Four days after the raid we heard that we were due for the Somme.
We marched through Béthune, which had been much knocked about and
was nearly deserted, to Fouquières, and there entrained for the
Somme. The Somme railhead was near Amiens and we marched by easy
stages through Cardonette, Daours, and Buire, until we came to the
original front line, close to the place where David Thomas had
been killed. The fighting had moved two miles on. This was on the
afternoon of 14th July. At 4 a.m. on the 15th July we moved up the
Méaulte-Fricourt-Bazentin road which wound through ‘Happy Valley’
and found ourselves in the more recent battle area. Wounded men and
prisoners came streaming past us. What struck me most was the number
of dead horses and mules lying about; human corpses I was accustomed
to, but it seemed wrong for animals to be dragged into the war like
this. We marched by platoons, at fifty yards distance. Just beyond
Fricourt we found a German shell-barrage across the road. So we left it
and moved over thickly shell-pitted ground until 8 a.m., when we found
ourselves on the fringe of Mametz Wood, among the dead of our new-army
battalions that had been attacking Mametz Wood. We halted in thick
mist. The Germans had been using lachrymatory shell and the mist held
the fumes; we coughed and swore. We tried to smoke, but the gas had got
into the cigarettes, so we threw them away. Later we wished we had not,
because it was not the cigarettes that had been affected so much as our
own throats. The colonel called up the officers and we pulled out our
maps. We were expecting orders for an attack. When the mist cleared
we saw a German gun with ‘First Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers’
chalked on it. It was evidently a trophy. I wondered what had
happened to Siegfried and my friends of A Company. We found the
battalion quite close in bivouacs; Siegfried was still alive, as were
Edmund Dadd and two other A Company officers. The battalion had been in
heavy fighting. In their first attack at Fricourt they had overrun our
opposite number in the German army, the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment,
who were undergoing a special disciplinary spell in the trenches
because an inspecting staff-officer, coming round, had found that all
the officers were back in Mametz village in a deep dug-out instead of
up in the trenches with their men. (It was said that throughout that
bad time in March in the German trenches opposite to us there had been
no officer of higher rank than corporal.) Their next objective had been
The Quadrangle, a small copse this side of Mametz Wood. I was told
that Siegfried had then distinguished himself by taking single-handed
a battalion frontage that the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take
the day before. He had gone over with bombs in daylight, under covering
fire from a couple of rifles, and scared the occupants out. It was a
pointless feat; instead of reporting or signalling for reinforcements
he sat down in the German trench and began dozing over a book of poems
which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not
report. The colonel was furious. The attack on Mametz Wood had been
delayed for two hours because it was reported that British patrols were
still out. ‘British patrols’ were Siegfried and his book of poems. ‘It
would have got you a D.S.O. if you’d only had more sense,’
stormed the colonel. Siegfried had been doing heroic things ever since
I had left the battalion. His nickname in the Seventh Division was
‘Mad Jack.’ He was given a Military Cross for bringing in a wounded
lance-corporal from a mine-crater close to the German lines, under
heavy fire. He was one of the rare exceptions to the rule against the
decoration of Third Battalion officers. I did not see Siegfried this
time; he was down with the transport having a rest. So I sent him a
rhymed letter, by one of our own transport men, about the times that
we were going to have together when the war ended; how, after a rest
at Harlech, we were going for a visit to the Caucasus and Persia and
China; and what good poetry we would write. It was in answer to one
he had written to me from the army school at Flixécourt a few weeks
previously (which appears in _The Old Huntsman_).
[Illustration:SOMME TRENCH MAP