On the night of 1 November 1918, the 37th US Division reached the Escaut river at Oudenaarde. The orders were simple: get across. Engineers tried repeatedly to build a bridge under German machine-gun fire that swept the water from the eastern bank. Most attempts failed. One company finally got a footbridge over and a bridgehead established. Ten days later the war ended. That bridgehead, gained at heavy cost by American soldiers most of whom would not know what they had achieved until they were already on their way home, was effectively the last forward inch of the Western Front in Flanders. The Battle of the Lys and the Escaut was the closing chapter of four years of trench warfare in the country it had ravaged longest.
By autumn 1918 the German army was being pushed back along the entire Western Front in what the Allies called the Hundred Days Offensive. In Belgium, King Albert I of Belgium commanded a combined formation called the Groupe d'Armees des Flandres, with French General Jean Degoutte as chief of staff. It comprised twelve Belgian divisions, ten divisions of the British Second Army under Herbert Plumer, and six divisions of the French Sixth Army under Antoine Baucheron de Boissoudy. The first phase of their offensive defeated the German Fourth Army at the Fifth Battle of Ypres and retook Passchendaele. The second phase, the Battle of Courtrai, drove the line east and liberated towns the Germans had held since 1914 - the French took Roulers, the British took Courtrai, Lille, and Douai, and the Belgians retook Ostend, Bruges, and Zeebrugge. The advance ran out of momentum in mud and supply collapse in early October. The American 37th and 91st divisions were brought up from quieter sectors to renew it.
The third phase opened on 20 October 1918 with the goal of pushing the Germans east of the Escaut, also known as the Scheldt, the river that runs from northern France through Belgium to the North Sea. In the north, Belgian forces attacked positions behind the Deinze-Bruges Canal. The fighting there was bitter for eleven days. On 2 November the Germans fell back to the Ghent-Terneuzen Canal, which they held until the armistice; by 10 November Belgian troops had reached the western edge of Ghent. In the south the British advance was steady: Valenciennes fell on 2 November, and Mons was reached on 10 November. In the center, the 91st US Division ran into severe German resistance in a forest called Spitaals Bosschen near Waregem and suffered heavy losses fighting through it. The French Sixth Army and the 37th US Division moved more easily between the two rivers but ran straight into prepared positions when they hit the Escaut itself.
On the night of 1-2 November, units along the entire central sector tried to cross the Escaut. Most attempts were broken by the machine-gun teams the Germans had positioned along the eastern bank - mobile units the German command called Maschinen Gewehr Kompanien, which were used to slow the Allied advance without committing infantry to a doomed defense. Only the 37th US Division got across in strength, gaining a bridgehead at Oudenaarde. Between 3 and 8 November the Allies paused to reorganize. The French attacked again on 8 and 9 November. The Germans repulsed the main push but the action established a second bridgehead between Oudenaarde and the village of Melden, just south of the city. A new offensive was planned for 10 November aimed at reaching Brussels. It was cancelled when it became clear that an armistice would be signed within hours.
The German retreat was orderly rather than a rout, and it inflicted heavy casualties on the advancing Allies. The Belgian Army alone lost one-fifth of its strength between 4 October and 11 November 1918 - one-third of all the casualties it suffered in the entire war, compressed into five weeks at the very end. The American 37th and 91st divisions paid heavily for their crossings of the Escaut. The British army, advancing alongside, lost its last two soldiers of the war at Mons on 10 November: George Edwin Ellison, a 40-year-old former coal miner, and George Lawrence Price, a 25-year-old Canadian, both killed within hours of the armistice. The end of the fighting came as a shock even to the soldiers who had just spent five weeks fighting it. Many German troops, told nothing of how far back they had been pushed, returned home convinced their army had been undefeated in the field - the seed of the stab-in-the-back myth that would poison German politics for the next two decades. A monument at Oudenaarde today honors the 40,000 Americans who fought there in those final weeks.
The battlefield ran roughly along the line of the Escaut (Scheldt) river through East Flanders, centered near 50.85°N, 3.60°E. The key crossing points at Oudenaarde and Melden lie clearly visible from cruising altitude where the river bends through gentle Flemish countryside. The Lys (Leie) river to the north and west forms the other anchor of the battlefield. Belgian and American war memorials are scattered through the towns of Oudenaarde, Waregem, and Melden. Nearest airports are Brussels (EBBR) approximately 50 km east-northeast and Lille-Lesquin (LFQQ) about 40 km southwest. The terrain is mostly flat farmland with the wooded Flemish Ardennes hills rising to the south.