End of the Battle of Hazebrouck

On 15 April 1918 there was relative calm on the front before Hazebrouck. For the three previous days the German Sixth Army had been trying to break through across the plain of the Lys to this important railway junction. On 12 April it had made deep breaches in the British lines, but on 13 April its attack was stopped by the 4th Guards Brigade at Vieux-Berquin and the fresh 5th Division in front of Nieppe Forest, and on 14 April it broke against the line of the 1st Australian Division. On 15 April the Germans twice assembled troops for an attack: before dawn opposite the 95th Brigade of the 5th Division and at 7.30 p.m. opposite the 184th Brigade of the 61st Division. Each time fire from artillery, rifles and machine guns and from low-flying aircraft dispersed them before they moved off. The Australians repulsed several minor attacks, and their heavy artillery destroyed a factory building from which the Germans had taken two forward posts the day before. The Germans shelled with gas the battery positions along the road from Saint-Venant to Hazebrouck and the roads through the forest. The British Battles Nomenclature Committee regarded this day as the last day of the Battle of Hazebrouck.

The calm was no accident. On the afternoon of 14 April Sixth Army headquarters reported to Erich Ludendorff that its offensive had evidently died away and that the troops were completely exhausted: the divisions were ordered to attack every day and did not carry out the order. The army’s chief of staff wanted to postpone further attacks until the artillery and mortars could be properly deployed. Ludendorff agreed and decided that the Sixth Army would advance on Meteren and Strazeele only on 17 April, “slowly but surely”, and until then would confine itself to minor actions. The main weight of the fighting passed to the Fourth Army, which on 15 April attacked the heights around Bailleul and took them in the evening. The day before, at a conference at Abbeville, General Ferdinand Foch, who had just become commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, refused to relieve the exhausted British divisions and, to the surprise of those present, declared: “the Battle of Hazebrouck is over”. On 15 April his liaison officer repeated to Haig that Foch maintained this view.

French troops were already standing behind the British front. General Robillot’s II Cavalry Corps, which had covered about 190 kilometres in 60 hours, took up positions in front of Steenvoorde and north of Cassel, and the 133rd Division stood near Caëstre, a few kilometres north-east of Hazebrouck. General Herbert Plumer agreed with Robillot that the French would relieve some of the tired British troops, but Foch forbade such arrangements: the French divisions in the north were to go “into battle”, not to replace the British. Robillot nevertheless took into his 133rd Division, which had no horses for its guns, the artillery of the British 21st Division, which that afternoon supported the defenders of Meteren with its fire.

The balance of three days of fighting was costly for the British, but favourable. On 12 April the Germans had taken a strip of ground in places several kilometres deep and come to within about 8 kilometres of Hazebrouck, but in the following days, although they had numerical superiority and fresh divisions, they gained almost nothing. The price of this defence was paid above all by the already shattered brigades of the 29th, 31st, 50th and 51st Divisions and by the 4th Guards Brigade, of which, according to the British official history, about 250 men remained. The losses of the whole army were enormous. On 15 April the Adjutant-General reported to Haig that since 21 March the infantry had lost 7,408 officers and 188,000 other ranks, and all arms up to 14 April about 210,000 men. Reinforcements sent from home in that time amounted to just under 115,000, and five divisions now existed only as cadres.

Hazebrouck remained in British hands. The 1st Australian Division held the front before Nieppe Forest for the following months, and the Australian official historian Charles Bean stressed that it was here that the Australians really stopped the German advance, as did the 5th Division on their right and the 33rd Division on their left. The Battle of the Lys, however, went on, and its weight shifted north, towards Meteren and the Flanders hills with Mount Kemmel.