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East of Epehy, between Bullecourt and Fontaine les Croisilles, important positions also had been captured by the gallant "Tommies." "The enemy was completely surprised." This was the laconic message sent to Field Marshal Haig by the man who had led the British to victory, as he rested until the morrow. Along the entire forty- mile line the attack had been successful.
And then at last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, mass-heroism, desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed, the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from Bullecourt to St.-Quentin.
Along the Aisne and south of St. Quentin the French continued to bombard enemy lines. A violent attack made by the Germans on the 12th against French positions on the Craonne Plateau north of Rheims broke down under French artillery and machine-gun fire. The British continued to hold their own in Bullecourt and to improve their position there and at Cavalry Farm and Roeux.
The British fiercely counterattacked, driving the enemy back, and gained more ground than they had held before. At Bullecourt there was the same story to tell. This place, to use the expression of an eyewitness, "had become a flaming hell." In twelve counterattacks the Germans had only succeeded in destroying a few of the British advanced positions.
In numerous raids carried out in the night on enemy trenches in the vicinity of Bullecourt, Roeux, Loos, and Hooge, much damage was wrought to German defenses and a considerable number of prisoners were captured. One daring body of British troops remained for two hours in German trenches, blowing up dugouts and inflicting serious casualties on the garrison.
They had only been able to maintain a hold on the southwest corner of the village owing to the tunnels in which they were protected from the heaviest fire. A German counterattack of unusual strength was delivered in the morning of May 16, 1917. No bloodier struggle was fought during the Allied offensive in 1917 than here at Bullecourt.
Early in the morning of May 20, 1917, a British attack broke into the Hindenburg line between Fontaine-les-Croisilles and Bullecourt, southeast of Arras. The Germans made several violent attempts to recover their lost positions, but were unable to make any gains during the day. The purpose of the British attacks in this sector was to capture the last salient on the front southeast of Arras.
On May 3, 1917, General Haig's troops struck a fourth blow against the German front east and southeast of Arras, penetrating the Hindenburg line west of Queant. The British push toward Cherisy, Bullecourt, and Queant was at the southern end of the day's major operation, which covered a range of nearly eighteen miles. At the north Fresnoy was the chief objective.
At a later hour the British attacked and regained the lost ground, but were forced to withdraw when the Germans brought forward two fresh divisions. The Germans continued their violent attempts to regain Roeux and that part of Bullecourt which was firmly held by the British.
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown.
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