End of the battle of the Beaurevoir Line

On 5 October 1918 at 6.05 a.m. the Australian 6th Brigade attacked the village of Montbrehain on the high ground behind the Beaurevoir Line. The British 46th Division had taken it as early as 3 October, but in the afternoon the Germans retook it, and on 4 October new attacks at Montbrehain and Beaurevoir failed. The 2nd Australian Division was the only division of the Australian Corps still left in the line. Prime Minister Billy Hughes was demanding that the whole corps be withdrawn to rest, but General Rawlinson could not relieve it before nightfall and asked General John Monash to try to push the front forward for this one last day. Monash chose Montbrehain, which lay on a plateau commanding the road further east.

The attack was made by the 21st and 24th Battalions and the 2nd Pioneer Battalion, used as infantry, which was to outflank the village from the south. The Mark V tanks were late after a night march under fire, but eleven of them caught up with the infantry and, as the British official history puts it, did much good work in the streets of the village. The Germans defended themselves stubbornly. As many as ten different regiments, that is parts of at least four divisions, were identified from prisoners, and flanking fire came from the Mannequin and Doon hills, which the British IX Corps had again failed to take. The hardest fighting was for a quarry on the north-western edge of the village, where about a hundred Germans had about forty machine guns. When the company commander fell badly wounded, Lieutenant George Ingram of the 24th Battalion rallied the men and himself leapt into the quarry. In the course of the day his men took several strongpoints and captured 62 prisoners. Ingram received the Victoria Cross for this, the last awarded to an Australian on the Western Front. In the afternoon the reserve battalions joined the fight, and by 4 p.m. the whole of Montbrehain was in Australian hands. According to the British official history they took more than 600 prisoners and 150 machine guns; according to the Australian one, written by Charles Bean, nearly 400 prisoners.

Two and a half kilometres further north the British 25th Division assaulted Beaurevoir all day. In the morning its brigades took Bellevue Farm, but when the mist lifted they had to give it up, and the bombardment did not silence the machine guns in the houses and the cemetery of the village. Five tanks drove into Beaurevoir from the south, but the infantry could not follow them. Only in the evening, after a new bombardment, did the 1/5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment climb the railway embankment before the barrage had even lifted, clear the positions behind it and enter the village, followed by companies of the Worcestershire Regiment. Guisancourt Farm, north of Beaurevoir, was taken before dawn on 6 October. That day the Germans also abandoned the St Quentin Canal and the Hindenburg Line in front of the right wing of the British Third Army, which crossed the canal without a fight. The last position of the Hindenburg system on this sector was lost.

The British official history judges that 5 October, with which it closes the battle of the Beaurevoir Line, was “a very successful day” for the Fourth Army. Since 29 September the Fourth Army had taken 14,664 prisoners. According to Bean, the fight for Montbrehain cost the Australians about 30 officers and 400 men, among them many of the best leaders of the 6th Brigade. During the night two battalions of the American 118th Infantry from the 30th Division came to take over the captured village. As an Australian officer was showing a map to their advance party by the railway embankment, a single German shell killed him and most of those he was talking to. On the night of 5/6 October the American II Corps relieved the 2nd Australian Division.

Montbrehain was the Australian infantry’s last battle of the war. The Australian Corps went to rest near Abbeville and did not return to the front before the armistice. Edmonds calculated that since 8 August the Australians had taken more than 22,800 prisoners and 332 guns, losing more than 25,500 men in the process, and he regarded Mont Saint-Quentin and Montbrehain as the best examples of their methods. Bean called the capture of Montbrehain one of the most brilliant feats of the Australian infantry, but doubted whether it had been wise: the attack produced a salient a kilometre and a half deep in the front line but not a single captured battery, and in his view it had been devised rather in order to use these soldiers once more before their withdrawal.