La Lys, 9 April 1918: the morning Portugal’s army in France was overrun

Captain Dartford, a British liaison officer attached to the Portuguese 4th Infantry Brigade, woke at 4.10 on the morning of Tuesday 9 April 1918 to very heavy shelling. He telephoned brigade headquarters. Every line was already cut. He dressed and set out up the Rue de la Gare under fire, smelt gas, pulled on his respirator and dodged into doorways as the shells came down.1 source1 source

When he reached the brigade dugout there was nothing to do. For three hours the men inside kept the gas blankets down and struggled for air, while a thick fog lay over the flat country of French Flanders and cut every post off from its neighbours. Along the whole Portuguese front the telephone lines had gone.1 source1 source

By the end of the morning the Portuguese sector between Neuve Chapelle and Fauquissart had been overrun. Portugal calls what followed the Battle of La Lys, after the river that ran behind the lines. It was the costliest day of the country’s war.3 sources3 sources

Portugal had sent the Corpo Expedicionário Português (CEP), an army corps of two divisions, to fight inside the British army under a convention signed in January 1917. From November 1917 both divisions held a sector of about 12 to 14 kilometres between Neuve Chapelle and Fauquissart, a stretch the British thought quiet.2 sources2 sources

The men had been promised relief and home leave. It never came. After Sidónio Pais seized power in Lisbon in December 1917 no more reinforcements reached France, and officers on leave were allowed to stay at home. The commander of the 2nd Division, Simas Machado, went to Lisbon in February 1918 and did not return; General Gomes da Costa took over the division in March.4 sources4 sources

Under a plan Pais had accepted, the British began taking the Portuguese out of the line. On 4 April men of three battalions of the 1st Division refused to go back to the trenches, and two days later the division was withdrawn. The 2nd Division was placed under General Richard Haking’s British XI Corps and left to hold the whole sector alone until its own relief, due on the night of 9 to 10 April.3 sources3 sources

Its three front-line brigades had four battalions each. In each brigade sub-sector two battalions held the front lines, called A and B, a third waited in Line C and the fourth sat in reserve in the Village Line. A fourth brigade, the 3rd, was in divisional reserve, posted so far back that it could not help quickly.2 sources2 sources

The battalions were badly under strength. By April the division was 399 officers and 7,059 men short, and the twelve battalions averaged about 400 rifles each. One, the 1st Battalion, had 13 officers and 153 men fit for duty.1 source1 source

Carlos Lopes dates to 7 April Haking’s order that the division must die on Line B. Jesse Pyles found the decision behind it in the minutes of an XI Corps conference of 25 March: Haking resolved that his British divisions would make their stand on the Village Line, about a kilometre further back, while the Portuguese were told to fight on Line B. By Pyles’s reading of the minutes, Haking did not mean to tell them.2 sources2 sources

The attack was part of the German gamble of spring 1918. With Russia out of the war, General Erich Ludendorff could bring divisions west and try to win before the Americans arrived in strength. Operation Michael, launched on 21 March against the British in Picardy, drove them back but stalled, and was called off on 5 April. Four days later came Georgette.2 sources2 sources

Its aim was to break through towards Hazebrouck, a railway junction and British supply depot behind the Portuguese front, and push on towards the Channel ports. The French historian Jean-Jacques Becker told RTP that Ludendorff chose the spot because it offered a short road to the Flemish coast and because he expected to meet less hardened troops.3 sources3 sources

The German Sixth Army under General Ferdinand von Quast struck the joins between the Portuguese and the British divisions on either side, as the Germans had struck the join between British and French armies in March. Its guns were directed by Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, the artillery planner of Operation Michael.3 sources3 sources

The bombardment worked from the rear forwards, smashing roads, batteries and headquarters, then the trenches. Most of the men in the front line survived it. Then a creeping barrage began to walk towards them, with the German infantry close behind. One platoon of the 20th Battalion, on the Portuguese left, lost 26 of its 38 men to it at about nine.2 sources2 sources

The main German infantry attack went in at about 8.45. The attackers came in small storm-troop groups that slipped past strongpoints and left them to the waves behind, and the fog, which did not lift until after ten, hid them until they were in the trenches. Portuguese reports describe posts that were fighting Germans to their front being taken from the flank or rear.3 sources3 sources

With the telephone lines gone and runners failing to return, the brigade commanders could not see their battles. All three stayed at their headquarters trying to direct the defence and were captured. The 4th Brigade, on the left, suffered losses of about 60 per cent, the highest in the division. In the reserve, two companies of the 14th Battalion and the whole of the 15th pushed forward through the barrage.1 source1 source

Pockets held out until they ran out of ammunition. A German account, cited by Brigadier-General J. E. S. Brind in a letter to the British official historian, had the 22nd Reserve Regiment taking Neuve Chapelle only around midday. By about a quarter past twelve the 2nd Division had been destroyed as a fighting force, and the British 40th Division to its north had been broken too.3 sources3 sources

Aníbal Augusto Milhais was born in 1895 into a poor family in Valongo, a village in the municipality of Murça in Trás-os-Montes. He never went to school, worked as an errand boy and herdsman, and was called up in 1915. In France he was a Lewis gunner in a machine-gun section of the 15th Infantry Battalion, which had come out of the front line the day before the attack and spent the night at Croix Marmuse.2 sources2 sources

In a recording he made in 1967, Milhais told how his battalion first fought around Haute Maison and then fell back, while he and a comrade nicknamed Malha Vacas stayed behind to cover the withdrawal. His comrade was lost in the shelling. Milhais took up positions near La Couture. His family’s telling adds that he fired his Lewis gun, which he called Luisinha, from different spots so the Germans would think the post was strongly held.3 sources3 sources

Cut off, he made his way back towards Saint-Venant over several days, living on a packet of sugared almonds and meeting stray groups of Portuguese and Scottish soldiers. Near a canal he met a Scottish officer; one account makes him a doctor whom Milhais saved from drowning in a marsh. The Scot wrote a long letter praising him, and word of what he had done reached the Allied command.2 sources2 sources

He was given the Tower and Sword, Portugal’s highest military decoration; the Presidency’s register of the orders dates it 31 August 1918 and lists him under his new name, Milhões. The name came from a pun by his commander, Major Ferreira do Amaral: “Tu és Milhais, mas vales milhões” (“You are Milhais, but you are worth millions”).4 sources4 sources

A law of 5 July 1924 renamed his village Valongo de Milhais. He went back to farming, lived poorly enough that a public subscription was raised for him, and died in 1970.2 sources2 sources

Nobody agrees on the exact toll, partly because both armies collected the wounded and many of the missing were only accounted for when they came home from German camps. Every count agrees that most of the losses were prisoners. Officers made up 270 of them in the Revista Militar’s tally, against 29 officers killed.3 sources3 sources

The scale shows in a comparison. In the year at the front before 9 April the CEP had lost 1,044 men killed, by the Revista Militar’s count, and between about 100 and 170 captured. In one morning it lost more men as prisoners than its losses of every kind, dead, wounded, gassed and captured, in the whole of that year, which the same count puts at 5,420.2 sources2 sources

The British blamed the Portuguese almost at once. Haig wrote in his diary on 11 April that if the Portuguese had not bolted the attack would have been checked. After the war British officers wrote to their official historian of a hasty flight, of stolen bicycles and of three men riding each mule, and the rout became Britain’s picture of Portugal’s war. Lisbon asked for an inquiry; London sent a report by General Horne that put the blame on the Portuguese.2 sources2 sources

Gomes da Costa’s own report, written about a month later, was frank about units that did not move up, but it noted that his division had to hold three lines of trenches some 40 kilometres long in total, with no corps reserve. Major Vitorino Godinho listed reasons for the defeat headed by too long a spell at the front and losses that were never made good.1 source1 source

In Portugal the blame was political. On the sixth anniversary, in 1924, the deputy Carlos Olavo, a veteran of Flanders, accused the government of 1918, Sidónio Pais’s, of “a crime without a name” for leaving the troops in Flanders without relief or replacements. The prime minister, Álvaro de Castro, refused to call the battle a disaster. Tamagnini, the CEP’s commander, had been replaced in August 1918, and Pais was murdered that December.3 sources3 sources

More recent work has turned against the British version. Jesse Pyles, in a 2012 master’s thesis based on Portuguese and British unit reports, argues that the British 40th Division gave way at the same time, that British war diaries shifted blame onto the Portuguese, and that no British witness recalled seeing large numbers of Portuguese running. The historian Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses notes real weaknesses, above all a shortage of officers, but also a British failure to make use of a willing ally.2 sources2 sources

The CEP never fought again as a corps. The British spread the survivors and the 1st Division among their own divisions to dig and repair rear defences, and split up the artillery. Only in October 1918 did a group of officers win General Garcia Rosado, Tamagnini’s successor, leave to rebuild some combat units. Three battalions were made ready, and were back in the line, under British brigades, when the armistice came on 11 November.3 sources3 sources

Many prisoners were sent back across no man’s land on their own and gathered behind the German lines into small columns under a light escort. Most were held at Friedrichsfeld, in Germany, which by August 1918 held more than 5,000 Portuguese; the officers, 262 of them by the armistice, were moved to a camp at Breesen. For most, captivity lasted less than nine months, but hunger and hard labour left many with damaged health.1 source1 source

Repatriation was slow. The first 485 former prisoners came home through Brest in November 1918. About 710 more landed in Lisbon from the Pedro Nunes on 2 January 1919 and were met by the president, João do Canto e Castro. The British ship Helenus brought 1,529 on 19 January, and the Menominee 1,337 on 19 April. Many came home to families already in mourning for them, and the welcome soon faded.1 source1 source

Three years to the day after the battle, on 9 April 1921, declared a national holiday, two unknown soldiers, one from Flanders and one from Africa, were carried through Lisbon. The next day they were laid in the chapter house of the Batalha monastery, built by João I after his victory at Aljubarrota in 1385.2 sources2 sources

Above the tomb hangs the Christ of the Trenches, a metal crucifix from the church at Neuve Chapelle. By the usual account it lost its legs and right arm in the fighting of 9 April 1918 and was carried out of the ruins. Portugal asked France for it in 1958, and it was formally handed over at Batalha on 9 April that year. It belongs to the Liga dos Combatentes, the veterans’ league founded after the war.3 sources3 sources

For decades the Liga has marked 9 April with ceremonies at Batalha and at the Portuguese cemetery and memorial in France. Its 82nd pilgrimage to the tomb, on 14 April 2018, closed the commemorations of the centenary.1 source1 source

In 2020 the Estatuto do Antigo Combatente, the law setting out veterans’ rights, made 9 April the official Dia do Antigo Combatente, a day to honour all of Portugal’s former soldiers. In France, 1,831 Portuguese soldiers, 238 of them unknown, lie in the Portuguese military cemetery at Richebourg, among them prisoners who died in Germany.2 sources2 sources