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Updated: June 11, 2025
A few yards, higher up and all was desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the little valley ran into the wood of Bécourt and sheltered there, and there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an English valley, by the side of an English wood.
At 7 A.M. the colonel announced that he and myself would ride up to Bécourt Chateau to visit the C.R.A. We touched the southern edge of Albert, familiar to thousands of British soldiers. The last time I had been there was on my return from leave in January 1917, when I dined and slept at the newly-opened officers' club.
Four days later the Battalion moved to bivouacs in Becourt Wood, and there the final preparations were made for action, and amid the growing violence of the artillery preparation it moved again on the 14th September to Shelter Wood. Zero for the second phase of the Somme battle was 6.20 a.m. on the 15th September.
On Christmas Day I went to dinner with the 7th N.F. at their H.Q., and was very hospitably entertained. The Brigade moved from Bresle to a camp at Bécourt on November 28, and stayed there two days; and then took over from a Brigade of the 1st Division at Bazentin-le-Petit.
From among them our soldiers peered through the smoke of burning and explosions at the promised land which the battle made ours. From those heaps there is a wide view over that part of the field. To the left one sees Albert, the wooded clump of Bécourt, and a high green spur which hides the Sausage Valley. To the front this green spur runs to the higher ground from which the Fricourt spur thrusts.
Yet one there is away to the east of Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name, so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley running into the wood of Bécourt.
Our line passes over the spur slightly below it, the enemy line takes in as much of it as the enemy needed. From it, he has a fair view of Albert town and of the country to the east and west of it, the wooded hill of Bécourt, and the hill above Fricourt. From our line, we see his line and a few tree-tops.
His patient was a man of thirty-eight, a victim of hydatid disease of the liver, from whom he withdrew one gallon of offensive material. Lieutaud cites a case, reported by Blanchard, in which, in a case of hydatid disease, the stomach contained 90 pounds of fluid. Ankylosis of the articulations, a rare and curious anomaly, has been seen in the human fetus by Richaud, Joulin, Bird, and Becourt.
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.
It soon became known, however, that the Division was moving south to take over a section of the line hitherto held by the French, still in the Somme area, just south of Peronne. From Becourt the Battalion continued its march to Ribemont.
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