The British retake Merville again

On 19 August 1918 British troops again entered Merville, a small town on the river Leie (Lys) in French Flanders. The Germans had taken it on the evening of 11 April, on the third day of the Battle of the Lys, and for more than four months had held it at the very tip of the salient their offensive had driven into the British front. Now they gave it up almost without a fight. It was the first clear sign that the Germans were abandoning the ground won in Flanders in the spring.

Merville was a place the British knew well. In October 1914 British cavalry had retaken it, and for the next three and a half years it lay just behind the front. Until May 1915 it was a railhead for supplies; in the autumn of 1914 and 1915 it housed the headquarters of the Indian Corps; and later it was a centre of billets and hospitals, where British casualty clearing stations operated. In April 1918, as they entered the town, the Germans also shelled the hospital buildings. All summer the German divisions in the salient on the Lys endured incessant fire from British guns and, as Haig wrote, suffered heavy losses not only in the front line but also in the rear.

The withdrawal was hastened by a battle fought the day before about ten kilometres to the north-east. On 18 August the Scottish 9th Division and the 29th Division of the British Second Army took the Outtersteene ridge near Bailleul. According to Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the same day British patrols also advanced considerably opposite Merville, the next day the town itself was occupied, and the front moved forward along the whole sector from the river Lawe to the Plate Becque stream. Merville lay in the sector of XI Corps under General Richard Haking, part of General William Birdwood’s Fifth Army, which then held the 61st and 74th Divisions. The available sources do not say clearly which units were first into the town. The British official history judges that the capture of the Outtersteene ridge threatened to outflank the German salient at Merville, and that this is why on the night of 19–20 August the Germans began a new withdrawal in front of the whole of XI Corps.

The Germans were preparing to leave in any case. After the collapse of the plan for the great “Hagen” offensive in Flanders, undone by the Allied counter-offensive on the Marne in July, the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht received permission to abandon less important salients. From the end of July ammunition and stores were taken out of the salient, and at the beginning of August the Germans fell back on its southern flank near the La Bassée canal. After the defeat at Amiens on 8 August Erich Ludendorff needed every division on the Somme, and the flat salient on the Lys, shelled from the heights around it, was costing him many men and no longer brought any advantage. The British were not always able to exploit this. Staff officers of the Fifth Army complained in mid-August that the troops were slow to follow the retreating enemy and that almost all of them had forgotten how to use a rifle.

By the evening of 23 August the British line ran from Le Touret on the La Bassée canal through Les Lobes, about a kilometre and a half east of Merville, and through Neuf-Berquin to Meteren. The Germans then halted for a few days, but at the end of August, as they fell back to the Somme in the south, they moved on. At the beginning of September the front returned close to the 1915 line near Neuve-Chapelle, and the whole salient won in April was gone. Merville remained in Allied hands until the end of the war.