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Updated: June 16, 2025
From the eastern flank of the hill, our line gives a glimpse of the site of the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, once one of the strong places of the enemy, and now a few heaps of bricks, and one spike of burnt ruin where the church stood. Like most Picardy villages, Ovillers was compactly built of red brick along a country road, with trees and orchards surrounding it.
Troops moving forward from reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support trenches. At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban.
At Ovillers and La Boiselle the Third Corps sustained all day long a desperate struggle. Two new divisions which had been brought forward to support now joined the fighting. One of these divisions successfully carried the trenches before Ovillers and the other in the night penetrated the ruins of the village of La Boiselle.
We were now immediately to follow them into battle, for next day a fleet of motor-'buses bore us south to the crowded village of Senlis behind the Ovillers La Boisselle Sector of the Somme front. The successful night attack of July 14th had eaten into the third German line between Longueval and Bazentin-le-Petit on a front of some three miles.
Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled in that place. Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had been a village called Ovillers.
A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of the garrison one hundred and fifty strong after a desperate and gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the last, surrendered with honor.
One shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells. It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy.
A division of Midland Territorials advanced from the southwest over the ground between Pozières and Ovillers. About the same time an Anzac division advanced from the southeast. German defenses south of the village were rapidly cleared by the Midland "Terriers," who then occupied a line in the outskirts of the village extending toward Thiepval.
On July 15, 1916, the British consolidated the new ground they had won, while their left advancing to the outskirts of Pozières attacked the Leipzig Redoubt, and renewed the struggle for Ovillers which had been fought over with scarcely any pause since July 7, 1916.
They were alloted a frontage of about 400 yards, spanning the head of the shallow valley running down to Ovillers; between the lines ran the almost obliterated tracks of a light railway. About 200 yards north of the left of our line a German strong point on higher ground looked into and enfiladed the whole of the captured ground, and D Company was ordered to attack it at 1.50 a.m. next morning.
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