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Updated: June 19, 2025
Now they were nothing but useless piles of brick and glorious names Thiepval, Pozières, La Boiselle, Guillemont, Flers, Hardecourt, Guinchy, Combles, Bouchavesnes, and a dozen others. Of all the crumbled roads the most striking was the long, straight one joining Albert and Bapaume. It looked fairly regular for the most part, except where the trenches cut it.
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.
Boiselle, too, had the remains of a small wood rising behind it. The bark hung from its ragged stumps as the rigging droops from the broken masts of a wreck. We were looking another way, watching our troops trying to creep up to the extreme right-hand end of the red trench on the top of the hill.
At Ovillers and La Boiselle the Third Corps sustained all day long a desperate struggle. Two new divisions which had been brought forward to support now joined the fighting. One of these divisions successfully carried the trenches before Ovillers and the other in the night penetrated the ruins of the village of La Boiselle.
Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boiselle were positions in the German front line. East of the last place the fortified village of Contalmaison occupied high ground, forming as it were a pivot in the German intermediate line covering their field guns. The British second position ran through Pozières to the two Bazentins and as far as Guillemont.
The villages captured were Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, La Boiselle, and Contalmaison the latter captured on July 10th, after particularly fierce fighting. Every observer dwells on "the immense strength of the German defences." "All the little villages and woods, each eminence and hollow, have been converted into a fortress as formidable as the character of the ground makes possible."
Another promontory was left jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our left La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but it could only be guessed.
It was not until the 5th that La Boiselle in the first German line was mastered, and farther east the initial success of the British was checked by a line of woods which required weeks to clear. On the 7th we took Contalmaison, but were driven out of most of it by a counter-attack. It finally fell on the 10th, but Ovillers held out till the 16th.
They followed the Bapaume Road toward Pozieres, passing through a country which had seen the heaviest fighting in the war. "This," said the O. C., drawing aside from the road, and riding to a slightly rising ground, "is La Boiselle, or at least where it was, and that I fancy is the famous mine crater. Sixty thousand pounds of gun cotton blew up that hole."
In this sector all the German first positions had been captured. The second position ran through a heavily wooded country and the villages of the Bazentins, Longueval, and Guillemont. During the night of July 2, 1916, the British had penetrated La Boiselle, and throughout the following day the battle raged around that place and Ovillers.
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