Monday November 4^th, 1918

Rose 8:30. Nothing doing. Standing to. Mail from home – two letters. Wrote home. Jerry fires at one of our observation balloons but is brought down. Balloon comes down in flames. Town is a mass of ruins, orders for moving up.

Taking Le Cateau

The 9th Battalion has been to Le Cateau before.  It first visited en route to the Battle of the Selle in the middle of October.  Today it is again a stopping-off point for the 9th Battalion as it makes its way to the current Front Line, now several kilometres away.

Le Cateau had been lost to the Allies in August 1914.  It was first re-taken during the Second Battle of Le Cateau on October 10th, 1918.  However, its strategic position caused the Germans to dig in.  Which is probably why it wasn’t until October 17th, 1918 that Douglas Haig, in his night report at the beginning of the Battle of the Selle, wrote:

‘On the left flank of our attack we have cleared the eastern portion of Le Cateau and established ourselves on the line of the railway beyond the town.’ ¹

The photograph shows dug-outs in the Railway Embankment, near Le Cateau. It could be depicting the very spot that Douglas Haig described in his report.

Destruction

Frank mentions that the town is in ruins – Le Cateau has obviously paid the price for being heavily fought over.

Sometimes the damage was caused by the tactics of the German’s retreat: ‘Explosions and fires in Caudry and other villages indicate that the enemy is rapidly destroying dumps that there is no time to remove.’³

However the destruction could be more wilful.  There were reports of the Germans booby-trapping towns and villages as they retreated.  Some of these news stories could have been propaganda, designed to ensure that the Allied resolve stayed true. A potential case in point:

‘In one village, where the people had retired to cellars with three days’ food they had been hoarding for this occasion, the German had hoisted a Red Cross flag on the church tower to tell that civilians were in the town, and we forbore to shell it. Within an hour of the enemy’s departure the German guns were pounding these same civilians in the village.’ ²

Regardless of the cause, the devastation was considerable:

‘The fires of Cambrai quite lit up our battle-front in the pitch black hours of the first assault, but its skeleton must now be empty of the enemy, and we should soon be drenching its fires. Flames from other villages joined their funereal light thrown luridly back from the low clouds.’ º

Frank is a first-hand witness to the fate of Le Cateau: ‘a mass of ruins‘.

9^th Battalion War Diary – 4^th November 1918 – Le Cateau

Battalion rested and packed up all surplus kit to battle order, and prepared for battle. Operation Order No 16 (Appendix No 3).

References & Further Reading

¹ Sir Douglas Haig’s Night Report, page 5, The Guardian, October 18th, page 5

² ‘Destruction of villages, The Guardian, October 10th, 1918, page 5

³ Report in The Guardian, October 10th, 1918, page 5

º Article, The Guardian, October 9th, page 5

* Art.IWM ART 3674, copyright Imperial War Museum