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Updated: June 24, 2025
Consequently our infantry had been ordered to withdraw their line slightly, while it remained impossible for the Field Artillery to push forward so long as the Boche observers possessed the Morval ridge. Our batteries, with an S.O.S. range of 1700 yards, were close enough, as it was, to startle strict adherents of siege-war principles.
On the 25th September an attack was timed for twelve o'clock noon for Morval and Lesboeufs, and the Guards, London Scottish, Norfolks, Suffolks and many other regiments were to take part. The day before I visited our front in that section to obtain preliminary scenes. The London Scottish were preparing to leave to take up their battle positions.
A brigade of our own Divisional Infantry was again to descend upon the village of Combles, while another brigade, working on the flank, would effect a turning movement northwards towards Fregicourt, a hamlet twelve hundred yards north-east of Combles. Meanwhile the Division on our left intended to make a desperate effort to free the Morval Heights.
In this sector on the night of October 7, 1916, the British guns shattered two attempted counterattacks and gathered in three officers, 170 men, and three machine guns. To the north of the Somme the French infantry cooperating with the British army attacked from the front of Morval-Bouchavesnes and carried their line over 1,300 yards northeast of Morval.
After our successful attack and capture of Lesboeufs and Morval on September 25th, 1916, beyond consolidating our gains there was comparatively little done in the way of big offensives until the capture of Mouquet Farm and Thiepval and the capture of Beaumont Hamel that fortress of fortresses on November 13th, and I devoted the interval to recording the ground won.
The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesboeufs, Morval, and Combles, and they did not look too good, but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and the exhaustion surely those fellows were exhausted! of British troops good enough.
The difficulties of the British position were summarized by Sir Douglas Haig: "The line of demarkation agreed upon by the French commander and myself ran from Maltzhorn Farm due eastward to the Combles Valley, and then northeastward up the valley to a point midway between Sailly-Saillisel and Morval.
Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new advance all this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our right by Roye Combles was evacuated without a fight and with a litter of dead in its streets; Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost by the Germans; and a day later Thiepval, the greatest fortress position next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all its garrison taken prisoners.
In Morval where houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the glasses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a shell but prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned afterward.
That effort on our right was, however, hampered by the Germans in the Quadrilateral and Bouleaux wood to the east of Ginchy, and the Guards were unable to carry out the most important tactical part of the day's work by carrying Lesboeufs and Morval. The French had no such accumulation of gains on the 15th, but they conquered a larger area between the 13th and 18th.
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