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Updated: June 21, 2025
I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert, looking over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on the left side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt, Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side.
For 7 miles or more east of Albert along both sides of the great highway to Bapaume up the long slope from La Boisselle to Pozières windmill, and down again towards Le Sars, the eye would pick out no natural landmark except a few broken sticks, once trees.
The trenches are filled in at this point now, so that the roads may be used, but the place was once an exceedingly hot corner. In the old days, all the space between the two roads at the fork was filled with the village or hamlet of La Boisselle, which, though a tiny place, had once a church and perhaps a hundred inhabitants. The enemy fortified the village till it was an exceedingly strong place.
Afterwards such complete destruction became common enough; but till then no one had seen a village literally blown away. Not only the walls, but the very brick dust had vanished; its site could be fixed only by reference to the map and to the board stating "THIS IS LA BOISSELLE." Every kind of battle-wreckage lay about, including many dead bodies, ten days unburied in the midsummer heat.
"This will require a little thinking," as one English officer said, "but of course we shall take it." The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff's Wood, the Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually "softened" by the artillery.
On this occasion the Battalion was given ample time to view and get familiar with the ground, as the attack did not take place until July 23rd. Soon after arrival at Senlis the officers went over to La Boisselle. This first sight of the devastated area created the deepest impression.
They fought with a desperate courage, holding on to positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them and when our men were getting near to them, making us pay a heavy price for every little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all serving their machine-guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a wonderful obstinacy, until they were killed or captured.
The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the air mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in hour by hour. "The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly.
Our strongest places were the half-dozen built-up observation posts at the mines near Fricourt, Serre, and La Boisselle. For the rest, our greatest strength was but a couple of sandbags deep. There was no concrete in any part of the line, very few iron girders and not many iron "humpies" or "elephant backs" to make the roofs of dugouts.
Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled in that place. Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had been a village called Ovillers.
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