Bois des Buttes (battle honour)

[1] The 2nd Devonshires were part of the 8th Infantry Division which had been severely depleted by the Spring fighting and had, on 12 May, been attached to General Duchêne's French Sixth Army and sent to a quiet sector to recuperate and rebuild.

Late that afternoon, the battalion was ordered to occupy positions on Bois des Buttes, a wooded sandstone hill southwest of La Ville-aux-Bois that had been fortified by both the French and the Germans over the previous years.

In addition to its surface fortifications, the hill was criss-crossed with creutes—underground quarries whose galleries were dry, impervious to shellfire and, in many cases, electrically lit, and in which the troops took shelter.

At approximately 0345, the German infantry attack began using the recently developed Stormtroop tactic of advancing rapidly, probing for weak spots and avoiding pockets of resistance.

Col Anderson-Morshead divided the 50 survivors of the battalion into two groups and moved them from the hill down to the Juvincourt-Pontavert road to engage the advancing Germans on two flanks.

However, the battalion significantly delayed the German advance, giving the French and British time to arrange ad hoc defences that brought it to a halt a week later.