Saint-Quentin in the First World War

Saint-Quentin, an industrial town on the Somme in the Aisne department, was on the German side of the front throughout the war. The Germans took it on 28 August 1914 and gave it up only on 1 October 1918. In the first years it was one of the centres of their rear area, in the spring of 1917 it came to lie just behind the Hindenburg Line, and in March 1918 the great spring offensive set out from beneath its walls. The Allies entered a town that was empty and in ruins.

August 1914

In the last days of August 1914 the Great Retreat rolled through the country around Saint-Quentin. On 26 August the commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre, the British commander John French and the commander of the French Fifth Army, Charles Lanrezac, conferred in the town. That same evening the British II Corps, beaten at Le Cateau, began to fall back towards Saint-Quentin.

On 28 August some 5,000 German soldiers entered the town. In the morning the 10th Territorial Infantry Regiment, made up of poorly equipped men over 35, tried to stop them. According to French figures it lost 1,986 of its 3,100 men killed, wounded and taken prisoner. A day later Lanrezac attacked the Germans in the Oise valley. The French call this fight the Battle of Guise, the Germans the Battle of Saint-Quentin. The French threw the enemy back at Guise, but did not recover the town and resumed their retreat.

Under occupation

On 28 August the Germans took the mayor, Arthur Gibert, and the councillors hostage and seized 91,000 francs from the municipal treasury. From mid-September came the requisitions of shirts, bicycles and the whole output of the textile mills, and 870 eighteen-year-olds were sent to forced labour felling timber and repairing roads. The inhabitants hid British soldiers who had been left behind the front during the retreat. The Germans discovered eight of them and shot them, and those who had hidden them were sentenced to hard labour. From 1915 part of the population, mostly women and children, was sent through Switzerland to unoccupied France.

Saint-Quentin was the headquarters of the German Second Army of General Fritz von Below, whose front ran across the Somme. When the Anglo-French offensive fell on it in the summer of 1916, the Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, came to the town and ordered that not a foot of ground be given up. Several thousand Russian prisoners of war were put to work in the area.

A town on the front line (1917)

After their losses on the Somme the Germans built a new position, which the British called the Hindenburg Line. Saint-Quentin lay just behind it, so before the withdrawal to it the Germans removed all the inhabitants between 1 and 18 March 1917, some 41,000 people (at the end of 1916 French records counted 42,300 inhabitants), to northern France and Belgium. The empty town was looted, and the machinery of its factories was carried off or destroyed.

At the beginning of April the British 32nd Division came to within about three kilometres of Saint-Quentin, while the French closed in from the south. From then on the town lay under the fire of French and British artillery. On the night of 15–16 August 1917 the roofs of the Gothic basilica of Saint Quentin burned. The Germans had earlier taken its most precious treasures away to Maubeuge.

1918

On 21 March 1918 German armies attacked in fog along the front on both sides of the town against the British Fifth Army of General Hubert Gough. The Battle of St Quentin, the first stage of Operation Michael, drove the British back behind the Crozat Canal and the Somme. On Manchester Hill, just outside the town, a battalion of the Manchester Regiment held out until the afternoon. The front moved far to the west, but in the autumn it came back.

On 29 September the British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson broke the Hindenburg Line north of the town in the Battle of the St Quentin Canal. Threatened with encirclement, the German Eighteenth Army of General Oskar von Hutier withdrew during the night into 1 October, and in the morning the French First Army of General Marie-Eugène Debeney entered Saint-Quentin.

Ruins and rebuilding

The soldiers found the town without inhabitants. About 70 per cent of the buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, and in the pillars of the basilica there were holes drilled for explosive charges, which had not had time to destroy it. In January 1919 the town had 253 inhabitants, and in November about 15,000. Saint-Quentin was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Rebuilding went on throughout the 1920s, and many of the new buildings, among them the railway station, were put up in the Art Deco style.