CHAPTER III.
THE BATTLE OF THE ANCRE.
On November 9th the weather improved. The wind swung round to the north and the rain ceased, but owing to the season of the year the ground was slow to dry, and in the area of the Fourth Army the roads were still past praying for. Presently frost came and a powder of snow, and then once more the rain. But in the few days of comparatively good conditions the British Commander-in-Chief brought the battle to a fourth stage and won a conspicuous victory.
On the first day of July, as we have seen, our attack failed on the eight miles between Gommecourt and Thiepval. For four months we drove far into the heart of the German defences further south, but the stubborn enemy front before Beaumont Hamel and Serre remained untried. The position was immensely strong, and its holders—not without reason—believed it to be impregnable. All the slopes were tunnelled deep with old catacombs—many of them made originally as hiding-places in the French Wars of Religion—and these bad been linked up by passages to constitute a subterranean city, where whole battalions could be assembled. There were endless redoubts and strong points armed with machine-guns, as we knew to our cost in July, and the wire entanglements were on a scale which has probably never been paralleled. Looked at from our first line they resembled a solid wall of red rust. Very strong, too, were the sides of the Ancre, should we seek to force a passage that way, and the hamlets of Beaucourt and St. Pierre Divion, one on each bank, were fortresses of the Beaumont Hamel stamp. From Gommecourt to the Thiepval ridge the enemy positions were the old first line ones, prepared during two years of leisure, and not the improvised defences on which they had been thrown back between Thiepval and Chaulnes.
At the beginning of November the area of the Allied pressure was over thirty miles, but we had never lost sight of the necessity of widening the breach. It was desirable, with a view to the winter warfare, that the enemy should be driven out of his prepared defences on the broadest front possible. The scheme of an assault upon the Serre-Ancre line might seem a desperate one so late in the season, but we had learned much since July 1st, and as compared with that date we had now certain real advantages. In the first place our whole tactical use of artillery had undergone a change. Our creeping barrage, moving in front of advancing infantry, protected them to a great extent from the machine-gun fusilade from parapets and shell-holes which had been our undoing in the earlier battle, and assisted them in keeping direction. In the second place our possession of the whole Thiepval ridge seriously outflanked the German front north of the Ancre. In the dips of the high ground behind Serre and Beaumont Hamel their batteries had been skilfully emplaced in the beginning of July, and they had been able to devote their whole energy to the attack coming from the west. But now they were facing southward and operating against our lines on the Thiepval ridge, and we commanded them to some extent by possessing the higher ground and the better observation. If, therefore, we should attack again from the west, supported also by our artillery fire from the south, the enemy guns would be fighting on two fronts. The German position in July had been a straight line; it was now a salient.
We had two other assets for a November assault. The slow progress of the Fourth Army during October had led the enemy to conclude that our offensive had ceased for the winter. Drawing a natural deduction from the condition of the country, he argued that an attack on a grand scale was physically impossible, especially an attack upon a fortress which had defied our efforts when we advanced with fresh troops and unwearied impetus in the height of summer. Again, the area from Thiepval northward did not suffer from transport difficulties in the same degree as the southern terrain. Since we would be advancing from what was virtually our old front line, we would escape the problem of crossing five or six miles of shell-torn ground by roads ploughed up and broken from four months’ traffic.
It is necessary to grasp the topographical features of the new battle-ground. From north of Schwaben Redoubt our front curved sharply to the north-west, crossing the Ancre five hundred yards south of the hamlet of St. Pierre Divion, and extending northward along the foot of the slopes on which lay the villages of Beaumont Hamel and Serre. From the high ground north-west of the Ancre several clearly marked spurs descend to the upper valley of that stream. The chief is a long ridge with Serre at its western extremity, the village of Puisieux on the north, Beaucourt sur Ancre on the south, and Miraumont at the eastern end. South of this there is another feature running from a point a thousand yards north of Beaumont Hamel to the village of Beaucourt. This latter spur has on its south-west side a shallow depression up which runs the Beaucourt-Beaumont Hamel road, and it is defined on the north-east by the Beaucourt-Serre road. All the right bank of the Ancre is thus a country of slopes and pockets. On the left bank there is a stretch of flattish ground under the Thiepval ridge extending up the valley past St. Pierre Divion to Grandcourt,
On Sunday, November 12th, Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army held the area from Gommecourt in the north to the Albert-Bapaume road. Opposite Serre and extending south to a point just north of Beaumont Hamel lay two Divisions of the old Regulars, now much changed in composition, but containing battalions that had been through the whole campaign since Mons. In front of Beaumont Hamel was a Highland Territorial Division. They had been more than eighteen months in France, and at the end of July and the beginning of August had spent seventeen days in the line at High Wood. On their right, from a point just south of the famous Y Ravine to the Ancre, lay the Naval Division, which had had a long record of fighting from Antwerp to Gallipoli, but now for the first time took part in an action on the Western front. Across the river lay two Divisions of the New Army. The boundary of the attack on the right was roughly defined by the Thiepval-Grandcourt road.
The British guns began on Sunday a bombardment devoted to the destruction of the enemy’s wire and parapets. It went on fiercely during the night, but did not increase to hurricane fire, so that the enemy had no warning of the hour of our attack. In the darkness of the early morning of Monday, November 13th, the fog gathered thick—a cold, raw vapour which wrapped the ground like a garment. It was still black darkness, darker even than the usual moonless winter night, when, at 5.45 a.m., our troops crossed the parapets. The attack had been most carefully planned, but in that dense shroud it was hard for the best trained soldiers to keep direction. On the other hand, the enemy had no warning of our coming till our men were surging over his trenches.
The attack of the British left wing on Serre failed, as it had failed on July 1st. That stronghold, being further removed from the effect of our flanking fire from the Thiepval ridge, presented all the difficulties which had baffled us at the first attempt. South of it and north of Beaumont Hamel we carried the German first position and swept beyond the fortress called the Quadrilateral—which had proved too hard a knot to unravel four months earlier. This gave us the northern part of the under feature which we have already described as running south-east to Beaucourt. Our right wing had a triumphant progress. Almost at once it gained its objectives. St. Pierre Divion fell early in the morning and the Division of the New Army engaged there advanced a mile and took over 1,000 prisoners at a total cost of 450 casualties. By the evening they were holding the Hansa line which runs from the neighbourhood of Stuff Trench on the heights to the banks of the river opposite Beaucourt.
But it was on the doings of the two central Divisions that