John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  But during the fighting at La Boisselle a party of North Country English soldiers, attacking to the east of the village, met with a success which had not been planned for them. They got into the enemy’s line, and (as far as one can tell) progressed eastwards along it, fighting their way, till they were in the village of Contalmaison, nearly a mile from any support. Here they were captured, but as Contalmaison became the central objective, as soon as we held Shelter Wood their captivity did not last long.

  Between the 2nd and the 14th of July, our advance was, in the main, a sapping up to the enemy second-line position, which we presently reached and attacked. All of this sapping up was a bitterly hard fight, in which our men and the enemy were hand to hand for many hours together in all the contested points. The men met each other face to face in trenches and shell-holes and blew each other to pieces with bombs point-blank. On the right, fighting on these terms, our men won the Caterpillar Valley; on the left, they attacked La Boisselle, and pushed on at Ovillers so that its capture became certain. But in the centre, the enemy had an intermediate position, where the fighting was more complex, more difficult, and more bloody than on either of the wings. This intermediate position consisted of two parallel spurs of chalk between the enemy’s first and second lines. The eastern spur is almost covered with the Wood of Mametz; the western spur is clear of woodland save for two or three tiny copses. It is a bare, swelling chalk hill, on the top of which there stood (at that time) the ruins of the village of Contalmaison.

  These spurs lie between those formations in the chalk which lent themselves to the enemy’s first and second main positions. Neither would come readily into either big system. The enemy had not taken special pains to fortify them, as the enemy reckons special pains, but both were naturally strong positions, and both had been made stronger by art. These places may now be described.

  A boot-shaped chalk hill to the north of Fricourt, and a deep, narrow, lovely, steep-sided gully, known as Shelter Valley, to the north of the boot, have been mentioned. Just beyond Shelter Valley, and bounded by it as by a river, to the west and south, is the big, bold, swelling, rather steep, shovel-headed snout of spur on the top of which Contalmaison stood. Right at the end of this snout, and low down, so as to be almost in the valley, is an oblong copse called Bottom Wood. Just above this, running diagonally across the spur, is a lynchet, once lined with trees. Just above this there is a half-sunken track or lane running parallel with the lynchet. Just above this, on the eastern side of the spur, was a strong enemy work called the Quadrangle, so sited that men approaching it from the south could be seen and fired at from the work itself, from the high ground on both flanks, and from the rear. Well-hidden support-lines linked this work with Contalmaison village (behind it) and with Mametz Wood (to the east flank). This work defended the spur on the eastern side.

  On the west side, the spur was defended (a) by the work in Shelter Wood, which we had won, (b) by two fortified copses to the north of Shelter Wood, and (c) by a field work (to the north of these copses) called the Horseshoe. These western works were not on the spur, but on that side of Shelter Valley which was mainly in our hands.

  Contalmaison itself lay on the top of the spur, about 500 yards to the north-east of the Horseshoe. It had a perfect field of fire in all directions. It was trenched about with a wired line, which was strongly held.

  In itself, it was a tiny French hamlet at a point where a road from Fricourt to Pozières crosses a road from La Boisselle to Bazentin. It may have contained as many as fifty families in the old days before the war. Most of these were occupied on the land, but there was also a local industry, done by women, children, and old men, of the making of pearl-buttons. There was a church in the heart of the village, and just to the north of it a big three-storied French château, in red brick, with white and yellow facings, and a turret en poivrière in the modern style. This château stood slightly above the rest of the village.

  The second or eastern spur lies parallel with this Contalmaison spur, and is parted from it by a narrow shelving valley or gully. It is more sharply pointed and shelving than the Contalmaison spur, and (perhaps) a few feet lower. Otherwise, it is of much the same size. The extreme point of this spur is bare chalk hill, but the bulk of it is covered with the big wood of Mametz, which splits (about half-way down the spur) into three projecting tines or prongs of woodland, parted by expanses of fallow. On the map, the wood looks something like a clumsy trident with the points to the south, threatening our advance. The spur rises due northward in a gradual ascent. The highest part of the wood is at its northern limit, and here, at its highest point, the ground suddenly breaks away in what may either be a natural scarp or the remains of an old quarry. The steep banks are wooded over now, and much dug into for shelter. Here the enemy made his main defence, with a redoubt of machine guns and trench mortars.

  It seems likely that before the war the wood was without undergrowth; but after the enemy occupation the shrubs were allowed to grow as screens to the defence. The trees were fine, promising timber, but not of great size in any part of the wood. Among them were horn-beams, limes, oaks, and a few beeches. The undergrowth, after two and a half years of neglect, was very wild and thick, especially in the northern part, where there was much bramble as well as hazel-bush. Our bombardment had destroyed many of the trees, and the enemy counter-bombardment destroyed others during the fighting. This made the going below even more blind and difficult, for it had tossed down many boughs and treetops, in full leaf, into the undergrowth, so as to make a loose abattis, exceedingly difficult to pierce or see through. In some of the bigger trees the enemy had built little machine gun posts, so well camouflé or protectively coloured with green and grey paint that they were almost invisible, even from quite close at hand. Some heavy guns of position were in the wood, and field guns were in battery in the road behind the scarp at the wood’s northern end. In the lower part of the wood barbed wire was strung from tree to tree, and machine gun pits were dotted here and there to command the few clearings. Works on the Contalmaison spur, to the west, and on the Bazentin spur, to the east, were so sited that they could rake an attack upon the wood with a cross, flanking, and plunging fire from half-rifle range.

  After the taking of the Poodles and Shelter Wood, our men moved to the assault of these two spurs.

  On the right they took position on the east flank of Mametz Wood; in the centre they attacked the Quadrangle and the Horseshoe; and on the left, in pouring rain, in the mud of the Somme, they got into the underground pits of La Boisselle, and made the place ours. This pouring rain was a misfortune.

  In modern war wet weather favours the defence. It is especially harassing to the attacker when it falls, as it so often has fallen in this war, at the moment of a first success, when so much depends on the roads being hard enough to bear the advancing cannon which secure a conquered strip. Our success between Maricourt and Ovillers had made it necessary to advance our guns along a front of six miles, which means that we had to put suddenly, upon little country roads, only one of which was reasonably good, and none of which had been used for wheeled traffic for the best part of two years, while all had been shelled, trenched across, and mined, at intervals, in all that time, a great traffic of horses, guns, caissons, and mechanical transport. When the weather broke, as it broke on the 4th of July, 1916, the holes and trenches to be filled in became canals and pools, and the surface of the earth a rottenness. The work was multiplied fifty-fold and precious time was lost.

  The rain hindered our advance during the next three days, though our attacks on the approaches to Contalmaison and Mametz Wood proceeded. On the west side of the Contalmaison spur our men carried the fortified copses and won the Horseshoe, after three days of most bloody and determined fighting in a little field. On the east side of the Contalmaison spur our men attacked the Quadrangle, got three sides of it, and attacked the fourth. This fourth side, known as the Quadrangle Support, could be reinforced from Contalmaison and from Mametz Wo
od, and could be observed and fired into from both places, so that though our men got into it and took it in a night attack, they could not hold it.

  When the Horseshoe fell, early on July 7, a big attack was put in against the whole of these two spurs. It began with a very heavy bombardment upon the ruins of the village and the wood, and was followed by the storm of the village from the west and south-west, and an advance into the wood. Our men reached the village, took part of it, and found (and released) in one of the dugouts there that party of English Fusiliers who had been captured by the enemy on the 2nd of July. At this point of the attack a very violent, blinding rain began, which went on for twelve hours. This rain made it impossible for our gunners to see where our men were. In order not to kill them, our fire on the ruins slackened, and in the lull, in all the welter of the storm, the enemy contrived a counter-attack, which beat our troops back to the ruins at the south of the village, where they established a line. The attack on the wood brought our line forward through the outer horns of copse up to the body of the wood.

  For the next two days our artillery shelled both wood and ruins, while plans were made for the next assault. The only “easy” approach to Contalmaison was from the west, near the Horseshoe, where the slope is gentler than it is to the south or south-west. The eastern approach was still blocked by the Quadrangle Support. The “easy” approach was not without its difficulties. Troops using it had to go down a slope into Shelter Valley (here gentle, open, and without shelter) in full view of the enemy entrenched above him. As soon as they were in the valley, under fire to their front, they were in full view of the enemy round Pozières, who could take them in flank and rear. Worse still, the whole of this part of the valley was commanded by well-contrived machine gun posts on a little spur, sometimes called the Quarry Spur, 500 yards to the north. However, this approach, bad as it was, was easy compared with the others. On the 10th of July the attack on the two spurs began again. In the right and centre our men went into the wood and into Quadrangle Support. On the left, they went across the “easy” approach in four successive waves, behind a “creeping barrage” or wall of shellfire advancing in front of them. They got into the village, without great loss. It was a compact village grouped at a road-knot, with little enclosed gardens. In that narrow space, in the cellars, in the dugouts under the cellars, and in the sunken roads, like deep trenches, close to the village, they fought what many believed to be the hardest body-to-body battle of this war. The village was very strongly held. The garrison outnumbered the attackers; in fact, the enemy dead and prisoners outnumbered the attackers. Contalmaison was won by the manhood of our men. When the enemy broke from the village to escape to the north, some Lewis gunners got on to them and caused them heavy loss.

  That night our line was secure in Contalmaison. The Quadrangle to the right of it was ours, and more than half of Mametz Wood was ours. Men can feel what our soldiers faced in the storm of Contalmaison. There they were in the open with the enemy’s trenches in front of them up above. But who can tell what they faced in Mametz Wood? The wood was partly on fire and full of smoke. The enemy was in strength and hidden. Our troops in the attack were thrusting through brambles, shrubs, scrub, and hazels, clambering over treetops and broken branches, cutting through wire and stumbling into pits, under what some have described as a rain of bullets, which fell from above and drove in from front and flanks. It is the biggest wood on the field. It is more than 200 acres in extent. There were four of our battalions in it at one time. Our men had to command themselves; for the only orders that could be given to them were to push uphill, driving back the enemy, and to hold what they won. After Contalmaison fell, on the evening of the 10th, the position was easier, on the left flank of the wood. The next day, after heavy losses, our men won the end of the wood, and came out on the other side, facing the Longueval Road, with the enemy main second line straight in front of them not a quarter of a mile away. In the last terrible attack on the end of the wood they took all the machine guns and trench mortars which had delayed the advance.

  Meanwhile, away to the right, on the extreme right flank of our advance, there had been much bloody and heroic fighting for elbow room. Our men had tried to widen the gap of their advance by attacks to the eastward. They had captured the big wood of Bernafay, near Montauban, and had attacked the bigger wood of Trones, which lies parallel with it a little to the east. They had captured Trones Wood more than once, but could not hold it, owing to enemy machine guns on the (very slightly) higher ground outside the wood to the north and east. In this fighting, our soldiers came for the first time against the defences of the stronghold of Guillemont.

  These assaults on Trones Wood and the capture of Mametz Wood are generally reckoned to be the last events in the first stage of the Somme battle. The wood of Mametz was the last part of the enemy’s first-line and intermediate-line defences in the path of our advance. Beyond it was the second main position, which needed a battle to itself. The first main position, in that part of the line, was all our own.

  In the twelve days’ fighting, on the sixteen-mile front, we had advanced upon a front of about 7½ miles, for distances varying from 1¼ to 2½ miles. It is true that within this captured territory one little patch, the fort of the ruins of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, was still defended, but it was surrounded, it could not be succoured, and had to fall within a few days (it fell on the 17th). The new line ran from Authuille Wood, over Ovillers Hill, so as to shut in Ovillers, across Mash Valley and beyond, so as to shut in La Boisselle, across Shelter Valley and the chalk hill, so as to shut in Contalmaison, and then over the next spur, so as to take in Mametz Wood.

  At Mametz Wood, the line turned south, down the gully on the wood’s east side for about 1,000 yards, when it turned eastward into the valley of Caterpillar Wood. This valley, mentioned and described some pages earlier, runs roughly eastward for a couple of miles from Mametz Wood. Roughly speaking, it marked our line as it was at the end of this first stage of the battle. Trones Wood, which marked our extreme right, and though not held, either by us or by the enemy, contained a party of our men who could not go on, but would not come back, lies just beyond the eastern end of this valley.

  The expanse of ground won by us in these first days of the battle was not large; it made but a tiny mark upon the map of France; but in this act of the war, which was so like a slow siege, victory was not measured by the expanse of territory won so much as by the value of the fortifications reduced. The first-line fortifications which we had taken were as strong as anything in the line and covered Bapaume, with its knot of roads, and the railway junction near it. The first line had been broken without great difficulty, and though the enemy resistance had stiffened and many more guns had been concentrated against us, we were within striking distance of his second line, from near Pozières to Guillemont, and if this fell with reasonable speed, it was thought, by some, that we might be in front of the ridge on which Bapaume stands before the autumn rain made great operations impossible.

  The second main enemy line (south of the Ancre) ran from the high ground or plateau top behind Thiepval along all the high part of the desolate, flat, fertile downland which makes the battlefield of the Somme. It runs pretty straight for 3½ miles, from the Ancre to the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit. Here it bends a little, to take in the wood and adapt itself to the ground, which is here thrust into by the two gullies which border Mametz Wood. It then crosses the eastern gully, takes in another wood on a steep hill, called the wood and hill of Bazentin-le-Grand, shuts in the village of that name (which, in spite of its name, was smaller, though more compact, than Bazentin-le-Petit), and continues along the brow of steep, bold, rolling chalk hills for a mile or two. The bold, rolling hills then merge themselves with high plateau land, as dull, but not as desolate, as the high ground above Thiepval. The wood of Trones thrusts a straggling point of woodland into this plateau. To the north of this point is another, larger and broader, wood growing beside what was once a straggling village, built
of red brick, and containing a prosperous sugar factory. The village was called Longueval, the wood is the famous wood of Delville. The line took in the wood, turned to the south so as to cover the village of Guillemont, and then ran away downhill, to the broken, steep valleys outside Maurepas and the marshy course of the Somme River.