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But few of them got back when they found that the line as a whole had held, and the losses of these troops in the fire to the left and the right and in front of them made up the bulk of the British casualties on that day. Farther south they fared better. The outskirts of La Boisselle and Fricourt were reached; Mametz was taken, and also Montauban by the most striking advance of the day.
The Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusiliers, and Borderers of the 32d Division were in possession of La Boisselle and clearing out communication trenches to which the Germans were hanging on with desperate valor.
Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep.
At La Boisselle, northeast of Albert, the Germans, after a violent bombardment, attempted a night attack which was repulsed with large losses. The Germans bombarded the Cathedral of Soissons again on March 21, 1915, firing twenty-seven shells and causing severe damage to the structure. On the same day Rheims was bombarded, fifty shells falling there.
In their progress up that sector of the Ridge the windmill came after Pozières, as the ascent of the bare mountain peak comes after the reaches below the timber line. Pozières was beyond La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle, from which the battle movement swung forward at the hinge of the point where the old first-line German fortifications had been broken on July 1st.
A Glorious Band of Wounded Heroes Stagger Into Line and Answer the Call I Visit a Stricken Friend in a Dug-out On the Way to La Boisselle I Get Lost in the Trenches And Whilst Filming Unexpectedly Come Upon the German Line I Have a Narrow Squeak of Being Crumped But Get Away Safely And later Commandeer a Couple of German Prisoners to Act as Porters. The day wore on.
At last, on December 14th, the Battalion, now reduced in strength to 540 all ranks, moved back to Bécourt Camp, a mile south of La Boisselle. It was a poor place, but situated beyond the western border of the great waste, and practically immune from shell-fire.
There in several places, as at La Boisselle and on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old front line by thousands of sandbags till it is a hill-top or cairn from which they could see beyond.
The fight is not over the victory is not yet but on the Somme no English or French heart can doubt the end. The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison. Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion of sandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into a common ruin.
One convulsion of this kind happened above Usna Hill, with a long, terrifying roar and a monstrous gush of flame. "What is that?" asked some one. "It must be the mine we charged at La Boisselle. The biggest that has ever been." It was a good guess.
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