Germans take Messines

On 10 April 1918 the German offensive in Flanders spread to a new sector. The day before, General Ferdinand von Quast’s 6th Army had broken through the Portuguese front south of Armentières and reached the river Lys. Now, north of the town, the 4th Army of General Friedrich Sixt von Armin went into action. In the morning fog its divisions crossed the Lys, took Ploegsteert and most of Ploegsteert Wood and captured Messines, the small town on the ridge south of Ypres. The Germans had first taken it on 1 November 1914. Less than a year before the April attack, on 7 June 1917, the British had recaptured the ridge after exploding nineteen great mines. By evening the British IX Corps had stopped the Germans on the western slopes, and the South African Brigade, counter-attacking, briefly passed through the ruins of Messines.

Morning in the fog

The night was rainy. Before dawn the rain stopped, but fog hung over the waterlogged Lys plain, and low cloud almost prevented air observation all day. At 2.45 a.m. the German artillery opened fire on the sector from the Lys to the Wambeke stream. It first hit the British batteries with gas shell, then headquarters, crossroads and camps in the rear, and in the last quarter of an hour the forward positions. In the darkness and rain the British guns could reply only with fire on roads and places where the enemy might assemble. At 5.15 a.m. the German infantry attacked.

On the British side nobody expected the attack that day. During the night patrols reported only unusually numerous flares, aimless machine-gun fire and movement of wagons near Pont Rouge. At five in the morning a patrol of the 11th Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment brought word that footbridges on piles, hidden under the water, lay across the Lys. This was taken to be a demonstration intended to pin down British reserves in the north. Meanwhile the Germans were throwing pontoon bridges across at Frelinghien and Pont Rouge, and their infantry, carrying boards for crossing the shell holes, were already moving on the forward posts of the 25th and 19th Divisions.

The defenders were weak. The three divisions of General Alexander Hamilton-Gordon’s IX Corps had lost more than half their men on the Somme in March and had returned to Flanders less than two weeks earlier, with replacements made up mainly of nineteen-year-olds. The front line consisted of isolated posts in the sea of flooded shell holes into which the fighting of 1917 had turned this ground. According to the British official history, two brigades of the 25th Division faced three German divisions, and the 57th Brigade of the 19th Division was attacked by five or six times as many men. In the fog the Germans passed between the posts and took those that resisted from behind. Many battalion commanders learned of the attack only when fighting was going on around their headquarters. In Messines the Germans bombed sappers in their dugouts before anyone could raise the alarm.

Messines and Ploegsteert

Before noon the British front between the Lys and Wytschaete fell back. The 214th Division took Ploegsteert, the 31st Division entered Ploegsteert Wood, and the 17th Reserve Division captured Messines with a blow from the north and the south. At 11.35 a.m. the command of the German XVIII Reserve Corps reported that the town had been taken and that the attack was continuing towards Wytschaete (PL). Counter-attacks by British brigades, which had almost no reserves left, recovered neither the village nor the wood. Two companies of the 8th Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment reached the edge of Messines and captured two machine guns, but got no further.

When the fog lifted, British rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire at close range stopped the Germans. The gunners stayed in their positions until the infantry had fallen back level with them, and the deeply buried telephone cables, laid before the previous year’s battle, allowed forward observers to direct fire. In the rear, sappers and hastily gathered reinforcements manned successive lines. According to the official history the Germans broke in at most just under four kilometres, and on average half as deep. In the north, on the sector of the 9th (Scottish) Division, the attack began only after 1 p.m., when the fog had gathered again, and broke down on the wire of the 27th Brigade’s support line. At Wytschaete, however, the Germans cut off a battalion to which the order to withdraw arrived too late, broke up three companies of another, and by evening the village was empty. It was saved by a strong patrol of a Scottish battalion of the Cameron Highlanders, which the brigade commander sent out to reconnoitre and ordered to stay there.

In the rear there were scenes that this part of Flanders had not known since 1914. Long-range German artillery began to shell villages and farms where civilians had until then been calmly tilling the fields. The commander of the South African Brigade, General Tanner, wrote in his diary that the road near Neuve-Église was choked with refugees, old men, women and children with their belongings on carts, wheelbarrows and prams, and the most pitiful sight was the infirm old men being carried in wheelbarrows.

The South African counter-attack

The South African Brigade, shattered on the Somme in March and rebuilt with recruits, numbered about 1,300 men. In the morning it was attached to the 19th Division and ordered to retake the ridge from Messines to Lumm Farm. The commander of the 9th Division protested that the brigade was not yet fit to attack, but he was not heeded. At 5.15 p.m. three small regiments moved off from Wulverghem, deployed on the Steenebeek stream and went uphill in fog and drizzle. The 2nd Regiment crossed the Messines–Wytschaete road and took several fortified farms, capturing prisoners and machine guns. The 1st Regiment drove back with the bayonet the Germans coming out of Messines and passed through the village, but on its eastern edge, after an hour of hand-to-hand fighting in which almost all its officers were killed or wounded, it had to fall back to a line just west of the town. That evening the German 4th Army war diary recorded four successive “violent counter-attacks” from beyond the Steenebeek. In the south the 75th Brigade, together with Australian sappers, got within two hundred metres of Ploegsteert but could not retake it.

Deliberations at headquarters

Ludendorff had hoped for more that day. In the early afternoon he offered the 4th Army two fresh divisions from the Supreme Command reserve, and if necessary even the Alpine Corps, but above all he demanded that the road from Armentières to Bailleul be reached before dark at all costs. South of the Lys the 6th Army took Steenwerck towards evening and widened its bridgeheads on the Lys and its tributary the Lawe, although the 55th Division still had not given up Givenchy. Armentières, threatened with encirclement from both sides, began to be evacuated by the British at 3 p.m.

Douglas Haig moved north the last divisions he could take from Picardy: two cavalry divisions, the 33rd Division for the Second Army and the 5th Division, newly arrived from Italy, for the First Army. Before noon he wrote to General Ferdinand Foch, who a week earlier at Beauvais had been entrusted with the strategic direction of Allied operations, asking that the French take over part of the British front and “take an active part in the battle”. His letter crossed with a note from Foch, who warned against voluntary withdrawals, for example from the Passchendaele ridge, because the enemy would regard them as a sign of weakness. Haig replied that the First and Second Armies had been ordered to hold their front at all costs. The commander of the Second Army, General Herbert Plumer, went round all the divisional headquarters in those days. As one of their commanders recalled, it was hard to overstate how much these visits heartened everyone.

During the night the 62nd Brigade from the 21st Division’s reserve reached Wytschaete and, after half an hour of hand-to-hand fighting, drove out the Germans, who were just climbing the ridge. At dawn on 11 April the village was in British hands, and IX Corps again had a continuous, if thin, line from the Lys at Armentières to the Ypres–Comines canal. Messines and most of the ridge south of Wytschaete remained on the German side, however, as did Ploegsteert Wood, and the Germans were preparing an attack on Wytschaete and Wulverghem for the next day. In the Battle of the Lys the hardest days still lay ahead of the British.