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That effort on our right was, however, hampered by the Germans in the Quadrilateral and Bouleaux wood to the east of Ginchy, and the Guards were unable to carry out the most important tactical part of the day's work by carrying Lesboeufs and Morval. The French had no such accumulation of gains on the 15th, but they conquered a larger area between the 13th and 18th.
A pair of white-birches lift their leafy crowns far above us, and after them we name the place Le Camp aux Bouleaux. "Why not call trees people? since, if you come to live among them year after year, you will learn to know many of them personally, and an attachment will grow up between you and them individually."
Below the Pozières-Bapaume road were five small woods, grouped like the Great Bear constellation of stars. Their roots were feeding on hundreds of dead bodies, after each of the five Trones, Mametz, Foureaux, Delville, and Bouleaux had seen wild encounters with bomb and bayonet beneath its dead trees.
On September 15 the British took Flers, Martinpuich, the important position known as the High Wood, Courcelette, and almost all of the Bouleaux Wood, and also stormed the German positions from Combles north to the Pozieres-Bapaume road, arriving within four miles of Bapaume and capturing 2,300 prisoners.
It will give you a little idea of what it was like under this bombardment. It seemed to numb one's very brain. What it must have been like in the German position is beyond me to conceive. We were certainly giving Fritz a jump. At last my camera was finished. Looking in the direction of Bouleaux Wood I could see our men still pouring forward over the open.
At 6 a. m. on September 15, 1916, the British attacked on a front of about six miles, extending from Bouleaux Wood east of Guillemont to the north of the Albert-Bapaume road. A tremendous bombardment of the enemy positions continued for twenty minutes before the infantry advanced to attack.
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