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Updated: May 24, 2025
After taking Pozières and driving over the ridge and on down into the Courcelette Valley, we took up a position about 500 yards from the German front lines. Here occurred another of those remarkable escapes from the Grim Reaper's toll that won for me throughout the unit the pseudonym, "Horseshoe Grant."
Then the little colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself. One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian.
Courcelette fell to the Canadians, Martinpuich to the Scots, Flers to the New Zealanders. High wood was at last enveloped in this advance, and Delville wood passed by the division of the New Army which pushed from Ginchy towards Lesboeufs.
In the mess the fights were reconstructed. Sudden silences were frequent an unspoken tribute to C. and the other casualties. But at lunch-time we were cheered by the news that the first and second objectives had been reached, that Martinpuich, Courcelette, and Flers had fallen, and that the Tanks had behaved well. After lunch I rested awhile before the long reconnaissance, due to start at three.
He was seeing a strange business, but high explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion. With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of the Fleur-de-lis.
During this advance the British penetrated the third German line, which was shattered at all points. Three new villages Flers, Martinpuich, and Courcelette fell into British hands and more than twenty miles of German trenches were taken. Over 100 officers and 4,000 other ranks were captured by the British.
British do the same against German attacks; only in the battle of the Somme the British had been always attacking, always taking machine gun positions. Crème de Menthe, chosen comrade of the Canadians on their way to the taking of Courcelette, was also at home among débris. The Canadians saw that she was as she moved toward it with the glee of a sea lion toward a school of fish.
The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesboeufs, Morval, and Combles, and they did not look too good, but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and the exhaustion surely those fellows were exhausted! of British troops good enough.
It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut.
The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.
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