Under the hazy moonlight, the German positions built along the road looked like a straight canal, and the German naval infantry wearing gray tops and blue beanies were deployed in a density of about two meters, and they were engrossed in the front, and in the open fields, countless figures were like flowers and plants swaying in the wind, slowly spreading at the speed of rising tide. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

"Steady! Steady! Finger off your trigger! Fire when the flare is on! Aim to hit! ”

Many non-commissioned officers walked back and forth in the trenches, reminding their soldiers to calm down, and except for their deliberately suppressed voices, the silence on the position naturally made people feel nervous, but the 3rd Naval Infantry Brigade was no longer the ignorant and immature rookie unit of ten days ago. At Amiens, they thwarted the French counterattack with a solid defense; At Beauvais, they crushed the French resistance with a devastating attack; On the front line of the Oise River, they truly experienced the bloody cruelty of war, with failed attacks, heavy casualties, and painful setbacks that made the surviving soldiers give up excessive optimism and unrealistic illusions, and made them sophisticated, steady, and mature. After nearly a week of rest and replenishment, these troops, who had been battered in front of the French line on the Oise River, were regained their vitality. Although many of the soldiers were still using outdated M1888 rifles, and the overall combat qualities of the reservists were lower than those of long-serving front-line soldiers, these brave naval infantry were clearly ready to withstand enemy attacks.

This defensive line on the northern outskirts of Amiens was reinforced on the basis of the remaining fortifications of the French army, using the standard configuration of trenches + barbed wire + trenches + civil bunkers, and the obstacles within the range of the guns were cleared, except for the craters and the ruins of a few scattered farmhouses, it was difficult for the soldiers of the attacking side to find a firing bunker in front of the position.

"Attention! Note! Ruler 400, ready to fire! All ready to fire! ”

The non-commissioned officers conveyed the instructions to prepare for battle to each combat squad in the trenches in the form of passes, and the rapid sound caused the atmosphere on the position to freeze suddenly. Suddenly, several guns fired flares into the air. Although they knew that the enemy's attacking force was ahead, when the flares illuminated the fields, the German naval infantrymen who were participating in the battle for the first time were still stunned by the sight before them: hundreds of British officers and soldiers were like the waves of the rising tide, they wore khaki flat-topped short-brimmed hats or Scottish-style highlander beanies, and wore solid-colored, khaki military uniforms with typical British characteristics, almost all of them carried a double-shouldered marching backpack, cross-shoulder grumbags, cartridge boxes, bayonets, short shovels, The kettle is hung neatly and orderly in the corresponding position of the armed belt, giving people the impression of being bulky, complicated, strong and powerful.

When the flares bloomed in the night sky, the British soldiers in the front were only about 300 meters away from the German battle line, and the gunfire suddenly rang out, and they suddenly fell in rows like harvested wheat, and the British soldiers behind did not immediately prostrate to avoid the bullets. With a faint shout, they bowed their heads and rushed forward with unabated speed, their rifles already loaded with bayonets in front of them. After a while, the artillery of both sides roared in unison, and the shells whistled and fell into the battlefield, and the German artillery fire blew up the attacking British officers and soldiers, killing and wounding them, and the accurate fire of the British artillery also killed many German infantry in an instant, greatly reducing the defensive firepower of the position.

"Medic! Someone was hurt! Medic! ”

In the German trenches, the sound of calling for medical personnel came and went, which made many soldiers who participated in the battle for the first time feel palpitations, but there were also people who were completely controlled by the nervous and exuberant fighting mood, and they automatically blocked the sound from the outside world, only knowing that they kept aiming, firing, reloading, and even being injured without realizing it.

The artillery fire on both sides continued for a while, and the rhythm of attack and defense on the battlefield changed. Realizing that the enemy was well defended, that it could not be taken by rushing and striking hard, and that their own artillery had not achieved the desired suppression effect, the British soldiers stopped in an orderly manner and fired at the German defenders on their stomachs.

The M1888 and M1898 rifles used by the German naval infantry were far inferior to the British army's Enfield MKI rifles, and they mainly relied on the MG08 water-cooled heavy machine gun and Madsen light machine gun to form an insurmountable dense network of firepower, firmly controlling the range within 1200 meters. If this continued, the British army would not have breached this German line no matter how many troops they invested, but the British victory at Abbeville and Pickini was no accident, and the stalemate lasted only ten minutes, and the battlefield suddenly sounded the scream of heavy shells breaking through the air. At the beginning, the interval between the two rounds of shelling was as long as two or three minutes, and after finding the point of impact, the artillery fire became dense, and the German defensive positions were gradually shrouded in deadly light and smoke.

The British shallow-water gunboats in the Somme were unsurprisingly engaged in the battle, but the intensity of the fire was significantly less intense than when they had previously shelled the Germans at Abwehr and Picini. In fact, the Somme is not navigable in its entirety, and the Amiens section is a watershed, and in the dry season only yachts and river barges with shallow drafts can pass, and shallow gunboats of larger tonnage may run aground if they force their way there.

Seeing that their own support artillery fire gradually controlled the situation, the British infantry re-engaged in the attack, but just as they were approaching victory step by step, a more sharp and piercing whistling sound suddenly sounded on the battlefield, a large wave of heavy shells smashed into the field in front of the German position, the ground trembled violently, the battlefield was like purgatory, even if they were not hit by shrapnel, the British officers and soldiers who were a little closer to the place where the shells fell could not escape, some of them were directly shocked to death, some were shocked to the point of organ injury, ear and nose bleeding, the attacking troops were in chaos, and the offensive was suddenly disintegrated.

At first, the British officers and men angrily thought that their own gunboats had mistaken the firing parameters, but after a few minutes, they realized that this was a premeditated and prepared move of the Germans, and that those terrible cannons were deployed outside the range of the British shallow gunboats, and although they were far from the battlefield, they fired very accurately, and began a fierce large-scale artillery bombardment almost without adjustment. Thousands of British troops entering the attack were immobilized in the open fields, and the number of casualties increased over time, and the commander had no choice but to order a retreat.

By the time they retreated, the British officers and men were not as calm as they had been, leaving hundreds of new craters and countless mutilated limbs on the battlefield. Neither in Abweil nor in Pickini suffered such a painful setback, and the mental and psychological impact was incalculable, and the beautiful counterattack of the German heavy artillery unit comforted the thousands of souls of the German 32nd Infantry Division, and also reassured the worried defenders of Amiens.

The turbulent night was not brought to an end by the temporary retreat of the British, who were advancing along the east bank of the Somme to launch an offensive northeast of Amiens, with as many as six or seven thousand infantry troops engaged in the attack, and the British shallow water gunboats tracing the river continued to provide effective fire support for the ground forces. From Abbeville to Amiens, three or four battles were fought in quick succession in just over a day, and the vitality of the British army was truly amazing, and the way the troops attacked was a little smarter than the French.

In the defensive line northeast of Amiens, the British encountered infantry units under the German 1st Army Corps, whose weaponry and tactical awareness were very different from those of the German Marine Corps, whose front-line companies and platoons were not equipped with expensive Madsen light machine guns, but were equipped with MG08 heavy machine guns according to the standard proportions of the German Army, and the well-trained infantry mainly relied on the strong, durable, and powerful Mauser M1898. During the battle, the German infantry, which numbered less than a third of the opponent, held out in the trenches, and with the support of the divisional artillery, the British attacking troops were held back in the barbed wire in front of the position, until the British cavalry launched a near-suicidal charge, and the stalemate was broken. Some British soldiers broke into the German trenches, and the two sides immediately began a white-knuckle battle, and at the most critical moment of the battle, the German cavalry deployed in the city rushed to the ground and drove the British troops from their positions with a small counter-assault.

To conquer a well-defended city of the enemy, unless the strength of the attacking side is much stronger than the opponent, it is difficult to end the battle in a relatively short time, but on the Paris front, a hundred kilometers away, the Entente army has put all its troops into battle, and the battlefield situation seems to have a slight upper hand, but the German army has only invested half of the main force in the east of Paris, and at the same time, there are two considerable forces from the north and south flanks to storm the outer defense line of Paris, this battle has reached a critical moment, The combat operations of the British Expeditionary Force in the Somme Valley were significant and time-sensitive.

The attack on the German defense line northeast of Amiens was only one step away from victory, and the British commander was naturally not willing to give up, and just as he was reorganizing the attack, the British shallow water gunboats on the Somme were suddenly shelled by the Germans. Because it was impossible to know the exact location of the German artillery positions, the British gunboats were completely in a situation of being passively beaten, after all, they were not dreadnoughts, they could withstand the attack of ordinary shells, so they had to move their berths in a hurry, but their every move could not escape the "eyes" of the German artillery, and soon two gunboats were wounded by bullets. The British cavalry was dispatched to search along the riverbank, but could not find the German outpost, so the British gunboat had to sail down the river and voluntarily withdraw from the range covered by the German artillery. Without the support of gunboats, the British commander had to postpone the attack and wait until the Mandate of Heaven to make plans.

Before dawn, the German airfield on the western outskirts of Amiens was an unusually busy scene, with pilots, maintenance technicians and aircrews carefully overhauling and maintaining all the aircraft for the next frequent takeoffs and landings, and some fuel and bombs were transported from the warehouse to the tarmac in advance. Around the airfield, more than 2,600 officers and men, including three battalions of naval infantry who had been brought back from the front line on the Oise River with train guns, were laying new fortifications overnight. In order to expand the defensive area to the railway line, they split the barbed wire fence around the airfield, set up blocking lines only at intersections and open areas, and set up machine gun positions in nearby houses and woods, and 20 train guns were concentrated in the defense area, and the infantry also piled sandbags and erected machine guns on the carriages of these train guns.

(End of chapter)