Mametz Wood, 31st May 2013

And so, finally, to Mametz Wood, the place that has haunted my dreams, and driven this project, since I first, and last, came here a decade ago. Then, lagging behind the tour party, I had walked quietly across the grass sward to the fringe of the wood, and crept a few feet into the thicket. Stuck all morning on a coach, I needed a pee, and, childishly, felt it my loyal duty to water the German trench. You shouldn't be fippant with ghosts. The silence wasn't normal, it was almost crushing, physical, hostile, and alarming. I stumbled back out of the wood. It was still a beautiful, soft May morning, and I could see my party in the distance walking along the track towards Flat Iron Cemetery, but I felt quite remote from them, and as I walked, faster now, diagonally across the gentle sward upon which so many of those young Welshmen had died 90 years before, I could feel my hairs on my neck prickling, and I imagined a thousand eyes piercing my back.

The track to Flat Iron Copse. The Welsh attacked from right to left onto the face of 'the hammerhead' on 4th July. Caught by enfilade machine-gun fire from Flat Iron, and direct fire from the face of the wood, the attack was, to use terminology common at the time, cut to ribbons. The track, and the valley (variously 'Happy' and 'Death' Valley) subsequently became a main route for supplies and men going up to the front, and was well marked by German artillery. It was on its shattered surface that the terribly wounded Robert Graves was bounced into agonised consciousness as he was taken back in a horse-drawn GS wagon.

And now, on another, more sultry, gloomy May morning, having learned that many others have experienced an identical sense of threat and foreboding, here, I am going to go back into the ("stretched long laterally, and receded deeply") dark wood. Alone. In search of David Jones of course, and Sassoon, and Robert Graves, and Wyn Griffith. And so I find myself walking across a line in the crop - the grass is gone now - and somewhat tentatively setting foot into the gloom. There has been logging, and a rough, muddy track curves through the ivy-choked shellholes at the entrance. A relative has pinned a photograph of a long-dead great-uncle or grandfather to a tree, with a single paper poppy on a tiny wooden cross. The birds are singing, the air is clear. I reach a patch where the loggers have cleared some the trees, and the undergrowth, and the naked, shallowed shellholes are clearly visible. I expect people, but they are not working today. I reach the strange recess in the trees that forms the neck of the hammerhead, there in David Jones's map, still there today. I can see the sky above me. Someone, or something, behind me shouts, or screams, just once, the sound puncturing the silence and making my heart thrash. Was it a dog? I hold my ground, and walk on. I want to suspect a fox, but I am not sure. The track leads further into the wood, and an open patch beckons ahead. I am not meant to be here. I reach the patch of light, an intersection of two tracks. Logging, last year, has opened it up slightly, and some of the young tree boughs hang down, their heavy new growth unsupported by departed neighbours. Wyn Griffith. This is it.

"I reached a cross-ride in the wood where four lanes broadened into a confused patch of destruction. Fallen trees, shell holes, a hurried trench beginning and ending in an uncertain manner, abandoned rifles, broken branches with their sagging leaves, an unopened box of ammunition, sandbags half-filled with bombs, a derelict machine gun propping up the head of an immobile figure in uniform, with a belt of ammunition drooping from the breech into a pile of red-stained earth - this is the livery of war."

My head is spinning, a peculiar sense of elation. I take just one photograph, and walk against his footsteps back down the main ride. The floor of the wood is pockmarked by shellholes, the dying remains of this month's bluebells scattered liberally through them. A section of corrugated iron elephant shelter leans against a tree, a tangible relic of the battle. I reach the southern end of the ride, where Griffith had ventured briefly from the track to 'escape a heavy shelling', but had been forced back onto it by the dense, impenerable thicket. A few more photos, and then I am out, out into the sultry daylight, the solid wall of lush green from which I have just burst snapping shut behind me, and brooding over me. But I am not frightened any more, not this time anyway.