British retake Bailleul

On the morning of 30 August 1918 British patrols of General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army found that the Germans had abandoned Bailleul, a town in French Flanders close to the Belgian border. The British entered it without a fight. For three and a half years it had been one of the largest British centres behind the Ypres front, until the British abandoned it on the night of 15–16 April, after the lost Battle of Bailleul. After four and a half months it came back into their hands as a heap of rubble.

Retreat from the Lys

The Germans had been preparing to give up the Lys salient since the end of July. They took the first steps on its southern flank as early as the beginning of August, and after losing Outtersteene Ridge on 18 August they gave up Merville and fell back several kilometres before the British Fifth Army. In the north, however, at Bailleul and Mount Kemmel, they held on firmly. British local attacks there met strong resistance, and on 24 August the Germans themselves counter-attacked near Dranoutre. Behind their line, though, the British could see fires, explosions and new belts of barbed wire, a sign that the Germans did not intend to stay there long.

Events on the Somme decided the matter. Under pressure from the British armies, which in the second half of August had gone over to the attack between the Somme and the Scarpe, the German Supreme Army Command on 26 August ordered a retreat to the line of the Somme. On 29 August the Germans again began to fall back before the Fifth Army, and on the night of 29–30 August, as Field Marshal Douglas Haig wrote, they began a wide withdrawal along the whole Lys front, pushed both by the constant pressure of the British on the spot and by urgent needs on other sectors.

A town in ruins

Bailleul no longer resembled the town the British had known since October 1914. For years it had housed headquarters, field hospitals and the billets of thousands of soldiers, but it had already suffered from bombing and shelling in July 1917, and in April 1918 it had been reduced to rubble by artillery fire. The town hall on the market square was destroyed on 13 April, as the Germans approached the town. According to a caption to a photograph in the British war collections, patrols of the 36th (Ulster) Division were already in the main building of the large lunatic asylum on the edge of the town by 2 p.m.

By the evening of 30 August British advanced troops had reached a line from Lacouture through Lestrem to Noote Boom, east of Bailleul. German rearguards continued to fall back, resisting stubbornly only at certain points. The next day the Germans abandoned Mount Kemmel, and on 1 September the British entered Steenwerck and Neuve-Église (PL).

The British official history notes that the retreat from the Lys salient was largely a result of the victories on the Somme: the Germans needed there the divisions that had hitherto held the now useless salient in Flanders. The number of their divisions in the front line from the La Bassée Canal to Ypres fell from 16 at the beginning of August to 9, and the rest were moved south against the British attacking between the Somme and the Scarpe. Ruined Bailleul was rebuilt after the war, and the new town hall, built on the site of the old one, was completed in 1932.