United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I wondered how we should feel in New England if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little Concord! The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins! It was dismal, indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; for at Bapaume we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme.
It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut.
Two days later several fugitives from the country round arrived at the castle with news that the Orleanists were advancing against Bapaume, and the next morning they heard that they had, after a fierce fight, won their way to the gate of the town. The Burgundian garrison had then sallied out and at first met with success, but had been obliged to retreat within the walls again.
I started early this morning in order not to be observed; in the first place because I did not wish my daughter to be seen in her female dress, and in the second because I would not that any should notice my coming in this direction, and indeed we rode for the first mile backwards along the road to Bapaume, and I shall return by the same way." "What will the end of these troubles be, Count?"
The preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have actually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes on the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather, before Grandcourt and Bapaume.
He had taken eight or ten troopers, commanded by an officer of his acquaintance, to escort him half way to Bapaume, being persuaded that the greatest danger would lie between the camp and the first stage.
"No," said the Chevalier; "but I see very well that they are some of the enemy's troopers." Upon which, observing to him that they were mounting, he ordered the horsemen that escorted him to prepare themselves to make a diversion, and he himself set off full speed towards Bapaume.
They were partially successful in the first two tasks, but north of the Somme the Germans got into Combles and the Third Army had to make a big retreat, surrendering Bapaume and nearly all the painful gains of the 1916 Somme campaign. The Germans renewed the attack with great energy on the 25th, and the British were unable to hold them up on their improvised lines.
So too Bourlon Wood, high and dark against the evening sky; the unspeakable desolation and ruin of the road thence to Bapaume; Bapaume itself, under the moon, its poor huddled heaps lit only, as we walked about it, by that strange, tranquil light from overhead, and the lamps of our standing motor-car; some dim shapes and sights emerging on the long and thrice-famous road from Bapaume to Albert, first, the dark mound of the Butte de Warlencourt, with three white crosses on its top, and once a mysterious light in a fragment of a ruined house, the only light I saw on the whole long downward stretch from Bapaume to Albert.
The German Third Line has been entered at the Bois de Foureaux, the whole of Delville Wood has been carried; and in the combined advance of July 30th, the French swept on to Maurepas on the north of the Somme, and are closely threatening both Combles and Péronne, while we are attacking Thiepval on the left of our line and Guillemont on the right, and pushing forward, north of Pozières, toward Bapaume.
Word Of The Day