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Pozières, the highest point, where Australians first peeped over it, lay miles away to our left rear. From the top of the ridge behind you, looking back over your left shoulder, you could just see a few distant broken tree stumps. I think they marked the site of that old nightmare. We were looking down a long even slope to a long up-slope beyond.
Pozières, then, was on the way to the Ridge and its possession would put the formidable defenses of Thiepval in a salient, thus enabling the British to strike it from the side as well as in front, which is the aim of all strategy whether it works in mobile divisions in an open field or is biting and tearing its way against field fortifications.
The camera was rushed to the photographic lorry, the plates were unloaded in the dark hut, the negatives were developed. Half an hour later I received the first proofs, and, with them, some degree of disappointment. Those covering the first outward and return journey between Pozières and Le Sars were good, as were the next three, at the beginning of the second journey.
Mash Valley curves round its finger-tip, and just at the spring of the curve the third of the four Albert roads crosses it, and goes up the spur towards Pozières and Bapaume. The line of the road, which is rather banked up, so as to be a raised way, like so many Roman roads, can be plainly seen, going along the spur, almost to Pozières.
It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich, Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozières, Guillemont, Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those places being what it was.
Standing in Mash Valley, at the foot of Ring Finger Spur, just where the Roman Road starts its long rise to Pozières, one sees a lesser road forking off to the right, towards a village called Contalmaison, a couple of miles away. The fork of the road marks where our old front line ran.
When you stand in Pozières to-day, and are told that you will find the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least sign of movement.
At Pozières the First and Second Divisions demonstrated that the abandon and tenacity against odds that secured a footing on the Gallipoli Peninsula was still the special prerogative of the care-free lads from these South Sea nations.
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.
But I think that the hardest fight of all was that of the second and third phases the battle for Pozières Ridge. Pozières village itself was not on the crest of the hill. It was on the British side of it, where the German was naturally hanging on because it was almost the highest point in his position and gave him a view over miles of our territory.
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