French retake Saint-Quentin

On 1 October 1918 General Marie-Eugène Debeney’s French First Army entered Saint-Quentin, an industrial town on the Somme in the Aisne department. The Germans had taken it on 28 August 1914, during the great Allied retreat, the day before the French Fifth Army struck at them at Guise and Saint-Quentin. For more than four years it was one of the main centres of the German rear on the Western Front, and from the spring of 1917 it lay just behind the Hindenburg Line, on the front line itself.

The Germans left the town without a fight. On the night of 30 September to 1 October General Oskar von Hutier’s 18th Army fell back to a new line east of Saint-Quentin, because to the north of it the British Fourth Army had broken through the Hindenburg Line on the St Quentin Canal, and the French XV Corps had crossed the canal and was outflanking the town from the north. General Charles Nollet’s XXXVI Corps approached it from the front, and further corps of the First Army from the south. The British official history, citing the French one, says briefly that when the Germans withdrew, the French First Army closed up to the canal and entered Saint-Quentin. According to some French sources an advance party entered the town on 1 October, and the whole of Saint-Quentin was occupied on 2 October. Sources also differ as to which corps entered first: some credit XXXVI Corps, others XV Corps.

The soldiers found the town empty of inhabitants. Before the retreat to the Hindenburg Line, from 1 to 18 March 1917, the Germans had removed all of its roughly 41,000 inhabitants to towns in northern France and Belgium, sending some of them through Switzerland to unoccupied France. The deserted town was plundered, and the factory machinery was carried off or destroyed. Then for a year and a half it was shelled by French and British artillery. In March 1918 the Germans had launched their great spring offensive from around Saint-Quentin, and now they had to give it up.

The Gothic basilica of Saint Quentin, the town’s patron, suffered most. Some of its treasures, including the saint’s sarcophagus and the most precious stained glass, were taken by the Germans to Maubeuge in 1917. On the night of 15–16 August 1917 a fire destroyed the roof timbers and roofs, and in the following weeks a large part of the vaulting collapsed. According to French sources, before their retreat the Germans drilled holes for explosive charges in the piers of the nave in order to blow up the church, as in the spring of 1917 they had blown up the keep of the castle at Coucy. The demolition never took place, probably because of the rapid French advance. Traces of these holes can still be seen in the piers today.

About 70 per cent of the buildings in the town were destroyed or badly damaged. The first inhabitants returned only at the beginning of 1919: in January there were about 250 of them, and by the end of the year about 15,000. In the following days the French First Army attacked east of Saint-Quentin, covering the right flank of the British, who were preparing to attack the last line of the Hindenburg system.