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Updated: May 24, 2025
"When the boys come back I want a mother here to welcome them. Why, you're getting transparent. It won't do ask Susan there if it will do." "Oh, if Susan and you are both banded together against me!" said Anne helplessly. One day the glorious news came that the Canadians had taken Courcelette and Martenpuich, with many prisoners and guns.
The British forces in France did not attempt any offensive during the day of January 29, 1917, but at night a successful raid was carried out in the neighborhood of the Butte de Warlencourt north of Courcelette. The British penetrated the German trenches and bombed the dugouts, destroying a gun and taking seventeen prisoners.
During this offensive more than 1,250 Germans were taken. Unceasing activity on the part of the Germans on October 11, 1916, showed that the recent successes of the Allies had by no means dampened their ardor or impaired their morale. All day long they shelled the British front south of the Ancre, especially north of Courcelette.
And ahead were Courcelette and Martinpuich, both only partially demolished by shell fire and in nowise properly softened according to the usual requirements for capitulation, with their cellars doubtless heavily reinforced as dugouts. Officers studying the villages through their glasses believed that they could be taken. Why not try?
On September 15 the British took Flers, Martinpuich, the important position known as the High Wood, Courcelette, and almost all of the Bouleaux Wood, and also stormed the German positions from Combles north to the Pozieres-Bapaume road, arriving within four miles of Bapaume and capturing 2,300 prisoners.
They cleaned up what was left of the Germans and established themselves firmly in Courcelette. The French Canadians had been holding Courcelette all day, but had lost heavily. Well, that night we went back in reserve; we were all in, and we staggered along till we got to the brick fields at Albert. There we had our bivouacs and we turned in.
One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking of Courcelette.
Through Longueval and Delville Wood, where the graves of the Highlanders and South Africans now lie thick, through Flers and Martinpuich, through Pozieres and Courcelette, they had fought their way, till they had reached the ridge, with High Wood at its summit, which the Boche, not altogether unreasonably, had regarded as impregnable.
Bapaume lay southwest from our trenches a matter of 15 miles; intervening were the towns of Labazell, Pozières, Courcelette and Martinpuieh, all on the Albert-Bapaume road. We arrived just in time to save Pozières.
Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naïve unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding, "'I golly!" that he had not been hurt!
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