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To conditions such as I have described the Battalion returned to do another tour in the Ablaincourt sector. Davenport went to my old headquarters, which the enemy was now busy trench-mortaring, and held half the front previously held by C, which, with D Company, was now in support. To the usual evils were now added rifle-grenades filled with gas, which caused several casualties in A Company.
German counter-attacks were frequent, but lacked the vigor and success of former efforts on this front. In a joint attack on October the village of Le Sars was taken and the Allies found themselves within two miles of Bapaume. General Foch with his French infantry took a number of German positions near Ablaincourt, south of the Somme, October 14, and held his gains against repeated German attacks.
French assaults by the German troops were repulsed on the following day when the French carried a wood between Génermont and Ablaincourt, taking prisoner four officers and 110 of other ranks, as well as a number of machine guns. The German aircraft were especially active on this day and the French fought seven engagements.
To the south of the river the French troops took the offensive and attacked on a front of over three miles between Berny-en-Santerre and Chaulnes. Here the French infantry by vigorous fighting captured the enemy position and certain points beyond it. They also captured the town of Bovent, and occupied the northern and western outskirts of Ablaincourt and most of the woods of Chaulnes.
The Battalion took over a three-company front. Brown with A Company guarded the left. Some 500 yards behind our front lay the Ablaincourt Sucrerie, a dismal heap of polluted ruins, like all sugar factories the site of desperate fighting. Ablaincourt itself, a village freely mentioned in French dispatches during the Somme battle, was the very symbol of depressing desolation.
Perhaps they would have seemed more so had the Battalion known, what luckily it could not, that an unpleasant tour was in store, and that afterwards, with the enemy in retreat, there would be no more billets until the summer. German retreat foreshadowed. The Battalion takes over the Ablaincourt Sector. Issues in the making. Lieutenant Fry mortally wounded.
South of the Somme from Ablaincourt to Chaulnes Wood, a distance of two and a half miles, the Germans pounded the French positions almost unceasingly for forty-eight hours. At 6 o'clock in the morning of November 15, 1916, the Germans after a final shower of tear shells endeavored to drive in their wedge. The main efforts of the attacking contingent were concentrated on Ablaincourt and Pressoir.
The German trenches had been over-run and many of their occupants had been killed or wounded. By a satisfactory coincidence the troops whom we surprised were a battalion of the Jaegers, the very regiment which after three hours' bombardment had raided us exactly two months previously at Ablaincourt.
Pierre Vaast wood and towards Moislains, while south of the Somme they took Ablaincourt, Le Pressoir, Fresnes, Villers-Carbonnel, and Barleux, and seized the west bank of the river opposite Eterpigny above Péronne.
Such was the tactical situation when the 184th Infantry Brigade relieved the French in the Ablaincourt sector. The Berks, who first held the left subsector, had an uneventful tour. Trenches taken over from the French were usually quiet at first owing to the different methods employed by us and our allies in the conduct of trench-warfare.
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