the bare crest of Mont Dury, they were hit by fire from machine guns sited in depth, beyond the range of the barrage, in a sunken road linking Dury with the Cambrai road. Despite losses the Canadians took that road before noon. The 10th Brigade, after its night march, took from the flank a strongpoint on the southern edge of Dury, with about 120 prisoners, and had secured the village by 7.30 a.m. The second phase of the attack, begun after eight o’clock, stalled. Without a barrage and without tanks the 78th Battalion halted two hundred metres beyond the sunken road, and German guns fired over open sights from the ridge between Buissy and Saudemont. General Raymond Brutinel’s motorised force tried to break through along the road to the canal but had to stop. Nicholson writes that premature reports of its progress meant that the artillery did not resume fire on the strip along the road, and the Canadians coming down the slopes below Dury paid for it.

On the left flank the British 4th Division, attacking with only one brigade, took its part of both lines with light losses. The tanks, however, mistook their objective and instead of the village of Étaing attacked a wood on the ridge south of it. Fire from Étaing and from nearby Prospect Farm lashed the British flank all day and stopped their second wave.

To the right of the Canadians

The XVII Corps of General Charles Fergusson of the Third Army had no tanks and waited for the outcome of the Canadian assault. Its artillery first screened their flank with smoke and shrapnel, and at about 6.30 a.m. shifted its fire south. Then the battalions of the 57th Division, which were following the Canadian right flank, turned down the forked trenches of the front line and took both their branches. At 8.45 a.m. the Scottish 52nd Division set off and, along the Hindenburg front line, reached the edge of Quéant by 3 p.m. The brigades of the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, made up of sailors fighting on land, advanced to the south-east without artillery support, as in mobile warfare. In the evening the Drake Battalion passed through the support line of the Hindenburg Line and found itself in the rear of German-held Pronville, while a night attack by the Hood and Hawke Battalions on Inchy collapsed under machine-gun fire. Further south VI Corps advanced only about a kilometre near Noreuil and Lagnicourt. The commander of a light tank battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard West, who had ridden forward on horseback to reconnoitre, took command of the infantry there when most of its officers had fallen, and rode up and down the line encouraging the men until he was killed. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.

The order to retreat

The breaking of the Drocourt–Quéant Line coincided with successes further south. The day before, the Australians had taken Mont Saint-Quentin and Péronne, and on 2 September they were clearing the outskirts of the town and pressing further east, although the British 74th Division, newly arrived from Palestine and thrown against the German Alpenkorps, was repulsed near Moislains. Divisions of the Third Army took Le Transloy and Villers-au-Flos and surrounded Beugny.

At about noon, or according to another account just after 2 p.m., the German Supreme Army Command issued orders to retreat. The Seventeenth Army of General Otto von Below was to fall back behind the Sensée and the Canal du Nord that very night, the Second Army the following night to the Hindenburg Line, and the Eighteenth and Ninth Armies in turn after them, so as to give up the whole salient won in March by 9 September. At the same time the evacuation of the Lys salient in Flanders was being completed. The British official history says briefly that the German command “acknowledged defeat”. According to regimental histories, the orders reached the battalions of the Seventeenth Army only at about midnight.

The same day the Crown Prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, commander of the army group to which the Seventeenth Army belonged, returning from sick leave, noted in his diary that in Nuremberg he had seen written on a wagon of a troop train: “Slaughter cattle for Wilhelm and sons”. He added that the mood was very bad not only in Bavaria but in northern Germany too.

The day’s balance

By evening the Drocourt–Quéant Line had been broken wherever it had been attacked. The Canadians had not reached the high ground above the Canal du Nord, and Étaing on the Sensée remained in German hands, but Currie knew he had won a great victory. His divisions paid a high price for it: from 1 to 3 September the corps lost more than 5,600 men, and in the same days took about 6,000 prisoners. Seven Canadians received the Victoria Cross for 2 September: besides Peck, Metcalf and Knight, Privates Walter Rayfield, Claude Nunney and John Young and the medical officer Captain Bellenden Hutcheson, who dressed the wounded in the open under fire. Nunney died of his wounds some two weeks later.

In the evening Currie ordered the advance to continue towards the canal the next day, but his divisional commanders reported heavy losses and the difficulty of attacking without preparation, and with Horne’s consent he cancelled the general attack. It proved unnecessary. During the night the Germans broke contact with the Canadians, and in the morning airmen saw no one between the ridge near Dury and the Canal du Nord. The British official history judges that 2 September showed that British troops now had the upper hand over the Germans in open fighting, even when outnumbered, and that fortifications and machine-gun nests, though they cost time and men, could be overcome.