Wednesday November 6th, 1918
Parade 8:30. Practice 9am till 12 and 2pm till 3pm. Very comfortable indeed. Wrote home.
Winter on the Western Front
Frank, the Band and presumably the rest of the B-team have been left behind in Le Cateau. Frank seems to be enjoying both the band practice and his billet. He is ‘very comfortable indeed‘.
Meanwhile the Battalion has moved on again from its overnight billet in Landrecies and is heading eastward to Maroilles. It is moving towards the front to join in the pursuit of the retreating enemy. However time is running out: winter is on its way.
‘The 1918 summer and autumn campaign on the part of the Allies was perfectly clearly a neck-and-neck race with the weather.’ ¹
Every winter since the war began, bad weather and especially the mud have severely hampered military operations. Both sides know it. For example, just weeks ago, Ludendorff proposed that if Germany could just delay defeat for a few weeks, its Army could re-group over the winter and continue the war into 1919.
The photograph shows the conditions faced in winter 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. Rain, snow and the shell-churned ground have created a quagmire. The horses and riders are covered in mud.
Therefore the Allies have to move quickly. Ideally they want to defeat Germany. At the very least they need to get past the devastated and stripped battlefields to the relatively untouched towns and cities of northern France and Belgium. There, they might hope to secure adequate billets and basics for their troops.
Logistics and Winter
The following photograph shows supply limbers going up over newly won-ground during the Battle of Canal du Nord. It is late September 1918 and at least the ground looks relatively dry. Note the remains of the light railway line, destroyed by the Germans during their retreat to hamper the Allies.
The scale of the logistics problems in wintertime was written about by the British war correspondent, Philip Gibbs. He cabled the following report to the New York Times on October 23rd, 1918:
‘The British troops slogged through water pools and trudged down rutty roads with the mud splashing them to their neck, while lorries surged along broken tracks, swung around shell crates and skirted deep ditches. Gun teams with all their horses plastered to the ears with mud traveled through the fog to take up new positions beyond the newly captured towns. All this makes war difficult and slow, and what is most amazing is the speed with which the armies are following up the German retreat like a world on the move, with aerodromes and hospitals, telegraph and transport, headquarters staffs and labor companies, all the vast population and mechanism which make up modern armies, across battlefields like the craters of the moon to country forty miles from their old bases.’²
Roll-on the 9th!
9th Battalion War Diary – 6th November 1918 – Landrecies
Battalion moved in the afternoon to Maroilles and billeted there.
References & Further Reading
¹ ‘Weather Controls over the Fighting During the Autumn of 1918‘ by Professor Robert DeC. Ward, Harvard University, The Scientific Monthly, January 1919, Page 6
² ibid, Page 10
* Q 2981, copyright Imperial War Museums
^ Q 9340, copyright Imperial War Museums