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Updated: May 24, 2025
But when I looked at Trones Wood in the distance, and the heavy shells bursting all round, I gritted my teeth and decided to push on. Thinking that more smoke might help to keep off the flies I lighted two cigarettes and puffed away at them, one in each corner of my mouth. I'm sure I must have looked a most extraordinary specimen of humanity at this moment.
It was the national fête-day of France, but the attack was made on the British front from Contalmaison to Trônes wood. The day was one of the most successful in the four and a half months' battle, and the dash of the British troops carried them as far as all their objectives.
This task presented many difficulties, for the advance from Trônes Wood must be made over a bare and shelterless country that was under the Germans' direct observation from Leuze Wood. There was also a strongly fortified quarry on its western edge and a ravine to the south of it between Maltzhorn and Falfemont Farms, while Angle Wood in the center was a German stronghold.
The artillery of both sides hammered the approaches of the woods to prevent reinforcements from coming up. In the cellars of Guillemont village beyond Trônes the Germans had refuges for concentrating their reserves to feed in more troops, whose orders, as all the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man. Trônes Wood was never to be yielded to the British. Its importance was too vital.
In woods from the high trees of which he could have clear observation, as in the Bazentin, Bernafay, and Trones Woods, he had several of these emplacements, and also stout concrete fortlets for heavy single guns. All the enemy position on the battlefield was well gunned at the time of the beginning of the battle. In modern war, it is not possible to hide preparations for an attack on a wide front.
"The bloodbath of the Somme," as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks through the woods of death Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette and Martinpuich I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux, scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle.
His antiquarian gait suited me, and this was the smoothest of the many torturous forms of travel I endured before I was able once again to move up-rightly on my feet as a man should. At Trones Wood I was swung into a horse ambulance and thereafter swung and swayed for a couple of hours until, closing my eyes, I could fancy I was once again at sea.
It was useless taking any notice of the lighter shells. They had come and burst before one realised what had happened. The heavier shells, particularly those that were timed to burst in the air, were very trying, and when they burst over Trones Wood the noise reverberated through what remained of the trees, and so became extraordinarily intensified.
Half a tactical eye could see that the woods of Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes must be held in order to allow of elbow room for a mass movement over a broad front.
The British had swept through Bazentin Wood and taken the Bazentin villages. They held Trônes Wood and were in Delville and High Woods. A footing was established on the Ridge where the British could fight for final mastery on even terms with the enemy.
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