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Updated: May 1, 2025
Flers is a somewhat busy manufacturing town where cotton and thread mills have robbed the place of its charm.
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.
We then go forth to make out what we can of the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle standing up as at Falaise. The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station.
And, probably for that reason, the new line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their third line so as to have a line still barring our way when we had broken through their second line branched off near Pozières to meet the third line near Flers.
"From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme," wrote a man of the 10th Bavarians, "and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties." A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was given in the diary of an officer captured in a trench near Flers, and dated September 22d.
Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see with what feelings we come into the line into trenches where for months shells of all caliber have rained... Flers is a scrap heap." Again and again men lost their way up to the lines.
Flers, Martinpuich, Courcelette, and Eaucourt l'Abbaye have fallen within the past week, and the tanks have made their first ungainly bow before the curtain of war, with the superlatives of the war correspondent in close attendance. Leave from France has been cancelled indefinitely.
Stretching away towards Flers, there is a tract of green country all ups and downs, but with no distant views except the peep of Domfront that appears a few miles north of the town.
Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy's command was already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing the number of its divisions.
On December 31 I took the party of observers up to the Cough Drop where they had a shelter near B.H.Q. I had also supervision of the two Brigade dumps, one at Hexham Road and the other at the Flers Line about half a mile north of B.H.Q. Both places came in for heavy shelling at intervals all day and night, for both were situated about the end of a trench tramway, an obvious place for dumping stores.
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