Start of the Battle of Hazebrouck

12 April 1918 was one of the most critical days of the spring of 1918 for the British Army. On the fourth day of the Battle of the Lys the German Sixth Army opened with an attack towards Hazebrouck, the railway junction through which supplies for the British forces in Flanders passed. Facing it were tired, intermingled divisions, many without their own artillery, with battalions led by junior officers. During the day the Germans made two breaches in the front, several kilometres deep, south of the Lys at Pacaut and north of it between Vieux-Berquin and Bailleul, and came within about 8 kilometres of Hazebrouck. The British official history records that for most of the day the line was not continuous, and divisional staffs, despite hourly reports from airmen, did not know where it ran. By the evening, however, the front was holding: before Nieppe Forest the fresh 5th Division, brought from Italy; at Vieux-Berquin the 4th Guards Brigade; and at Meteren improvised detachments of the 33rd Division. During the night the Australians began to arrive at Hazebrouck.

“The Amiens of the north”

Hazebrouck, a small town in French Flanders which the British had taken in October 1914, was to them what Amiens was to the Somme front. Here converged the railway lines from the ports of Calais, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Dunkirk, along which supplies went to General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army and to the Ypres salient. Had the Germans taken the town, or come close enough to keep it under fire, the British would probably have had to give up the whole Ypres salient, and perhaps fall back towards the coast.

After three days of the offensive the Germans were closer to this objective than at any time since 1914. On 9 April they routed the Portuguese, a day later they took Messines, and on 11 April they captured Armentières and Merville. For 12 April General Ferdinand von Quast’s Sixth Army was given as objectives the hills at Bailleul, Meteren and Strazeele, the edge of Nieppe Forest and the La Bassée Canal. The army group commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, regarded the attack on Hazebrouck as the most important task. In his diary that day he wrote that “the most important thing of all is to exhaust the British completely, so as to bring about their final collapse”.

Pacaut and Nieppe Forest

The first blow fell south of the Lys. At 5 a.m., in the darkness and mist just before dawn, the German 68th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division, which had crept up to the very trenches during the night, broke through at the first assault the thin line of two brigades of the 51st (Highland) Division at Pacaut. Within half an hour it had advanced about 2 kilometres, captured the commander of the 152nd Brigade with his entire staff in the village of Le Cornet Malo, and then fanned out to the sides, taking the British lines in enfilade. Two field artillery batteries had to be abandoned because the Germans shot down the horses with machine guns from 150 metres. German patrols reached the La Bassée Canal and the little River Clarence near Robecq, a few kilometres from Béthune.

The breach, however, was plugged by improvisation. The gunners of the two remaining batteries crossed the canal and defended the bridges until the infantry arrived, and the commander of the 3rd Division ordered the canal to be held along almost 6 kilometres. The last 170 troopers of King Edward’s Horse were sent to the bridges, and battalions of the 61st Division, detraining from their trains, set off across the fields and by 11 a.m. had taken up positions at Robecq. The Germans threw neither cavalry nor cyclists into the breach. The British official history concluded that what had seeped through the front was “a trickle, not a flood”, and that the brilliant start had yielded only a small gain of ground.

North of the Lys the 50th Division, by now only the remnants of battalions, fell back slowly before the German 35th and 12th Reserve Divisions, waiting for reinforcements. These arrived in the afternoon. The 5th Division, which had spent the winter on the quiet Italian front, detrained during the night near Aire-sur-la-Lys and in the morning was ordered to counter-attack towards Merville. At midday, when British GHQ, in line with Foch’s wishes, ordered the armies to hold “at all costs” the line from Kemmel through Bailleul to Nieppe Forest, XI Corps headquarters cancelled the counter-attack and wanted to give up the eastern part of the forest. The leading brigades, however, were already on its eastern edge, and General Reginald Stephens obtained permission to stay there. In the evening the 5th Division retook the brickworks at Le Corbie on the Lys, beat off a counter-attack, and during the night dug in along a chain of strongpoints. As the official history puts it, the direct route to Hazebrouck through the forest was blocked because the division was used as a whole, rather than broken up to patch holes.

The Guards at La Couronne

To the left of the 50th Division, on the road from Estaires to Hazebrouck, stood General Leslie Butler’s 4th Guards Brigade, part of the 31st Division. In the morning it was ordered to attack to secure the road to Vieux-Berquin, and at 11 a.m. two of its battalions, the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards and the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards, left a good defensive position and advanced across open fields towards the hamlet of Vieux Moulin. Without machine guns, supported by a single battery, they ran into crossfire from the cottages and orchards around Neuf-Berquin. Despite their losses they advanced several hundred metres, and Captain Thomas Pryce’s company of the Grenadiers took Pont Rondin. By the evening, however, each battalion had lost about 60 per cent of its men. The Guardsmen beat off every attempt to drive them from the positions they had taken, and after dark returned to their starting line around the La Couronne crossroads south of Vieux-Berquin. The brigade now had to defend a front more than 3.5 kilometres long. According to the military police, not a single straggler was seen on the roads behind its line all day.

The breach at Doulieu and the gap at Meteren

Things went worst further north, on the front of the British XV Corps. At about 7–8 a.m., without artillery preparation but under cover of heavy machine-gun fire, six German divisions attacked the remnants of the 29th and 31st Divisions. The main blow was struck by the fresh 81st Reserve Division. The Germans entered Le Doulieu and from there fired into the British brigades from the flank. By midday the line was very thin, and a slow withdrawal from hedge to hedge began, while a battalion from the island of Guernsey, the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry, later singled out by Haig, held its ground until 1.30 p.m. In the evening four brigades stood on a line from Vieux-Berquin to Merris. In a wedge about 8 kilometres wide the Germans had advanced almost 5. The 86th and 87th Brigades together numbered 11 officers and 352 men.

Between Merris and Bailleul a gap almost 5 kilometres wide opened. Luckily for the British, the 19th Brigade of the 33rd Division stood at Meteren, on the hill just behind it. The divisional commander, General Reginald Pinney, began receiving news of the withdrawal in the morning and sent forward his machine-gun battalion. The first eight machine guns with their crews were loaded onto a lorry commandeered by force and sent towards the Germans. After them came infantrymen, cyclists, sappers, tunnellers, a New Zealand entrenching battalion and soldiers from the reinforcement camps. By 11 p.m. the gaps on both sides of the brigade had mostly been closed, and the burning church at Meteren lit up the surrounding country for many kilometres. As was said, the 33rd Division had “played the defender when the attackers had lost the mill”. East of Bailleul the brigades of IX Corps beat off attacks at Neuve-Église and on the slopes of the hills, giving up only a little ground.

The Australians on their way

Relief for Hazebrouck was to come from General Harold Walker’s 1st Australian Division, brought up by rail from near Amiens. Its journey showed how hard it was to move troops in the narrow strip into which the British armies had been squeezed. German long-range guns shelled the station at Amiens, and aircraft bombed the tracks, which caused the French railway staff to flee. The trains set off many hours late, and on the way ran into an air raid on the station at Saint-Pol. Divisional headquarters reached Hondeghem near Hazebrouck at dawn, but the first train with infantry, carrying three companies of the 7th Battalion, arrived only at 2 p.m., and the next ones at dusk.

Plumer wanted to keep the Australians in reserve around the town, but XV Corps asked for them to be sent forward battalion by battalion as they arrived. At 5 p.m. three companies of the 7th Battalion passed through the northern part of Nieppe Forest. The 8th Battalion detrained at Hazebrouck at 7 p.m. and by one in the morning had taken position behind the Guards. The first company of the 3rd Battalion reached Strazeele at 6.30 p.m., and the rest only at midnight. By dawn four Australian battalions with one machine-gun company had spread out along a front about 11 kilometres long, a kilometre or a kilometre and a half behind the line of the 5th, 29th and 31st Divisions. General Beauvoir De Lisle decided that the Australians would not patch the old line but would form a new barrier behind it.

At headquarters

At midday the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, worried about the coal mines near Bruay, met Haig. The field marshal used the opportunity to impress on him the gravity of the situation: he had no reserves apart from exhausted divisions resting by the sea and the 52nd Division, which was arriving by sea from Palestine and was just about to begin disembarking. He asked for the transfer of French divisions from the Somme to be speeded up, for the area around Dunkirk to be flooded, and for French and American troops on the Saint-Omer–Dunkirk line. Clemenceau replied that such matters were dealt with through General Ferdinand Foch. That day Foch demanded that the British Cavalry Corps move at once to the Aire area, sent his own II Cavalry Corps north together with two divisions that were to come under Plumer’s orders, and asked the Belgians to hand over to Plumer any divisions they could spare from their front. In a directive he ordered the Germans to be stopped on the Béthune–Saint-Omer line in the south and the Kemmel–Cassel line in the north. Plumer, meanwhile, quietly began shortening the Second Army’s front in the Ypres salient to save troops.

In the evening the German Sixth Army reported heavy fighting and great progress, but admitted that it had not reached even the objectives set for 11 April, and that west of Merville it had been unable to hold all the ground it had won. British prisoners saw jammed roads behind the German front, transport columns made up of everything from carriages to wheelbarrows, and exhausted horses. Ahead of the Germans now lay a line that the British were to defend without further withdrawal, and the next day the weight of the fighting fell on the 4th Guards Brigade at La Couronne.