“I came to a bridge over a defile which our plan of attack required us to cross, and examined it with interest. A few days later the bridge, marked with unerring accuracy by the German machine gunners, was heaped with our dead and wounded so as to be almost impassable; a platoon 48 strong on one side emerged with a strength of 12.”

Captain Charles Douie

Although some 600 yards behind the 1st July front lines, the wood is overlooked by the Thiepval and Ovillers spurs, high ground held by the Germans on 1st July 1916. The bridge, which had been reconnoitered by Charles Douie a few days prior to the offensive, crossed a ravine just inside the wood and beyond the crop tramlines, and was accurately targeted by German machine guns firing by map reference, causing horrendous casualties amongst second-wave troops before they even achieved the British front line. So too was the path up through the shattered wood;

“We had a terrible dose of machine gun fire sweeping us through the wood, could not understand why. If front and second lines had been carried, enemy machine guns would be out of action…..Across the opening, I saw the last platoon of A Coy going over the open ground to our original front line trench, a distance of about 120 yds. Half of this platoon were killed and almost all the remainder wounded in the crossing and I realised that some part of the attack had gone radically wrong, as we were being enfiladed by batteries of enemy machine guns from the ridge on our right front”.

From the diary of CSM Ernest Shepherd.

Only one officer and some 25 men of 1st Dorsets reached the German trenches. There is a memorial to the battalion on the upper side of the wood, by the entrance to the Lonsdale Cemetery.