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Updated: June 12, 2025
This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of the world. On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the Mametz wood upon our left.
On this higher ground, behind Fricourt and its wood, is a much bigger, thicker, and better grown wood, about a mile and a half away; this is the wood of Mametz. Some short distance to the left of this wood, very plainly visible on the high, rather bare hill, is a clump of pollarded trees near a few heaps of red brick.
On the right of our attack we have captured the German labyrinth of trenches on a front of seven miles to a depth of 1,000 yards, and have stormed and occupied the strongly fortified villages of Montauban and Mametz. In the centre on a front of four miles we have gained many strong points.
Headquarters will be ready to start after an early dinner. I am returning by car. "Hallo! they're expecting a big advance to-morrow," said the adjutant. The note also decided a discussion in which the adjutant, the signalling officer, and the cook had joined as to whether we should dine early and pack up ready to go, or pack up and have dinner when we got to the new position behind Mametz Wood.
To Aubrey, sitting beside his brother, the Nikê more than once suggested the recollection of a broken Virgin hanging from a fragment of a ruined church which he remembered on a bit of road near Mametz, at which he had seen passing soldiers look stealthily and long.
Next day Contalmaison was won by the British, but recaptured by the Prussian Guard, who held the town for three days, when they were again driven out. A desperate struggle for the possession of the Mametz woods marked the fighting from the 10th to the 12th, the British and the Germans alternating in its possession.
There was one morning on the quay when, watching the incoming tide, two of us were discussing Mametz Wood and some matters relating to it which will never be published, and the young man who was instructing me was approached by an older man, who beamed, and held in his hand a news-sheet. "Splendid news this morning," said the elderly man to the young soldier.
The magnitude of the achievement was not yet estimated, but already names hitherto unknown were flung up flaming into the world's sky in letters of eternal fire, Ovillers, Mametz Wood, Trones Wood, Langueval, Mouquet Farm, Deville Wood for the British, with twenty-one thousand prisoners, and Hardecourt, Dompierre, Becquin-Court, Bussu and Fay for the French allies, with thirty-one thousand prisoners.
One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road that turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road, bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing without a pause over Fricourt and Mametz.
The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in masses to captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic assault of our English and Scottish troops.
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