First World War: Amiens -The start of the end

In war, all battles are bloody and, for the many in the wrong place at the wrong time, fatal.

In this one, perhaps limited context, then, the Battle of Amiens, remembered yesterday at the French city’s cathedral, was in no way unlike others in the four long years of the First World War.

The crude scoresheet at the battle’s end was 46,000 Allied soldiers killed or injured, against the German loss of 75,000, including many thousands taken prisoner.

However, Amiens was as significant as the much better- recollected carnages of the Somme and Passchendaele.

The surprise attack by a massive Allied force — British and Irish, Canadian, Australian, and French — announced a dramatic change in the tactics that had bogged down both armies in futile trench warfare, achieving infinitesimal advances at huge costs in body count.

At Amiens, the Allies advanced eight miles in three days, sufficient to persuade Germany’s emperor that his war was lost. “We have,” he said, “reached the limits of our capacity. The war must be terminated.”

And so, after a 100 days in which the Allies had a series of offensive successes, it was.

Amiens can be marked as a decisive, but perhaps not ultimate, turning point in Europe’s history. It was the beginning of the end of the 1914-18 struggle.

It modernised warfare, as Europe was to see a mere 21 years later, thanks in part to the mess that was made by the Allies of the reparations agreement, and to Hitler’s stab-in-the-back lie.