An abandoned excavation deep inside Trones, perhaps a collapsed dugout, offers random hazard to the unwary. Having been taken, late on the 14th July, Bois de Troncs thereafter lay on the front line until September. By this time all that remained of the once dense thicket were shattered tree stumps and churned mud, liberally scattered with the putrifying remains of the many men of both sides who had been killed here. Today the regrown wood is a mournful, dark place within which there is little desire to linger, the evidence of continuous artillery bombardment still clearly visible in the numerous shell holes amongst the trees.

"...he remembered the dead in Trones Wood, the unburied dead with whom one lived, he might say, cheek by jowl, Briton and Hun impartially confounded, festering, fly-blown corruption, the pasture of rats, blackening in the heat, swollen with distended bellies, or shrivelling away within their mouldering rags; and even when night covered them, one vented in the wind the stench of death."
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916, Frederic Manning