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Updated: June 21, 2025
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.
German gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage fire, it roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead of me, and now and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of Fricourt, and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of "hate." Our men were working like ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up toward Boisselle.
But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the countryside.
Some detachments must have reached their objective, as their signals had been seen. From La Boisselle southward the British had taken every objective. They were in Mametz and Montauban and around Fricourt. For the French it had been a clean sweep, without a single repulse. Twenty miles of those formidable German fortifications were in the possession of the Allies.
One shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells. It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy.
We were now immediately to follow them into battle, for next day a fleet of motor-'buses bore us south to the crowded village of Senlis behind the Ovillers La Boisselle Sector of the Somme front. The successful night attack of July 14th had eaten into the third German line between Longueval and Bazentin-le-Petit on a front of some three miles.
He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one to the other and then back to the owner. "Your men are extraordinary," he said. "They are wonderful." One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when that place was smoking with shell-bursts.
At La Boisselle they said we had pushed through, and fighting was still going on. I decided to leave for that district right away. Passing through Albert, I halted the car at the top of Becourt Wood. From this point I had to walk. In the distance I could see hundreds of shells bursting, and guns were thundering out. I gave one camera to my orderly and another had the tripod.
We had only some seven casualties from this source our support and reserve companies moved up or down constantly in accordance with the ever-shifting situations. Battalion Headquarters remained in a German dugout in La Boisselle. Though tainted by the foul reek from the village, it earned the admiration of its tenants by its solid and elaborate construction.
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