Start of the battle of the Beaurevoir Line

At 6.05 a.m. on 3 October 1918 the British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson struck the last position of the Hindenburg Line, the reserve line which the British called the Beaurevoir Line after the village of Beaurevoir. Four days earlier the Fourth Army had broken the main position on the St Quentin Canal, and two days earlier the French had entered Saint-Quentin. Now the British 46th and 32nd Divisions and the Australian 2nd Division attacked on a front of a dozen or so kilometres from Sequehart to Beaurevoir. By noon the line had been broken along its whole length and the British had entered Montbrehain, but in the afternoon German counter-attacks took back part of their gains.

The last line

The Beaurevoir Line ran three or four kilometres behind the main position of the Hindenburg system. It consisted of two trenches with concrete machine-gun posts every two or three hundred metres, protected by very dense wire. Behind it rose a belt of low hills with the villages of Montbrehain and Beaurevoir, and the Germans had hidden machine guns in pits, villages and sunken roads. On one sector the British were already in it: on 1 October men of the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment, of the 32nd Division had broken into it east of Joncourt and had been beating off counter-attacks for two days.

Rawlinson issued his orders on the afternoon of 2 October, and they contained little beyond the objective. Prisoners said there were no German reserves in the rear and that the civilian population further east was being evacuated. Field Marshal Douglas Haig had the Cavalry Corps held in readiness: as soon as Montbrehain and Beaurevoir fell, the cavalry was to make for the railway junctions at Busigny and Le Cateau. The main blow on the right wing was to be delivered by the 46th Division, the same division that had crossed the canal at Bellenglise on 29 September. It took over half the sector of the 32nd Division, whose ranks were full of young soldiers who had been without shelter or hot food for several days. In the centre, General John Monash’s Australian Corps had only Major-General Charles Rosenthal’s 2nd Division left in the line, and on the left wing the British 50th Division was to cover the attack from the north. The French First Army, to the right of the British, was to attack with them, but according to the British official history it did nothing that day.

Ramicourt and Montbrehain

The night was dark, and towards morning a thick fog came down. In the 46th Division the 139th Brigade advanced behind a creeping barrage with six tanks, which crushed lanes through the wire. The brigade passed through the trenches of the Beaurevoir Line and went on towards Ramicourt. The two leading battalions bypassed the village on both sides, and it was taken by Lieutenant-Colonel Bernard Vann of the 1/6th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, who led his headquarters and reserve company there. About 400 prisoners were taken. Vann, later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for the canal crossing on 29 September, was killed soon afterwards as he was leaving the village. Sergeant William Johnson of the regiment’s 1/5th Battalion received the Victoria Cross for single-handedly attacking machine-gun nests beyond the line. One of the companies drove the Germans out of Wiancourt, which the Australians had not yet reached. On the way the tanks destroyed a nest of sixteen machine guns, but outside Montbrehain four of them were hit, a fifth got stuck and the sixth broke down.

After a twenty-minute pause the barrage moved on, and after fierce fighting the brigade had taken Montbrehain by 11.30 a.m. It took more than a thousand prisoners there and, according to Bean, also sent 74 of the village’s inhabitants to the rear. The Germans seemed to be fleeing in disorder: artillery teams and infantry were seen moving off. The commander of the 46th Division asked for a cavalry brigade as early as eight o’clock, but the orders reached it several hours late, and in the end the cavalrymen were used dismounted to hold the captured line. The Cavalry Corps waited in readiness all day and returned to its billets in the evening. The 137th Brigade, to the right of Montbrehain, crossed the Beaurevoir Line under fire from concrete posts, which it took at the point of the bayonet with the help of tanks, and reached the slope of Mannequin Hill, but did not hold the crest. On the extreme right the 32nd Division took Sequehart, lost it to a counter-attack and retook it.

The Australians at Estrées

The Australians of the 5th and 7th Brigades advanced without tanks, which had been delayed by a night march across trenches and shell holes, and had to force their own way through the wire. They took the trenches of the Beaurevoir Line between 7.15 and 8 a.m., except for a stretch of about 500 metres east of Estrées, where the wire was impassable. Lieutenant Joseph Maxwell of the 18th Battalion tried to clear it from the south. One of the prisoners told him that the Germans in a neighbouring post wanted to surrender, so Maxwell went over to them with two men, but was himself surrounded and disarmed. When British shells began falling into the trench, he drew a hidden revolver, shot two Germans and escaped. He received the Victoria Cross for that day. At about 11.30 a.m., after half an hour’s bombardment, the stretch was attacked from the north and 200 prisoners and 18 machine guns were taken. The Whippets that were to help take Beaurevoir were knocked out one after another by a gun hidden by the road to Le Cateau.

Further north the 7th Brigade crossed the line without much resistance. Its men took one concrete shelter after another, each holding ten or twelve Germans, while, as the Australian official historian Charles Bean writes, more fled down the slope. One of the battalions reached Bellevue Farm just outside Beaurevoir, but fire from guns firing over open sights from the north of the village and a German counter-attack forced it back. On the left wing the British 50th Division took Prospect Hill, Gouy and Le Catelet, though one battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers was decimated on the way.

German pincers

The German command had no intention of giving up Montbrehain. According to Bean, the headquarters of the German Second Army ordered that, at worst, Montbrehain and the artillery protection line at Beaurevoir be held, and when news came of their loss, the commanders threw into a counter-attack everything they had to hand: the remnants of the 241st Division, the bled-white 2nd Guard Division, which now numbered only about 400 rifles, and a regiment hastily formed from three battalions of the arriving Saxon 24th Division. Each division was to counter-attack on its own responsibility, without waiting for its neighbours. At about 12.30 p.m. German infantry advanced in waves on Montbrehain from the south and north. The barrage was called for too late, because shells had cut the telephone cables. The brigade in Montbrehain, with no cover on its flanks, fell back to a line in front of Ramicourt, and by 3 p.m. the Germans had recovered the village. They got no further. In the evening attacks were still being beaten off at Sequehart and on Mannequin Hill, and the Germans retook Le Catelet.

At 6.30 p.m. the Australians, reinforced by battalions of the 6th Brigade, attacked again and, almost without loss, reached the ridge behind the Beaurevoir Line, near the windmill south of the village. There was no strength left for Beaurevoir itself. That day the Australian 2nd Division took 1,192 prisoners, 163 machine guns and 11 guns, and lost, according to the British official history, no more than a thousand men.

Evening

In the evening the Fourth Army held the Beaurevoir Line on a front of about 10 kilometres, from Sequehart to the vicinity of Prospect Hill, but the heights with Montbrehain and Beaurevoir remained in German hands. The British official history judges it a considerable tactical success against exceptionally stubborn resistance, though a smaller one than expected: the French had not advanced, and the Third Army still stood before the St Quentin Canal. Prisoners stated that the Germans were laying charges under railway tracks and bridges, which pointed to a further retreat. During the night Rawlinson issued orders for the next day: the exhausted Australian 2nd Division was to be partly relieved by the British 25th Division, which was to attack Beaurevoir at dawn.

That same day in Berlin Prince Max von Baden became chancellor, and during the night of 3–4 October the new government sent the President of the United States a request for an armistice. The Supreme Army Command, alarmed by precisely such defeats as the loss of the Hindenburg Line, had been pressing for this step for several days.