Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
I then visited the trenches near the windmill and then returned to the south of Mametz Wood. Whilst waiting here I examined with interest the many curious little 'cubby holes' that our troops had made during the attack on Mametz Wood. I also watched the German 'heavies' shelling our field batteries near Bazentin-le-Grand, and sending up clouds of chalky dust.
To the north of Mametz the ground rises. From the eyrie of the salient one can look over it and away to the north to big rolling chalk land, most of it wooded.
East of Mametz a battalion from the Champagne front appeared and was destroyed, or made prisoner, a short time after detraining at the railhead. The British took a thousand prisoners within a small area of this sector. An eyewitness describes seeing 600 German prisoners being led to the rear by three ragged soldiers of a Scotch regiment "like pipers at the head of a battalion."
Going in from the west while the Germans had their curtains of fire registered elsewhere, the British grubbed their way in one charge through most of Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it was Briton or German lying on the other side of a tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of possessing four big guns which the Germans had been unable to withdraw, and had ascertained also that the Germans had a strong position protected by barbed wire at the northern end of the woods.
The villages captured were Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, La Boiselle, and Contalmaison the latter captured on July 10th, after particularly fierce fighting. Every observer dwells on "the immense strength of the German defences." "All the little villages and woods, each eminence and hollow, have been converted into a fortress as formidable as the character of the ground makes possible."
It was a sad lot of men when we swung out on the road again back to the Somme, and there was less singing than usual. That first night we remained at Mametz Wood. We figured that we would get to kip while the kipping was good. There were some old Boche dug-outs in fair condition, and we were in a fair way to get comfortable. No luck!
It was British troops, too, which took Contalmaison and Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes Woods and who carried out all the attack of July 15th, with the exception of the South African brigade which stormed Delville Wood with the tearing enthusiasm of a rush for a new diamond mine.
On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack failed, as I have told, but southward the "impregnable" lines were smashed by a tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Montauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz village.
The British battalions that went over the parapet from Thiepval northward were of the same mettle as those that took Montauban and Mametz; their training and preparation the same. Where battalions to the southward swept forward according to plan and the guns' pioneering was successful, those on this front in many cases started from trenches already battered in by German shell fire.
The other wooded heights are about three miles away. All that line of high ground marked by woods was the enemy second line, which with a few slight exceptions was our front line before the end of the third week of the battle. From this hill-top of the salient the lines run down the north-eastern snout of the hill and back across the valley, so as to shut in Mametz.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking