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Updated: May 5, 2025
Besides, the British were so near Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances that its taking was only another step forward, one of savage fighting, however, in the same kind of operations that I have described in the chapter on "Watching a Charge."
Three of the British divisions in action here were from the New Army; one was a Territorial brigade and the two others had seen hard fighting in Flanders and Gallipoli. They confronted a series of strongly fortified villages Gommecourt Serre, Beaumont-Hamel, and Thiepval with underground caves that could shelter whole battalions.
Just to the east of Crucifix Valley a second spur thrusts away down to the south like a forefinger. It is a long sloping spur, wooded at the lower end. It is known on the maps as Thiepval Hill or the Leipzig Salient. When the lines turn to the south after crossing Crucifix Valley they run along the side of this hill and pass out of sight round the end. The lines are quite regular and distinct.
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.
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.
A two-mile trench system, believed to be impregnable, was stormed by the Allied forces near Thiepval September 17, while south of the Somme the French took the German trenches along a front of three miles. Next day more ground was taken in the advance toward Bapaume and German prisoners continued to fall into the Allies' hands.
Their irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches, and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps, this side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work.
As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate of the correspondents this time they really were not conducting the war for us did not inform us of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages and trenches after they were over the Ridge while High Visibility had Low Visibility shut up in the guardhouse.
Hillyard laughed as he read it but it was less in amusement as from pleasure at the particular information which this sentence contained. Harry Luttrell had clearly won a special distinction in the hard fighting at Thiepval. There was not a word in Harry's letter to suggest it. There would not be.
Thiepval was always in the background of the army's mind, the symbol of rankling memory which irritated British stubbornness and consoled the enemy for his defeat of July 15th and his gradual loss of the Ridge.
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