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Updated: May 21, 2025
Two new divisions had been brought up and were hurled into the struggle only to be literally torn to fragments before they could reach even an outpost. On this date also Gavrelle was violently attacked from the north. This was the fourteenth or fifteenth counterattack the Germans had made against the village, which failed as all the previous ones had done.
We watched him spin round like a teetotum and kenned that he was bye with it. 'You are sure he was killed? I asked. 'Yes, sirr. When we counter-attacked we fund his body. There is a grave close by the farm of Gavrelle, and a wooden cross at its head bears the name of the Graf von Schwabing and the date of his death. The Germans took Gavrelle a little later.
We passed slowly along the road to the east of Arras, honeycombed still with dug-outs, and gun emplacements, and past trenches and wire fields, till suddenly a mere sign-board, nothing more "Gavrelle!" shows us that we are approaching the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch of the Hindenburg line, which the Canadians and the 17th British Corps, under Sir Henry Horne, stormed and took in September of last year.
As for the rest there is a marshy lagoon called the Patte d'Oie beside the farm of Gavrelle, which runs all the way north to the river, though in most places it only seems like a soft patch in the meadows. This the tanks had to cross to reach our line, and they never made it.
He was in all the fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula and was wounded, but returned to duty and was one of the last to embark on the final evacuation of Helles, in January, 1916. It was largely due to him that Gavrelle was taken; and he was awarded a bar to his D.S.O. In October, 1917, in the Battle of Passchendaele the Naval Division were heavily engaged.
What might be termed the second phase of the battle of Arras was begun in the morning of April 23, 1917, when the British resumed the offensive. At 5 o'clock in the morning the British advance started east of Arras on a front of about eight miles, capturing strong positions and the villages of Gavrelle and Guémappe.
On 23 April Gavrelle and Guémappe were captured after desperate fighting; and on the 28th an advance was made at Arleux and Oppy. On 3 May the Canadians took Fresnoy, and the Australians trenches at Bullecourt, but the Germans kept up a series of stubborn counter-attacks, especially at Fresnoy, Roeulx, and Bullecourt, and Fresnoy was lost on the 8th.
As not unexpectedly happened, we had left the scene of our labours before winter set in. More than three weeks of October were spent by the Battalion in the trenches. This was no great hardship. Half of the time was spent nearly two miles behind the line in an old German trench known as the Gavrelle Switch.
After a week spent in the back area, advance by the usual stepping stones was made to the front line. The 184th was the last Brigade to go into the trenches; not till the beginning of October did it take over the line. The front held by the 61st Division stretched from the Chemical Works of Roeux upon the right to a point south of Gavrelle upon the left.
The occupation of these places and of strongholds south of Gavrelle as far as the river Scarpe broke the so-called Oppy line, defending the Hindenburg positions before Douai. The British were successful in clearing the enemy out of the neighborhood of Monchy, which commands the region for forty miles.
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