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The purpose was to use them for an attack on Ginchy; but a shift of arrangements brought the 47th Brigade into line against Guillemont and its quarries, which had on six occasions been unsuccessfully attacked. The Irish carried them. Three days later the whole division was launched against Ginchy. They equalled the Ulstermen's valour, and were luckier in the result.
The devastation in the neighbourhood of Cockrane Alley was worse than at Guillemont. Here the men witnessed the full terrors of the stricken field. Living men dwelt among the unburied dead. Booted feet of killed soldiers protruded from the side of the trench. Here and there a face or a hand was visible.
The country around us was mostly brown-mud shell-holes. Not like the shell-holes of that blasted hill-top of two months back I have never seen anything quite like that, though they say that Guillemont, which I have not seen, is as devastated. In this present area there is green grass between the rims of the craters. But not enough green grass to matter.
Through Guillemont, that wicked resort of machine guns, which had been as severely hammered by shell fire after it had repulsed British attacks as any village on the Somme, the Irish swept in good order, cleaning up dugouts and taking prisoners on the way with all the skill of veterans and a full relish of the exploit, and then forward, as a well-linked part of a successful battle line, to the sunken road which was the second objective.
Apparently owing to the darkness of the night and the width of frontage allotted to the attacking Companies, touch was lost with the right Battalion of the 144th Brigade which was enveloping Guillemont Farm from the south. As our rôle was to protect the right flank, and as the attack on the left was disorganised by shell-fire, the operations came to a standstill.
Another section, owing to miscalculation, swept through the German trenches straight into the village of Guillemont, where they lost their direction amid the ruins and confusion. Working their way through the shattered streets they proceeded to dig themselves in when they had reached the far northeast corner of the place.
Foch fought off many determined German counter-attacks in the Somme sector, and continued their advance, the French gaining Maurepas and the British moving closer to Guillemont and Ginchy, driving the Germans back along eleven miles of front and capturing Thiepval Ridge and other important positions near Pozieres.
It was nearly dark when we reached the Guillemont cross-roads. Small parties of infantrymen were coming along, and ammunition and ration waggons. As we turned up the road leading south-west, a square-shouldered man with a stiff big-peaked cap saluted with the crisp correctness of the regular soldier. I recognised the sergeant-major of A Battery.
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown.
One of the most desperate attacks made was against the British positions between the quarry and Guillemont. After a heavy preparatory bombardment the Germans launched an attack that took them to the edge of the British trenches, where a desperate hand-to-hand struggle was made in which the Germans fought with stubbornness and determination, but were finally repulsed with heavy losses.
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