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Updated: May 29, 2025
On July 2 and 3, the battle of the Somme continued without cessation of infantry fighting, while the big guns thundered on both sides. The British offensive took Fricourt on the 2nd, after a tremendous bombardment, and occupied several villages, while the French advanced to within three miles of Peronne. Ten thousand more prisoners fell into the hands of the Allies on these two days.
His Majesty's Arrival at Boulogne At G.H.Q. General 's Appreciation The King on the Battlefield of Fricourt Within Range of the Enemy's Guns His Majesty's Joke Outside a German Dug-out His Memento from a Hero's Grave His Visit to a Casualty Clearing Station The King and the Puppy Once in Disgrace Now a Hospital Mascot. That evening I reported at headquarters.
Now and then one could even see heads, with our flat steel helmets on them, showing out from the red trench against the skyline. So the fighting could not be severe at the moment on the crest of the hill. Yet we were clearly not holding the whole of that skyline trench. On its southern or right-hand shoulder the hill ran into Fricourt Wood, which covered all that end of it.
For some weeks, the underground arrangements of Fricourt, the stairs with wired treads, the bolting holes, the air and escape shafts, the living rooms with electric light, the panelled walls, covered with cretonnes of the smartest Berlin patterns, the neat bunks and the signs of female visitors, were written of in the press, so that some may think that Fricourt was better fitted than other places on the line.
But the kindly grass, the uncut growth of two years, hid them; and the valley, except for a few thin white trench lines, might have been any other smiling summer landscape. When the wave of our attack swept through that country the Germans in Fricourt village and wood still held on.
To the right the lines droop down the spur to a valley, across a brook and a road in the valley, and up a big bare humping chalk hill placed at right angles to the spur on which Fricourt stands. The spur on which Fricourt stands and the spur down which the lines run both end at the valley in a steep drop.
But few of them got back when they found that the line as a whole had held, and the losses of these troops in the fire to the left and the right and in front of them made up the bulk of the British casualties on that day. Farther south they fared better. The outskirts of La Boisselle and Fricourt were reached; Mametz was taken, and also Montauban by the most striking advance of the day.
"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I. who were killed in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme"; and below it there were placed these splendid words: "Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."
Another promontory was left jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our left La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but it could only be guessed.
Just above the steep fall our men fought very hard to push back the enemy a little towards Fricourt, so that he might not see the lower part of the valley, or be able to enfilade our lines on the other side of it. For about three hundred yards here the space between the lines is filled with the craters of mines exploded under the enemy's front line.
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