End of the Battle of the Canal du Nord

At five in the morning on 1 October 1918 all four divisions of General Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps attacked once more north and north-east of Cambrai. Since crossing the Canal du Nord on 27 September the Canadians had been fighting without a break and had reached the very outskirts of the city, but they still did not hold the crossings of the Scheldt canal north-east of it, which would open the way to encircling Cambrai. That day a joint attack by the whole corps was to change this. Rain fell during the night, and runners carrying barrage maps were delayed on the slippery roads, but the bombardment nevertheless began on time. According to the Canadian official history (G. W. L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919), the artillery supporting the corps fired 7,000 tons of ammunition that day.

The start was promising. On the left flank the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Canadian Division passed through Sancourt and took Blécourt, and its battalions occupied Cuvillers and Bantigny. The neighbouring 1st Brigade, however, could not keep pace with them, because the British 11th Division attacking beside it was stopped right at the start by uncut wire. The Canadian battalions lay under fire all day by the railway line in front of Abancourt. There Sergeant William Merrifield of the 4th Battalion single-handedly destroyed two German machine-gun posts and was awarded the Victoria Cross for it. Fire from the exposed left flank grew heavier, the Germans counter-attacked three times at Bantigny, and the Canadians had to give up all the villages they had taken. At dusk the 3rd Brigade fell back west of Blécourt, having lost 29 officers and 618 other ranks. Nicholson writes that the 1st Canadian Division suffered that day the heaviest reverse of any division fighting under Currie’s command and lost more than a thousand men in all.

In the centre the 4th Canadian Division reached the road from Ramillies to Cuvillers and sent patrols towards the crossings at Eswars. Prisoners from many different regiments showed that the Germans had thrown in strong reserves here. When the 1st Division began to fall back, the attack on Eswars was called off. On the right flank the 3rd Canadian Division took the high ground east of Tilloy at little cost, capturing about 350 prisoners, but when its battalions turned downhill towards the crossings at Ramillies, they were stopped by machine-gun fire from the woods on the far side of the canal. Late in the afternoon the Germans counter-attacked and drove back the forward posts, but the main line held. At the very edge of the sector the Canadians held the canal bank as far as the northern outskirts of Neuville-Saint-Rémy.

The Canadians gained about one and a half kilometres that day. Their most important prize was the high ground near Tilloy, from which Cambrai and the Scheldt valley could be seen. In the afternoon the commander of the British First Army, General Henry Horne, judged that pressing the attack against such strong resistance with tired troops would lead to disaster, and ordered Currie to “hold and consolidate the positions gained in today’s fighting”. During the night the Canadian 2nd Division relieved the 4th Division and most of the 3rd Division. With this the British Battles Nomenclature Committee ended the Battle of the Canal du Nord. That same day, south of the city, the Third Army widened its bridgehead across the Scheldt canal. The New Zealanders took Crèvecœur and the 3rd Division took Rumilly.

The balance of the five days was nevertheless favourable. The Canadian Corps covered the advance of the Third and Fourth Armies from the north, took more than 7,000 prisoners and 205 guns, and broke the last organised defensive system before Cambrai. It paid dearly for this, however: according to the British official history, between 27 September and 7 October it lost more than 13,600 killed, wounded and missing. The following days on this sector were spent relieving the exhausted divisions. Field Marshal Douglas Haig was impatient that day for another reason: the attacks in Flanders and between the Meuse and the Argonne had stalled for lack of supplies. “How many valuable days are being lost!” he wrote in his diary on 1 October, blaming the inexperience of the Belgian and American staffs. The capture of Cambrai, which the British had tried in vain to reach in November 1917, was still more than a week away.