Start of the Battle of the Selle

At 5.20 a.m. on 17 October 1918 the British Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson attacked the German position beyond the river Selle, south of Le Cateau. Three corps, the British IX and XIII and the American II, crossed the river in thick fog, broke into a new German defensive line called the Hermann Position, and after a day of fighting stood on the ridge beyond the valley. By evening Le Cateau was in British hands, the small town near which in August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force had given battle during the retreat from Mons.

Before the attack

Since the capture of Cambrai the Fourth Army had stood on the Selle for almost a week. The Germans had halted beyond the river and were hastily digging in, while for several days the British could not bring up enough ammunition, because the wrecked railways and roads were being repaired only with difficulty. On 13 October Rawlinson issued instructions to the artillery, ordering it to stockpile several hundred rounds per gun and to keep up counter-battery fire until the moment of the attack. Heavy howitzers demolished selected villages and road junctions, the Bois d’Andigny was drenched with gas, and 6-inch guns shelled the crossings over the Sambre–Oise Canal, behind which ran the second German position. From 15 October the whole of the ground in front was under bombardment.

The British knew that the German divisions were exhausted and hoped that resistance might collapse at any moment. The objectives were set ambitiously, with the second objective about six kilometres beyond the start line. Intelligence believed that only four relatively fresh and two exhausted German divisions faced the Fourth Army. According to the British official history, the attack in fact ran into nine divisions on the first day, five of them fresh, and a tenth arrived during the morning. For the Germans the Selle line was of particular importance: it covered the railway junction at Aulnoye, through which ran their most important lateral railway behind the front, and it gave time to the armies withdrawing from Laon and Lens. An order of one of the German artillery groups, captured during the battle, read: “The British must not cross the Selle on our front. The artillery must prevent it.”

The river was not a serious obstacle everywhere. At Saint-Souplet it was four to six metres wide and up to one and a half metres deep, but further downstream, in front of the British 50th Division, the Germans had dammed it and flooded the valley. The boundary between XIII Corps and the Americans was therefore moved south, so that the 50th Division could cross the river on a narrow, half-kilometre stretch at Saint-Souplet. The sappers prepared twelve portable footbridges from timber found in a German depot, and four floating bridges. During the night the pioneers carried them almost to the bank and hid them a few dozen metres from the river.

Fog over the valley

The night was dark, and towards morning a thick fog settled over the valley, at first limiting visibility to a few metres. At 4.50 a.m. the Germans began shelling the roads in front, including with gas shells, so the men waited for the attack in their masks. Five minutes before zero hour the sappers of the 50th Division laid the first footbridges on the water, and at 5.20 a.m. the creeping barrage began.

On the right wing, General Walter Braithwaite’s IX Corps attacked so as to outflank from the north the Belle Vue ridge, which could not be taken frontally. In the Forêt de Riquerval one battalion of the 46th Division staged a feint attack, showing the Germans dummy tanks and soldiers, while the rest of the division and the 6th Division struck alongside. In the fog the battalions lost direction, but by midday British units, among them the 1st Division advancing in the second wave, had taken Regnicourt, the Belle Vue ridge and Andigny-les-Fermes. One battalion of the 1st Division took 170 prisoners and ten machine guns there, and at Andigny-les-Fermes another 70 prisoners and two guns, losing only fifteen men. To the right of the British, the French First Army advanced only slightly that day.

The Americans at Molain and Saint-Souplet

In the centre the American 30th Division of General Edward Lewis and the 27th Division of General John O’Ryan attacked, supported by ten brigades of Australian field artillery. For them the river proved a minor obstacle: the men crossed it on footbridges and on planks laid across the surviving abutments of destroyed bridges. The tanks fared worse. The American 301st Tank Battalion had difficulty crossing, could not keep up with the infantry in the fog, and later lost to fire nine of the nineteen vehicles it had left. The American official monograph called its support “negligible”.

The 117th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Division met heavy fire in front of Molain and crossed the Selle only after half past ten, once the village had been cleared. On the ridge it was stopped by fire from the main German position. The neighbouring 118th Regiment fought until the afternoon for Molain and Saint-Martin-Rivière and only at 3.30 p.m. drew level with the 117th at the hamlet of L’Arbre-de-Guise. In the 27th Division the 105th Regiment crossed the river despite a counter-attack and reached L’Arbre-Guernon before nine, while the 108th Regiment cleared the eastern part of Saint-Souplet and before seven took Baudival Farm, more than one and a half kilometres from the start line. In the afternoon the Germans twice counter-attacked at the junction of the Americans and the British, but the American divisions held the ridge above the Selle valley. By evening their engineers had built a bridge at Saint-Souplet and opened the bridge at Molain to motor traffic.

The fight for Le Cateau

The hardest day fell to General Thomas Morland’s XIII Corps. The battalions of the 50th Division crossed by the footbridges at Saint-Souplet and in the bend of the river, but beyond it they came up against the embankment of the Le Cateau–Wassigny railway, manned by machine guns. The fog covered the crossing, but made command so difficult that for a long time the staffs did not know where their companies were. Two battalions, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Black Watch, fought their way north to the railway station on the southern edge of Le Cateau. The British described it as a small fortress: a nine-metre embankment, sidings, warehouses and brick factories, and next to it a triangle of tracks which the Germans defended all day. At about eleven, when the fog lifted, and again at 2.15 p.m., German battalions counter-attacked from the ridge beyond the orchards and pushed some of the British units back towards the railway. In the evening the intermingled battalions of three brigades of the 50th Division dug in on the intermediate objective. The railway triangle was not taken.

From the north the 66th Division attacked Le Cateau, with the South African Brigade in the lead. Its men had crossed the river during the night, by eight footbridges built in a few hours in the northern suburbs of the town and near Baillon Farm, and until dawn they lay in the fog fifty metres from the Germans. At 8.05 a.m. they moved forward, cutting the wire by hand, and reached a railway cutting, in places more than ten metres deep, whose eastern bank was full of machine guns. Only after an hour did they occupy it along its whole length, and by evening, in hand-to-hand fighting, they had covered their flank along the Richemont stream. The town itself, a maze of streets and cellars, was cleared in turn by battalions of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Lancashire Fusiliers of the 198th Brigade. At six in the evening the whole of Le Cateau, except for a small suburb in the east, was in British hands.

The day’s balance

The Fourth Army had forced the Selle despite strong resistance, broken into the first Hermann Position and established itself on the broad ridge between the Selle valley and the Sambre valley. The objectives the staff had set for the first day, as well as the railway triangle at Le Cateau, were left for the following days. The British official history states that between 17 and 19 October the Fourth Army took more than 5,100 prisoners and 60 guns, most of them on the first day.

On the same day British GHQ ordered the Fourth, Third and First Armies to advance, around 21 October, from their bridgeheads on the east bank of the Selle in a general attack aimed at the Sambre–Oise Canal, the western edge of the Forest of Mormal and, beyond, the Scheldt. Field Marshal Douglas Haig also received a letter from Marshal Foch asking for secrecy and for a halt to visits to the front by neutral officers and journalists. In the north, the German armies, falling back after their defeat in Flanders, gave up Douai that day without a fight, and British patrols found that they had also abandoned Lille. In Berlin the government of Chancellor Max von Baden conferred with Ludendorff on the reply to Wilson’s second note.