British retake Maubeuge

The British chronology of the war records under 8 November 1918 the recapture of Maubeuge, an old fortress on the Sambre close to the Belgian border. On 8 November the British Third Army was fighting on the approaches to the town, and according to the British official history it took Maubeuge itself on the night of 8/9 November. Field Marshal Douglas Haig gave the date as 9 November in his final dispatch.

After their defeat on the Sambre on 4 November the Germans were falling back to the Antwerp–Meuse position, and their rearguards delayed the pursuit by blowing up bridges and mining roads. In torrential rain the British divisions advanced more slowly than the command wanted. On 7 November the Guards Division entered Bavay, and on 8 November the Fourth Army took Avesnes. That day only the fortifications of the entrenched camp of Maubeuge still stood in the Third Army’s path. The 42nd Division of IV Corps took the small town of Hautmont on the Sambre in the morning: all the bridges had been blown, but a battalion of the Manchester Regiment crossed by improvised means and drove the German rearguards onto the heights near Fort Hautmont, one of the outer forts of the fortress. Alongside, the 62nd Division of VI Corps took the village of Neuf-Mesnil, but was stopped by fire from Fort Gravaux. Two night attempts to take the fort failed; only the third succeeded, at 4.30 a.m. on 9 November. Guardsmen of the neighbouring 2nd Brigade drove the Germans out of La Longueville, but then they too were stopped by fire from the fort and from the village of Feignies.

In the evening a battalion of the Coldstream Guards brought to headquarters an order captured from a German runner. It showed that the Germans intended to make their next stand only beyond Maubeuge, and that their rearguards were to hold at all costs only until the morning of 9 November. The commander of the Guards Division, General Torquhil Matheson, proposed a night attack on the town, but it turned out that the commander of the 2nd Guards Brigade, General Bertram Sergison-Brooke, had already sent his reserve battalion there, the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, with machine guns on pack mules. The Grenadiers marched in complete darkness along the road from La Longueville and met almost no resistance. At about two in the morning they occupied the citadel of the old fortress and took about fifty prisoners. The rest of the Germans had already gone. By three the town was free, and the inhabitants began to come out of the cellars in which they had been hiding. In the morning the 62nd Division cleared the suburb of Saint-Lazare on the southern bank of the Sambre, and both divisions moved on east, towards Belgium.

For the British, Maubeuge had a special significance. In August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force had passed through it on its way to Mons and withdrawn near the fortress during the retreat. After it left, the Germans surrounded Maubeuge, and on 7 September 1914 the fortress capitulated and its garrison went into captivity. Now the town returned to France after more than four years of occupation, in days when the attention of the world was taken up by the armistice negotiations. On 8 November the German delegation with Matthias Erzberger received the armistice terms from Foch, and three days later the fighting stopped, when British troops already stood some fifteen kilometres east of Maubeuge.