Capture of Outtersteene Ridge

On 18 August 1918, a Sunday, on a hot morning, the Scottish 9th Division of the British Second Army attacked in French Flanders a low ridge by the hamlet of Outtersteene, between Meteren and Bailleul. The attack began at 11 a.m., at an hour when nobody expected it, and lasted little more than an hour. Under cover of smoke the Scots took the crest of the ridge with the Hoegenacker mill, and the 29th Division took the village of Outtersteene. Almost 700 Germans were taken prisoner. It was the first British attack since April in the salient that the Germans had driven into the front during the Battle of the Lys, and the beginning of its clearing.

The last rise

Since April the front in this part of Flanders had run at the foot of the hills that the British and French had held with difficulty during the German offensive. The Germans sat lower down, on the marshy plain of the Lys, under constant fire from above. Outtersteene Ridge, stretching between Meteren and Bailleul, rose barely a dozen or so metres above that plain, but in flat country that was enough. The British official history calls it the last piece of higher ground the Germans still held here. From the ridge they looked down on the positions of General Beauvoir De Lisle’s XV Corps, which since 11 August had been advancing step by step near Vieux-Berquin and Meteren.

The Germans were no longer planning an offensive in Flanders. Operation “Hagen”, prepared since May to smash the British in the north, had been abandoned after the Allied counter-offensive on the Marne in July, and after the defeat at Amiens on 8 August the German command needed every division on the Somme. Since the end of July the Germans had been removing stores from the Lys salient, and on its southern flank they were already falling back. In the north, however, near Bailleul and Kemmel, they still held the front firmly. The 9th Division was given the task of forcing them to retreat.

The Scots and the smoke

The choice was not accidental. The 9th (Scottish) Division, one of the first divisions of Kitchener’s volunteer army, had fought at Loos, on the Somme, at Arras and Ypres, in March 1918 had fallen back before the German offensive on the Somme, and in April had defended itself on the Lys and at Kemmel. Its commander, General Hugh Tudor, was a gunner and one of the first British generals to use smoke shells to lay screens. He was also an advocate of artillery fire without prior registration, tried out on a large scale at Cambrai in November 1917. On 19 July 1918 the division had retaken Meteren in an attack prepared with great care, and now it was to repeat that success a few kilometres further on.

The preparations took a week. Brigadier-General William Croft’s assaulting 27th Brigade rehearsed the attack in the rear, and the gunners worked out a barrage whose first salvo was to be entirely smoke. Two days before the attack a German order with lessons from the fighting at Meteren fell into British hands. The Germans attributed their defeat to the smoke screen and ordered that at the sight of one the British front line should immediately be swamped with fire. Tudor therefore changed the plan: the infantry was to leave the trenches not ahead of the fire but after counting to ten from the first salvo, before the Germans could react.

A pack of hounds

During the night of 17/18 August three battalions, the 6th Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the 11th Battalion Royal Scots and two companies of the 9th Battalion Scottish Rifles from the South African Brigade, occupied the jumping-off trenches north of the bend in the Meteren Becque stream. Before dawn the trenches were covered with coconut-fibre mats painted with a black stripe, which to German airmen was meant to look like a shadow. The soldiers waited under them all morning. The Germans noticed nothing. A Sunday morning on a sector that had been quiet for weeks promised to be an ordinary one, and patrols sent out during the night had detected nothing suspicious.

At 11 a.m. the smoke salvo crashed down, followed by a barrage in which every fourth shell was smoke, and oblique fire from the guns of the 29th Division. On the left the artillery of the 36th Division laid a smoke screen that hid the battlefield from the German observers in Bailleul, and the heavy guns of XV Corps pounded farms, crossroads and battery positions. The Scots left their trenches. An eyewitness wrote that they “went like a pack of hounds and were difficult to hold, which, it must be admitted, is a good fault”. The Scottish Borderers on the right flank, by the stream, met strong resistance, but the Royal Scots and Scottish Rifles advanced very quickly and met hardly any. The Germans of the 4th and 12th Divisions were completely surprised.

The brigade took Belle Croix Farm and the Hoegenacker mill and then, as planned, moved further south as far as the buildings known as Terrapin House. Shortly after noon blue smoke from rifle grenades, the signal that the objective had been taken, rose over the ridge, and red flares were lit for the RAF aircraft circling over the battlefield. Two companies of the 1st Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers of the 29th Division, advancing along the stream, wheeled their flank back to the Meteren Becque and closed off the captured ground from the west.

The village of Outtersteene

Then the 29th Division moved off, the same division which in April, together with the 31st Division, had stopped the Germans before Hazebrouck. Patrols of its 87th Brigade moved across the stream, and a company of the 1st Battalion Border Regiment passed through the village of Outtersteene and dug in south of it. By about 1.30 p.m. the brigade was already consolidating a new line from the level crossing on the Hazebrouck–Armentières railway in front of the village to Terrapin House. Only the right flank ran into machine guns. Two companies of the 2nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers attacked at 12.50 p.m. Lyndé Farm and a position known as “The Trucks”, railway wagons on a siding filled with road metal, which the Germans had turned into machine-gun nests. Their only support came from trench mortars, because all the divisional artillery was working for the 87th Brigade, and the attack stalled. The brigade commander called it off, not wishing to lose men in vain.

In the afternoon the Germans tried to retake the ridge. At 5 p.m. three reserve battalions launched a counter-attack, which collapsed so quickly that the British war diaries did not record it at all. German regimental histories remembered it differently: only 29 men came back from one battalion of the 49th Infantry Regiment, and the 62nd Regiment lost two entire companies. In the evening the British counted 697 prisoners. Their own losses amounted to 671 killed, wounded and missing.

The first step

The next day the 31st and 29th Divisions finished the job and took Lyndé Farm and “The Trucks”. Field Marshal Douglas Haig wrote in his dispatch that the capture of the village and ridge of Outtersteene, with about 900 prisoners, had hastened the German movements on the Lys. Indeed, the British official history judges that the success threatened to outflank the German salient at Merville, and the Germans quickly began to withdraw from there.

18 August 1918 was the day on which the Allied offensive began to spread along the whole front. The Battle of Amiens had died down a week earlier, and at the same time as the Scots in Flanders, General Charles Mangin’s French Tenth Army was attacking German positions between the Oise and the Aisne. The action at Outtersteene was small by comparison, but it opened the “Advance in Flanders”, as the British committee named the pursuit of the Germans retreating from the Lys. In less than three weeks the salient, won by Ludendorff in April at the cost of tens of thousands of men, had vanished from the map.