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They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was tracked all along the way by British gun-fire directed from airplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison. At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells.
I reached the chalk-pit safely and then, cutting across direct to the gun pits, I took up my original position and awaited Fritz's good pleasure to send a few more crump to provide me with scenes. But not a shell came over. Before leaving this section I thought I would film Contalmaison, a name immortalised by such fighting as has rarely been equalled even in this great war.
The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort New charts at headquarters The battle of the Somme the battle of woods and villages A terrible school of war in session Mametz A wood not "thinned" The Quadrangle Marooned Scots "Softening" a village Light German cigars Going after Contalmaison Aeroplanes in the blue sky Midsummer fruitfulness and war's destruction Making chaos of a village Attack under cover of a wall of smoke A melodrama under the passing shells.
Our field-batteries, and some of our "heavies," had moved forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison where German shells came searching for them all day long and new divisions had been brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard and so long.
Night bombardments we had already seen, and I would not dwell on this except that it had the same splendor by night that the storming of Contalmaison had by day. The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host.
Behind them the German barrage fire, beating time methodically, entirely hid from view the attacking columns. By noon the British infantry, having carried Bailiff Wood by storm, captured the greater part of Contalmaison.
But although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, in an attack which I was able to see, they were smashed out of it again by storms of fire followed by masses of men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh were attacking Mametz Wood. They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle, "like turnips."
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.
It was British troops, too, which took Contalmaison and Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes Woods and who carried out all the attack of July 15th, with the exception of the South African brigade which stormed Delville Wood with the tearing enthusiasm of a rush for a new diamond mine.
John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried.
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