French take Roye

On 17 March 1917 the leading units of General Georges Humbert’s French Third Army entered Roye, a small town on the river Avre in the Somme department, lying just behind the German front line. The Germans did not defend it. Along the whole sector from Andechy to the Oise they abandoned the trenches they had held since the autumn of 1914 and fell back to the Hindenburg Line. The French war communiqué reported in the evening that the advance guards had entered Roye in pursuit of enemy troops who were blowing up street crossings, and that about 800 civilians whom the Germans had not had time to deport gave the soldiers an enthusiastic welcome. Some accounts give the date as 18 March, but both the French communiqué and the dispatch of Field Marshal Douglas Haig say that the French entered the town on 17 March.

Roye was to have been taken in quite a different way. The Northern Army Group of General Louis Franchet d’Espérey was preparing an attack to break through the German front on a narrow sector between Lassigny and Roye, where the terrain favoured a rapid blow. The plan even envisaged cutting off the Germans in the northern part of the salient around Roye. The limited attack to which General Robert Nivelle finally agreed was to begin after a 36-hour bombardment starting on 17 March. The Germans forestalled it. When everything indicated that they were leaving, the French shortened the artillery preparation, and on 17 March the Third Army moved forward. There was no longer any question of cutting anyone off, so the pursuit was directed further east. On the left wing the French advanced side by side with the British Fourth Army, with which the boundary now ran from the Amiens–Roye road through Offoy on the Somme towards Saint-Quentin.

The town the soldiers entered was a ruin. According to the chronicler of the occupation in the Somme department, the priest Charles Calippe, the fighting of 1916 had caused damage in Roye that could be repaired, but before the retreat the Germans had systematically destroyed industrial plants, carried off whatever they could and cut down trees. On the last night they blew up the railway station and the town hall, built in 1775–1777, of which almost nothing was left on the morning of 17 March. Mines had cut the approach roads and streets. On the same day the French took Lassigny and crossed the Roye–Noyon road in several places. They took prisoners, but there was no real fighting: the Germans had left only rearguards with machine guns.

The pursuit moved quickly. The next day French cavalry entered Nesle, where it met British cavalry, and soon afterwards the Third Army reached Ham on the Somme. Its leading elements advanced several dozen kilometres within a few days, but supplies could barely keep up with them over the destroyed roads and bridges. According to French communiqués the inhabitants of the recovered villages, without a roof over their heads and without food, had to be fed by the army. Roye did not enjoy its freedom for long. In the spring of 1918, during the great German offensive, the Germans occupied the town again and finally lost it only in August 1918.