Third Battle of Artois ends

On 15 October 1915 the commander of the French 10th Army, General Victor d’Urbal, ordered his corps to consolidate the ground they had won and build a strong defence for the winter, with a view to resuming the offensive in the future. So ended the Third Battle of Artois, which had begun on 25 September. The British official history, drawing on the French one, notes that the 10th Army’s last attack had taken place on 11 October, and that 15 October merely closed the battle formally. The French also counted its losses up to that day.

The last attack

At the end of September the French had taken the ruined village of Souchez and briefly reached the crest of Vimy Ridge, but German counter-attacks drove them off the crest. General Ferdinand Foch, commanding the French armies in the north, wanted to renew the attack together with the British at Loos. The date was postponed several times, because the exhausted divisions had to be relieved. On 8 October the Germans forestalled the Allies with a counter-attack of their own between Lens and the La Bassée Canal, which was repulsed with heavy losses, but their shelling delayed the British preparations. Foch therefore decided that the 10th Army would attack the ridge alone, without waiting for its allies.

The attack began on 11 October. The Germans were ready and strong. According to the French official history, as summarised by the British, IX Corps at Loos was stopped at the German wire and did not even recover the trench lost on 8 October. One division of XXI Corps gained “a little ground”, XXXIII Corps had to return to its trenches after a slight advance, and XII Corps achieved little more. The attack cost about 2,200 men. Foch attributed the failure to inadequate artillery preparation.

Joffre’s decision

Foch wanted to try once more. His troops stood “one bound” from the edge of the ridge, on slopes that the Germans could see completely and fire on from above. He believed that they could not get through the winter there without constant losses. The commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, thought otherwise. Ammunition, especially for the heavy guns, was by now so short that he ordered major operations to cease both in Artois and in Champagne, where the last great attack, on 6 October, had brought only the capture of the village of Tahure. The French IX Corps was now merely to support the British at Loos with artillery fire. Their attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt on 13 October ended in heavy losses.

On 15 October Field Marshal Sir John French, who had already learned that the French offensive had been halted, wrote to the commander of the First Army, General Sir Douglas Haig, that he did not wish to carry the First Army’s operations further than was necessary to secure its left flank. Haig replied that the Fosse 8 slag heap by the Hohenzollern Redoubt must nevertheless be retaken, and went on preparing further attacks until early November, when rain and German shelling forced him to give them up. The great Allied autumn offensive in Artois had, however, in practice come to an end.

The balance

According to the French official history, from 25 September to 15 October the 10th Army lost 1,250 officers and 46,980 other ranks, in all more than 48,000 killed, wounded and missing. It took 50 officers and 2,100 men prisoner. German losses on the whole Artois front, against the French and British together, amounted, according to German casualty lists cited by the British official history, to about 56,000 men. The French advanced 1–3 kilometres but did not break through the front, and Vimy Ridge, the main objective of both the spring and the autumn offensives, remained in German hands.

The 10th Army spent the winter in the mud below the ridge, in the position that Foch considered so unfavourable. In the spring of 1916 the British took over the sector. The ridge was finally taken by the Canadians in April 1917, in the Battle of Vimy Ridge.