https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/ https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/links.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/about.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/otheritems.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/gallery.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/news.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/31st-may-2016-somme https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/news95432.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/31st-may-2013-the-somme https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/may-2013 https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/mametz-wood-31st-may-2013 https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/bells-redoubt-contalmaison https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/montaubin-bazentin-31st-may-2013 https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/page89748.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/page74968.html https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/the-somme https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo35085284.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11179653225b139691a3f6c.jpg[color="#800000"]The Butte de Warlencourt, March 2018[/color] <div align="justify"></div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945337.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_12169508705a62f72a4a98c.jpg[color="#800000"]Known to be Buried in This Cemetery, La Sucrerie, Autumn 2015[/color] <div align="justify">La Sucrerie CWGC Cemetery lies at the end of the avenue of graceful old sweet chestnut trees that runs part of the way between Colincamps and the front line at Serre, and takes its name from the sugar refinery which used to stand close by. Prior to the opening of The Battle of The Somme it is said that troops coming up to the line from Colincamps were compelled to march past the newly dug grave pits which were lying open in anticipation of expected casualties. 1103 1914-18 casualties are commemorated here, of whom 219 are unidentified. This row of headstones along the north wall of the cemetery commemorates a number of soldiers who are known to be buried here, but whose individual graves are unknown.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874657.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_30527562561cc64725255.jpg[color="#800000"]The Course of the Railway, Trones Wood, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The railway was reinstated after the armistice, the course as before cut in on one side, and embanked on the other. Shell craters, many of them fifteen feet or more across, still mark its passage through the regrown trees. The canopy in Trones is notably dense, and even on a late summer's afternoon the wood has an atmosphere of oppressive gloom.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo28844611.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_121264848257c5e8dd494bb.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]White Stone at the intersection of Wood Support & Strip Trench, Mametz Wood[/color] <div align="justify">Private Ball, David Jones's alter ego, is wounded in the foot. As he crawls from the wood, increasingly delerious from loss of blood, he is unwilling to leave his rifle, but it impedes his progress; [i] "Slung so, it swings its full weight. With you going blindly on all paws, it slews its whole length, to hang at your bowed neck like the Mariner’s white oblation. You drag past the four bright stones at the turn of Wood Support."[/i] [color="#800000"]David Jones (15th RWF), artist and poet, from his prose-poem 'In Parenthesis', published in 1938.[/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo26083979.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_178493293956409f5924aff.jpg[color="#800000"]Thiepval, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">This long line of poplar trees leads to the high ground behind Thiepval, the culmination of the Pozieres Ridge before the land falls away sharply to the Ancre valley. There were two ferociously defended German redoubts here, just beyond the point where the trees end, Feste Staufen to the left, and Feste Zollern to the right - respectively Stuff and Goat to the British. Zollern fell to our people, the Dorsets and the Manchesters, on the 26th September 1916, concurrent with the fall of the neighbouring fortress of Mouquet Farm. The attack on Stuff was chaotic and disorganised, but parties of the West Yorks and the Green Howards gained a foothold on the 27th. However, the Germans were to counterattack repeatedly and in force, and the fighting continued 'at close quarters' - a euphemism that surely conceals horrors incomprehensible to our sensibilities - until the rest of the position finally succumbed to the 10th Cheshires on 13th October.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo34701948.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_17955138205aebfdb181ddc.jpg[color="#800000"]Silent Pickets at Ginchy, March 2018[/color] <div align="justify">[i]TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF GOD In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time, You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death. And Oh! they'll give you rhyme And reason: some will call the thing sublime, And some decry it in a knowing tone. And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, Know that we fools, now with foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed, And for the secret scripture of the poor.[/i] Tom Kettle, 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Irish Nationalist, barrister, poet, writer, famed orator, one-time MP for South Tyrone, and convert to a peaceful settlement for Ireland. Killed near this spot 9th September 1916. His daughter Betty died in her 80s in an old people's home in Dublin some 20 or so years ago.[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940185.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1076437255a605999a9a32.jpg[color="#800000"]Rainy Trench, Lesboeufs, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">This aptly-named spot, desolate even now, was infinitely worse in November 1916, when it marked the limit of the advance on the extreme right hand of the British sector. Beyond the right of the frame lies the slope of the Transloy Ridge. Here, in rain sodden, freezing ditches that passed for trenches, the British troops spent the winter of 1916/17, one of the bitterest on record. Prior to this, on October 7th and amongst the drawn-out death-throes of the battle, a series of futile assaults were launched out of the ragged trenches and waterlogged shellholes that ran through this view. Amongst those wounded and brought in was journalist and poet Leslie Coulson. A few weeks before he had written to his father. "If I should fall, do not grieve for me. I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers." He lived long enough to thank his stretcher bearers, and to dictate a final message to his family. He died at a clearing station to the rear a few hours later. He was 27.</div> [i]But a Short Time to Live Our little hour, how swift it flies When poppies flare and lillies smile; How soon the fleeting minute dies, Leaving us but a little while To dream our dream, to sing our song, To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower, The Gods - They do not give us long, - Our little hour.[/i] [color="#800000"]Frederick Leslie Coulson, mortally wounded here on 7th October 1916[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940183.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_16312242835a605997cc803.jpg[color="#800000"]The Ancre and the ruins of Le Hamel Mill, Somme, March 2015[/color] [i]Where tongues were loud and hearts were light I heard the Ancre flow; Waking oft at the mid of night I heard the Ancre flow. I heard it crying, that sad rill, Below the painful ridge By the burnt unraftered mill And the relic of a bridge. And could this sighing river seem To call me far away, And its pale word dismiss as dream The voices of to-day? The voices in the bright room chilled And that mourned on alone; The silence of the full moon filled With that brook's troubling tone. The struggling Ancre had no part In these new hours of mine, And yet its stream ran through my heart; I heard it grieve and pine, As if its rainy tortured blood Had swirled into my own, When by its battered bank I stood And shared its wounded moan. [/i] [color="#800000"]Edmund Blunden [/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945340.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_8376459545a62fc13905bf.jpg[color="#800000"]The Station, Beaucourt-sur-l'Ancre, Somme, Spring 2016[/color] [i]“Still your works live on, and Death, the universal snatcher, cannot lay his hand on them.”[/i] <div align="justify">Beaucourt and neighbouring Beaumont-Hamel finally fell during The Battle of The Ancre, launched on 13th November 1916. The Royal Naval Division fought along and parallel to the Hamel-Beaucourt road and the railway line, through thick belts of German barbed wire and entrenchments. It is somewhere close to here that the Australian-born composer Frederick Kelly was killed whilst rushing a German machine gun position. Kelly had been a close friend of Rupert Brooke, had been a member of his burial party on Skyros in 1915, and his hauntingly beautiful pastoral piece [i]Elegy for String Orchestra[/i] was written in memory of his friend. Also amongst the same burial party the previous year had been Bernard Freyberg, who won the VC for his bravery here at Beaucourt Station, continuing to direct the battle despite having been seriously wounded by machine gun fire. In another war the much-wounded Freyberg was to lead the ill-fated British defence of Greece and Crete, and would go on, as General Lord Freyburg VC, to become Governor General of New Zealand. He was amongst the most decorated servicemen of The Great War. [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZI5FrDjF_c]Elegy for String Orchestra, In Memoriam Rupert Brooke, by Frederick Septimus Kelly[/url] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23893621.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4698460625522a6df240b2.jpg[color="#800000"]Leipzig Redoubt, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">This view looks back along the Thiepval spur to the chalk quarry known as the Liepzig Redoubt. This underground fortress, with its 'bakery, boudoir and deep shelters', had fallen to the 17th Highland Light Infantry on July 1st by dint of their having crawled to with 30yds of the British barrage, rushing the position as the guns lifted. However, support troops coming up behind them fell to the now very active German machine guns further back. A fierce fight developed, but at the end of the day the British had hung tenuously onto the quarry. Further advances were frustrated by machine guns in the 'Wonderwork' Redoubt further back on the spur, and intact wire in front of the Hindenberg Trench, which crossed the vantage point in this photograph. Although the British inched their way further along the spur during the following weeks, there was to be no significant progress here until the assault on Thiepval in September.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945327.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_12614885885a62f5fe3ce1c.jpg[color="#800000"]The Leipzig Redoubt, Thiepval, 2016[/color] <div align="justify">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; [i]“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”.[/i]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo26083996.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_55109059056409feac96b0.jpg[color="#800000"]Hunters Cemetery, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015 [/color] <div align="justify">This small cemetery is in fact the mass grave of 46 Highlanders who were killed in the November 13th attack and were laid to rest in a vast shell hole, to which it owes its unconventional circular shape. Beyond it can just be seen the earthworks of the German fire trench as it turns in the direction of the Hawthorn mine crater, and the memorial to the 51st highland Division. </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940203.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4580373005a6059aa0d244.jpg[color="#800000"]Newfoundland Memorial Park, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Many of the wounded lay out here throughout the day, indeed it was to be four long, agonising mid-summer days before the last of the survivors were brought in, in the main by stretcher parties working at night, though it is recorded that there was a short truce during which the Germans cooperated in pointing out casualties close to their wire. Any movement at all during the day below this, the location of the 'danger tree', was spotted and summarily dealt with by German riflemen. Some of the many dead were roughly buried, again by parties working at night for many weeks after the assault, but still more were to lie out until after the successful attack by the 51st Highland Division which was to take place on 13th November. The battered fields here were again occupied by the opposing sides in March 1918, when the German spring offensive was halted in this sector in exactly the same trenches as those in which they had faced the French and then the British in 1914, 15 and 16 In 1921 the area of the park was purchased by the Dominion of Newfoundland as a permanent memorial to those Newfoundlanders who had died in France during the war, and upon the old trenches and overlooking no-man's-land and the distant German lines they erected a cairn of granite which had been brought over from the dominion, from the top of which Basil Gotto's great bronze caribou cries out in anguish for its fallen children.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo26083988.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_139577751056409fc3c0017.jpg[color="#800000"]Newfoundland Memorial Park, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The 74 acre park lies outside the village of Beaumont Hamel, and comprises the largest area of preserved battlefield on the Somme. This sector, across which the 29th Division attacked on July 1st, is almost unique in the Somme battlefield in that the British trenches overlooked those of the German first line. However, rising ground behind the German fire trenches, and positions even further back on the Beaucourt Ridge, gave the Germans a clear and open field of fire onto the assaulting troops, and the advance of the initial wave of the 87th Brigade across what was an unusually wide expanse of no-man's-land was quickly and decisively checked.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo24033729.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_484886637553749d08e7b1.jpg[color="#800000"]Trones Wood, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Taken on the 14th July after several days of confused, no-quarter fighting, by units of the 18th (Midland) Division under the inspired command of Lt. Col Frank Maxwell VC, who, with enormous difficulty pursuaded the men of his battalion to form a line and 'beat' the dense thicket in the manner of a peacetime pheasant shoot, thereby preventing the enemy from isolating individuals and parties and picking them off from behind. [i]"To talk of a 'wood' is to talk rot. It was the most dreadful tangle of dense trees and undergrowth imaginable, with deep, yawning broken trenches criss-crossing about it. Every tree broken off at top or bottom and branches cut away, so that the floor of the wood was almost an impenetrable tangle of timber, branches and undergrowth, blown to pieces by British and German heavy guns for a week. Never was anything so perfectly dreadful to look at...particularly with its dreadful addiction of corpses and wounded men, many lying out for days and days."[/i]</div> [color="#800000"]Lt.Col Frank Maxwell VC[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940209.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_17716107755a6059af0977c.jpg[color="#800000"]The Marsden-Smedley Memorial, Guillemont, Somme, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">On 18th August 3rd Battalion The Rifle Brigade attacked German positions at Guillemont Station from their positions in front of Trones Wood. 2nd Lt George Marsden-Smedley, from Matlock in Derbyshire, who had recently celebrated his 19th birthday, was last seen attacking a machine gun position. Having killed the crew, he was shot by a German officer, and fell across the parapet of the German trench. It was to be another month before the shattered village of Guillemont fell, and young Marsden-Smedley's body was never found. After the war, his father located the position of his son's courageous final action, and he fenced the area off, placing a stone in memory. He subsequently bought the tiny piece of land, and it remains to this day one of a handful of private memorials on the Somme. It is still maintained by the family, with the support of The Western Front Association. Its position affords a fine view back towards the now long regrown Trones Wood, and the peaceful fields once, with good reason, known as 'The Valley of Death' which lie in front of it.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940189.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2399333295a60599d431fa.jpg[color="#800000"]Sausage Valley, Ovillers-la-Boisselle[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"I could see, away to my left, long lines of men. Then I heard the 'patter patter' of machine guns in the distance. By the time I had gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; another 20 yards and I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit."[/i] [color="#800000"]Sgt J Galloway, 3rd Tyneside Irish, Sausage Valley July 1st 1916[/color] The Tyneside Irish, which comprised the second wave in front of La Boisselle, had suffered greviously in what was an unusually extended advance, the first 2000 yards of which was down the long, completely exposed slope of the Tara and Usna hills, and behind the British front-line, which their already depleted ranks then had to cross before they entered no-man's-land. Despite this, a small party penetrated all three enemy trench lines, probably in the area shown in the next photograph, and managed to reach the village of Contalmaison where, completely cut off from any possibility of reinforcement, they were either killed or captured. To them went the somewhat hollow distinction of having achieved the longest advance and deepest penetration of any unit on 1st July. </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo27980605.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_19508423435768e45916b20.jpg[color="#800000"]Bazentin Windmill, May 2015[/color] <div align="justify">On the morning of 20th July Frank Richards, a signaller in 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, was detailed to form a semaphore transmitting station in the windmill on the high ground above Bazentin cemetery, relaying visual messages by flag or heliograph from the units attacking High Wood back to Brigade HQ at Mametz Wood. The mill was some 600 yards in front of High Wood and a prominent landmark. His activities were soon spotted by the Germans in the wood, and the mill came under increasingly ferocious artillery fire - this is likely to have been the same barrage in which Robert Graves was wounded a hundred or so yards away. [i]'The brigade runner, who was not a signaller... volunteered to write the message down, and stood behind me in the doorway of the mill whilst I read it. When I was halfway though it, he gave a shout; I turned round and found him groaning on the ground. A shell splinter which must have passed high up between my legs had hit him in the thigh. It was a nasty wound.'[/i] This view looks along the front of the now tree-clad mill mound, the distinctive whaleback of Trones Wood visible in the distance. High Wood is left of the frame.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778776.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1212701410527c3745c5214.jpg[color="#800000"]Mametz Wood, The Main Ride, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">Wyn Griffith survived unscathed the devastating German bombardment of the approaches to the wood, carefully pre-registered by their gunners and deliberately designed to cut the units within the wood off from either reinforcement or successful withdrawal, and found himself on this spot. [i]"My first acquaintance with the stubborn nature of the undergrowth came when I attempted to leave the main ride to escape a heavy shelling. I could not push through it, and had to return to the ride...Heavy shelling of the southern end had beaten down some of the young growth..Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas-helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf"[/i]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940182.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11081645785a605996d9805.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, Somme[/color] <div align="justify">Caterpillar Valley Cemetery is situated on the high ridge overlooking Montauban, just visible through the arch, to the rear, and High Wood on the next ridge in front. The cemetery contains the remains of 5,568 men, including 100 Australians, 8 Canadians, 18 South Africans and 213 New Zealanders. A further empty grave once held the remains of an unknown soldier from New Zealand, who was exhumed in 2004 and now lies in the Tomb of The Unknown Warrior in The National War Memorial, Wellington. A memorial wall on the eastern side of the cemetery holds the names of over 1200 New Zealand officers and men whose graves are not known, and who died in the fighting here in September of 1916. [color="#800000"][/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19782704.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2141674715527d24a24e7b5.jpg<center>[color="#800000"]Crucifix Corner, Bazentin-le-Grand, May 2013.[/color]</center> <div align="justify">Once Mametz, Trones and Bernafay Woods had fallen, the way was clear for the British forces to launch their assault on the German second line in the central Somme sector. A daring and unprecendented nightime attack was planned, preceded by a considerably more concentrated artillery barrage than that of 1st July. Launched early in the morning of the 14th July, the assault was a complete success, and by nightfall British forces had penetrated High Wood, or Bois de Forceaux, which stood on a ridgeline overlooking the German rear areas. However, the success was shortlived, and the British were rapidly ejected from the wood by fresh German reinforcements. It was to be another two months before High Wood finally fell, at enormous cost in blood to both sides.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940180.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_5139033325a605995196a3.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Sunken Lane, Guedecourt[/color] <div align="justify">The wounded Ridley was compelled to lie out in the tenuously held trench for 12 hours, drifting in and out of conciousness. When he regained conciousness he was dismayed to find that his "hand was still on", and he feared that it would mean that he would be compelled to return to the trenches. Eventually he was brought in, and his wounds would have been dressed at a forward aid post at this point, a few yards further up the lane from the Battalion HQ dugout. He was eventually evacuated to a Canadian hospital, where he received the first of 5 operations on his seriously damaged tendons. His fractured skull was not diagnosed until later. He never did return to the trenches, and survived to fight in another war, being evacuated, traumatised by his second exposure to the horrors of war, from the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940. He subsequently served in the Home Guard, an experience that was no doubt to inform his part, many years later, as Private Charles Godfrey, the gentle, much loved, urologically challenged character in 'Dad's Army'.</"justify"> [color="#800000"][/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874648.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1910727120561cc62023177.jpg[color="#800000"]The Ancre Marshes, St.Pierre Divion, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"For a moment the water below him looked like a window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water,' he said with horror. 'Dead faces!' 'I don't know,' said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. 'But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.' " [/i] [color="#800000"]J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings[/color] Tolkien, a signals officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers, was posted several times to the Somme front between July and October of 1916, and spent much time in the battered trenches in Thiepval Wood, just a few hundred yards from this location, one which would have been very familiar to him. It is clear to see how this desolate, still haunted landscape, must surely have served as inspiration for the marshes of Mordor.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778785.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1384215608527c377500c8c.jpg[color="#800000"]Redan Ridge Cemetery No.3, Beaumont-Hamel, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">The Redan Ridge is an area of high ground which runs for a short mile from the German Heidenkopf redoubt to the infamous village of Beaumont-Hamel. Heavily fortified, the British attack of July 1st was utterly repelled here, and by the evening fierce German artillery fire had even driven the surviving troops back from their front line trenches, the only sector in the first day of the Somme to have witnessed an effective withdrawal rather than a gain. There are three Commonwealth burial grounds here, battlefield cemeteries similar in nature to those found in nearby Serre. Redan Ridge No.3, which lies upon the German front line, contains the remains of some 50 men, of whom half are unidentified, together with memorials to a further 13 whose original graves were subsequently lost. Most were killed in the November 13th assault. The distinctive rounded shapes of the lime trees around the Serre Road Cemetery No.2 and the tall poplars around Serre Road No.1 can be seen on the skyline.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778783.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1719692512527c376bb7cda.jpg[color="#800000"]The grave of Private J.Maclean from Canada, Serre Road No.2 Cemetery, under evening sunlight, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">This sector was assaulted by various regular and territorial units of the British 4th Division, predominantly the 1/6th and 1/8th Royal Warwicks, on July 1st. The Heidenkopf, a salient extending forward from the German front line, was considered indefensible as it lay on an exposed forward slope, and it had been mined by the garrison with a view to destroying any force that should occupy it. Some accounts relate that the charges were blown early, burying several of the defenders instead, and the British initially fought their way into and through the web of trenches. However, fierce enemy artillery and enfilading machine gun barrages cut the troops occupying the redoubt off from either reinforcement or resupply, and vigorous bombing attacks along the trenches from the flanks eventually forced the surviving attackers back across no-man's land in the early hours of the 2nd July. That morning only 142 survivors of the 1,450 Royal Warwicks who had set out across no-man's land the previous day were present at roll-call.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo28002326.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_664558937576b9ad6f1101.jpg[color="#800000"]The brooding face of High Wood from Bazentin Mill, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Taken from the exact position in which Frank Richards stood in the doorway of Bazentin Mill. Just visible in the centre of the frame is the London Cemetery & Extension, the third largest on the Somme and which contains the graves of 3,872 men killed in the fighting in and around High Wood. 3,113 of them are unidentified. [i]'The enemy now turned a machine gun on us - our flag-wagging had attracted their attention. On the right of the mill a battalion of Manchesters from another division were in some shallow trenches: they had heavy casualties during the day, a number of shells bursting right amongst them. One of their captains ran across to us and asked if it was possible to get a message back to his Brigade HQ, as his men were being blown to pieces. We told him we were very sorry, but we were under orders to deal only with messages connected with our own Brigade. As we were speaking, some large shells exploded right on the parapet of the trench he had left, knocking in a big stretch of it. He then rushed back there, to look after the survivors. He was a very brave and humane man.'[/i]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo24033727.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1603205860553746cca27ce.jpg[color="#800000"]The track to the Schwaben Redoubt, Thiepval, Somme, March 2015 [/color] <div align="justify">By the summer of 1916 the summit of this now innocuous slope concealed a veritable hornet's nest of interlinked trenches, strongpoints and underground shelters. Although it was briefly occupied by units of the 36th (Ulster) Division on July 1st, reinforcements attempting to cross no-man's land from Thiepval Wood were flayed by machine gun and artillery fire from the Thiepval & Beaucourt flanks, where the British attacks had failed. Eventually the exhausted survivors, depleted of ammunition, bombs and water and under sustained bombing attack from the German garrison, filtered back into their start lines. The enemy positions here held out until late September, the final corner of the battered Schwaben finally yielding, after repeated and costly assaults, on October 14th. It is precisely within the area shown in this photograph, and during the closing days of that tragic September, that a young subaltern in The Bedfordshire Regiment, Tom Adlam, having the previous day shown extraordinary courage in assaulting the German lines in Thiepval village, led a party of men along the trench - the ghost of which is visible as a dark shadow on the hillside - hurling bombs and urging his men forward, finally driving the defenders out of this section of the redoubt. His exploits earned him the Victoria Cross.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo24225689.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2001606493555193e3939cc.jpg[color="#800000"]'Sausage Valley', with Bécourt Wood and Lochnagar, Somme, March 2015[/color] [i]"Silently our machine guns and infantry waited until our opponents came closer. Then, when they were only a few metres fom our trenches, the serried ranks of the enemy were sprayed with a hurricane of defensive fire....within moments it appeared that the battle had died away completely, but later in huge masses the enemy bagan to pull back towards Bécourt, until finally it seemed as though every man was attempting to flee back to his jumping-off point. The fire of our machine guns persuaded them, hitting them hard." [/i] [color="#800000"]Colonel Kienitz, 110th Reserve Infantry Regiment.[/color] <div align="justify">So named by British troops after a German observation balloon that flew over it prior to the battle, Sausage Valley formed the path of advance towards the village of Contalmaison. The largest of the mines sprung on July 1st, the Lochnagar, was only partially successful in destroying the Schwaben Höne, a German defensive position on the front line - the lips of the still extant and vast crater are visible in the centre of the frame - and the troops of the British 34th Division were compelled to advance into fierce fire from both flanks, and from in front. This vantage point is precisely on the German third line of trenches - the course of the second is visible as the white chalk mark in the centre, the first ran just this side of the crater. The advancing men were shockingly, and lethally, exposed.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945336.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_12825330185a62f7297a448.jpg[color="#800000"]The track from Guillemont to Hardecourt, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">"[i]By cutting a piece out of the side of the trench, I was just able to stand in front of my tiny altar, a biscuit box supported on two German bayonets. God's angels, no doubt, were hovering overhead, but so were the shells, hundreds of them, and I was a little afraid that when the earth shook with the crash of the guns, the chalice might be overturned. Round about me on every side was the biggest congregation I ever had : behind the altar, on either side, and in front, row after row, sometimes crowding one upon the other, but all quiet and silent, as if they were straining their ears to catch every syllable of that tremendous act of Sacrifice — but every man was dead ! Some had lain there for a week and were foul and horrible to look at, with faces black and green. Others had only just fallen, and seemed rather sleeping than dead, but there they lay, for none had time to bury them, brave fellows, every one, friend and foe alike, while I held in my unworthy hands the God of Battles, their Creator and their Judge, and prayed Him to give rest to their souls. Surely that Mass for the Dead, in the midst of, and surrounded by the dead, was an experience not easily to be forgotten." [/i] Father William Doyle, 16th Irish Division The event described in his diary by 'Willie' Doyle, the much loved priest of the 16th Irish, took place beneath this now peaceful landscape following the fall of Guillemont. The track emerges from Junger's sunken lane here, and the British trenches cut across the line of the German outpost at this spot.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23224416.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1477842519548ca0225397f.jpg[color="#800000"]Brooding skies over Mouquet Farm, Pozières.[/color] <div align="justify">When the Australians had finally consolidated on the Pozières Ridge, their offensive was turned to the left, along the ridge itself and towards the rear of Thiepval, the German-held salient that had completely rebutted all efforts of the 1st July and which had now to be taken if the Somme offensive was to resume towards its original objectives. Mouquet Farm was a bastion of that fortress, deeply entrenched and with a mass of interlinking underground shelters and tunnels. The exhausted Australian divisions were eventually pulled off the line on the 5th September. In one month they, and the British divisions on their left, had advanced a mere mile. They had fought into the earthworks of the farm 3 times, each time to be repelled by fresh enemy troops who were fed in. Mouquet Farm, known to the troops variously as 'Moo-cow' or 'Mucky' Farm, eventually fell to the British on 26th September. The original farm buildings stood where the trees are, to the left of the road, and are famous for a series of aerial photographs showing their sequential obliteration by artillery barrage. </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23893625.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11124559765522a6e887d08.jpg[color="#800000"]Gordon Dump Cemetery, Somme, March 2015[/color] [i]"I must admit that it was the biggest fluke alive, and I did nothing"[/i] [color="#800000"]2nd Lt. Donald Bell in his last letter to his mother, on winning the Victoria Cross.[/color] <div align="justify">Sausage Valley became the route through which passed troops and supplies going up to the line in the Pozières and Contalmaison sectors. Sausage Valley Cemetery, later known as Gordon Dump, was first established around the 10th July, and now contains the remains of 1675 men, most collected in from the surrounding fields after the armistice. Amongst them lies 2nd Lt. Donald Bell VC, 9th Bn. The Green Howards, in peacetime a professional footballer playing for Bradford (Park Avenue). He was killed on 10th July whilst single handedly attacking a German machine gun post on the edge of Contalmaison, reprising an action for which he had won the VC five days earlier. There is a memorial to him on the site of that post, now known as Bell's Redoubt. Gordon Dump CWGC Cemetery is situated some distance along a dipping grass path from the secondary La Boiselle-Contalmaison road, and is now a place of peace and solitude, the silence broken only by the song of skylarks, and the occasional passing farm vehicle.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23917427.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_20859911065524ba0d0c6b4.jpg[color="#800000"]Pozières CWGC from Bailiff Wood, Contalmaison, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Bailiff Wood was secured amidst heavy fighting between the 7th and 10th July, and thereafter this natural defile, a continuation of Sausage Valley, served as a route for troops and supplies going up onto the Pozières ridge. Numerous Royal Artillery batteries and supply dumps were sheltered in this dead ground once it had fallen - there is much evidence of shelling in the wood which can almost certainly be accounted for by accurately registered German counter-battery work. The Pozières Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery stands alongside the Roman Road from Albert to Bapaume. There are 2,758 Commonwealth servicemen buried or commemorated here, of whom 1,380 are unidentified.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778774.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_913814720527c370863e62.jpg[color="#800000"]Mametz Wood, The Cross-Ride, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"I reached a cross-ride in the wood where four lanes broadened into a confused patch of destruction. Fallen trees, shell holes, a hurried trench beginning and ending in an uncertain manner, abandoned rifles, broken branches with their sagging leaves, an unopened box of ammunition, sandbags half-filled with bombs, a derelict machine gun propping up the head of an immobile figure in uniform, with a belt of ammunition drooping from the breech into a pile of red-stained earth - this is the livery of war. Shells were falling, over and short, near and wide, to show that somewhere over the hill a gunner was playing the part of blind faith for all who walked past this well-marked spot. Here, in the struggle between bursting iron and growing timber, iron had triumphed and trampled over an uneven circle some forty yards in diameter. Against the surrounding wall of thick greenery the earth showed red and fresh, lit by the clean sunlight, and the splintered tree trunks shone with a damp whiteness, but the green curtains beyond could reveal nothing of greater horror than the disorder revealed in this clearing."[/i] </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940210.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_21197642705a606321d190d.jpg[color="#800000"]Hamel Mill, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Hamel Mill, and the bridge across the Ancre linking Hamel and Thiepval, lay effectively between the opposing lines, and the once quite substantial buildings were destroyed in the fighting, though the great wheel and its retaining wall survived to be photographed in the 1920s. This is all that remains now, the foot of that wall and the weir below the mill race, isolated amongst the marshes, the silver birches and the willows of the Ancre valley. The ruin was evidently a haunting sight to the troops posted to this sector, amongst whom, at various times, were the young writers Edmund Blunden, J.R.R.Tolkien, and A.A. Milne.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874596.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2095958178561cbc22d4418.jpg[color="#800000"]The base of a shell-shattered wall still visible in Lesboeufs, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">There are very few man-made structures that survive the battle, at least above the surface. Continuous and intense artillery barrage from both sides virtually ground villages and farmsteads to powder, or at best piles of shattered rubble, and post-war clearance and rebuilding was comprehensive. However, the sharp of eye can occasionally spot sights such as this, a small area of brickwork exposed by erosion on the bank of a sunken lane on the edge of the village.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940177.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2621419635a60599269504.jpg[color="#800000"]Caterpillar Valley, July 2016[/color] <div align="justify">Scene of the initial attack on Mametz Wood by the 38th Welsh Division on 7th July 1916. The Welsh advanced down the valley towards the wood, which is behind the viewpoint. They were caught by interlocking machine gun fire from within the wood itself, and from Flatiron Copse in 'Happy Valley'. The German defenders were the experienced Prussians of the Lehr Regiment, for the Welsh it was their baptism of fire. The attack left 400 Welsh dead here and in front of the wood, and the division was going to have to throw itself against the wood again, finally taking it after incurring 4000 casualties on 12th July.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/serre-road-no2-cemetery-may https://images.on-this.website/24791_1653324367527c37667bf0e.jpg[color="#800000"]Serre Road Cemetery No.2, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">Lying just in front of the German front line, and partially straddling the site of a strongpoint, the Heidenkopf or Quadrilateral, Serre No.2 contains 7,127 Commonwealth graves, of which 4,944 are unidentified, the highest proportion of any British & Commonwealth cemetery in France. Most are from the unsuccessful attacks of 1st July and 13th November 1916, though the cemetery also contains many graves from the subsequent consolidation of smaller burial sites. It was designed by Sir Edwin Luytens, and completed in 1934.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/color800000la-sucreries-colincamps-sommecolor https://images.on-this.website/24791_105754424561cc62f5cb80.jpgLa Sucrerie, Colincamps, Somme [size=10][color="#800000"]Wind in the Sweet Chestnuts beside La Sucrerie CWGC Cemetery, Colincamps, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">[i]'In the distance a star-shell would rise, and as its light dilated, wavered and failed, one saw against it the shattered trunks and boughs of trees, lunatic arms uplifted in imprecation, and as though petrified in a moment of shrieking agony. The communication-trench was deep, and one looked up out of it to a now tranquil sky, against which the same stark boughs were partly visible. Then on the right appeared the ruins of a shattered farm, an empty corpse of a building. There was for Bourne an inexplicable fascination in that melancholy landscape: it was so still, so peaceful, and so extraordinarily tense. One heard a shell travel overhead, or the distant rattle of a machine-gun, but these were merely interruptions of a silence which seemed to touch the heart with a finger of ice. It was only really broken when a man, stumbling on a defective or slippery duck-board, uttered under his breath a monosyllabic curse... "Fuck..." '[/i] [color="#800000"]The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916, Frederic Manning[/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/the-brooding-presence-of-mametz https://images.on-this.website/24791_51047157527bfebb171b5.jpg[color="#800000"]The brooding presence of Mametz Wood, looking towards the feature known as The Hammerhead, May 2013.[/color] <p align="justify">[i]"I passed through two barrages before I reached the Wood, one aimed at the body, and the other at the mind. The enemy was shelling the approach from the South with some determination, but I was fortunate enough to escape injury and to pass on to an ordeal ever greater. Men of my old battalion were lying dead on the ground in great profusion. They wore a yellow badge on their sleeves, and without this distinguishing mark, it would have been impossible to recognize the remains of many of them. I felt that I had run away."[/i] Capt Llewelyn Wyn Griffith Many visitors to the Welsh memorial in front of the wood report of experiencing a certain vivid malevolence emanating from the trees, a sense of being watched, of being unwelcome, and of a sometimes heavy silence which is notably devoid of birdsong. I count myself amongst them, having slipped into the fringes of The Hammerhead on my first visit a decade ago. I knew nothing of these matters then, but didn't stay long, retreating back to my party across the soft meadow upon which so many of the Welsh had been slain on their initial July 7th assault, the back of my neck prickling all the way.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo28850212.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_165605298457c7398166cfe.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Mametz Downs towards Mametz Wood[/color] <div align="justify">[i] "Sweet sister death has gone debauched today, she stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite, but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered. By one and one the line gaps, where her fancy will, howsoever they may howl for their virginity."[/i] [color="#800000"]David Jones (15th RWF), artist and poet, from his prose-poem 'In Parenthesis'.[/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo27980608.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1976330295768e463f048f.jpg[color="#800000"]A strange nest, Beaumont-Hamel, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">A dangerous one too. Primed and ready for use, this cache of British Mills Grenades lies where they have been left by a farmer for the munitions collection teams who regularly pass through the old battlefields. Mills Bombs are a surprisingly common find, and present a particularly sinister sight whenever you happen upon them, small, deadly, and a very immediate and direct link to the terrible events of 100 years ago.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874658.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_180042169561cc64e56c51.jpg[color="#800000"]Trones Wood, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">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. [i]"...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."[/i] [color="#800000"]The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916, Frederic Manning[/color]</div> </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23893638.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_14220905445522a70d53b41.jpg[color="#800000"]The Guards Memorial, Lesboeufs, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify"></div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/the-queens-nullah-mametz https://images.on-this.website/24791_21702989527bffd804b40.jpg[color="#800000"]The Queen's Nullah, Mametz, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">This feature, which provided some cover for the men, was the position from which the battalions of the 38th (Welsh) Division launched their second attack on Mametz Wood on 10th July, and crops up in several accounts, including David Jones's. In fact they were already taking casualties from an accurate German shrapnel barrage before the whistles blew, the vicious ordnance raining down on the exposed backs of the men as they lay waiting on this bank. [i]"Seven minutes to go . . . and seventy times seven times to the minute this drumming of the diaphragm. From deeply inward thumping all through you beating no peace to be still in and no one is there not anyone to stop can't anyone - someone turn off the tap or won't anyone before it snaps."[/i] Even when the front line had moved away from here, the killing did not stop, as the area remained well within range of German batteries for the duration of the battle. On 28th July Major-General Edward Charles Ingouville-Williams, C.B., D.S.O., G.O.C. 34th Division was killed on this spot while walking to meet his car, having reconnoitred in the area of Contalmaison on foot, an act which in itself quietly throws into stark relief the oft-quoted fiction that the senior officers routinely kept themselves well away from the fighting.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940188.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_528262735a60599c56bd9.jpg[color="#800000"]Three newly-dug Graves, Connaught Cemetery, Thiepval, Autumn 2015[/color] <div align="justify">During road-widening in the preparation for the Centenary, French workmen uncovered the bodies of three British soldiers. One of was identified by his identity tag, a bespoke-made gift from his wife, as Sgt David Harkness Blakey of The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. The 26 year old son of a miner from Gateshead, and father of three, he was last reported wounded in no-man's-land on July 1st, but his body was lost for 97 years. His funeral and that of the two unidentified soldiers, which took place with full military honours the morning after this photograph was taken, was attended by his granddaughter, great-granddaughter, two great-great-grandaughters, great-neice and two great-nephews, and was a deeply emotional occasion. The Somme reached across 100 years with extraordinary impunity.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778781.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_946482145527c376170df8.jpg[color="#800000"]The Iron Harvest, Serre, May 2013.[/color] <div align="justify">Each year farmers all along the Western Front plough up substantial quantities of unexploded ordnance, making agriculture an unexpectedly hazardous occupation. The failure rate of British shells was particularly high in the early days of the Somme battle due to rushed and faulty manufacturing, though matters were quickly improved. However it has been estimated that throughout the war some 1 in every 4 shells fired failed to explode, largely due to the soft and very often muddy nature of the torn up ground. Given the enormous tonnages of iron and explosive that the two sides hurled at each other throughout the war, such a calculation would indicate that the soil will continue to yield substantial quantities of ordnance for many years to come. When farmers find such items, they are left at the sides of the fields for the disposal teams to collect, and sights such as shown in this photograph are extremely common, particularly during the autumn and spring drilling programmes. It need hardly be mentioned that these things can be exceptionally dangerous - each year brings a handful of sad tales of death and horrible injury. Even after the passage of nearly 100 years, The Great War continues to take.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo24033728.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11867552505537470076d2b.jpg[color="#800000"]Thiepval Wood & Connaught Cemetery from the approach to the Schwaben Redoubt, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The jumping-off trench for the 36th (Ulster) Division ran along the face of the wood, from whence they were to advance onto the Ancre Heights. From this vantage point somewhere amongst the German second and third line of trenches, it is clear to see how exposed to enfilade were the young Ulstermen as they advanced up the long slope. The initial rush had carried the first wave into the German trenches facing the wood, but thereafter the defenders recovered their composure and flayed the follow-up waves with rifle, machine gun and artillery fire from all sides, including this position, and others on the Beaucourt flank on the far side of the Ancre valley, even from their rear from Thiepval Spur, where the British attacks had already broken on the ferocious defences. The losses were so grievous that this land remains hallowed ground to the people of the Province of Ulster, for some 2000 of her households were plunged into grieving during the following days, as the dreadful tidings filtered home. There are two CWGC cemeteries here, Connaught and Mill Road, the latter just out of view to the right.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo28002177.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1997994961576b8ef119c27.jpg[color="#800000"]Mametz Wood, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">On 15th July the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers came into the line, amongst them Robert Graves. The fighting for Mametz Wood had concluded three days ago, and the ground was scattered with the dead, 'Prussian Guards, big men, and Royal Welch and South Wales Borderers of the new-army battalions, little men'. The weather was wet and cold, and Graves went into the shattered wood to find German greatcoats to act as blankets for the men. Coming and going by the only possible route, he had to pass by the body of a German.</div> [i]'Today I found in Mametz Wood A certain cure for lust of blood: Where, propped against a shattered trunk, In a great mess of things unclean, Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk With clothes and face a sodden green, Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired, Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.'[/i] [color="#800000"]Robert Graves, 'A Dead Boche'.[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945332.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_18561999975a62f725c6f26.jpg[color="#800000"]A Track Crosses the Course of the Railway, Trones Wood, October 2015[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945335.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_13754409525a62f72882abe.jpg[color="#800000"]A Rainstorm crosses Guillemont, Somme, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">Cow parsley grows thick today in the gentle meadow beneath which lies the now infilled Guillemont Quarry, a strongly held German strongpoint which guarded the approaches to the benighted village from the direction of Trones Wood, part of a defensive network which defied British attacks for over 6 weeks in the heat of July and August of 1916. The shallow valley which it faced and overlooked became known to the British troops, with grim appropriateness, as 'The Valley of Death', and it was the site of many acts of extraordinary valour. Guillemont finally fell on 3rd September, by which time the village had been ground virtually to powder by continuous artillery barrage. It's tenure is considered to be one of the finest defensive actions on the part of the Germans on the entire Western Front.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874588.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2121040139561cbb84aca79.jpg[color="#800000"]Delville Wood Military Cemetery, Longueval, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Situated opposite the entrance to the notorious wood from which it takes its name, this is a concentration cemetery mostly comprising the graves of those who were collected in from smaller cemeteries and the surrounding fields after the battles in July, August and September of 1916. There are 5,523 burials and commemorations of the First World War here, of which 3,593 are unidentified, and there are special memorials to 27 casualties known or believed to be buried amongst them.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940181.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_10584871725a605996079a5.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Delville Wood from The Gird Trench, Guedecourt[/color] <div align="justify">On the 16th September 1916 the 6th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry attacked across this field, with orders to occupy the heavily defended 'Gird' trench, the main German third line. The Somersets in fact mistook a secondary trench that the Germans had dug in front of their main line for the Gird, and the attack failed, leaving the Somersets dreadfully exposed in the half dug German trench [i]"I went round one of the traverses, as far as I can remember, and somebody hit me on the head with a rifle butt. I was wearing a tin hat, fortunately, but it didn't do me much good. A chap came at me with a bayonet, aiming for a very critical part naturally, and I managed to push it down, I got a bayonet wound in the groin. After that I was still very dizzy, from this blow on the head presumably. I remember wresting with another German, and the next thing I saw, it appeared to me my left hand had gone. After that I was unconscious."[/i]</"justify"> [color="#800000"]Lance Corporal Arnold Ridley of 6th Btn SLI. [/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940199.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11170954785a6059a632a76.jpg[color="#800000"]Newfoundland Memorial Park, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015 [/color] This soft, autumnal scene showing the graceful avenue of lime trees that leads to the Hawthorn Ridge No.2 Cemetery belies the horror which rapidly unfolded on this spot on the morning of July 1st 1916, as failure was unkowingly reinforced. The second wave of attackers, comprising the 1st K.O.S.B and 1st Borderers, adhering to the plan of attack, though slightly delayed by a fierce German counter barrage, followed the first at 7.35, advancing right to left across the frame of this photograph. However, they quickly came under intense machine-gun and rifle fire, and failed even to reach as far as the initial wave before they too were scythed down, or forced to take refuge in what little cover the open and dreadfully exposed ground offered. https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940174.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1789305155a60598f7b3b3.jpg[color="#800000"]Mills Bomb & Scrap of German Boot Heel, Mametz Wood, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">[i]'Dark, faceted iron oval lobs heavily into fungus cushioned dank, wobbles under low leaf to lie close to where the heel drew out just now. Tough, fibrous roots boomerang into topmost green filigree, earth clods flung disturb fresh, fragile shoots that brush the sky. You huddle closer to your mossy bed, you make yourself scarce, you hurry forward and pretend not to see, but ruby drops from young beech sprigs are bright your hands and face, and the other one cries from the breaking buckthorn, he calls for Elsa, for Manuela, for the parish priest of Berkersdorf in Saxe Altenberg.'[/i]</div> [color="#800000"]David Jones from 'In Parenthesis'.[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940202.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_9398127365a6059a8e29d0.jpg[color="#800000"]The Danger Tree, Newfoundland Memorial Park, November 1915[/color] <div align="justify">Communications back to Divisional HQ were confused by false reports that parties of troops had penetrated the German front line. Therefore, at 8.45, the two battalions of Divisional Reserve, 1st Essex and 1st Newfoundland, were pitched into the unfolding tragedy, with vague instructions to complete the occupation of the first line of German trenches. So choked were the British communication trenches with dead, wounded and withdrawing troops that the commanding officer of the Newfoundlanders was compelled to order his men to advance on the surface. As they appeared on the skyline they provided a rich target for the enemy machine-gunners. Many troops were thus killed or wounded whilst still [i]behind[/i] the British jumping-off trenches. Others managed to reach the hundred or so yards beyond the front line, where they came under a fierce shrapnel barrage along the line marked now by these trees, then a small copse which offered some illusion of safety. </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945339.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2933677675a62fc12ae085.jpg[color="#800000"]White Trench, Mametz, July 2016[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"..and if you looked behind, the next wave comes slowly, as successive surfs creep in to dissipate on a flat shore."[/i]</div> [color="#800000"]David Jones, from "In Parenthesis".[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo35117286.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2181453525b178d85a8918.jpg[color="#800000"]Malins' View, Beaumont-Hamel[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"I hastily fixed my camera on the side of a small bank, this side of our firing trench, with my lens facing towards the Hawthorn Redoubt. Time: 7.19 a.m. My hand grasped the handle of the camera. I set my teeth. My whole mind was concentrated upon my work. Another thirty seconds passed. I started turning the handle, two revolutions per second, no more, no less. I noticed how regular I was turning... I fixed my eyes on the Redoubt. Any second now. Surely it was time. It seemed to me as if I had been turning for hours. Why doesn't it go up? I looked at my exposure dial. I had used over a thousand feet. The horrible thought flashed through my mind, that my film might run out before the mine blew. Would it go up before I had time to reload? The thought brought beads of perspiration to my forehead. The agony was awful; indescribable. My hand began to shake. Another 250 feet exposed. I had to keep on. Then it happened."[/i] [color="#800000"]Geoffrey Malins[/color] https://youtu.be/g8YfJmwY5Uo https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940179.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_20658974735a6059942c37c.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Sunken Lane between Ginchy & Guedecourt[/color] <div align="justify">On 16th September 1916, the day after the major attack between Flers & Courcelette which saw the first use of tanks, the 6th Bn Somerset Light Infantry were ordered to attack the heavily defended Gird Trench, the main German 3rd line, in front of the village of Guedecourt. They assembled in this sunken lane, and the battalion HQ was establised in a dugout in the right-hand bank of the lane at this point. [i]"If you've ever tried to keep awake when you haven't had any sleep for days, it's not a question of allowing yourself to go to sleep. I can remember lying in a sunken road behind Guedecourt. The trenches were full of water, and I can remember getting out of the trench and lying on the parapet with the bullets flying around, because sleep was such a necessity, and death only meant sleep."[/i]</"justify"> [color="#800000"]Lance Corporal Arnold Ridley, 6th Somerset Light Infantry[/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/quarry-cemetery-montauban https://images.on-this.website/24791_1211138225527c283554d20.jpg[color="#800000"]Quarry Cemetery, Montauban[/color] <div align="justify">Montauban village, located in the south of the British sector, fell to the excellent 18th and 30th Divisions on July 1st in what was one of the rare successes of that terrible day. Quarry Cemetery is located on the site of an advanced dressing station and originally contained the graves of 157 soldiers who had succumbed to their wounds, but this was increased when the surrounding fields were cleared of their dreadful harvest after the battle. It now contains the graves of 740 Commonwealth soldiers, amongst them a number of commemorations of casualties buried during the battle, but whose graves were subsequently lost. The Germans also buried a number of their dead here during their final offensive of 1918 when this ground was again lost to them, and their graves remain, as beautifully tended as those of their former enemies.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940205.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_21330383485a6059abc1632.jpg[color="#800000"]Delville Wood, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">Sanguinary even by the shocking standards of the Somme, the battle for the half-mile square Delville Wood lasted for the seven weeks from 15th July. The four regiments of the South African Brigade entered the wood at the beginning, on the 15th July, and a terrible struggle ensued, from which the brigade emerged 5 days later having lost 2,400 of the 3,152 men with which they had entered. In the ensuing weeks the wood passed repeatedly back and forth between the opposing sides. The Germans were finally expelled from their remaining toehold on 3rd September, by which time the wood had been reduced to a moonscape of shell holes, ragged trenches and shattered tree stumps. Now regrown within its original boundaries, the wood is the property of the South African nation, and here they commemorate their dead of both wars. Cut through by wide rides named after streets in Edinburgh and London, it is a beautiful and peaceful place, the only hint as to the carnage of 99 years ago the time-softened zig-zag of trenches through the graceful hornbeam, oak and sweet chestnut trees.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo24033726.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1703268191553746c7f220b.jpg[color="#800000"]Beaucourt viewed from the Ancre heights, Somme, March 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The rear of the infamous Schwaben Redoubt lies just beyond the left-hand frame of this photograph. The British advance in this sector remained limited - the final German line of November 1916 would have crossed through where this line of poplars now stands on the brow of the slope. The Battle of the Ancre Heights, of which this location marks the left flank, was one of the final, faltering acts of the the great Somme offensive.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940201.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_20885733105a6059a7ebbf2.jpg[color="#800000"]The German Front Line, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The German trenches and dugouts were occupied by the 119th Reserve Infantry Regiment, which had been here for nearly 20 months. Drawn largely from the coalmining region of Lorraine, since 1871 sequestered by Germany, the garrison had benefitted from both time and experience, and had established a layered defence bolstered by a system of deep dugouts and tunnels in which the troops were able to shelter from the British barrage.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940193.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4992226975a6059a0cec6e.jpg[color="#800000"]The Sunken Lane, Guillemont, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"My platoon front formed the right wing of the position held by the regiment. It consisted of a shallow sunken road which had been pounded by shells. It was a few hundred metres left of Guillemont and a rather shorter distance right of Bois-de-Trônes. I stood alone in the midst of an uncanny sea of shell-holes over which lay a white mist whose swathes gave it an even more oppressive and mysterious appearance. A persistent, unpleasant smell came from behind.... ...When day dawned we were astonished to see, by degrees, what a sight surrounded us. The sunken road now appeared as nothing but a series of enormous shell-holes filled with pieces of uniform, weapons, and dead bodies. The ground all round, as far as the eye could see, was ploughed by shells. You could search in vain for one wretched blade of grass. This churned-up battlefield was ghastly. Among the living lay the dead. As we dug ourselves in we found them in layers stacked one upon the top of another. One company after another had been shoved into the drum-fire and steadily annihilated. The corpses were covered with the masses of soil turned up by the shells, and the next company advanced in the place of the fallen. The sunken road and the ground behind was full of German dead; the gound in front of English. Arms, legs, and heads stuck out stark above the lips of the craters. In front of our miserable defenses there were torn-off limbs and corpses over many of which cloaks and ground-sheets had been thrown to hide the fixed stare of their distorted features."[/i] [color="#800000"]Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel[/color] A contemporary photograph exists, as horrifying to behold as any of the Somme battle, looking back from the top of the battered, shell churned lane towards this vantage point after it had fallen, which serves amply to visually confirm Junger's account.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940208.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2654230585a6059ae25a31.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Morning sun burning off the mist near the site of 'Summer House', The Ancre Marshes[/color] <div align="justify">On 2nd September 1916 Edmund Blunden was in charge of a carrying party taking supplies of bombs up in support of an attack that was going in along the Beaucourt road. [i] "We walked along the river road, passed the sand bag dressing station that had been built only a night or two earlier where the front line crossed the road, and had already been battered in; we entered No Man's Land, but could make very little sense of ourselves or the battle. There were wounded Highlanders trailing down the road. They had been in the marshes of the Ancre, trying to take a machine gun post called Summer House. Ahead the German front line could not be clearly seen, the water mist and smoke veiling it."[/i] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940186.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1118003335a60599a92a73.jpg[color="#800000"]The Guards Cemetery, Lesboeufs, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">A concentration cemetery, first established during the fighting, but greatly increased in size after the armistice, when the surrounding fields and smaller cemeteries scattered throughout them were cleared and brought in. There are now 3,137 casualties of the First World War buried or commemorated here. 1,644 of them are unidentified, and there are special memorials to 83 soldiers known or believed to be buried among them, mostly along the lower wall. Other special memorials record the names of five casualties buried in Ginchy A.D.S. Cemetery, whose graves were destroyed by shell fire, and three officers of the 2nd Bn. Coldstream Guards, killed in action on 26 September 1916 and known to have been buried together beside the road near Lesboeufs, but whose grave could not later be located. </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940196.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_14148186285a6059a38a6f5.jpg https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940187.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4183098485a60599b88907.jpg[color="#800000"]Rain falling on the grave of Edward 'Bim' Tennant, Guillemont Road Cemetery[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"I feel rather like saying "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me", but the triumphant finish nevertheless not what I will but what "Thou Willest" steels my heart and sends me into this battle with a heart of triple bronze...I always carry four photies of you when we go into action, one is in my pocket-book, two in that little leather book, and one round my neck, and I have kept my little medal of the Blessed Virgin. Your love for me and my love for you, have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been. Brutus' farewell to Cassius sounds in my heart : ' If not farewell, and if we meet again, we shall smile.' Now all my blessings go with you, and with all we love. God bless you, and give you peace - Eternal Love, from BIM."[/i] Lt The Hon Edward Wyndham ('Bim') Tennant, was the son of 1st Baron Glenconner. A deeply sensitive yet phenomenally brave 19 year old, loved by his men and fellow officers, he had served on the front since 1915, having been commissioned into the Grenadier Guards at the age of 17. He had written daily to his mother whenever away, reassuring her always that he was safe and well. However, some premonition - undoubtedly inspired by the deaths of so many friends and contemporaries - must have entered into his last letter to her, written the night before the attack onto the 'hogsback', and from which the final excerpt above is taken. 'Bim' Tennant was killed close to the present site of the Guards Memorial on the Ginchy Hogsback, where his company was holding part of a sap occupied by both the British and the Germans. After his death his mother self-published a book of his extensive poetry, and of the many shocked messages of love and affection that she received.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo34262992.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_15070338215aa78fcedee9b.jpg[color="#800000"]The grave of Raymond Asquith, Guillemont Road Cemetery, October 2015[/color] Raymond Asquith was the eldest son of prime minister H.H.Asquith. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he easily took first class honours, his was one of the outstanding minds of his generation. Called to the Bar in 1904, he served as a junior counsel on the Titanic inquiry, and was a prospective Liberal candidate when the war intervened. He requested a transfer from staff to his battalion just prior to the Somme battle. Wounded in the chest during the advance on Lesboeufs, he died whilst being carried back. A fortnight earlier Asquith had been on a training exercise when he received a telegram instructing him to meet his father at 'crossroads K.6d', those that lie to this day at the foot of Bois Francois below Fricourt. [i]'I vaulted into the saddle and bumped off to Fricourt where I arrived exactly at the appointed time. I waited for an hour on a very muddy road congested with troops and lorries and surrounded by barking guns. Then two handsome motors from G.H.Q. arrived, the P.M. in one of them with two staff officers, and in the other Bongie, Hankey and one or two of those moth-eaten nondescripts who hang about the corridors of Downing Street in the twilight region between the civil and domestic service. We went up to see some of the captured German dug-outs and just as we were arriving at our first objective the Boches began putting over a few 4.2 shells from their field howitzer. The PM was not discomposed by this, but the GHQ chauffeur to whom I handed over my horse to hold, flung the reins into the air and himself flat on his belly in the mud . . .'[/i]The party was escorted round the dug-out by several generals and after the shelling died down[i] 'the P.M. drove off to luncheon with the G.O.C. 4th Army' [/i]while Asquith rode back to his billets. It was their last meeting. Raymond Asquith lies in Guillemont Road CWGC. On his headstone are inscribed the concluding words of Shakespeare's 'Henry V'; 'Small time but in that small most greatly lived this star of England' https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940192.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2702154425a60599fe2c9b.jpg[color="#800000"]Wind in the Maize, Ginchy Quadrilateral, Autumn 2015[/color] <div align="justify"></div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo35085283.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_14219195025b139691314b2.jpg[color="#800000"]The Sunken Lane, Beaumont-Hamel[/color] <div align="justify">[i][/i] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945328.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_981535375a62f5ff3a5a0.jpg[color="#800000"]Authille Wood, Somme, August 1916[/color] <div align="justify">[i]“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.”[/i] 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; [i]“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”.[/i] 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.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778784.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2087874337527c37704f790.jpg[color="#800000"]The Portal, Serre Road No.2 Cemetery, looking towards the British front line, May 2013.[/color] [i]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!”[/i] [color="#800000"]Wilfred Owen, 'The Sentry'[/color] <div align="justify">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.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945334.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_17532692115a62f727a2c0a.jpg[color="#800000"]The Lane from Bazentin-le-Petit to High Wood[/color] <div align="justify">On 18th July 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers were ordered to move from their billets in Mametz Wood, from whence Robert Graves had earlier retrieved greatcoats for his men, to the line at Bazentin Le Petit. On the way up they lost several men to gas, and once in their shallow trench they came under a sustained barrage, the shells just bracketing their trench, but none falling in. The following afternoon Robert Graves's platoon was ordered to go out after dark that evening into no-man's-land to build a pair of cruciform strongpoints, one on each side of the Bazentin-High Wood lane. [i]"It was a bright, moonlit night. My way to the stongpoint on the right took me along the Bazentin-High Wood road. A German Sergeant-Major, wearing a pack and full equipment, was lying on his back in the middle of the road, arms stretched wide. He was a short, powerful man with a full black beard. He looked sinister in the moonlight: I needed a charm to get myself past him. The simplest way, I found, was to cross myself. Evidently a brigade of the 7th Division had captured the road, and the Germans had been shelling it heavily. It was a sunken road, and the defenders had begun to scrape fire positions in the north bank, facing the Germans. The work had evidently been interrupted by a counter-attack. They had done no more than scrape hollows in the lower part of the bank. To a number of these little hollows wounded men had crawled, put their heads and shoulders inside, and died there. It looked as if they had tried to hide from the black beard. They were Gordon Highlanders.[/i] [color="#800000"]Capt Robert Graves, 2nd Bt RWF [/color]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo26084048.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_15728733125640a0b036f03.jpg[color="#800000"]Delville Wood, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify"></div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940191.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_12170709125a60599f13328.jpg[color="#800000"]Sunken Lane in front of Lesboeufs, Somme, Autumn 2015[/color] <div align="justify"></div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo27980606.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_21334810265768e45c4f800.jpg[color="#800000"]Bazentin-le-Petit Village Cemetery & CWGC Extension, October 2015[/color] <div align="justify">In mid-July the Royal Welch Fusiliers were forming up in support of an attack that had gone in on High Wood when they came under accurate artillery fire. As they withdrew down this gentle slope to escape the ferocious barrage, there were many casualties. Amongst them was the poet Robert Graves, then a captain in the RWF; [i]"One piece of shell went through my thigh, high up near the groin; I must have been at full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation. The wound over my eye was made by a little chip of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin headstones. This, and a finger wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me. But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder blade, and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple, in a line with my collar bone"[/i]</div>[color="#800000"]Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers[/color] <div align="justify">Graves was evacuated to the old German dressing station in the corner of Mametz Wood, but his wounds were so severe that he was not expected to survive, and was laid down outside. His commanding officer duly listed him as killed in action. Siegfried Sassoon, who was in billets a short distance away, wrote this poem to the memory of his old friend when the news reached him;</div> [color="#800000"]To His Dead Body[/color] [i]When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried, Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died, Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair Can bring me no report of how you fare, Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day, Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind— Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.[/i] [color="#800000"]Siegfried Sassoon MC, Royal Welch Fusiliers.[/color]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940148.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4993851615a6043f8bb441.jpg<center>[color="#800000"]Serre Road No.3 Cemetery with Mark, Luke & John Copses, and Queen's Cemetery beyond.[/color]</center> <div align="justify">The northernmost sector of the July 1st 1916 offensive, and particularly infamous as the location in which several of the untried 'pals' battalions were pitched against German defensive trenches that were expected to have been obliterated during the week long artillery bombardment. The German forces were in fact largely intact in deep dugouts, from which they ascended as soon as the barrage lifted at 7.30 on the morning of the 1st, and so too was the wire ahead of their trenches, carefully laid to channel the attackers into blind funnels. As the troops of the Sheffield City and the Accrington Pals Battalions, advancing from their fire trenches along the face of the copse to the left, appeared on the skyline of no man's land, they were caught in a hail of interlocking enfilade machine gun fire. The attack was only suspended after the second wave, the Barnsley Pals, had suffered an identical fate. The attack completely failed here, and indeed throughout the northernmost sector, as did a subsequent assault on 13th November. Amongst those who lost their lives here was John Streets, a sergeant in the Sheffield Pals. He was killed going back into no-man's-land to bring in a wounded soldier.</div [i]No splendid rite is here - yet lay him low, Ye comrades of his youth he fought beside, Close where ye winds do sigh and wild flowers grow, Where the sweet brook doth babble by his side. No splendour here, yet we lay him tenderly To rest, his requiem in artillery.[/i] [color="#800000"]John Streets[/color] <div align="justify">John Streets' grave may be found in Euston Road Cemetery, in nearby Colincamps.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940178.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_12392847205a60599343332.jpg[color="#800000"]T14D, Ginchy, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">[i]Dear Mother I am writing these few lines severely wounded. We have done well our batt. advanced about 3 quarters of a mile. I am laid in a shell hole with 2 wounds in my hip and through my back. I cannot move or crawl. I have been here for 24 hours and never seen a living soul. I hope you will recieve these few lines as I don't expect anyone will come to take me away, but you know I have done my duty out here now for 1 year and 8 months and you will always have the consolation that I died quite happy doing my Duty. Must give my Best of Love to all the cousins who have been so kind to me time I have been out here. And the best of love to Mother and Harry + all at Swinefleet. XXX[/i] These extraordinary lines were scribbled on a piece of paper by Corporal John Duesbery of 2nd Sherwood Foresters, who attacked the Ginchy Quadrilateral on 15th September. His expectation proved tragically correct, but his belongings, including this letter, were evidently recovered from his body before he was buried, probably in the shellhole in which he lay. The grave marker must have been lost in the subsequent fighting, and his name is now etched amongst the legions of the missing high up on the Thiepval Memorial. In the post war clearances the battlefield was laid out in a grid, and the bodies were recovered and reburied in the many cemeteries that were established during and after the fighting. It is likely that his battlefield grave was somewhere close to this sad and desolate spot, and here he may still lie, though it is more likely that his unidentified remains were recovered, one of an astonishing 274 in the 230 square metres of grid reference T14D, and now rest beneath a stone marked "A Soldier of The Great War, Known Unto God." (With acknowledgement to the Duesbery family, and to Peter & Tom Barton)</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778777.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_2097516776527c374ab1744.jpg[color="#800000"]May Blossom in The Queen's Nullah, Mametz[/color] As the wounded and semi-delerious Private Ball drags himself out of the wood, David Jones again invokes the mystical female figure who has already taken the form of 'sweet sister death' and 'mother, madre'. She now appears in benevolent form as The Queen of the Woods, adorning the dead with flowers and berries. <div align="justify">[i]"The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering. These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize. She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what's due to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-men. She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down. Some she gives white berries some she gives brown, Emil has a curious crown it's made of golden saxifrage. Fatty wears sweet-briar, he will reign with her for a thousand years. For Balder she reaches high to fetch his. Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand. That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain - you'd hardly credit it. She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower. Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod. Sion gets St.John's wort, that's fair enough. Dai Greatcoat, she can't find him anywhere, she calls both high and low, she had a very special one for him. Beneath this July noblesse she is mindful of December wood, when the trees beat against each other because of Him. She carries to Anaerin-in-the-Nullah a rowan sprig for the glory of Guenedota. You could not hear what she said to him, for she is careful for the Disciplines of the Wars."[/i] [color="#800000"]David Jones, 'In Parenthesis'.</div>[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945331.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_11165667905a62f7243a767.jpg[color="#800000"]In Front of Guedecourt, Autumn 2015[/color] <div align="justify">A British .303 bullet, split only by the passage of this year's plough, lies on the position of the half-finished trench in which Arnold Ridley was wounded on 16th September.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo19778772.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1597520970527c36ea96d92.jpg[color="#800000"]Mametz Wood from Pommiers Redoubt, HQ 38th (Welsh) Division, May 2013.[/color] [i]"The gentle slopes are green to remind you of south English places, only far wider and flatter spread, and grooved and harrowed criss-cross whitely, the disturbed subsoil heaped up albescent"[/i] [color="#800000"]David Jones, from 'In Parenthesis'.[/color] <div align="justify">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.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo23893640.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_1261067345522a71546665.jpg[color="#800000"]Bazentin Calvary, Somme, March 2015[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo25874598.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_623789741561cbc31db0d0.jpg[color="#800000"]The grave of Captain Mark Tennant, Guards Cemetery, Lesboeufs.[/color] <div align="justify">Mark Tennant was killed outside Ginchy on 16th September. He was the cousin of Edward Wyndham Tennant.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo27980607.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_770989475768e45f7c1cb.jpg[color="#800000"]A British Pill Box on the Martinsart - Auchonvillers Road, Somme, May 2016[/color] <div align="justify">A backstop defensive position facing towards what is now the Newfoundland Memorial Park, this is likely to date not from the 1916 battle, but from the fighting of 1918, which settled back on exactly the same lines as had been held by the two sides between 1914 and 1916 in this northern sector of the Somme battlefield.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/along-the-roman-road-from https://images.on-this.website/24791_358546868527bffd21d689.jpg[color="#800000"]Pozières Mill towards Bapaume, 2013.[/color] <div align="justify"> Looking along the Roman Road towards Bapaume from Hill 160, site of the Pozières windmill, the highest point on the Somme battlefield, and a July 1st objective of the British 8th Division. It was finally taken after a shocking price in blood had been paid by first the British, then the Australian 1st and 2nd and finally 4th Divisions, on the 7th August 1916, the end of the fifth week of the battle. It is 2½ miles from the July 1st start line. The Pozières ridge has been described as being "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth." </div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940175.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_17922793805a6059909b48c.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Strip Trench, Mametz Wood, August 2016[/color] <div align="justify">[i] "It is not to be broken on the brown stone under the gracious tree. It is not to be hidden under your failing body. Slung so, it troubles your painful crawling like a fugitive’s irons."[/i] [color="#800000"]David Jones (15th RWF) from 'In Parenthesis'.[/color]</div>[/size][/i] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33940207.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_3768644525a6059ad57fa4.jpg[color="#800000"]The Devonshire Trench, Mametz[/color] [i]I, that on my familiar hill Saw with uncomprehending eyes A hundred of thy sunsets spill Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, Ere the sun swings his noonday sword Must say good-bye to all of this; - By all delights that I shall miss, Help me to die, O Lord.[/i] [color="#800000"]William Noel Hodgson, believed 29th June 1916[/color] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo26084018.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_21351041215640a0372c689.jpg[color="#800000"]Newfoundland Memorial Park, Beaumont Hamel, November 2015[/color] <div align="justify">The massacre of the Newfoundlanders took place over no more than 20 or 30 minutes, in which time some 80% of the regiment are believed to have become casualties - all of the officers and some 645 other ranks. Of the 770 men who jumped-off from the St.John's Road support trench, which ran immediately beside the current Hamel-Auchonvilliers road on the border of the park, only about 110 survived unwounded. This degree of attrition was second only to that of the Green Howards at Fricourt on July 1st.</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945330.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_19147768045a62f6013a7dd.jpg[color="#800000"]The Ground in Front of 'The Queen's Nullah' & White Trench Mametz, July 2016[/color] <div align="justify">[i]"If you looked to left and right, small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort, moved in tenuous line.."[/i]</div> https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo28844859.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_150972078457c5f3ae6af94.jpg[size=10][color="#800000"]Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, Somme[/color] <div align="justify">The grave of William Adams, commemorated by his family 100 years after his death on 28th July, 1916. [color="#800000"][/color]</div>[/size] https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo33945338.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_4959828115a62f72b2ffde.jpg https://www.tobywebsterphotography.co.uk/photo35117284.html https://images.on-this.website/24791_3880166855b1785a887248.jpg[color="#800000"]Along the German Front Line, Beaumont-Hamel[/color] <div align="justify">The German front line facing the infamous Sunken Lane runs just inside the treeline, and was known as the 'Bernwerk'. The zig-zag line of the trench is very clear to see here, and the positions afford a clear line of fire onto the Hawthorn Ridge opposite, whilst those rising from the road and onto the ridge cover the Sunken Lane positions in the classic interlocking fire pattern. It is self-evident what little chance the attacking troops stood, despite the blowing of the vast mine beneath the Hawthorn Redoubt.</justify>