31st May 2013, The Somme

My first visit to the Somme battlefield in exactly 10 years comes at the culmination of three days frantic peregrination around southern France visiting wine producers, and having just driven up from the Vaucluse and spent the night in a motorway car park 'somewhere on the A7'. The last leg, to try catch daybreak on the Somme, finds me not taking photographs, but in exhausted slumber in the pull-in just below the Mansell Copse and The Devonshire Trench opposite Mametz. But I am, finally, here, and wondering what had happened that it should have taken me so long. I walked up to the cemetery in a rather greyly sombre, still early morning light, and it was just as I had recalled it. I found Noel Hodgson's grave again, then felt guilty for all the less remembered who lie here. There is, I am all too aware, a hierarchy in the remembered. 163 closely spaced headstones, of whom all but two later burials are Devonshires, and they all died as they advanced across the road and the field at the foot of this slope on 1st July, 1916, into the certain fire of the machine gun which they knew was there, but which the artillery programme refused to accomodate. That evening they were brought back, and buried together in their jumping-off trench.

"The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still."

I drove over to the village cemetery, and stood below the shrine where the machine gun which killed them had been concealed, and looked over to Mansell Copse. The louring sky grimaced back at me.