In March 1917, following the Germans’ voluntary withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, the author John Masefield, commissioned at the behest of the Foreign Office to write a book on the battle, travelled the Somme battlefields. He wrote to his wife;

“Took in the Leipzig Redoubt…I never saw such mud, or such a sight, in all my days. Other places are bad and full of death, but this was deep in mud as well, a kind of chaos of deep running holes and broken ground and filthy chasms, and pools and stands and marshes of iron-coloured water, and yellow snow and bedevilment. Old rags of wet uniform were everywhere, and bones and legs and feet and hands were sticking out of the ground, and in one place were all the tools of a squad just as they had laid them down; in order, and then all the squad, where they had been killed, and the skull of one of them in a pool, and, nearby, the grave of half a German, and then a German overcoat with ribs inside it, and rifles and bombs and shells literally in heaps…such a hell of desolation all round as no words can describe”.