United States or Northern Mariana Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the German right, below the little river of the Ancre, Courcelette fell, and Martinpuich, and at last, as I have written, High Wood, which the Germans desired to hold at all costs, and had held against incessant attacks by great concentration of artillery, was captured and left behind by the London men.
The Germans were overwhelmed as the waves of khaki-clad, cheering men rushed forward and over them and out beyond the objective points as originally planned. In front of Courcelette there were formidable German positions; two trenches in particular which had been strongly fortified and against which the British troops for a time hurled themselves in vain.
When they were shifted from the Ypres sector to the Somme, the dashing success at Courcelette showed them as efficient in offense as in defense. In 1917 a Canadian general, Sir Arthur Currie, three years before only a business man of Vancouver, took command of the Canadian troops.
In the battered and shell-pitted region to the northwest of Pozières fighting between the British and German troops continued unceasingly. A great part of it could be reached by machine guns, while German batteries at Courcelette and Grandcourt commanded the ground at close range. A network of German trenches, well planned, stretched in almost every direction.
Lack of tact on the part of the Government and reckless taunts from extremists in Ontario made the breach steadily wider. Yet there were many encouraging considerations. Another grandson of the leader of '37, Talbot Papineau, fell fighting bravely, and it was a French-Canadian battalion, Les Vingt Deuxiemes, which won the honors at Courcelette.
"Hurrah for Canada!" and added touches of characteristic dry humor which shell fire makes a little drier, such as a request to engage seats for the theatre at Courcelette that evening.
Flers, Martinpuich, Courcelette, and Eaucourt l'Abbaye have fallen within the past week, and the tanks have made their first ungainly bow before the curtain of war, with the superlatives of the war correspondent in close attendance. Leave from France has been cancelled indefinitely.
Bink and I had a lot of sad letters to write to the boys' relatives that day. Shortly after this we were taken back of the line a few miles and reorganized, and in a few days we were back in the trenches again. The battalion went in at Courcelette a night or two before me, and such a place it was. The German artillery had made it a veritable hell-hole.
On the left Mouquet Farm, which, with its unsurpassed dugouts and warrens surrounded by isolated machine gun posts, had repulsed previous attacks, could not resist the determined onslaught which will share glory, when history is written, with the storming of Courcelette.
We know now that he was at Albert, at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the taking of the Regina trench, where, unknown to him, one of his cousins fell in the heroic charge of the Canadian infantry. His constant thoughtfulness for those who were left at home is manifest in all he writes.
Word Of The Day