Mist sat over the valley of the Ancre on the morning of the 5th of April, 1918, thick enough to swallow a man at 180 m. Along a railway embankment south of the town of Albert in northern France, 4,000 Australians of the 4th Division crouched in scattered posts and waited for whatever the fog was hiding. Across the line in the village of Dernancourt and the ground behind it, four German divisions were forming up unseen, close to 25,000 men.

 It worked out to about five of them for every one Australian on that bank. Then the German guns opened and the embankment started to come apart. The barrage ran for the better part of 2 hours, a mix of  high explosive and gas that churned the bank and the cuttings where the forward companies sheltered. That same fog hid the Germans and  blinded the defenders, so the signal flares meant to bring down the Australian guns never reached the eyes of the gunners behind the slope.

 A bombardment that could have torn the assault apart in the open never fell. Around half past nine, the shelling lifted and the gray infantry came on out of the mist in waves straight at the railway line. The heaviest weight came down on the center where the 47th Battalion held the line directly opposite Dernancourt.

These were Queensland and Tasmanian men dug into the most exposed sector of the whole position with the 50th Reserve Division driving at them and the 230th Reserve Infantry Regiment in the lead. Off to their left, the 48th Battalion, West Australians and South Australians, took the push of two full German regiments at once.

One Australian battalion against two enemy regiments and the 48th held its front through the long morning. The break came at the seam between the brigades where the 12th and 13th Brigades joined near the railway bridge northwest of Dernancourt, the bank dipped to let the Lavieville road pass underneath it. German infantry forced their way through that gap beneath the bridge and got in behind the forward Australian posts.

From there, they rolled the line up from the flank and by the middle of the day, they’d driven deeper into an Australian position than they managed anywhere else in the whole war. The forward trenches were gone and the support trenches behind them were taken, too. By early afternoon, the forward line along the embankment had stopped working as a defense.

German troops were already climbing the long bare slope behind it, pushing up toward the Amiens road that ran along the crest. Take that high ground and the fourth division’s whole position came apart. 4,000 spent men held a broken line while 25,000 Germans worked uphill through the fog, the road to Amiens lying open behind them.

What the Australians did in the next few hours would settle whether Amiens fell. The German spring offensive had opened on the 21st of March, 1918, with over a million men thrown against the British line in northern France. Germany had just signed a peace with Russia at Brest-Litovsk and the divisions freed from the Eastern Front had come west to mount one last bid to win the war  before fresh American troops arrived in strength.

That blow landed hardest on the British Fifth Army, which buckled and fell back in confusion and left a widening gap pointing straight at the railway hub of Amiens.  Every reserve that could march was rushed toward the breach. Amiens was the reason all of it mattered. The city sat on the rail lines that fed both the British and the French fronts, the point where the two Allied armies effectively joined hands.

Lose that junction and the British and French could be levered apart and beaten one at a time, which was what the German command was reaching for. The ground in front of Dernancourt covered the northern approach to the city and whoever held the embankment and the heights behind it controlled that approach.

 Holding it was the job the fourth division had been sent south to do. The push at Dernancourt  was one half of a two-day effort. On the 4th of April, south of the Somme, the Germans had struck toward Villers-Bretonneux with 15 divisions. They took the village of Hamel and the high ground  they called Hill 104 and came within sight of Amiens from the south.

The Australians and British in that sector only just held them off the town. And with the southern thrust checked, the weight swung north of the river the next day  onto the Ancre and the fourth division. The Germans were testing both shoulders of the approach to Amiens, looking for the one that would give.

 The men sent to hold it were close to spent. The fourth division had wintered in the Flanders sector of Belgium and its battalions carried the names of Messines and Polygon Wood from the year before. They’d come south by stages out of rest areas as the British front gave way and dug their new line along the Ancre between Buire and Dernancourt while the Germans were still pressing forward.

The two brigades that would take  the weight on the 5th of April were already under strength when they arrived. They were tired  veterans and there weren’t enough of them. The ground at Dernancourt suited the attacker.  Along the valley floor, the Australian line followed a railway embankment and a string of cuttings with the village close on the far  side and the Germans able to gather behind its buildings out of sight.

Behind the Australians, the land rose in a long open slope toward the Amiens road, a feature the maps marked as the Lavieville heights. The forward posts ran thin along the bank, too far apart to cover each other once the mist closed in. Hold the embankment and the Germans were pinned on the valley floor.

 Lose it and they had a clear run up the slope to the crest. The shape of that ground decided a lot of the fight. Seen from the Australian line, the field fell away to the railway bank like the floor of an amphitheater, with Durnancourt and the assembling Germans on the far side as the stage. The defenders on the slope could see the whole sweep of it whenever the mist thinned, every wave that crossed the open toward the bank.

It was good ground to shoot across and bad ground to be caught on. Any counterattack would have to cross that open floor in full view to reach the enemy below. The Germans had already tried this stretch of line once before. On the 28th of March, the 50th Reserve Division attacked the same sector and was thrown back inside a day, beaten in part by Sergeant Stanley McDougall of the 47th Battalion,  who broke up an early morning assault almost on his own and took the Victoria Cross for it.

That first attempt went in off the line of march behind thin  artillery support and the Australians and the British troops of the 35th Division beside them held it without much trouble. The Germans came off worse that day with about 550 losses against fewer than 140 Australian. They took the lesson to heart.

 When they came back a week later, they brought the better part of a full core and a far heavier weight of guns. The new plan carried the code name Sonnenschein, German for sunshine, and it massed the German 23rd Reserve Corps against the narrow front between Albert and Durnancourt. On the German left stood  the 79th Reserve Division, while the 50th Reserve Division took the center opposite the village with the 230th Reserve Infantry Regiment leading.

The 13th Division pushed in on the right and behind a lot of them, more troops waited in support, the whole force building toward 25,000 men. Against that, the Fourth Division could field two understrength brigades, barely 4,000 rifles between them. Inside those two brigades sat the battalions that would carry the day on their backs.

The 12th Brigade held the center and right of the line with the 47th Battalion opposite Dernancourt and the 48th alongside it. The 13th Brigade held the left and kept its four battalions, the 49th, the 50th, the 51st, and the 52nd, ready to be thrown in if the line gave way. Those reserve battalions were the only real weight the division had left once the bank went.

Everything that happened after midday would turn on how they were used. Morning on the 5th came in under a heavy mist that cut sight down to 180 m. The German guns opened soon after 7:00 and worked the bank over for close to 2 hours with high explosive and gas. For most of that time, the men on the embankment could do nothing but take it, sitting it out in their masks while the cuttings filled with fumes.

Down on the line, the Australian observers fired their flares to call  for protective fire, the signal that should have brought their own shells onto the German forming-up ground, and in the  fog, the gunners behind the slope saw nothing of it. The infantry came forward around half past 9:00  with the defensive barrage still silent behind them.

 The first rush struck the 47th Battalion in  the center, and the fighting along the bank turned close and hard. Down the bank, the Australians fired into the German waves as they crossed the open ground below the line, the railway cutting filling with smoke and the crack of rifles. The 47th held the front of the embankment for hours even as the weight against it kept building.

Across on the left, the 48th Battalion faced the 261st and 262nd  Reserve Infantry Regiments and wouldn’t give ground, one battalion checking two whole regiments through the morning. The fire that met the German waves came mostly from  the machine guns. Lewis guns in the forward posts and Vickers guns sighted back on the slope swept the open floor the Germans had to cross,  catching the lines in the flank as they bunched toward the gaps in the bank.

 For a while, the ground in front of the embankment filled with men  who couldn’t get forward and couldn’t easily fall back. That same mist that had ruined the Australian artillery plan now cut the other way, letting the gun teams hold their fire until the Germans loomed up close.

 It was the guns, more than anything else, that made the enemy pay for every yard of the bank. The 47th’s fight went on long after the line either side of it had bent. The forward posts on the bank were  small and far apart, and as the Germans worked between them, each post came to fight on its own, firing until the enemy was among it.

 Some posts were overrun and their men taken, others held until the  order came to fall back. The cutting and the bank changed hands in pieces through the morning, rather than in one clean  break. By the time the center finally gave, the 47th had bought the division most of a day. The German method  that spring leaned on speed and infiltration, rather than weight alone.

The assault troops  were trained to slip between strong points and leave the hard knots of resistance to be cleared up behind them, keeping the advance moving into the soft ground in the rear. At Dernancourt, the 47th and 48th were exactly the kind of hard knots that held, so the Germans worked around them, and the join between the two brigades under the railway bridge was the soft ground they found.

 That same tactic had cracked the British line open further south a fortnight earlier. It came close to doing the same to the fourth division here. One of the men in the 48th that day was George Mitchell, who later set the battle down in his book Backs to the Wall. Mitchell wrote of holding a forward post under the German guns, the heavy machine guns tacking away off to his right rear, the line around him growing thinner by the hour.

 He described the order that finally reached him by runner, a single line telling him to pull back at once. Off the bank he went, out across the lower ground with German bullets pecking the dirt at his heels until he reached a fresh trench dug across the slope and lined with steady Australians waiting for the enemy to come on.

 While the 47th and the 48th held their fronts, the Germans kept working that soft spot at the join between the brigades. The railway bridge northwest of Dernancourt carried the line over the Lavieville road, and the gap beneath it gave the attackers a covered way through the bank. German infantry pressed through that underpass, swung in behind the forward posts, and began clearing them from the rear.

By the middle of the day, the forward companies were cut off or falling back, and the enemy held the embankment along much of the front. The fall back carried the survivors up the bare slope toward the Lavieville heights, the same open ground that handed the Germans a clear view and a clear field of fire. A fresh trench had been dug partway up that slope during the morning, and the men coming off the bank filed into it and turned to face the valley.

From there they could see the German masses gathering below for the push to the crest. The word passing down the line was that the enemy would come on within about 20 minutes. The Australians had one chance to stop them before the high ground went. This was the worst hour of the day for the 4th Division. The forward line was gone, the Germans were on the slope and climbing, and the crest with the Amiens road behind it lay only a few hundred meters above the new trench.

Reach the top and the whole valley position was turned, and the way to Amiens stood open. The men in the slope trench were the last organized line between the Germans and the high ground. Everything now hung on whether two worn and outnumbered brigades could do more than sit and hold their ground. The answer the divisional command settled on was to attack rather than dig in and wait.

Late in the afternoon, the reserve battalions of the 13th Brigade were ordered forward to drive the Germans back off the slope and down toward the bank. It was a hard thing to ask of tired men. They’d have to advance in the open and downhill into the fire of an enemy who outnumbered them and held the better ground for the moment.

Around half past 5:00, the order went out and the counterattack formed up on the slope above Dernancourt. Every man who could be found was put  into it. Engineers and pioneers fell in alongside the infantry as the reserve battalions formed their line because there wasn’t anybody else left to send. From his place in the  slope trench, George Mitchell watched the 49th battalion sweep forward into the gap on his right.

He wrote of the way they came on with a momentum nothing seemed able to stop.  The ranks thinning as German fire tore into them. The men closing the last few yards with the bayonet. The 49th drove straight into the German line on the slope and broke its forward edge. Other companies of the 13th Brigade pushed in alongside and the fight turned into close work across the open ground, rifle and bayonet at a few paces.

The counterattack did what sitting still could never have done. The German advance up the slope stopped  then bent backward as the Australians pressed downhill into it. Yard by yard, the attackers were forced off the high ground  and back toward the valley floor they’d climbed from. By dusk, a new front line had formed running diagonally across the face of the slope above Dernancourt with the Australians looking down on the village once more.

 On the right of the line, the Australians pushed all the way back to the railway bank and retook it. In the center  and on the left, they couldn’t quite reach the bank again and dug in about 1,300 m short of it on the slope below the heights. By nightfall, the fourth division held the high ground northwest of Dernancourt along its whole front.

 The Germans were back down near the valley floor, holding the village and the center of the embankment, but stopped cold short of the crest they’d needed to take. The night that followed was tense and cold along the new line. Both sides dug in where the fighting had left them, close enough to hear each other working in the dark.

 The Australians on the slope braced for the attack to come again at first light and kept improving their trench through the hours of darkness. No fresh assault came. The German effort against the fourth  division had burned itself out on the slope that afternoon, and the corps that began the day expecting to be in the Amiens Valley by dark  ended it pinned on the floor of the Ancre.

 The scale of what had been thrown at the division shows in the numbers. Four divisions of the German 23rd Reserve Corps, close to 25,000 men, had gone in against two understrength Australian brigades of roughly 4,000. It stood as the strongest  assault aimed at Australian troops in the whole of the Great War, and the Germans had driven further into the line than they ever would again.

For all that weight and all the ground they took, the attack still failed. The road to Amiens stayed shut, and the offensive’s push on this sector had spent itself against the fourth division. The day came at a heavy price. The division’s losses ran to between 1,100 and 1,260 men fallen and wounded across those few hours on the slope and the bank.

Those losses fell unevenly between the battalions  caught in the worst of it. In the 52nd Battalion alone, 154 men were taken, 30 of them gone for good before it came out of the line. Most of that toll came in the morning fighting along the embankment and in the evening counterattack down the slope. That cost landed on an army already running short of men.

By the spring of 1918, the flow of volunteers from home had thinned, and the two conscription votes had both failed. So, few replacements were coming for the gaps the fighting tore open. Within weeks of Dernancourt, the 52nd Battalion, which had lost so heavily on the slope, was broken up entirely, and its surviving men parceled out to other units to keep them up to strength.

The battalion that helped hold the line in April didn’t last the spring as a unit. There simply weren’t enough Australians left to go round. The line the counterattack drew across that slope held for a long time after. The Australians stayed on the high ground northwest of Dernancourt, and the front there barely moved until the Germans pulled back of their own accord in the August that followed.

For losing the village and a stretch of the embankment, but holding the heights, the Fourth Division’s battalions were given the battle honor Ancre 1918. The name fixed to the colors what the men had done on the slope. It said little of the cost. For the German command, Dernancourt was part of a plan starting to stall everywhere.

Their drive on Amiens had been blunted north and south of the Somme, and within days they swung the main effort far to the north into Flanders, where a fresh offensive opened along the Lys on the 9th of April. That northern push drove at the Channel ports and gave the British their worst fright of the spring, and it too ground to a halt in the weeks that followed.

The German army was spending its best troops faster than it could replace them. The men who’d climbed the Dernancourt slope were among the ones it couldn’t get back. The crisis ran right up the Allied chain of command. On the 11th of April, with the German push now hammering the line in Flanders, the British Commander-in-Chief Douglas Haig put out an order of the day telling his armies there was no ground left to give and every position had to be held where it stood.

 He wrote of men fighting with their backs to the wall. George Mitchell would give the book in which he set down what the 48th did at Dernancourt that same name, Backs to the Wall. The men on the Ancre had been  fighting that way for a week before the order ever reached them. The fighting for Amiens didn’t  end at Dernancourt.

That same German drive pushed on south of the river toward Villers-Bretonneux, a few kilometers away, where Australian and British troops fought through the rest of April to keep the city out of German hands. North of the river, the approach the Fourth Division had blocked on the 5th of April stayed blocked.

 Along the Ancre, the Germans never did get  the clean run at Amiens they had been reaching for. The high ground above Dernancourt  stayed Australian. Dernancourt was the opening of the hardest stretch the Australians would know in the war. In the months after the slope was held, the same divisions fought  at Villers-Bretonneux in April and took Hamel in July in a morning of careful  planning.

In August, they led the great advance at Amiens that began the run to the armistice. The spring of 1918 was where the AIF earned its name  as the troops the British command reached for when a line had to hold. Dernancourt came before any of the famous names and it got the least notice of them all.

 On the 7th of April, the 12th Brigade was pulled out of the line and the Australian 2nd Division came south from Flanders to take  over the sector the Fourth had been holding. The relief was a slow business carried out under German guns that still ranged the back areas. The men who’d held the bank and the slope filed out past the troops coming in to replace them.

Two days of fighting had cut the brigade down to a fraction of what had marched in.  They were finally going to the rear, out of the fighting. There’s a small thing that came out of the ground at Dernancourt months later after the Germans had gone. Near the line the 48th Battalion had held,  the graves of two Australians were found among several German ones.

The Germans had buried the two Australians and set crosses  over them, and on the crosses they’d written in their own language that here lay a brave  warrior. The enemy who’d thrown four divisions at that slope and come off second best had taken the time to mark two of the men who stopped them.

 Rain set in for the march out and the men of the 12th Brigade were wet through and worn down after two days under fire. The commanding officer of the 48th Battalion noted afterward that it rained the whole way and that the men marched well and sang for most of the road back. Behind them the Germans held a wrecked village and a length of railway bank and the knowledge that their heaviest blow toward Amiens had come apart with the prize nearly in reach.

The road to the rear stayed open and the road they’d wanted stayed shut. For the men on that wet road, the battle ended out of the line, still on their feet and singing most of the way back.