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Updated: May 29, 2025
The few trees along the roads had been razed the only vegetation to be seen being coarse grass and weeds and thistles. The southern section between Fricourt and Montauban presented a more inviting prospect. A line of woods extended from the first village in a northeasterly direction, a second line running from Montauban around Longueval.
The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place, and loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a tunnel there. It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But was it Victory?
When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and repulsed fierce counter-attacks.
In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty crater of one of the mines exploded on July 1st at the hour of attack was large enough to hold a battalion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with its vast plume of smoke and dust scooped from the bowels of the earth. Famous since to sightseers of war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were the last word in German provision against attack.
After having seen the trenches that the British had taken on the high ground around Fricourt, I was the more interested to see those that the French had taken on July 1st. The British had charged uphill against the strongest fortifications that the Germans could devise in that chalky subsoil so admirably suited for the purpose.
The will to stand firm must be impressed on every man in the army. The enemy should have to carve his way over heaps of corpses...." To understand the exact position of the British forces on July 3, 1916, the alignment of the new front must be described in detail. The first section extended from Thiepval to Fricourt, between which the Albert-Bapaume road ran in a straight line over the watershed.
Finally the cars came to a halt at an appointed place near the ruins of the village and once beautiful woods of Fricourt, well within range of the enemies' guns. The spot where the King alighted was known as the Citadel, a German sandbag fortification of immense strength. It was arranged in the form of a circle, with underground tunnels and dug-outs of great depth.
At the lower end of the wood, standing out against it, was the dusty yellow ruin which once was Fricourt. Behind that shoulder of the hill was a valley, of which we could see the gentle green slopes stretching away to Mametz and Montauban, both taken the day before, in the first half-day's fighting. The green slopes must have been covered with the relics of that attack.
The storm of shells swept the entire enemy front, destroying trenches at Ypres and Arras and equally obliterating those at Beaumont-Hamel and Fricourt. By July 28, 1916, all the region subjected to bombardment presented a scene of complete and appalling devastation. Only a few stumps marked the spot where leafy groves had stood.
From a ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a tall crucifix between two trees, which our men called the "Poodles," a body of men came down and shrapnel burst among them and they fell and disappeared in tall grass. Stretcher bearers came slowly through Fricourt village with living burdens. Some of them were German soldiers carrying our wounded and their own.
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