knuckle of the big chalk plateau to the north of it like the finger of
a hand, in this case the middle finger. It is longer and less
regularly defined than the Leipzig Hill; because instead of ending, it
merges into other hills not quite so high. The valley which parts it
from the Leipzig is steeply sided, with the banks of great lynchets.
The lines cross the valley obliquely and run north and south along the
flank of this hill, keeping their old relative positions, the enemy
line well above our own, so that the approach to it is up a glacis.
[Illustration: Dug-outs and barbed wire in La Boisselle. Usna-Tara
Hill, with English Support Lines in Background. At Extreme Left is
the Albert-Bapaume Road]
As one climbs up along our old line here, the great flank of Ovillers
Hill is before one in a noble, bare sweep of grass, running up to the
enemy line. Something in the make of this hill, in its shape, or in
the way it catches the light, gives it a strangeness which other parts
of the battlefield have not. The rise between the lines of the
trenches is fully two hundred yards across, perhaps more. Nearly all
over it, in no sort of order, now singly, now in twos or threes, just
as the men fell, are the crosses of the graves of the men who were
killed in the attack there. Here and there among the little crosses is
one bigger than the rest, to some man specially loved or to the men of
some battalion. It is difficult to stand in the old English line from
which those men started without the feeling that the crosses are the
men alive, still going forward, as they went in the July morning a
year ago.
Just within the enemy line, three-quarters of the way up the hill,
there is a sort of small flat field about fifty yards across where the
enemy lost very heavily. They must have gathered there for some rush
and then been caught by our guns.
At the top of the hill the lines curve to the southeast, drawing
closer together. The crest of the hill, such as it is, was not
bitterly disputed here, for we could see all that we wished to see of
the hill from the eastern flank. Our line passes over the spur
slightly below it, the enemy line takes in as much of it as the enemy
needed. From it, he has a fair view of Albert town and of the country
to the east and west of it, the wooded hill of Bécourt, and the hill
above Fricourt. From our line, we see his line and a few tree-tops.
From the eastern flank of the hill, our line gives a glimpse of the
site of the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, once one of the strong
places of the enemy, and now a few heaps of bricks, and one spike of
burnt ruin where the church stood.
Like most Picardy villages, Ovillers was compactly built of red brick
along a country road, with trees and orchards surrounding it. It had a
lofty and pretentious brick church of a modern type. Below and beyond
it to the east is a long and not very broad valley which lies between
the eastern flank of Ovillers Hill and the next spur. It is called
Mash Valley on the maps. The lines go down Ovillers Hill into this
valley and then across it.
Right at the upper end of this valley, rather more than a mile away,
yet plainly visible from our lines near Ovillers, at the time of the
beginning of the battle, were a few red-brick ruins in an irregular
row across the valley-head.
A clump of small fir and cypress trees stood up dark on the hill at
the western end of this row, and behind the trees was a line of green
hill topped with the ruins of a windmill. The ruins, now gone, were
the end of Pozières village, the dark trees grew in Pozières cemetery,
and the mill was the famous windmill of Pozières, which marked the
crest that was one of the prizes of the battle. All these things were
then clearly to be seen, though in the distance.
The main hollow of the valley is not remarkable except that it is
crossed by enormous trenches and very steeply hedged by a hill on its
eastern flank. This eastern hill which has such a steep side is a spur
or finger of chalk thrusting southward from Pozières, like the
ring-finger of the imagined hand. Mash Valley curves round its
finger-tip, and just at the spring of the curve the third of the four
Albert roads crosses it, and goes up the spur towards Pozières and
Bapaume. The line of the road, which is rather banked up, so as to be
a raised way, like so many Roman roads, can be plainly seen, going
along the spur, almost to Pozières. In many places, it makes the
eastern skyline to observers down in the valley.
Behind our front line in this Mash Valley is the pleasant green Usna
Hill, which runs across the hollow and shuts it in to the south. From
this hill, seamed right across with our reserve and support trenches,
one can look down at the enemy position, which crosses Mash Valley in
six great lines all very deep, strong, and dug into for underground
shelter.
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. 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.
We held a part of the village cemetery. Some of the broken crosses of
the graves still show among the chalk here.
[Illustration: Photograph showing the Scene of the Successful
British Advance at La Boisselle, taken from the British Front
Line]
To the left of the Roman Road, only a stone's throw from this ruined
graveyard, a part of our line is built up with now rotting sandbags
full of chalk, so that it looks like a mound of grey rocks. Opposite
the mound, perhaps a hundred yards up the hill, is another, much
bigger, irregular mound, of chalk that has become dirty, with some
relics of battered black wire at its base. The space between the two
mounds is now green with grass, though pitted with shell-holes, and
marked in many places with the crosses of graves. The space is the old
No Man's Land, and the graves are of men who started to charge across
that field on the 1st of July. The big grey mound is the outer wall or
casting of a mine thirty yards deep in the chalk and a hundred yards
across, which we sprang under the enemy line there on that summer
morning, just before our men went over.
La Boisselle, after being battered by us in our attack, was destroyed
by enemy fire after we had taken it, and then cleared by our men who
wished to use the roads. It offers no sight of any interest; but just
outside it, between the old lines, there is a stretch of spur, useful
for observation, for which both sides fought bitterly. For about 200
yards, the No Man's Land is a succession of pits in the chalk where
mines have been sprung. Chalk, wire, stakes, friends, and enemies seem
here to have been all blown to powder.
The lines cross this debated bit, and go across a small, ill-defined
bulk of chalk, known as Chapes Spur, on the top of which there is a
vast heap of dazzlingly white chalk, so bright that it is painful to
look at. Beyond it is the pit of a mine, evenly and cleanly blown,
thirty-five yards deep, and more than a hundred yards across, in the
pure chalk of the upland, as white as cherry blossom. This is the
finest, though not the biggest, mine in the battlefield. It was the
work of many months, for the shafts by which it was approached began
more than a quarter of a mile away. It was sprung on the 1st of July
as a signal for the attack. Quite close to it are the graves of an
officer and a sergeant, both English, who were killed in the attack a
few minutes after that chasm in the chalk had opened. The sergeant
was killed while trying to save his officer.
The lines bend down south-eastward from Chapes Spur, and cross a long,
curving, shallow valley, known as Sausage Valley, famous, later in the
battle, as an assembly place for men going up against Pozières. Here
the men in our line could see nothing but chalk slope to right, left,
or front, except the last tree of La Boisselle, rising gaunt and black
above the line of the hill. Just behind them, however, at the foot of
the Sausage Valley they had a pleasant wooded hill, the hill of
Bécourt, which was for nearly two years within a mile of the front
line, yet remained a green and leafy hill, covered with living trees,
among which the château of Bécourt remained a habitable house.
The lines slant in a south-easterly direction across the Sausage
Valley; they mount the spur to the east of it, and proceed, in the
same direction, across a bare field, like the top of a slightly tilted
table, in the long slope down to Fricourt. Here, the men in our front
lines could see rather more from their position. In front of them was
a smooth space of grass slightly rising to the enemy lines two hundred
yards away. Behind the enemy lines is a grassy space, and behind
this, there shows what seems to be a gully or ravine, beyond which the
high ground of another spur rises, much as the citadel of an old
encampment rises out of its walled ditch. This high ground of this
other spur is not more than a few feet above the ground near it, but
it is higher; it commands it. All the high ground is wooded. To the
southern or lower end of it the trees are occasional and much broken
by fire. To the northern or upper end they grow in a kind of wood
though all are much destroyed. Right up to the wood, all the high
ground bears traces of building; there are little tumbles of bricks
and something of the colour of brick all over the pilled, poxed, and
blasted heap that is so like an old citadel. The ravine in front of it
is the gully between the two spurs; it shelters the sunken road to
Contalmaison; the heap is Fricourt village, and the woodland to the
north is Fricourt Wood. A glance is enough to show that it is a strong
position.
To the left of Fricourt, the spur rises slowly into a skyline. To the
right the lines droop down the spur to a valley, across a brook and a
road in the valley, and up a big bare humping chalk hill placed at
right angles to the spur on which Fricourt stands.
The spur on which Fricourt stands and the spur down which the lines
run both end at the valley in a steep drop. Just above the steep fall
our men fought very hard to push back the enemy a little towards
Fricourt, so that he might not see the lower part of the valley, or be
able to enfilade our lines on the other side of it. For about three
hundred yards here the space between the lines is filled with the
craters of mines exploded under the enemy's front line. In some cases,
we seized and held the craters; in others the craters were untenable
by either side. Under one of those held by us it was found that the
enemy had sunk a big counter-mine, which was excavated and ready for
charging at the time of the beginning of the battle, when Fricourt
fell. This part of the line is more thickly coated with earth than
most of the chalk hills of the battlefield. The craters lie in a blown
and dug up wilderness of heaps of reddish earth, pocked with
shell-holes, and tumbled with wire. The enemy lines are much broken
and ruined, their parapets thrown down, the mouths of their dugouts
blown in, and their pride abased.
[Illustration: A View of Fricourt]
The Fricourt position was one of the boasts of the enemy on this
front. Other places on the line, such as the Leipzig, the Schwaben,
and the trenches near Hamel, were strong, because they could be
supported by works behind them or on their flanks. Fricourt was strong
in itself, like Gommecourt. It was perhaps the only place in the field
of which it could be said that it was as strong as Gommecourt. As at
Gommecourt, it had a good natural glacis up to the front line, which
was deep, strong, and well wired. Behind the front line was a wired
second line, and behind that, the rising spur on which the village
stood, commanding both with machine-gun emplacements.
Fricourt was not captured by storm, but swiftly isolated and forced to
surrender. It held out not quite two days. It was the first first-rate
fortress taken by our men from the enemy in this engagement. In the
ruins, they saw for the first time the work which the enemy puts into
his main defences, and the skill and craft with which he provides for
his comfort. For some weeks, the underground arrangements of Fricourt,
the stairs with wired treads, the bolting holes, the air and escape
shafts, the living rooms with electric light, the panelled walls,
covered with cretonnes of the smartest Berlin patterns, the neat bunks
and the signs of female visitors, were written of in the press, so
that some may think that Fricourt was better fitted than other places
on the line. It is not so. The work at Fricourt was well done, but it
was no better than that at other places, where a village with cellars
in it had to be converted into a fortress. Our men took Fricourt at
the beginning of the battle, in a fair state of preservation. Such
work was then new to our men, and this good example was made much of.
[Illustration: Looking at Fricourt and Fricourt Wood. Troops
bivouac for a Short Rest under Ground Sheets laced together]
In the valley below the village, in great, deep, and powerfully
revetted works, the enemy had built himself gun emplacements, so
weighted with timber balks that they collapsed soon after his men
ceased to attend them. The line of these great works ran (as so many
of his important lines have run) at the foot of a steep bank or
lynchet, so that at a little distance the parapet of the work merged
into the bank behind it and was almost invisible.
This line of guns ran about east and west across the neck of the
Fricourt Salient, which thrust still further south, across the little
valley and up the hill on the other side.
Our old line crosses the valley just to the east of the Fricourt
Station on the little railway which once ran in the valley past
Fricourt and Mametz to Montauban. It then crossed the fourth of the
roads from Albert, at Fricourt cemetery, which is a small, raised
forlorn garden of broken tombs at cross-roads, under the hill facing
Fricourt. Here our line began to go diagonally up the lower slopes of
the hill. The enemy line climbed it further to the east, round the
bulging snout of the hill, at a steep and difficult point above the
bank of a sunken road. Towards the top of the hill the lines
converged.
All the way of the hill, the enemy had the stronger position. It was
above us almost invisible and unguessable, except from the air, at the
top of a steep climb up a clay bank, which in wet weather makes bad
going even for the Somme; and though the lie of the ground made it
impossible for him to see much of our position, it was impossible for
us to see anything or his or to assault him. The hill is a big steep
chalk hill, with contours so laid upon it that not much of it can be
seen from below. By looking to the left from our trenches on its
western lower slopes one can see nothing of Fricourt, for the bulge of
the hill's snout covers it. One has a fair view of the old English
line on the smoothish big slope between Fricourt and Bécourt, but
nothing of the enemy stronghold. One might have lived in those
trenches for nearly two years without seeing any enemy except the rain
and mud and lice.
Up at the top of the hill, there is an immense prospect over the
eastern half of the battlefield, and here, where the lines converge,
it was most necessary for us to have the crest and for the enemy to
keep us off it. The highest ground is well forward, on the snout, and
this point was the only part of the hill which the enemy strove to
keep. His line goes up the hill to the highest point, cuts off the
highest point, and at once turns eastward, so that his position on the
hill is just the northern slope and a narrow line of crest. It is as
though an army holding Fleet Street against an army on the Embankment
and in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the
steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its
opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense
strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front
line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is
a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is double at
important points.
[Illustration: The Sandbags at the Fricourt Salient]
Our old front line runs almost straight across the crest parallel with
the enemy front line, and distant from it from forty to one hundred
and fifty yards. The crest or highest ground is on both flanks of the
hill-top close to the enemy line. Between the lines at both these
points are the signs of a struggle which raged for weeks and months
for the possession of those lumps of hill, each, perhaps, two hundred
yards long, by fifty broad, by five high. Those fifteen feet of height
were bartered for with more than their own weight of sweat and blood;
the hill can never lose the marks of the struggle.
In those two patches of the hill the space between the lines is a
quarry of confluent craters, twenty or thirty yards deep, blown into
and under each other till the top of the hill is split apart. No man
can now tell which of all these mines were sunk by our men. The quarry
runs irregularly in heaps and hollows of chalk and red earth mingled
like flesh and blood. On our side of the pits the marks of our
occupation are plain. There in several places, as at La Boisselle and
on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old
front line by thousands of sandbags till it is a hill-top or cairn
from which they could see beyond. The sandbags have rotted and the
chalk and flints within have fallen partly through the rags, and
Nature has already begun to change those heaps to her own colours, but
they will be there for ever as the mark of our race. Such monuments
must be as lasting as Stonehenge. Neither the mines nor the guns of
the enemy could destroy them. From among them our soldiers peered
through the smoke of burning and explosions at the promised land which
the battle made ours.
From those heaps there is a wide view over that part of the field. To
the left one sees Albert, the wooded clump of Bécourt, and a high
green spur which hides the Sausage Valley. To the front this green
spur runs to the higher ground from which the Fricourt spur thrusts.
On this higher ground, behind Fricourt and its wood, is a much bigger,
thicker, and better grown wood, about a mile and a half away; this is
the wood of Mametz. Some short distance to the left of this wood, very
plainly visible on the high, rather bare hill, is a clump of pollarded
trees near a few heaps of red brick. The trees were once the
shade-giving trees about the market-place of Contalmaison, a hamlet at
a cross-roads at this point. Behind these ruins the skyline is a kind
of ridge which runs in a straight line, broken in one place by a few
shatters of trees. These trees are the remains of the wood which once
grew outside the village of Pozières. The ridge is the Albert-Bapaume
Road, here passing over the highest ground on its path.
Turning from these distant places and looking to the right, one sees,
just below, twelve hundred yards to the east of Fricourt, across the
valley at the foot of this hill of the salient, the end of an
irregular spur, on which are the shattered bricks of the village of
Mametz before mentioned.
To the north of Mametz the ground rises. From the eyrie of the salient
one can look over it and away to the north to big rolling chalk land,
most of it wooded. Mametz Wood is a dark expanse to the front; to the
right of it are other woods, Bazentin Woods, Big and Little, and
beyond them, rather to the right and only just visible as a few sticks
upon the skyline, are two other woods, High Wood, like a ghost in the
distance, and the famous and terrible Wood of Delville. High Wood is
nearly five miles away and a little out of the picture. The other
wooded heights are about three miles away. All that line of high
ground marked by woods was the enemy second line, which with a few
slight exceptions was our front line before the end of the third week
of the battle.
From this hill-top of the salient the lines run down the north-eastern
snout of the hill and back across the valley, so as to shut in Mametz.
Then they run eastward for a couple of miles, up to and across a
plateau in front of the hamlet of Carnoy, which was just within our
line. From our line, in this bare and hideous field, little could be
seen but the slope up to the enemy line. At one point, where the road
or lane from Carnoy to Montauban crossed the enemy line, there was a
struggle for the power to see, and as a result of the struggle mines
and counter-mines were sprung here till the space between the lines is
now a chaos of pits and chasms full of water. The country here is an
expanse of smoothish tilted slopes, big, empty, and lonely, and
crossed (at about the middle point) by a strange narrow gut or gully,
up which the railway once ran to Montauban. No doubt there are places
in the English chalk counties which resemble this sweep of country,
but I know of none so bare or so featureless. The ground is of the
reddish earth which makes such bad mud. The slopes are big and
gradual, either up or down. Little breaks the monotony of the expanse
except a few copses or sites of copses; the eye is always turning to
the distance.
[Illustration: View of Mametz]
In front, more than half a mile away, the ground reaches its highest
point in the ridge or bank which marks the road to Montauban. The big
gradual sweep up is only broken by lines of trenches and by mud heaped
up from the road. Some of the trees which once made Montauban
pleasant and shady still stand over the little heaps of brick and
solitary iron gate which show where the village used to stand. Rather
to the right of this, and nearer to our lines, are some irregular red
heaps with girders protruding from them. This is the enemy fortress of
the brickworks of Montauban. Beyond this, still further to the right,
behind the old enemy line, the ground loses its monotony and passes
into lovely and romantic sweeping valleys, which our men could not see
from their lines.
Well behind our English lines in this district and above the dip where
Carnoy stands, the fourth of the four roads from Albert runs eastward
along a ridge-top between a double row of noble trees which have not
suffered very severely, except at their eastern end. Just north of
this road, and a little below it on the slopes of the ridge, is the
village of Maricourt. Our line turns to the southeast opposite
Montauban, and curves in towards the ridge so as to run just outside
Maricourt, along the border of a little wood to the east of the
houses. From all the high ground to the north of it, from the enemy's
second line and beyond, the place is useful to give a traveller his
bearings. The line of plane-trees along the road on the ridge, and
the big clumps of trees round the village, are landmarks which cannot
be mistaken from any part of the field.
Little is to be seen from our line outside Maricourt Wood, except the
enemy line a little beyond it, and the trees of other woods behind it.
The line turns to the south, parallel with the wood, crosses the
fourth road (which goes on towards Peronne) and goes down some
difficult, rather lovely, steep chalk slopes, wooded in parts, to the
ruins of Fargny Mill on the Somme River.
The Somme River is here a very beautiful expanse of clear chalk water
like a long wandering shallow lake. Through this shallow lake the
river runs in half a dozen channels, which are parted and thwarted in
many places by marsh, reed-beds, osier plots, and tracts of swampy
woodland. There is nothing quite like it in England. The river-bed is
pretty generally between five and six hundred yards across.