End of the First Battle of Picardy

On 26 September 1914 the First Battle of Picardy came to an end, the first large engagement of the so-called Race to the Sea. After five days of fighting between the Oise and the Somme, neither side had managed to turn the enemy’s flank. The exhausted French and German troops began to dig in.

An attack that stalled

The French 2nd Army of General Noël de Castelnau went over to the attack on 22 September in order to get into the rear of the Germans fighting on the Aisne. After only two days the situation was reversed. Further German corps were reaching the battlefield, brought over from the Aisne front and from around Reims. The XVIII Corps, which had made a forced march of several dozen kilometres, counter-attacked together with the II Corps towards Roye. Further north fresh German forces took Péronne from the French and pushed their units back behind the Somme.

On 25 and 26 September fighting still went on along the whole front, from Lassigny to the Somme. The French repelled German attacks but no longer had the strength to attack themselves. Castelnau extended his line north, where fighting at Albert had been under way since 25 September, and further German corps took up position opposite him. By the evening of 26 September the attacks of both sides had died down.

A new sector of the front

After the battle the front settled on a line running roughly from Ribécourt on the Oise through the area of Lassigny and Roye northwards, towards the Somme. Local clashes continued here at the turn of September and October, but the line now changed little. The soldiers dug ever deeper trenches, and the villages around Roye and Lassigny lay in ruins. The losses in this battle cannot be established exactly, because the fighting flowed seamlessly into further engagements, but both sides lost thousands of men.

The weight of the fighting shifted north. The French commander-in-chief, Joseph Joffre, and the chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, still believed they could outflank the enemy and sent further corps further north, to the area of Arras and then to Flanders. The pattern revealed in Picardy, however, repeated itself in every subsequent battle of the Race to the Sea. The line that set at Roye and Lassigny in September 1914 survived almost unchanged until the spring of 1917, when the Germans withdrew to the Siegfried Line (known to the Allies as the Hindenburg Line).