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The woods to the right offered a no less stubborn resistance. Bernafay wood was, indeed, gained on the 4th, but the German flanks in Mametz wood to the west and Trônes wood to the east were only driven in at the cost of five days' ferocious fighting from the 8th to the 13th. The French encountered similar opposition north of the Somme, but south of it they were more fortunate.
And a neutral who saw the attack on Mametz told the same eye-witness that he had seen most of the fighting in the world in recent years, and that he "did not believe a more gallant feat was ever performed in war." The story of the British advance was written "in the dead upon the ground, and in the positions as they stand."
At the end of this period, on the 23rd October, the Battalion left the Wood and marched back to Becourt, where two days were spent in tents. On the 25th October the men were on the move again over familiar ground and soon found themselves in tents just outside Mametz Wood. After a week spent on working parties they moved up to the front line, W Company, now under 2nd Lieut.
All were pleased to see me safe and sound, and to hear of my success. I was told that lively things were happening at La Boisselle. I heard also how successful our troops had been in other parts of the line. Fricourt and Mametz and a dozen other villages had fallen to our victorious troops. This news put new life into me.
On Sunday September 10, the Brigade left Hénencourt, and B.H.Q. went to the deep dugouts in Mametz Wood. I travelled there with Sergts. Moffat and Hogg, and we were lucky enough to get good lifts, first in a Canadian Staff car and then on a motor-lorry. Capt. It was the first deep dugout I had entered, and of course it was the work of the Germans.
The second morning at Mametz Wood I was greatly shocked to hear that our Brigadier had been killed by a sniper from High Wood, as he was going out to inspect the forward trench just after dawn. It was nearly two days before his body could be brought in, owing to the shelling that went on at night. He was buried at Albert.
On the 20th September, the Battalion moved further back to shelter in Mametz Wood, where a draft of 50 men from the 2/6th Battalion, Essex Regiment, joined. After four days' rest it again went forward to the intermediate line. The same day Major Wilkinson, of the 149th Machine Gun Company, joined as second in command. The following night the whole Battalion turned out to dig a jumping-off trench.
Trenches disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them for some men had to stay on duty there were blown to fragments. Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban.
I have seen men walk over broken bottles with bare feet, swallow swords and eat fire and knew that there was some trick about it, as there was about the taking of Mametz.
There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory, and hunting-men cried the "View halloo!" and shouted "Yoicks! yoicks!" ... General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own room that night and let discipline go hang.... When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death Belville Wood, Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others.
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