Fighting at Béthune

On 18 April 1918, on the tenth day of the German offensive on the Lys, German troops tried for the last time to break the southern wing of the British First Army in Flanders. Their objectives were the ruined villages of Givenchy and Festubert and the line of the La Bassée canal, and beyond them the town of Béthune. After a night gas bombardment six divisions of the German 6th Army went in to the assault in the morning mist. By evening it was clear that the attack had failed. The British official history says briefly that 18 April was “another day of successful defence”, and that the German plans to take Givenchy, Festubert and Béthune had been “completely frustrated”.

Before dawn

Since 9 April, when the Germans broke the Portuguese and burst into the front between Armentières and Givenchy, Béthune had lain just behind the front line. On 12 April, when the German vanguards reached the Bois de Pacaut on the canal, a few kilometres from the town, the authorities ordered the inhabitants to be evacuated. The fighting then moved north, to Hazebrouck and Bailleul, and on the southern wing there was relative quiet for four days. The British knew, however, that it was the calm before the storm. Observers saw German preparations, and on the evening of 17 April First Army intelligence, relying on prisoners’ statements, warned the corps commanders that an attack between the La Bassée canal and the Forest of Nieppe would come the next morning.

The Givenchy–Festubert sector, stubbornly defended since 9 April by the 55th (West Lancashire) Division, had just been taken over by the 1st Division. Some of its battalions and machine guns had taken up their positions only at 10 p.m. the previous evening. The divisional commander, General Peter Strickland, was returning to familiar ground: in December 1914 his battalion of the Manchester Regiment had fought here for Givenchy. On the canal stood the 3rd Division and the 4th Division, brought here in haste from Arras six days earlier.

The bombardment

At one in the morning the German artillery opened fire on the sector from Givenchy to Robecq. The bombardment resembled that of 21 March: gas shells fell on the battery positions, high-explosive shells on the roads, crossroads and Béthune itself. The British batteries suffered heavy losses: one field artillery brigade lost 11 of its 24 guns. In front of the 3rd and 4th Divisions the fire lasted about four hours, in front of the 1st Division seven. In time it also covered the front-line trenches and smashed the brick stacks of the old brickworks, which had until then given the defenders good cover. The weather was dismal: cold, mist, thick especially over the canals, and passing showers. The airmen of both sides could do little.

Givenchy and Festubert

At 8.10 a.m., when the mist had thinned enough to see about 150–200 metres, the German infantry of three divisions advanced behind a creeping barrage on Givenchy and Festubert. It kept close behind the bursts and reached the trenches of the 1st Battalion of the Black Watch on the salient around Givenchy before the defenders could leave their dugouts. Two companies of the Scots were overwhelmed. The rest of the battalion and the garrisons of the concrete redoubts in the ruins of the village held out. In the Givenchy Keep redoubt, where nine were left of some forty defenders, command was taken by an officer of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment who had come through an underground tunnel from a neighbouring redoubt. The waves of attackers, as Edmonds writes, broke on these points one after another, while machine guns on the far bank of the canal mowed them down from the flank. By 11 the attack on Givenchy had come to a halt, and the ground in front was strewn with dead Germans, rifles and equipment. The Germans kept part of the ruins of the village and a few craters north of it.

At Festubert it was harder. The Germans took the Route A Keep redoubt and through gaps in the line got into the rear of the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. This was the regiment whose soldiers wear a badge on the back of their caps as well, in memory of the battle of Alexandria in 1801, when the rear rank turned about and repulsed an attack from behind. The official history could not fail to notice it: the Gloucesters, “again, as in Egypt in 1801”, had to fight front and rear at the same time. The battalion’s last reserve, twenty signallers, cooks, runners and orderlies, fought its way through the gardens on the edge of the village and drove the Germans out. At the southern end of Festubert, in the buildings of Le Plantin, the situation long remained uncertain, because runners could not get through the bombardment. Only a company of the Cameron Highlanders and part of the 2nd Battalion of the Welch Regiment cleared the southern part of the village. Around noon surviving Germans from the first waves tried to crawl back, and many of them were killed. By 5 p.m. the fighting had died down. Route A Keep remained in German hands.

On the canal

North of Givenchy, on the La Bassée canal (PL), the Germans attacked while it was still dark. Just after four they overran two posts of the Seaforth Highlanders near the Bois de Pacaut, and then tried to throw pontoons and light footbridges across the canal. Riflemen on the southern bank shot down their crews, and before 6.30 the attack had collapsed completely. 115 Germans who had taken cover under the embankment on the northern bank surrendered. Some swam across the canal, others were ferried over in boats. Nearby, men of a King’s Own battalion were pushed back into the hamlet of Riez du Vinage, but in the evening a hundred men with two officers retook part of it, with 19 prisoners and a machine gun. German orders captured that day showed that the objective of the attack on the northern bank was Hinges and the hill of Mont Bernenchon, from which Béthune can be seen. Further north, in front of the 61st Division, the Germans tried to cross the little river Clarence near the Baquerolles farm, but were also repulsed.

Evening

By evening the front along the whole sector from Givenchy to the Forest of Nieppe had returned roughly to its morning line. Even the Germans’ own reports gave them no comfort. The history of one of the regiments attacking at Givenchy complained that the heavy guns had fired short, into their own infantry, and that surviving machine-gun nests had stopped the attack. In German documents 18 April was recorded as “another painful failure on the left wing” of the 6th Army: the attackers had “almost taken both villages”, but had had to withdraw under counter-attacks and the fire of the uncaptured concrete nests.

For the British, after the defeats of 21 March and 9 April, it was a rare day on which the defence held almost everywhere. Béthune, an important railway junction, and the coal mines south-west of it, on which the French armaments industry depended, remained in Allied hands. As early as 20 April Rupprecht of Bavaria ordered the 6th Army to go over to the defensive, and the German command concentrated its remaining strength on Mount Kemmel far to the north. The town was still to suffer, however: in May the German artillery reduced its historic centre to rubble.