Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, looking over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on the left side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side.
The British entered the wood of Mametz to the north of Mametz village on July 4, 1916, and captured the wood of Barnafay. These positions were not carried without stiff fighting, for the Germans had fortified the woods in every conceivable manner.
And other units were not so fortunate in that respect. About 24,000 grenades went through my hands, and of these perhaps 5000 went into the sandbags. On September 14 we first saw the mysterious tanks, which had arrived behind the quarry to take part in the great attack next day. We had two allotted to our Division. That night we moved from Mametz Wood to the Chalk Quarry at Bazentin-le-Petit.
On this second tongue the village of Mametz once stood. Near here the road, having now cut across the salient, again crosses both sets of lines, and begins a long, slow ascent to a ridge or crest. From this point, for a couple of miles, the road is planted on each side with well-grown plane-trees, in some of which magpies have built their nests ever since the war began.
In Delville Wood the South African Brigade of the 9th Division was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come out with few officers to lead them. In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to pieces before these South Africans.
Below the Pozières-Bapaume road were five small woods, grouped like the Great Bear constellation of stars. Their roots were feeding on hundreds of dead bodies, after each of the five Trones, Mametz, Foureaux, Delville, and Bouleaux had seen wild encounters with bomb and bayonet beneath its dead trees.
The ridge is the Albert-Bapaume Road, here passing over the highest ground on its path. Turning from these distant places and looking to the right, one sees, just below, twelve hundred yards to the east of Fricourt, across the valley at the foot of this hill of the salient, the end of an irregular spur, on which are the shattered bricks of the village of Mametz before mentioned.
There was no co-ordination of divisions; no knowledge among battalion officers of the strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were involved. "Goodness knows what's happening," said an officer I met near Mametz. He had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing fire.
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.
They recall the Wilderness a Wilderness lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race. It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that concerns us now.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking