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Updated: May 5, 2025
But the symbol for which it stood was there in readiness as a jumping-off place for the sweep-down into the valley later on when the Canadians should take the place of the Australians; and before they retired they could look in triumph across at Thiepval and down on Courcelette and Martinpuich and past the valley to Bapaume.
On 9 November the weather improved, and though the October rains had made transport almost impossible across the mangled soil of the battlefield on the Somme, the conditions were not so bad north of Thiepval, where our advance had been stayed on 1 July.
If this charge had none of the display of other days it had all the more thrill because of its workmanlike and regulated progress. No get-drunk-six-days-of-the-week-and-fight-like-h l-on-Sunday business of the swashbuckling age before Thiepval.
The Germans, on the defensive, considered that the failure to take Thiepval at the beginning of the Somme battle proved its impregnability; the British, on the offensive, considered no place impregnable.
On that day the British at last mastered the Quadrilateral east of Ginchy, and thus prepared for the great success which attended the next general attack on the 25th. It was the best day of the whole campaign. Lesboeufs and Morval fell on the north of Combles, while the French took Rancourt on the south-east, and away to the west Gough's army made the surprising seizure of Thiepval.
When British fifteen-inch shells made it their target some of the dust rose in a great geyser and fell back into place; but there were cellars in Thiepval which even fifteen-inch shells could not penetrate. "However, we'll make the Germans there form the habit of staying indoors," said a gunner.
Thiepval and Ovillers had not yet been taken, and only a portion of La Boiselle, but the British had broken through the first position south of that place and had pushed well along on the road to Contalmaison. This northern section had been transformed by warfare into a scene of desolation, bare, and forbidding, seamed with trenches and pitted with shell holes.
On Friday, July 7, 1916, the British began an attack on Contalmaison from Sausage Valley on the southwest, and from the labyrinth of copses north of Fricourt through which ran the Contalmaison-Fricourt highroad. South of Thiepval there was a salient which the Germans had organized and strongly fortified during twenty months' preparation.
In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison there the 180th Regiment, who had held it for two years knew that they were doomed.
On the night of Thursday, September 13, 1916, the British forces won German trenches to the southeast of Thiepval and a heavily fortified place known as Wunderwerk. This was the prelude to a series of brilliant victories won by the British troops which had not been surpassed during the entire fighting in the Somme area.
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