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Updated: July 1, 2025
The charge of July 1st had been at seven-thirty in the morning. Contalmaison had been stormed in the afternoon. Fricourt was taken at midday.
German Fictions Winter Preparation Albert La Boisselle and Ovillers In the Track of War Regained Ground Enemy Preparations German Dug-outs "There were no Stragglers" Contalmaison Devastation Retreating Germans Death, Victory, Work Work of the R.E. A Parachute Approaching Victory. No. 6
The guns were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give and the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared in a fog like a fishing smack off the Grand Banks.
On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old chateau set in a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct hit of a fifteen-inch shell.
To the women who stood in the long lines waiting with the potato and butter tickets for food on the other side of the old stone bridge that spans the Havel they were merely ordinary cumbersome furniture wagons. How were they to know that these tumbrils contained the bloody story of Contalmaison?
If any reader of this chapter cares to look into the files of English newspapers at the time of the Contalmaison battle, for such it was, they will find confirmation of my statements as to the presence of the Prussian Guard in the English despatches published in the second week in July.
The villages captured were Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, La Boiselle, and Contalmaison the latter captured on July 10th, after particularly fierce fighting. Every observer dwells on "the immense strength of the German defences." "All the little villages and woods, each eminence and hollow, have been converted into a fortress as formidable as the character of the ground makes possible."
A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contalmaison justified the expectation as to what was in store for Contalmaison. I saw the blackened and shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La Boisselle. Once with many others they had given shade in the gardens of houses; but there were no traces of houses now except as they were mixed with the earth. The village had been hammered into dust.
The Germans could not hold what they had won back, and the khaki succeeded the field grey at Contalmaison. The evacuation of the wounded occupied hours. I purposely missed my train, for I knew that I was probably the only foreign civilian to see the historic picture of the proudest soldiery of Prussia return to its garrison town from the greatest battle in history.
Standing in Mash Valley, at the foot of Ring Finger Spur, just where the Roman Road starts its long rise to Pozières, one sees a lesser road forking off to the right, towards a village called Contalmaison, a couple of miles away. The fork of the road marks where our old front line ran.
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