First Battle of Champagne, 1914 to 1915: Joffre's winter offensive

The ground was chalk, and when the rain came it turned to mud. Across it, for three winter months, French infantry went forward against a German line that had been dug only weeks before, gained a trench, a wood, a ruined village, and lost them again to the counterattack. The First Battle of Champagne was one of the first great tests of the trench war that had settled over the Western Front in the autumn of 1914. It showed, at enormous cost, that a well-entrenched line could not be broken by courage alone.²

Who won the First Battle of Champagne and why?

The German defenders, in the sense that their line held. The French Fourth Army took the first German trenches and a few kilometers of chalk at a cost of 93,000 men, but faulty shells, winter weather and German reserves rushed to each threatened point stopped it from breaking through, and Joffre called the offensive off in March 1915.³

Background: a war of siege

By mid-November 1914 the race to the sea had ended on the North Sea coast. The war of movement was over, and the front settled along a line of nearly 700 kilometers from the sea to the Swiss border, where the armies dug in to shelter from artillery fire.⁴› The First Marne, 1914

General Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, did not give up on the offensive. He believed in the breakthrough: a heavy bombardment, an infantry assault, then exploitation into open country, where the Germans could be beaten in a war of maneuver. He had reasons to act. Much of north-eastern France was occupied, the Russian army was under heavy German and Austro-Hungarian pressure, and a Germany fighting on two fronts could be worn down. Answering his critics in 1915, Bourlet writes, he is said to have replied that he was nibbling at them; Lukasik calls the idea grignotage, the nibbling away of German materiel and reserves.⁵

Armies and commanders

Joffre's plan called for two concentric offensives against the shoulders of the Noyon salient, the great bulge of German-held territory pointing toward Paris: one in Artois, north of Paris, and one in Champagne, to the east. An attack in Artois, against the Lorette ridge, had already failed between 14 and 24 December. The Champagne attack went ahead regardless.⁶

The French. The main blow fell to the French Fourth Army of General Fernand de Langle de Cary, which held the Champagne front. Buchan counts it at four corps at the start of January, with two fresh corps of the new formations arriving in the middle of the month.⁷

The Germans. Facing him was the German Third Army of General Karl von Einem. Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff, had decided in November 1914 to stand purely on the defensive in France and sent some seven infantry divisions and a cavalry division east, but Einem's army held a line it had had weeks to fortify. Buchan gives Einem four corps in January and at least one and a half more by way of reinforcements in February, among them six battalions of the Prussian Guard brought down from Ypres.⁸

The ground. The fighting was on the dry, rolling chalk plain of Champagne, the Champagne pouilleuse, between Souain and Massiges, with Perthes-lès-Hurlus and the farm of Beauséjour at its center. Buchan noted that before the war the region had been France's great training ground for troops, its every position studied in the annual maneuvers. Why attack here? Bourlet notes that a breakthrough in Champagne, as in Artois, would open country for maneuver; Buchan adds that the chalk drained quickly and made good trenches, and that a French lateral railway from Reims to Verdun ran behind the front while the Germans depended on a lesser line from Bazancourt to Grandpré.⁹

The commanders' decisions

Joffre's goal was a rupture, a breach in the German defenses that would force the enemy out of his trenches and into the open. Buchan sets out the more modest aims beneath it: in Champagne the direct objective was to push the Germans back about three miles and threaten their lateral railway, and the wider purpose was to wear them down and hold troops in the west that might otherwise reinforce Hindenburg against Russia. Falkenhayn, from the other side, called the winter attacks relief offensives for the Russians.¹⁰

Langle de Cary had to make the plan work on the ground. Lukasik writes that after the first weeks of costly, inconclusive attacks he suspended the offensive in mid-January to take stock and draw the lessons, and that when it resumed he tried methods that tied the artillery closely to the infantry, with fire meant to keep pace with the assault through every phase.¹¹

Falkenhayn's decision was to hold with what he had and move reserves quickly to wherever the line was threatened. He wrote after the war that during the winter battle in Champagne his defenders were outnumbered by as much as six to one, and credited their system of defense, the way the lines were built and manned and the swift transfer of reserves. Buchan saw the other side of the same decision: Einem had to call for reserves that would otherwise have gone east or stayed in Flanders.¹²

The battle in phases

December. The offensive opened on 20 December 1914 on a front of about thirty kilometers, supported by nearly 700 guns. The attacking infantry established footholds in the first German line, but further progress proved difficult in the face of fierce counterattacks, bad weather and defective artillery ammunition: Lukasik describes faulty shells bursting in the breeches of the French guns or doing little damage to the German positions.¹³

January. The French line ran through Souain, south of Perthes and south of the farm of Beauséjour. In January, local attacks took the village of Perthes-lès-Hurlus and the high ground north of it, the best gun position in the neighborhood. Rain and cold slowed every movement, and in mid-January Langle de Cary paused to take stock.¹⁴

February and March. The general attack resumed on 16 February, with even more artillery. The Germans held a strong position north of Beauséjour, on a ridge between two small valleys, and between 25 and 27 February French colonial troops carried it after heavy fighting. Elsewhere the front crept forward wood by wood and ridge by ridge, by Buchan's reckoning about five yards a day over the month, and the German line held.¹⁵

The German view. Falkenhayn described the fighting as a monotonous, fluctuating struggle in which the attackers gained no notable advantage anywhere. At many points, he wrote, the Germans not only won back the ground lost in the first rush but pushed into the French lines themselves. Buchan, writing in 1915 from the French reports, has two regiments of the Prussian Guard almost destroyed in the February fighting.¹⁶

Along the rest of the front. Champagne was not the only sector where the French attacked that winter. Bourlet lists secondary offensives at Saint-Mihiel in December and January, on the Aisne in January and in the Argonne forest, and Buchan describes the see-saw forest fighting in the Argonne, east of the Champagne battlefield, through the same months. Their aims were local and their results, as Bourlet puts it, just as inconclusive.¹⁷

Turning point: the defense that held

There was no single moment when the battle turned; it simply failed to turn. Each assault that took a German trench came up against the next one, and German reserves arrived to restore the line. Lukasik blames the French inability to attack the whole German defensive system at once, through its depth.¹⁸

The sources do not agree on the day it ended. Bourlet ends the battle on 18 March 1915, and the 1914-1918-online encyclopedia on 20 March, when the French high command called the operation off. Buchan notes that when Joffre reviewed the troops of the Fourth Army on 24 March, they had still not won a point from which to threaten the German railway.¹⁹

Counting the losses

The French cost is the better known. The 1914-1918-online encyclopedia gives 93,000 dead, wounded or missing for about five square kilometers of ground. Bourlet does not separate the two winter offensives, but writes that the First Battle of Champagne and the First Battle of Artois together cost the lives of more than 200,000 French soldiers.²⁰

German losses are much less certain. Buchan, writing in 1915 from the French communiqués, reported 10,000 German dead buried and 2,000 prisoners taken, and claimed that the German staff admitted losses heavier than at the Masurian Lakes. Falkenhayn gives no figure for his own side and insists that the attackers suffered disproportionately heavy losses.²¹

Aftermath

The gains were derisory: the village of Perthes-lès-Hurlus and the small fort of Beauséjour, an advance of a few kilometers at most. Joffre did not change his mind. He still saw Champagne as the best place to break through, Lukasik writes, and after a summer of preparation he attacked there again.²²

On 25 September 1915 nearly half a million men of General Castelnau's Center Army Group attacked on a front of about thirty kilometers after a three-day bombardment. Lukasik counts over 2,000 guns; Bourlet more than 1,000 field guns and 600 heavy pieces. On the first day the French broke through the first German line, but the attack ran out of steam as it neared the second. Lukasik puts French casualties at over 62,000 and the prisoners at 18,000 in the first four days; Bourlet gives 150,000 French losses in Champagne alone and 25,000 prisoners and 150 guns taken. Joffre ended the offensive on 14 October.²³› Second Battle of Artois, 1915

Legacy and memory

At the time, the battle could be presented as a success. Writing in 1915, John Buchan called it probably the most successful of all the Allied enterprises in the West in the first months of the year, measured by the losses it inflicted rather than the ground it gained. Later historians have been harsher. For Lukasik the Champagne offensives showed how hard it was for modern armies to master the new war of attrition.²⁴

After the second offensive failed, the war's center of gravity moved elsewhere, to Verdun, Flanders and the Chemin des Dames, and the old battlefields of Champagne became one of the Western Front's quiet sectors, where worn-out units were sent to rest. Lukasik notes that they came alive again in 1918, when the Fourth Army under General Gouraud broke through the German defenses and advanced toward Sedan.²⁵› The Battle of Verdun, 1916

Visiting today

Some of the villages the battle was fought over were never rebuilt. Perthes-lès-Hurlus, Hurlus, Le Mesnil-lès-Hurlus, Tahure and Ripont lie inside the military camp of Suippes, set up on the war-damaged land in the early 1920s under the name of the camp of Tahure; the ruins of their churches and cemeteries are what remains.²⁶