The French take Rethel

On 6 November 1918 French troops entered Rethel, a small town on the river Aisne in the Ardennes department. The British chronology of the war records the recapture of Rethel by the French on that day. Most accounts give the same date, although 5 November is also found. The town had been in German hands since 31 August 1914. The Ardennes was the only department of France that the Germans occupied in its entirety throughout the war.

Rethel lay on an important road and rail junction between Reims and Mézières. As early as the winter of 1914 the French Fourth Army, attacking in the First Battle of Champagne, was supposed to advance in its direction, but never even came near it. For the next four years the front stood several dozen kilometres south of the town. This changed only in the autumn of 1918. After the great Franco-American attack of 26 September, the Germans fell back to the Aisne in October and took up a new position there. In the Rethel area two French armies met: General Henri Gouraud’s Fourth Army, attacking from Vouziers, and the Fifth Army of General Adolphe Guillaumat, which in October had forced the Suippe and west of the town had in places crossed the Aisne as well. For several weeks the front here ran along the river.

The fate of Rethel was decided by events on other sectors. On 1 November the Americans and the French Fourth Army broke through the German defences between the Aisne and the Meuse, and on 4 November the British and the French First Army launched a great attack on the Sambre and at Guise. Marshal Ferdinand Foch wrote in his memoirs that on 5 November the shaken Germans began a great retreat along the whole front from the canal at Mons to the Aisne at Rethel, and that in the following days the retreat spread to the whole front as far as the Meuse. When the Germans withdrew from the Aisne, the French occupied the town. According to French records, on 6 November the Fifth Army set off in pursuit from the line Rethel – Château-Porcien, and by 7 November it was already at Signy-l’Abbaye, roughly halfway to the Meuse.

The French found ruins. Much of Rethel had burned down in the very first days of the occupation, in August 1914, and after the war it was estimated that more than 80 per cent of the town had been destroyed. According to the French Ministry of Defence, only about a hundred inhabitants remained there during the occupation. The Germans renamed the streets and introduced German time. In 1920 Rethel was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Five days after its liberation, on 11 November, the armistice came into force, and by then the French armies were already standing on the Meuse.