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"Anatole France. I used to be crazy about him, but now he seems rather a back number." Then he glanced towards the just-vacated chair. "Australian," he said. "How d'you know?" "Can't mistake them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw them fight. Lord! Such men!
By this time batteries had been and were being installed everywhere at Pozières where there was room to place a gun: like beavers the men were working as busily as men could work, although they were constantly subjected to the severest strafing; but on the Somme it seemed that nobody minded.
After taking Pozières and driving over the ridge and on down into the Courcelette Valley, we took up a position about 500 yards from the German front lines. Here occurred another of those remarkable escapes from the Grim Reaper's toll that won for me throughout the unit the pseudonym, "Horseshoe Grant."
For these many weeks Pozières has been but a name and a waste brick pile; yet the site of the powdered village cannot be mistaken from the air, for, slightly to the east, two huge mine-craters sentinel it, left and right. From here to Le Sars, which straddles the road four miles beyond, was our photographic objective.
Its buildings were scattered as you would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged. By the time Boiselle and Ovilliers were taken, and the front had pushed up to within a quarter or half a mile of Pozières, a tattered wood was all that marked the spot. Behind the brushwood you could still see in three or four places the remains of a pink wall.
In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozieres now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the slopes below.
Then they moved up four miles to the edge of Pozières Woods, where they believed they would be safer from view, and for the further reason that they would not have so far to travel when the next drive was pulled off.
By the time we reached Albert our height was 12,000 feet, and we steered eastward over the ground gained in the June-July advance. Beyond the scrap-heap that once was Pozières two enormous mine craters showed up, dented into the razed surface, one on either side of the Albert-Bapaume road. Flying very low a few buses were working on trench reconnaissance.
Beyond the scrap-heap that once was Pozières two enormous quarries dipped into the earth on either side of the road. Until the Messines explosion they were the largest mine craters on the western front.
Ovillers which had been bravely defended for some days was finally captured by the British on July 16, 1916, thus clearing out the principal obstacle in the way of a general assault on Pozières. On this day the British were also successful in taking Waterlot Farm, about midway between Longueval and Guillemont, which cut another slice out of the German front.
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