Cambrai in the First World War

Cambrai, a town in the Nord department on the upper Scheldt, was a road and railway junction that lay on the German side of the front for more than four years. The Germans took it on 26 August 1914 and gave it up only on 9 October 1918. Two battles took their name from it: the first great tank attack in November 1917 and the last of the battles of the Hindenburg Line in the autumn of 1918. The Allies entered the town while its centre was in flames.

August 1914

In August 1914 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force marched through Cambrai towards the Belgian frontier. The British correspondent Hamilton Fyfe remembered a town full of French and English soldiers, and of townspeople trying to talk to them. A week later the same troops were passing through in retreat, and most of the inhabitants had fled.

On 26 August, while the British II Corps was fighting the Battle of Le Cateau a dozen or so kilometres to the east, the Germans entered Cambrai. It was defended by the French 84th Territorial Division, made up of older reservists from the Mayenne department, which fought from barricades and windows. More than 500 wounded were treated in the town’s hospitals. The fighting helped to cover the British left flank.

Under occupation

The Germans imposed a levy of 200,000 francs on the town, and then for four years burdened it with billeting and requisitions. The occupation was marked by looting and hostage-taking. Cambrai was an important German centre of command, supply and hospitals, and next to the town they carefully laid out a military cemetery with monuments to the French, British and German dead. On 17 September 1916 the first victory of Manfred von Richthofen was scored over the area, and on 31 October a memorial service for Oswald Boelcke was held in Cambrai Cathedral.

In the spring of 1917 the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line. Its belts of defences ran south-west of the town, between the St Quentin Canal and the dry, unfinished Canal du Nord.

Tanks at Cambrai (1917)

On 20 November 1917 General Julian Byng’s British Third Army attacked this position with hundreds of tanks, without the usual days-long bombardment. It broke through, and in Britain church bells rang for the victory. But the attack stalled at Bourlon Wood, and on 30 November the Germans counter-attacked and took back most of the gains. When the Battle of Cambrai ended, the front still stood about eight kilometres from the town. That winter British soldiers looked through field glasses from a ridge west of Cambrai at the top of the cathedral tower.

Liberation (1918)

In March 1918 the German offensive pushed the front far to the west, but in the autumn the Allies came back. From 27 September General Arthur Currie’s Canadians, who had been fighting their way forward from Arras since the end of August, crossed the Canal du Nord and closed in on Cambrai from the west and north. On 8 October the Third and Fourth Armies broke the last German positions south of the town in the Battle of Cambrai, and during the night the garrison left.

On 9 October the Canadians entered the town together with patrols of the British 57th Division. They found it almost without inhabitants, with fires raging in many districts. The Canadian official history says the Germans had decided to burn the town before leaving, and sappers found piles of combustible material that had not been set alight. The main square was still burning two days after the fighting.

Ruins and rebuilding

The centre burned down, along with the town hall, of which only the facade survived, and the municipal archives. Sources count the losses differently: according to some French descriptions of the town 900 buildings were destroyed and 5,400 damaged, according to others more than a thousand, and according to others still as many as more than 1,500 of Cambrai’s 3,500 buildings. The centre was rebuilt to a new plan by the architect Pierre Leprince-Ringuet. Work began in 1923 and ended in 1932 with the opening of the new town hall.