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Updated: May 11, 2025
The British obtained a grip on Bullecourt for the time being, but they knew the respite would be brief, when the Germans would return and renew the bloody struggle. The old Hindenburg line having been breached at Bullecourt and Wancourt, the Germans were now busy strengthening their new line of defense which ran through Montigny, Drocourt, and Queant.
For some days General Haig's troops had been tightening their grip around Bullecourt, which lies in the original Hindenburg line due east of Croisilles. The Australians who held this front had surrounded the village on three sides and its fall was imminent. On May 8, 1917, Bavarian troops stormed Fresnoy village and wood and wrested some ground from the British on the western side.
The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the Fifth Army.
On the 14th we completed our capture of Roeulx, and on the 17th that of Bullecourt. The fighting died down, towards the end of May, and the scene was shifted farther north in June to the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge. During the month of the battle of Arras we had taken over 20,000 prisoners, and the French claimed more on the Aisne. We had also bitten into the Hindenburg "line."
During May there has been no such striking advance on either the French or British fronts, though Roeux and Bullecourt, both very important points, from their bearing on the Drocourt-Quéant line, behind which lie Douai and Cambrai, have been captured by the British, and the French have continuously bettered their line and defied the most desperate counter-attacks.
The British and French casualties had also been very heavy the former numbering about 80,000 and the latter 93,000 including killed, wounded, and prisoners. On the British front the Germans continued to make the most desperate efforts to regain a section of the Hindenburg line east of Bullecourt, which the Australians had won in the advance of May 3, 1917.
Severe and continuous fighting went on during May 9, 1917, in the neighborhood of Bullecourt, where the Germans tried vainly to shake the British hold on the position. East of Gricourt a portion of the German front and support lines were captured by the British, also a considerable number of prisoners.
On the 16th September, the Battalion was relieved and marched by companies to a bivouac area by Bullecourt. On arrival a thunderstorm took place. The men were soon wet, the ground sodden, and the bivouac sheets caked with mud. To this was added the fact that fires and lights were not permitted on account of the enemy aeroplanes. The next day, however, was fine and everyone quickly dried.
I watched the faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by instinct or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries the chanting of the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high mass which were beyond their understanding, and which they could not link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made haste with their killing.
After the first great attack which gave us the Vimy Ridge and brought our line close to Lens in the north, and to the neighbourhood of Bullecourt in the south, the 23rd of April saw the second British advance, which gave us Gravrelle and Guemappe, and made further breaches in the Hindenburg line. Altogether the Allies in little more than a month took 50,000 prisoners, and large numbers of guns.
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