Péronne and Noyon taken

On 18 March 1917 the Allies took two towns that had lain just behind the German front since the autumn of 1914. In the north the British 48th Division entered Péronne on the Somme, and in the south the French marched into Noyon on the Oise. It was the third day of the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line, and for a large part of the retreating troops the last “marching day”. By evening the main German forces facing the British Fourth Army were already behind the new position, leaving only rearguards in front of it.

Péronne

In front of Péronne lay the most difficult obstacle of the whole pursuit: the Somme valley, with the canal, the main river and the marshes between them. The Germans had blown up all the bridges. The sappers of the 48th Division had prepared in advance. On a very dark and frosty night, 16–17 March, they towed six pontoons along the canal, sawing through sunken tree trunks and breaking ice almost four centimetres thick, with the German posts a few hundred metres away. Covering a kilometre and a half took them four hours. By noon on 17 March a floating bridge over the canal was ready. In the evening a company of a Royal Warwickshire battalion crossed it, got over the river on pontoon rafts and was the first to enter the town.

According to the dispatch of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, troops of the 48th Division entered Péronne at 7 a.m. on 18 March and took the hill of Mont-Saint-Quentin north of the town. At about the same time the first field battery crossed on rafts, and at 3.30 p.m. the sappers finished a new bridge on the piles of the old one. The British official history describes Péronne, “once a beautiful little town”, as a pitiful sight: the façades of almost all the old houses had been blown out. The Germans left on one of the buildings a board with the inscription “Nicht ärgern, nur wundern!” (“Don’t be angry, just wonder!”), in which the historian Cyril Falls saw the bravado of an uneasy conscience rather than a joke. South of the town the British reached the west bank of the Somme, and by 10 p.m. the bridge at Brie, on the main road from Amiens to Saint-Quentin, had been repaired enough for infantry to cross it in single file.

Noyon

Noyon, an old episcopal town with a Gothic cathedral, the birthplace of John Calvin, had been since September 1914 the point of the German front furthest advanced towards Paris, less than a hundred kilometres from the capital. Georges Clemenceau was said to remind the readers of his newspaper of this with a short sentence: “The Germans are at Noyon”. In the sector of General Émile Fayolle’s French First Army the Germans had for several days been flooding the roads around the town and blowing up bridges. On 17 March the French set off in pursuit, and on the morning of 18 March cavalry and light detachments marched into Noyon. By about 10 a.m. the 26th Infantry Division was already in the town. Further units were already passing through it, the 61st Infantry Division and the 3rd Cavalry Division, which on 19 March took Chauny.

Unlike Péronne, Noyon had not been destroyed. It was one of several places, along with Nesle and Ham, that the Germans spared and in which they gathered the civilian population of the area. According to the British official history, they were not moved by humane motives, but wanted to get rid of “useless mouths”. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people were left in these places, almost all children, mothers and old people. About ten times as many, including almost all those fit for work, were taken away behind the Hindenburg Line. The inhabitants of Noyon, overcrowded and hungry, greeted the French soldiers after thirty months of occupation. On 24 March the town was visited by President Raymond Poincaré.

On 18 March French and British cavalry met at Nesle, and French patrols found that the Germans had also abandoned the trenches north of Soissons. The retreat now covered the whole arc of the front from Arras to the Aisne. During the night of 18–19 March the Germans blew up the medieval castle at Ham.