The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow. From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban’s earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gunfire was immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right. By the afternoon the entire living German population, more than seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down below in the valley on our side of the lines, and on the ridge were many of their dead as I saw them afterward horribly mangled by shellfire in the upheaved earth. The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper—“Uncle Harper,” he was called—had done as well as the Canadians, though they had less honor, and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional sign as I saw it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. “Well, General,” said a Scottish sergeant, “they don’t call us Harper’s Duds any more!” … On the right English county troops of the 12th Division, 3rd Division, and others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had broken through, deeply and widely, capturing many men and guns after hard fighting round machine-gun redoubts. That night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras, where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in other days of history. They herded together with their bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow and giving a little human warmth. All night through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: “It is cold! It is cold!” And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.
Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.
“The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the capital fighting during this year.
“April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six thousand yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without more ado. It takes a good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and guns as well as munitions that results from such a breach. It was the business of the Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large scale. But in view of the troops available, and of the war situation, it was simply not possible to hold a second division in readiness behind each division that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day like April 9th upset all calculations. It was a matter of days before a new front could be formed and consolidated. Even after the troops were ultimately in line the issue of the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very materially upon whether the enemy followed up his initial success with a fresh attack and by fresh successes made it difficult for us to create a firm front. In view of the weakening of the line that inevitably resulted, such successes were only too easy to achieve.
“From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as Bullecourt. On April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the night before the 12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23rd and 28th, and also May 3rd, were again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between there was some bitter local fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor successful counterattacks, and on the other hand lost ground slightly at various points.”
I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city itself, when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its ruined streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the German lines, and I went along them when one line of men was going into battle and another was coming back, wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the fumes of gas in their lungs—their steel hats clinking as they groped past one another. In vaults each side of these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long
