Start of the Battle of Festubert

On 15 May 1915, half an hour before midnight, British infantry went out into the darkness in front of their trenches at Festubert in French Flanders. Six days after the bloody defeat at Aubers, General Douglas Haig’s First Army renewed the attack in order to support the French fighting for Vimy Ridge in Artois. This time it struck at night. According to the British official history, it was the British Army’s first night attack of this war. On the right wing it succeeded completely: the men reached the German trench before the first shot was fired. On the left the Germans were waiting, ready.

A new method

At Aubers on 9 May the British had relied on a short, violent bombardment and an attack on a ridge nearly three kilometres away. The bombardment failed to destroy the German breastworks, and the attack collapsed within a few hours. Haig concluded that the German fortifications had to be demolished slowly and methodically, and that the infantry should be given close objectives. Field Marshal Sir John French agreed and instructed him to conduct a “deliberate and unremitting” attack that was gradually to wear the enemy down. This time the first objective was the La Quinque Rue road, running north-east from Festubert, about 900 metres from the British line.

On the morning of 13 May 433 guns and howitzers began a slow, carefully observed bombardment of the German trenches on a front of about five kilometres north of Festubert. Every round was to be observed, and for the first time the wire was cut methodically, shell by shell. All through 13 May, however, it rained, which hampered observation and turned the ground into mud that smothered the explosions. On 14 May the commander of the Indian Meerut Division reported that the damage in front of his sector was insufficient and that wire-cutting had only just begun. Haig, with French’s consent, postponed the attack by a day. The bombardment, planned to last 36 hours, finally lasted 60, and the artillery of I Corps fired more than 100,000 shells. Many of them failed to explode, because the factories could not keep up with inspecting the fuzes.

A day of waiting

Saturday 15 May was sunny. The long bombardment betrayed to the Germans that an attack was being prepared, so the British tried at least to deceive them about the hour. At 10 a.m. and at 3 p.m. the artillery suddenly quickened its fire and fell silent after five minutes, while the infantry in the trenches cheered as if they were going over the top. At the same moment the batteries swept the German front line with shrapnel, in case the defenders had come out to man their posts.

The night attack had been proposed by the commander of the 2nd Division, General Henry Horne. His men knew this patch of flat, waterlogged plain well, and were to take the first two lines of German trenches in the dark and press on at dawn. The 7th Division of General Hubert Gough, recently moved here from another sector, did not know the ground and was to attack only at dawn, a few hundred metres further south. After dark the assaulting brigades took up their positions in the breastworks. In front of them ran a ditch nearly four metres wide with more than a metre of water in it, across which light footbridges had been laid.

Attack in the dark

At 11.30 p.m. the artillery lifted its fire deeper, and some 10,000 men of three brigades went into the attack: the British 6th and 5th Brigades of the 2nd Division and the Indian Garhwal Brigade of the Meerut Division. The sky was overcast and the moon had only just entered a new phase, so it was completely dark. Every man wore a white patch on his chest and back to tell friend from foe. The leading half-companies crossed the ditch on the footbridges and lay down in the grass of no man’s land, less than 300 metres from the German breastwork.

On the right wing the 6th Brigade went forward at a walk, in silence, with bayonets fixed. The leading ranks reached almost to the German breastwork itself before the defenders fired the first shot. Most of the Germans fled down a communication trench to the rear, and the support companies went on and took the German support trench. The signal of success was two motor-car headlamps lit on the German breastwork. The brigade lost few men, although among them was the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, who was mortally wounded.

On the left wing there was no surprise. The Indian Lahore Division, standing further north, was to distract the Germans by opening short bursts of rifle fire during the evening. The effect was the opposite: the defenders by the road from Port Arthur to La Bassée grew suspicious, saw by the light of flares the soldiers laying footbridges, and as soon as the British artillery lifted its fire they swept the ground in front with machine-gun fire. No man’s land was lit by rockets, flares and a searchlight, and the German artillery smashed some of the footbridges. The attacking battalions of the 5th Brigade and the Garhwal Brigade were mown down. Only part of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, reached the German trench; that day, mainly in this attack, the battalion lost nearly 650 men. The Germans quickly blocked the trench and stopped attempts to work along it with grenades.

Before dawn

At about 12.45 a.m., already on 16 May, reports of the results of the attack reached the corps headquarters. Orders were given to renew the attack on the left wing at 3.15 a.m., together with the attack of the 7th Division. In those three hours, however, the Germans managed to turn the communication trenches into a new line, and the further battalions thrown into the attack at dawn could not break through. The 7th Division did better, breaking into the German trenches just north of Festubert at dawn. Between the two divisions, however, there remained a gap in which the Germans held a strong point. A battle had begun in which for ten days a few hundred metres of mud would be won.