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On the 30th of June Wallenstein's troops appeared, and on the 5th of July encamped close by the king, and posted themselves not on the Bavarian side, but between the king and his own friends of Schwaben and Frankenland, in order to intercept his provisions, and, as they thought, to starve him out of his camp. Here they lay to see, as it were, who could subsist longest.
But for this stricken wood, the eastern bank of the Ancre is a gentle, sloping hill, bare of trees. On the top of this hill is the famous Schwaben Redoubt. The Ancre River and the marshy valley through which it runs are crossed by several causeways. One most famous causeway crosses just in front of Hamel on the line of the old Mill Road.
The troops advanced with the utmost dash and determination, and detachments got far ahead of the line into Pendant copse, Thiepval, the Schwaben redoubt, and even the outskirts of Grandcourt.
Kusche told Voigt to bring the reports in a hurry which Voigt promptly did. "On Tuesday evening, May 12, 1936, the Captain of the Nazi ship 'Schwaben', which had just arrived from Antwerp, Belgium, came to your office and handed you a sealed package of orders and propaganda. He laid it on your desk in this room.
Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches.
But in a short time the British troops by a vigorous attack drove them out, capturing five officers and seventy-nine of other ranks. A subsequent attack by the British, delivered on a front of some 5,000 yards between Schwaben Redoubt and Le Sars, advanced the British line from 300 to 500 yards.
During this advance over 400 prisoners, including ten officers, were captured, and also fifteen machine guns. Large gatherings of German troops reported north of Saillisel were caught by the concentrated fire from the French batteries. In the region of Gueudecourt the British advanced their lines and beat off a furious attack made on the Schwaben Redoubt north of Thiepval on October 8, 1916.
De Diemerbroeck mentions the fact that a knife ten inches long was extracted by gastrotomy, and placed among the rarities in the anatomic chamber of the University at Leyden. The operation was done in 1635 at Koenigsberg, by Schwaben, who for his surgical prowess was appointed surgeon to the King of Poland. The patient lived eight years after the operation.
When one stands on this causeway over the Ancre one is almost at the middle point of the battlefield, for the river cuts the field in two. Roughly speaking, the ground to the west of the river was the scene of containing fighting, the ground to the east of the river the scene of our advance. At the eastern end of the causeway the Old Mill Road rises towards the Schwaben Redoubt.
The church and churchyard of Hamel, both utterly ruined, lie well up the hill in such a position that they made good posts from which our snipers could shoot across the river at men in the Schwaben Redoubt.
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