The days following the initial assault of 1st July 1916 witnessed a series of confused and often ill-coordinated actions to consolidate and align the front in the areas to the south, where varying degrees of success had been achieved on the first day, prior to a swift assault on the German second line. Essential to this end was the taking of three areas of woodland that stood ahead of those lines, Bernafay, Trones and Mametz woods. Although the struggle proved to be fairly brief in terms of the wider Somme campaign (the attack on the second line was able to take place on the 14th July), it was no less bitter and sanguinary. Of the three woods, the largest was that which stood a mile to the north of the village of Mametz.

It is from Pommiers Redoubt that a young staff officer, Capt Llewelyn Wyn Griffith, set out to try to re-establish contact with the battalions engaged in the confused fighting in the wood on 10th July, and with whom communication had completely broken down. His account, published in his book 'Up to Mametz', is both vivid and deeply moving, and most beautifully written. The poet and artist David Jones was amongst those fighting in the wood, and his autobiographical book-length prose-poem 'In Parenthesis', one of the unjustly forgotten gems of British literature, culminates with his alter-ego, Private Ball, being wounded here. I shall be drawing on both in captions to subsequent photographs.