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With no shells falling in Contalmaison, the bomb and the bayonet had the stage to themselves, a stage more or less hemmed in by explosions and with a sweep of projectiles from both sides passing over the heads of the cast in a melodrama which had "blessed little comedy relief," as one soldier put it.
A typical description of some of the horrors of the battle, as it surged around Contalmaison, was given by a German prisoner on July 12 to the war correspondent of the London Chronicle. He spoke English, having been employed in London for some years prior to the war. With his regiment, the 122nd Bavarians, he went into Contalmaison five days before his capture.
Next day Contalmaison was won by the British, but recaptured by the Prussian Guard, who held the town for three days, when they were again driven out. A desperate struggle for the possession of the Mametz woods marked the fighting from the 10th to the 12th, the British and the Germans alternating in its possession.
Thiepval and Ovillers had not yet been taken, and only a portion of La Boiselle, but the British had broken through the first position south of that place and had pushed well along on the road to Contalmaison. This northern section had been transformed by warfare into a scene of desolation, bare, and forbidding, seamed with trenches and pitted with shell holes.
Other prisoners said in effect that the fire was terrible in Contalmaison and at least half their men holding it were killed or wounded, so that when the British entered they walked over the bodies of the dead. The men who escaped were in a pitiful condition. "They lay on the ground utterly exhausted, most of them, and, what was strange, with their faces to the earth.
The trees were once the shade-giving trees about the market-place of Contalmaison, a hamlet at a cross-roads at this point. Behind these ruins the skyline is a kind of ridge which runs in a straight line, broken in one place by a few shatters of trees. These trees are the remains of the wood which once grew outside the village of Pozières.
This, then, was the battered remnant of the five Reserve regiments of the Prussian Guard which had charged the British lines at Contalmaison three weeks before in a desperate German counter-attack to wrest the village from the enemy, who had just occupied it. Each train discharged between six and seven hundred maimed passengers. Nor was this the last day of the influx.
Then the Kaiser seemed to question him, for I heard his hard, metallic voice: "Contalmaison ... Trones Wood ... heavy losses ... forced back ... terrific artillery fire ..." were words that reached me. The Kaiser's voice rose on a high note of irritability. Suddenly he dashed the papers on the desk from him and exclaimed: "It is outrageous! I'll break him!
On this date Horseshoe Trench, the main defense of Contalmaison from the west, was attacked, and here a battalion of West Yorks fought with distinction and succeeded in making a substantial advance. There was a pause in the fighting during the day of July 6, 1916, as welcome to the Germans as to the British, for some rest was imperative.
"This will require a little thinking," as one English officer said, "but of course we shall take it." The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff's Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually "softened" by the artillery.
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