The Portal, Serre Road No.2 Cemetery, looking towards the British front line, May 2013.
There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck –
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined
“O sir, my eyes — I’m blind — I’m blind, I’m blind!”
Wilfred Owen, 'The Sentry'
There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck –
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined
“O sir, my eyes — I’m blind — I’m blind, I’m blind!”
Wilfred Owen, 'The Sentry'
The July 1st attack on the German line here was beaten back at woeful cost to the British, and the area remained in German hands until their withdrawal the following spring. In January 1917, some 8 weeks after the Somme offensive had been officially closed down, a young subaltern named Wilfred Owen was posted to the battered trenches which ran across the skyline visible through this entrance. Sent across no-man's-land that same night to occupy an abandoned German dugout a few yards away from where this structure now stands, his group was detected and shelled. Taking cover in the partially flooded dugout, he suffered his baptism of fire, a traumatising experience which inspired the poem from which the passage above was taken.
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