Arras in the First World War

Arras, the capital of the historic province of Artois, was a city on the front line itself for almost the whole war. In the autumn of 1914 the French saved it at the last moment, and the front came to rest just beyond its eastern suburbs. The Germans never took it, but for four years they shelled it so heavily that after the war almost the whole city had to be rebuilt. In the spring of 1917 a great British offensive set off from beneath it, and in the spring of 1918 the Germans tried to take it for the last time.

Autumn 1914: a city saved at the last moment

At the end of August 1914, during the Great Retreat, the French territorial divisions withdrew from Arras and the city was left undefended. On 6 September German Landwehr troops entered it, but after two or three days, while the fate of the campaign was being decided on the Marne, they left. On 30 September French troops returned: the first units of General Louis de Maud’huy’s new group, which became the Tenth Army.

The Race to the Sea was under way, with each side trying to outflank the other to the north. On 1 October three corps of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s Sixth Army attacked between Arras and Douai, and the French, instead of attacking, had to defend the city itself. They held it, but in the First Battle of Artois the Germans took Lens and Vimy Ridge, from which they could see the French rear. From 6 October German artillery shelled Arras systematically. On 7 October the town hall burned, and on 21 October its Gothic belfry collapsed.

A city under fire (1915–1916)

In 1915 the French Tenth Army twice tried to drive the Germans off the heights north of the city, in the Second and Third Battles of Artois. It took the Lorette spur and several villages, but Vimy Ridge stayed in German hands. Arras meanwhile lived under the shells. On 6 July 1915 the cathedral was destroyed, one quarter of the old town after another was reduced to ruin, and the inhabitants who stayed took shelter in cellars and medieval underground passages. In March 1916 the British took over the whole Arras sector from the French.

The underground city and the 1917 offensive

The city centre lay only about two kilometres from the front line. Beneath the Grand’Place and the Petite Place, however, ran huge cellars, and beneath the suburbs of Ronville and Saint-Sauveur old chalk quarries, forgotten since the 18th century. The British discovered them in October 1916, and sappers of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company joined them within a few months into underground barracks with electric light, running water and a hospital. According to the British official history they could hold 24,500 soldiers; according to today’s museum, up to 24,000.

On 9 April 1917 the soldiers left these tunnels to attack. So began the Battle of Arras, an offensive by three British armies meant to draw German reserves away before the French attack on the Aisne. The plan was drawn up by the commander of the Third Army, General Edmund Allenby. On the first day the Canadians took Vimy Ridge, and east of the city the villages the Germans had held since October 1914 were retaken. There was no breakthrough, and the battle, dragged out until mid-May, cost the British about 150,000 men. Even so, the front moved a few kilometres further from the city.

1918: Mars and the road east

On 28 March 1918, a week after the start of the great spring offensive, the German Seventeenth Army attacked on both banks of the Scarpe in Operation Mars. According to a map captured that day from a downed aircraft, eight divisions were to break through the front and a ninth was to take Arras itself. The British defence held, and in the evening Erich Ludendorff called off the attack and turned towards Amiens.

At the end of August the front began to move away from the city for good. On 26 August General Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps attacked east of Arras, astride the road to Cambrai, and in the Battle of the Scarpe retook Monchy-le-Preux. On 2 September the Canadians broke the Drocourt–Quéant Line, the northern extension of the Hindenburg Line, and the war moved away from Arras onto the plain of Douai.

What remained

After the war Arras was 85% destroyed, and only 5% of its houses were left intact. The squares, the town hall and the belfry lay in ruins. Rebuilding took many years, and its principles were set by the Cornudet law of April 1919. The old quarries, forgotten after the war, were rediscovered by archaeologists in the early 1990s. In 2008 the Carrière Wellington museum opened in them.