Battle of the Yser
Notre Dame de Lorette, Cimetière et mémorial français (French cemetery and memorial)
Rat-gnawed bones in disused trenches - The Battles of Artois 1915
In late 1914 and 1915 this high plateau was a battlefield. At that time a small church stood here and in October 1914 the Germans, advancing to take Arras further south, occupied most of this plateau and the valleys beneath. Arras withstood German attacks and the line of the Western Front established itself in a great bulge around Notre Dame, Ablain St Nazaire and Carency a few kilometres away to the south. On the plateau the Germans built five lines of deep trenches and threw up a fortress of sand bags, metal plates and machine guns in the ruins of the old church.
Notre tranchee a Carnoy 1914 (Our trench at Carnoy 1914), Louis Abel-Truchet, 1914. [Lithograph on paper, AWM ART92965]
Lantern tower, French National Memorial and Cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. [DVA]
From December 1914, the French kept up attacks on the Germans in Notre Dame, and during the Second Battle of Artois, which began on 9 May 1915, they wrenched the position from their enemies. Notre Dame fell on 12 May, but only after days of hand–to–hand fighting in the trenches and the ruins.
The man in charge of French forces at the retaking of Notre Dame was General Paul Maistre and a statue of the general lies just beyond the cemetery gates. The main French attack was down below between the villages of Souchez and Neuville St Vaast. It was aimed at forcing the Germans off the eastern heights of Vimy Ridge so that the French could once more command the view out over the plain of Douai and the industrial heartland of northern France then under German occupation. In late July, after appalling casualties on both sides, the battle came to an end without the French gaining Vimy Ridge.
Graves, French National Memorial and Cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. [DVA]
Statue of General Paul Maistre outside the gates of the French National Memorial and Cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. [DVA]
Le rampart de Verdun (The rampart of Verdun), Jonas, Lucien-Hector, c. 1916. [Lithograph chine colle on paper, AWM ART92974]
On 25 September the Third Battle of Artois commenced in conjunction with a large–scale British attack at Loos further north. A huge bombardment of five days preceded the infantry advance towards the village of Souchez below Notre Dame. It rained heavily and the soldiers – the ‘poilus’ – went forward soaked to the skin. Again, casualties were enormous and a French officer, Captain Humbert, recorded: ‘Each night the dead were loaded on carts while the companies going up the line passed by long rows of other dead awaiting their turn to be removed.’ Again, the battle failed to secure Vimy Ridge for the French but Souchez fell.
Inscription, lantern tower, French National Memorial and Cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. It reads: ‘To our glorious dead on the battlefields of Artois and Flanders’. [DVA]
A French machine gun crew, June 1917. [AWM H04313]
In early 1916, the British Expeditionary Force took over this part of the line from the French as the Germans mounted their massive assault on Verdun far to the south–east. Philip Gibbs, the English war correspondent, came up to Notre Dame at the time and wrote of how the French left this ‘sacred ground’ with reluctance – ‘Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead’. Gibb was guided by a French officer around the blasted landscape of Notre Dame as German shells flew over from Vimy Ridge. As the French departed Gibb described the war–torn countryside inherited by the incoming British garrison:
... khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat–gnawed bones, in disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down and uncovered them.
Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, London, 1920, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/nicbt10.txt
In April 1917, as part of the British offensive at Arras, the Canadian Corps attacked the Germans from positions east of Souchez in a line with the modern A26 Autoroute and drove the enemy from Vimy Ridge.
Cross for Soldat Ferdinand Edet, killed on 16 June 1915, French National Memorial and Cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. [DVA]
A French soldier, a ‘Poilu’, of World War I. ‘Poilu’, like ‘Digger’ or ‘Tommy’, was the popular name for a soldier in France during the war. It means literally ‘hairy one’ and came into usage during the period of Napoleon between 1800 and 1815. [AWM H17975]
An Australian and a French soldier on the Somme, June 1918. [AWM E02537]
Badge for French Red Cross Day in Australia, 6 December 1918. [AWM REL25033.005]
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© 2008 Department of Veterans' Affairs and Board of Studies NSW :: Last update - November 2008