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Updated: May 15, 2025
From Gommecourt to the Somme was an area of concentrated destruction. The wilderness swelled outwards, becoming twelve miles wide at parts. Tens of thousands of shells had pocked the dirty soil, scores of mine explosions had cratered it. Only the pen of a Zola could describe adequately the zone's intense desolation, as seen from the air.
A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a cornfield, and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to their stirrup leathers crying: "Pity! Pity!" The Indians lowered their lances, but took prisoners to show their chivalry. But it was nothing more than a beau geste.
In something like a panic they fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay. The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack.
The first streaks of light, gray and cold, show new attacking forces coming up over the hill. They penetrate deep into the plowed soil. They seem to hold the hill. Stumbling through the cratered terrain the Austrians advance toward the Italian positions. Then from out of the tawny earth an Italian battalion springs up. One can almost imagine that one hears their hoarse battle cry, 'Avanti, Savoia!
He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by piece at that weedy and cratered earth. He was looking for the village where he was born. The House With Two Storeys I came again to Croisilles.
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