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Updated: May 24, 2025
And I chanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on my consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns of my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of 1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois des Trones.
With that knowledge new resolutions were born within you; resolutions that bade you never to slack for an instant in your endeavour to bring success to our arms. Trones Wood! That name had been drummed into my ears for days. It seemed to have a fascination for me. I asked several men to describe the place.
Our Divisional Infantry are in the line again, and the latest report, timed 6 A.M., comes from Montauban, and says that they are approaching Trones Wood. We shall be supporting them to-morrow morning, and the C.R.A. is anxious for positions to be reconnoitred in X 10 and X 11. The C.R.A. has gone up that way in the car this morning."
Here, and among those ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south and east Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood human suffering and heroism, human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reached their height.
Victory at this point finally lay with the British, who on July 12 gained possession of the whole locality, together with the Trones wood, which had also been the scene of a bloody straggle.
Assisted by the flanking fire of the French guns, the British penetrated Trônes Wood, and obtained a foothold there, seizing a line of trenches and capturing 130 prisoners and several mitrailleuses. On the same day the French on the British right were pushing forward toward Maltzhorn Farm.
The German realized this and after he had lost Mametz and Bernafay he held all the more desperately to Trônes, which, for the time being, was the superlative horror in woods fighting, though we were yet to know that it could be surpassed by Delville and High Woods. In Trônes the Germans met attack with counter-attack again and again.
Indeed from July 4, 1916, onward, there was scarcely any cessation to the German fire on the entire British front, and around Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban in the background. On July 7, 1916, the British General Staff informed the French high command that they would make an attack on Trônes Wood on the following morning, asking for their cooperation.
Of course, large numbers of Germans were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the process of "thinning" out the woods; but that was to be expected, as the Germans learned during the battle of the Somme. How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do not understand; or how they took Trônes Wood later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only heightened perplexity.
Following hard blows with blows Trônes Woods Attack and counter-attack A heavy price to pay "The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering Second-line German fortifications A daringly planned attack "Up and at them!"
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