Mametz Wood, 31st May 2013

I follow a crop tramline in the wheat along the face of the wood, back towards the hammerhead. It is intermittently drizzling, and the grey clouds scud northwards. The brooding wood beside me really does have a presence, the fringe is dark, and solid, and looms over you. This is the ground that the Welshmen of the 38th Division crossed in their second attempt on the wood, on the 10th July. David Jones was here. Exactly here.

‘And now the gradient runs more flatly toward the seperate scarred saplings, where they make fringe for the interior thicket and you take notice.
There between the thinning uprights at the margin
straggle tangled oak and and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced
and June shoots lopt
and fresh stalks bled
runs the Jerry trench.
And cork-screw stapled trip-wire
to snare among the briars
and iron warp with bramble weft
with meadow-sweet and lady’s smock
for a fair camouflage.’

So too was Wyn Griffith, sent down by HQ at Pommiers Redoubt later in the afternoon, to try to reestablish contact with the troops in the wood;

"I passed through two barrages before I reached the Wood, one aimed at the body, and the other at the mind. The enemy was shelling the approach from the South with some determination, but I was fortunate enough to escape injury and to pass on to an ordeal ever greater. Men of my old battalion were lying dead on the ground in great profusion. They wore a yellow badge on their sleeves, and without this distinguishing mark, it would have been impossible to recognize the remains of many of them. I felt that I had run away."

It was here, on this wide, open field, that Wyn Griffith's younger brother, a runner, fell to the barrage whilst carrying a message back, one that had been written by Wyn Griffith himself, a tragedy that surely haunted the older man for all of his years.

The ground undulates more than you would expect. You can see gentle hollows that might have afforded some cover from the raking machine-gun fire. But not from the black shrapnel, or the snipers high up in the trees. I reach an old field boundary that runs part of the way from the wood back to the track in happy valley. I sit down briefly, low in the tall, damp grass, and look back along the face of the wood, across the killing field. It is difficult to describe the thrill of suddenly finding youself walking in the precise footsteps of these figures whose words, so often read, have attained for them an almost mythical status. I feel charged with endorphin, thrilled and simultaneously exhausted, drained. How could such appalling violence have thrashed against this peaceful, sylvan place? But then now could it not have, it seeps from the soil's memory, and that of the dark trees. It will always be there. Another squall crosses the shallow valley, and I follow the tramlines back to the track, chilled in the damp breeze.