Germans take Armentières and Merville

On 11 April 1918, the third day of the German offensive in Flanders, two towns on the river Lys that had lain just behind the British front since autumn 1914 passed into German hands. German troops occupied Armentières without a fight, abandoned the previous day by the British 34th Division, and in the evening broke into Merville, a dozen or so kilometres further up the river. Since 9 April, when General Ferdinand von Quast’s 6th Army smashed the Portuguese near Neuve-Chapelle, the Germans had crossed the Lys at Bac-Saint-Maur and at Estaires, and on 10 April the 4th Army attacked north of Armentières and took Messines. Now they were advancing from the Lys breach towards Hazebrouck, the key railway junction behind the British Second Army.

Armentières, a textile town, had been in British hands since III Corps entered it in October 1914. For three and a half years it had lain a few kilometres from the front line and was well known to British soldiers. Even before the offensive the Germans had prepared its fall: on the night of 7/8 April, by British estimates, they fired 30,000–40,000 gas shells into the town, largely mustard gas, and the 34th Division had more than 900 men gassed. The German plan assumed that the town would not need to be stormed: it was to be cut off by attacks from both sides. And so it turned out. When on 9 and 10 April the Germans crossed the Lys south of Armentières and the 4th Army broke into the front north of it, on the morning of 10 April the headquarters of the British First Army ordered an evacuation. In the afternoon and evening the battalions of the 34th Division withdrew through the ruined streets to the north bank of the river. The railway bridge had already been destroyed, so the last units crossed by the road bridge, mistaken by the Germans in the darkness for their own troops.

The German Supreme Army Command communiqué of 11 April announced that Armentières had fallen and that the surrounded British garrison, “50 officers and over 3,000 men”, had laid down its arms after a gallant defence. German accounts even spoke of 40 captured guns. The British official history firmly denies this: the town was not captured but evacuated, only a handful of men were taken prisoner, and the artillery withdrew, losing two howitzers previously destroyed by fire. The historian James Edmonds regarded the German communiqué as evidence of Ludendorff’s disappointment with the progress of the attack. The 34th Division, withdrawn from the town, together with the brigades attached to it, held out throughout 11 April in a narrow wedge near Nieppe, and during the night fell back to a line near Steenwerck railway station.

On the western flank of the breach the fighting was heavier. The Germans moved off as early as 4.30 a.m., again in the morning mist. South of the Lys the exhausted 51st (Highland) Division, whose battalions were breaking up into chains of small groups, fell back more than 2 km, until its left flank rested on Merville. On the north bank of the river the British 50th Division, reduced in some brigades to a few hundred men after almost three days of fighting, was falling back together with units of the 29th Division, which were losing whole companies in counter-attacks. In the afternoon the Germans began shelling Merville, including hospital buildings marked with the Red Cross flag. At about 7.30 p.m. they entered the northern part of the town, and after street fighting, in which sappers also took part, the British 151st Brigade withdrew behind a stream on its western edge. The sappers blew the bridges over the Lys, the last at midnight, when the Germans were already crossing it; they did not manage to destroy the railway bridge south-west of the town. Because the Germans occupied Merville only by the morning, some studies give 12 April as the date of its loss.

On the evening of 11 April the British situation was the worst since the battle began. On many sectors the First Army’s front had turned into a loose chain of posts, and between Merville and the Hazebrouck road there yawned a gap. The commander of XV Corps, General John Du Cane, complained that the situation would be good “if only I could get anyone to stand instead of going back”. That day Field Marshal Douglas Haig signed an order of the day calling on his soldiers to fight “with our backs to the wall”. During the night the 4th Guards Brigade moved into the gap in front of Hazebrouck, and more divisions, Australian ones among them, were already on their way from Picardy. The following days would show whether they could stop the Germans before the junction on which the supply of the troops defending Ypres depended.