End of the Battle of the Selle

On 25 October 1918, according to the British Battles Nomenclature Committee, the Battle of the Selle, which had begun on 17 October, came to an end. The British official history (James Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918, vol. V) closes it a day earlier, on 24 October, and treats 25 October as the first day of a pause before the next great attack. That day there was no more heavy fighting on the front of the three British armies, the Fourth, Third and First. Patrols of IX Corps were entering Catillon and Ors on the Sambre–Oise Canal, and north of the Forest of Mormal the Germans were falling back from the line of the Le Quesnoy–Valenciennes railway.

The last phase of the battle was opened on 23 October by a joint attack of the three armies, carried out mostly at night, by moonlight: the Fourth Army set off at 1.20 a.m., and the Third Army at two and at 3.20 a.m. The aim was to reach the second German position, Hermann II, resting on the canal and the Forest of Mormal, and to win positions from which British guns could shell the railway junction at Aulnoye. The ground beyond the Selle, with orchards, thick hedges, streams in deep valleys and woods, favoured the defenders, who held clusters of buildings and machine-gun nests. The German historian Max Schwarte wrote that according to one war diary it was the day of the heaviest fighting since the defeat of 8 August. Even so, on 23 and 24 October the British advanced eight to nine kilometres on some sectors, took the Bois l’Évêque and the villages of Pommereuil and Bousies, and came up to Englefontaine and Le Quesnoy, and in the north to Valenciennes.

On 23 October the German Second Army reported that at the Forest of Mormal it was already on its last prepared position and that its divisions were so weak that the defence of the great forest area gave cause for serious concern. It proposed a general retreat to the Antwerp–Meuse line. On 24 October it was ordered to hold the ground it occupied and, if it had to give way, to fall back only step by step, fighting.

Edmonds summed up the battle briefly: 24 British and 2 American divisions, despite natural obstacles and fortifications, had taken about 20,000 prisoners and 475 guns from the 31 German divisions that stood in their way. The German units could still defend themselves from good cover, but the infantry and machine-gun crews could no longer be relied upon, and at times they fell back without fighting before the approaching barrage. The German army had not, however, disintegrated, and was capable of retreating to a shorter line behind a large water obstacle. Marshal Ferdinand Foch said in those days that the Germans would hold out until the spring. Field Marshal Douglas Haig believed that a little more pressure would be enough for the front to collapse, and decided to keep attacking as soon as he had taken Valenciennes.

The British troops needed rest. Since August they had been fighting almost without a break, bivouacking in the open, and in three months the British and Dominion divisions had lost almost 300,000 men in the infantry and cavalry. Until 31 October there was only local fighting on the Selle front: during the night of 25–26 October the British took Englefontaine, and the armies prepared for the attack on Valenciennes on 1 November and for the battle on the Sambre on 4 November.