End of the First Battle of Champagne

On 17 March 1915 the French Fourth Army halted its offensive in Champagne. The commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, instructed the army’s commander, General Fernand de Langle de Cary, to end the attack and consolidate the positions won. So ended the First Battle of Champagne, which had begun on 20 December 1914. For nearly three months, in rain, frost and mud, the French had stormed the German trenches east of Reims, but they had not broken through the front.

The last attack

From mid-February the Fourth Army had been attacking on a narrow sector between Perthes-lès-Hurlus and Mesnil-lès-Hurlus, taking individual hills, copses and lines of trenches. At the beginning of March de Langle de Cary concluded that the Germans were now defending only hastily prepared positions, and asked for permission for one more blow, in his view a decisive one. On 8 March Joffre agreed, but with a proviso: if after three or four days of effort the gains remained merely local, most of the corps would have to be placed at his disposal.

The attack began on 12 March. The fresh XVI Corps of General Grossetti, reinforced by the 48th Division, struck, while the neighbouring corps supported it on the flanks. On the first day the infantry took only bits of trench north of Hill 196 and on the edge of the Bois Jaune-Brûlé, and on the following days it attacked again and again under machine-gun and heavy artillery fire. On 16 March soldiers of the 48th Division, among them Moroccan riflemen, captured the German positions on Hill 196, the ridge east of it and the northern edge of the Bois Jaune-Brûlé. The Germans counter-attacked at once. On 17 March their counter-attack broke down with heavy losses, but arriving reinforcements managed to patch up the line.

The decision to stop

General Grossetti reported that the enemy was not exhausted, that fresh troops were needed for further attacks and that a decision could not be expected soon. Joffre shared this assessment and on 17 March ordered the offensive to be broken off. Some works present this as the decision of de Langle de Cary himself, who halted the attack in line with the condition set on 8 March. The Fourth Army began to consolidate its new positions and to send to the rear troops that the high command needed elsewhere. The next day Joffre sent the army and its commander his thanks and congratulations.

The balance sheet

The gains of three months of fighting were modest. The French had advanced at best 2–3 kilometres on a sector roughly eight kilometres wide, taken the ruins of Perthes-lès-Hurlus and a few hills, but had not even come close to Rethel and the railways supplying the German armies. The figure most often given is that the Fourth Army lost 93,432 killed, wounded and missing, and the Germans about 46,000. The German official history estimated French losses much higher, but these figures are considered exaggerated.

The French command presented the battle as an unbroken chain of local successes that had forced the Germans to bring several corps to Champagne. Joffre and his staff drew from it the conclusion that the front could be broken if the attack was supported by more artillery and more infantry on a wider sector. The British had drawn a similar lesson only a few days earlier at Neuve-Chapelle. The further offensives of 1915 were based on this belief: in Artois in the spring, and in Champagne again in the autumn.