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Updated: May 29, 2025
Indeed from July 4, 1916, onward, there was scarcely any cessation to the German fire on the entire British front, and around Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban in the background. On July 7, 1916, the British General Staff informed the French high command that they would make an attack on Trônes Wood on the following morning, asking for their cooperation.
The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the débris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of reckoning had been reached.
Trenches disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them for some men had to stay on duty there were blown to fragments. Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban.
The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage. I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in '15.
Holding the ground that they had gained, they were waiting on something to happen elsewhere. Others must advance before they could go farther. The battle was not general; it raged at certain points where the Germans had anchored themselves after some recovery from the staggering blow of the first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was making a crushing concentration on a clump of woods.
German 5.9 shell were falling just on our side of Fricourt village, and in a line from there up the valley behind our attack. It was not a really heavy barrage big black shell-bursts at intervals on the ground, helped by fairly constant white puffs of shrapnel in the air above them. Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La Boiselle.
In the course of this visit, I had the good luck to go into the former German trenches at Notre Dame de Lorette, and also to see some of the German first-line trenches and dug-outs on the Somme at Fricourt, and Albert and its hanging statue. But although this was exciting, it was eclipsed by a visit to Ypres, which I was able to induce my friend, R , to manage for me.
We rode on to where the front line had been at Fricourt then to Fricourt 'Circus, Mametz, and then to the south of Mametz Wood, where we left our horses. First we went through the wood to B.H.Q., which were in some deep dugouts there. Having obtained guides and a rough sort of map, we went on to Battalion H.Q. at the Chalk Quarry east of Bazentin-le-Petit.
German gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage fire, it roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of Fricourt, and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of "hate." Our men were working like ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle.
"We have every reason to hope that Ovillers, Fricourt, Thiepval are impregnable; at the same time in war one never leaves things to chance." The Kid's astonishment turned to stupefaction; he himself had been in the storming of Ovillers.
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