First Battle of Champagne begins

On 20 December 1914 the French Fourth Army of General Fernand de Langle de Cary began an attack on the German positions in Champagne, east of Reims. The British chronology of the war records under this date the start of the First Battle of Champagne. It was the first great Allied offensive against the fortified lines of trenches which since the autumn had cut across France from the sea to Switzerland. The first day brought the French only small gains, and the fighting then dragged on, with breaks, until mid-March 1915.

Joffre’s plan

The commander-in-chief of the French army, General Joseph Joffre, did not intend to wait until spring to attack. In mid-November his staff judged that the Germans had ended their offensive in the west and were moving several corps to the east, where heavy fighting was going on in Poland. The French wanted to exploit this and at the same time prevent the Germans from weakening the French front further at the Russians’ expense.

The plan called for an attack from two sides on the great salient of the front that reached deep into France around Noyon. From the north, in Artois, the Tenth Army was to attack, and from the south, in Champagne, the Fourth Army, towards Rethel and on to Mézières. If they managed to reach these towns, the railways supplying the German armies in France would be threatened. Subsidiary attacks were to go in on other sectors of the front. In Flanders an attack had already been made on 14 December at Wytschaete, and in Artois fighting had flared up on 17 December. Joffre knew that he was short of heavy guns and ammunition, but decided that he could not remain idle.

The first day of the attack

The ground of the attack lay on the chalky, sparsely wooded plains around the villages of Souain, Perthes-lès-Hurlus and Mesnil-lès-Hurlus. Facing the French were the troops of the German Third Army of General Karl von Einem. Since September the Germans had had time to dig in here, surround their positions with barbed-wire entanglements and site their machine guns.

On 20 December two French corps went in to the attack. XVII Corps attacked several times on the sector between Souain and Perthes, and I Colonial Corps struck at the hills near the Beauséjour farm. Both corps took pieces of German trench, but nowhere did they break the front. The next day XII Corps joined the attack, but its infantry was held up in front of the wire, because every gap in it was under machine-gun fire. The French then began digging mines and saps towards the German lines, while the artillery shelled the enemy trenches.

Dates of the battle

Not all sources begin the battle on 20 December. The British site greatwar.co.uk gives 10 December as its start, counting from the first minor attacks at Perthes, and the French Wikipedia and some more recent studies begin it on 14 December. It was only on 20 December, however, that the main, planned attack of the Fourth Army began, and this is the date adopted by most studies, including the Polish and English Wikipedia.

What happened next

In the following days General de Langle de Cary shifted his main effort to the area of Perthes and Massiges, and Joffre sent him reinforcements. The Germans replied with counter-attacks. In January the French took the ruins of the village of Perthes-lès-Hurlus, but on 13 January frost and mud forced them to halt the offensive. In mid-February the attack was resumed with larger forces. On 17 March 1915 the offensive was finally broken off. The French had advanced at best 2–3 kilometres, losing more than 90,000 killed, wounded and missing. The First Battle of Champagne showed how hard it was to break through a front held by machine guns, but the French command still believed that it could be done with stronger artillery and more infantry.