Towards the end of this third week in July, in hot, clearing, summer weather, some batteries and battalions of fine men were moving along the roads towards the battlefield of the Somme. They had not been “in” in that battle before this, and although they did not know, it seems that they had generally guessed that they were to go in against Pozières. These men and batteries belonged to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and they were coming to the first big battle that had happened since they landed in France. It is said that these troops, as they moved along the roads in the July days between hedges covered with honeysuckle and shadowed by ranks of plane-trees, felt that they were marching in fairyland; for they had seen no such earthly beauty in their own lands over the sea, nor in Egypt and Gallipoli, where they had served. Perhaps no soldiers who have been hotly engaged in a modern battle ever really want to go into another. They go in the knowledge that it is their duty, and that their going may end the war and bring peace. These soldiers went in that spirit, but it is said that they felt satisfaction that they were to take part in a big battle with the enemy against whom they had enlisted to fight. About the 20th and 21st of July they came into camp within sound of the battle, and their officers were able to examine the ground which they were to attack. Their attack was to be the crowning act of that part of the battle. It may be well to describe here the nature of the ground of that little place, which for some weeks was as famous to our nation as the town of Troy.
Pozières was a little village of no interest and no importance strung along the Bapaume Road near the top of the plateau. It was in the main one street of buildings facing each other across the road. The houses of this street were not all dwellings. Some of them were byres, granaries, and barns, so that the main effect of the street was rude. Most of the houses were built of red brick; the byres and barns were of course plaster or clay daubed upon wooden frames. In the years before the war the village contained about 300 people, most of whom got their livings from the land, for all the plateau was good farm land. It has been said that some of the people (as at Contalmaison) made pearl buttons, but the chief work of the place, as of the Somme battlefield, was farming. The church was the chief building, and next to it in importance was the school. Both seem to have been modern buildings, of no interest. I do not know whether there was any market-place. There was no château. The road ran straight through the village in a north-easterly direction towards Bapaume. It may be said that it cut the village in two, for it divided the one row of houses from the other. In writing of the Battle of Pozières one has to think of this road as a mark or boundary, cutting one part of the battle from the other. Our advance in the battle was towards Bapaume, in the north-easterly direction. It may be better to write of the two halves of the village as lying east and west of the road.
Though the village was poor and without glory it was the home of men who had given its windy perch a beauty. The village was planted with trees. On the eastern side of the road, at the southern end of the village, these trees made a wood of fine timber, 200 yards long by 100 yards across. Orchards and outliers from this wood ran along the outskirts of the village on this side, behind the gardens of the backs of the houses. In the village street there were a few trees. Just beyond the village (at both ends) the fine plane and poplar trees which mark so many French highways made the road a shady avenue. Two hundred yards from the last house, at the north-east end of the village, the road dipped towards Bapaume. Just before the dip down, on the highest ground of the plateau, and a few yards to the west, or left-hand, side of the road, was the village windmill.
The eastern side of the village street had fewer houses in it than the western side. About midway in the village, the abreuvoir, or village watering-place for stock, opened from the road on this eastern side. It was an oblong, surface-drainage pond fenced with brick and shaded with elm-trees. On the western side of the road where the main village stood – for on this side the houses had a southern aspect – the ground rose slightly, perhaps as the result of generations of building. The school and the church both stood on this side of the village, though well back from the road. Near the church, a lane or country track ran westward from the high road towards the village of Thiepval, two miles away. A few buildings stood near this lane, well to the west of Pozières proper. Beyond them (to the west) was the head of the Mash Valley, which ran parallel with the high road down to La Boisselle. On the western slope of this valley, perhaps 200 yards from the village, was the village cemetery.
Seen from some little distance, from either side of the road, Pozières was like several other Picardy villages: a church tower and some red-tiled roofs among a big clump of fruit and timber trees, wood, and orchard. Being high up, it was waterless, save for a well or two and the rain. It was also as windy as Troy and as visible. From the north and west it was conspicuous for many miles. Men walking near the windmill could be seen from Serre, Pys, Irles, and Loupart, from three to six miles away. From the north-east it was screened. From the east, it could be seen within a distance of two miles as a kind of ridge or skyline above the shallow pan which may be called the head of Sausage Valley. On this eastern side a distant view of it was blocked by Bazentin Wood. From the south and south-east, from Contalmaison and from the high road between Mametz and Montauban, it was plainly visible as a clump of trees, and the road to it from Contalmaison was a most conspicuous, whitish, straight line pointing to it. From the south-west, from the high ground of Usna Hill, it appeared as a few buildings, with roofs of red tile in front of a woodland.
The routes by which our troops could attack Pozières were all in full view of the enemy, who had so arranged his trenches and machine guns that to approach from any of the routes was scarcely possible in daylight. The approach by the Mouquet Valley was flanked and enfiladed by fortresses not yet reduced; those by the Ovillers Hill and Mash Valley were commanded throughout their length by the Pozières plateau. The route by the Albert Road over the big central spur led up a natural glacis, strongly wired, trenched, and flanked. The gully or valley between this central spur and the next to the east contained some dead ground, though the greater part of it could be seen from the village. This gully or valley has been mentioned (in the Contalmaison fighting) as the Quarry Gully, from two small chalk quarries on its eastern bank. The small spur to the east of Quarry Gully hid the next valley – which may be called Hospital Valley (because a dressing-station once stood there) – from the village, though all this valley was plainly visible from the enemy trenches at its head, which enfiladed it. Beyond this, to the east, is the big spur on which Contalmaison stood. At the north-eastern side of this spur is the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit, which stands on ground a little higher than that on which Pozières stands. In a way it turns Pozières, for troops stationed there are directly on the village’s left flank. Troops advancing from this wood towards Pozières had a better chance of success than from any other point. Near this wood, as has been said, they had secured a part of the enemy main position, and had proceeded along it, westward, bombing from bay to bay in both trenches, to within a third of a mile of Pozières itself.
A road or track runs in Quarry Gully. Another, rather better road, runs in Hospital Gully. Both lead into Pozières.
The Quarry Road starts from the Albert-Contalmaison Road at the top of a rise. Just at the junction it is sunken rather deep between banks. When the enemy held that ground, before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, he dug into these banks for shelter of various kinds. At the junction of the two roads he had dug a field dressing-station, which was taken over and used by our men when we had won the ground. The junction of the roads was often called Dressing-Station Corner for this reason. But it was always a dangerous place. The enemy shelled it day and night, throughout the Pozières fighting, as a likely piece of road for the passing of men and munitions. Before the end of the Pozières fighting, the junction itself, the strip of road leading downhill from it towards Contalmaison, past the much-blasted copse called Bailiff Wood,
and the turn to the left into Quarry Valley, were generally known as Suicide Corner.
The dressing-station was destroyed by a shell during the attack. All the Corner is much battered by shellfire; but the road to Contalmaison, being needed for supply, has been kept in good order. It is now much wider than it was at the time of the fighting. It, too, runs between deep banks at this point. Bailiff Wood may once have cast a shadow on it on summer days, just here, at noon. Since the fight for Pozières, that wood has cast no shadows save from perhaps a dozen spikes of burnt branch, on one of which a magpie has built her nest.
The Corner, towards Pozières, is a rough, steep spur slope, terraced with those regular, steep steps or banks which the French call remblais, and our own farmers lynchets. As usual, the enemy had dug down into these lynchets for shelter from our fire. On the level terraces on the tops of the lynchets he had once placed his batteries, and his artillery-men had lived in the dugouts near-by. In one of the officer’s rooms there was a library of good books. Early in the Battle of the Somme, our fire made the Corner untenable, the batteries were destroyed or withdrawn, and the dugouts – with their books, furniture, and officer’s possessions – were abandoned to us. All these lynchets are much pitted and blasted by shellfire. There are a few currant bushes on them here and there. The earth is bald, dried reddish mud with a little grass on it. In the winter it looked like the skin of some animal sick of the mange.
From the slopes of the Corner, standing in the wreck of the battery position, one can look up the Quarry Valley and see Pozières at the head of it. From this point, the village seems to stand on a backbone or ridge of earth on the northern skyline. In early July, when our men first saw Pozières from the Corner, it was still fringed with wood on this side, and though the shells had knocked some of the trees away, the place was green and leafy. The trees are on slightly lower ground than the village, for all the fall of the land there is to the south and east. From all this eastern side of the Albert Road, the line of the road along which the village ran makes a kind of ridge or wall. It was a green wall once; early in the battle the dust of the shells had covered it with grey. In the heat haze of July, 1916, that grey wall, with the blue air trembling above it, was the last thing seen by many hundreds of men.
The Quarry Valley is only fifty yards across. On the eastern side of it is the little spur, before mentioned, with its battered copse. The spur, which was once mainly plough land, is fleeced with coarse grass and dandelions. The many shell-holes are reddish all over it, though the red is mixed with dirty fragments of chalk. The spur itself is a small roll or heave of the ground, perhaps forty feet higher than the valley and one hundred yards across at its widest point.
The slope of the spur on its western side facing the Corner is naturally steep, and has been made steeper by man. A little way from the Corner the bank has been cut into for chalk, and the quarry, though hardly more than a recess, gives some sort of shelter. It is about twenty yards long by ten across, and the depth of the cutting, from top to floor, may be twenty feet.
A little further towards Pozières the Quarry Road forks, and near the fork there is a second quarry in which the chalk is much more clearly laid bare. This quarry is twice the size of the other and about half as deep again. It gives better shelter, as it is deeper than the other and equally well-screened, by the lie of the bank, from the view of an enemy artilleryman in Pozières village. From this point the road to Pozières, by either fork, is across the wreck of battle. All the ground has been blasted and gouged by shells. Men have dug shelters there and heaped up sandbags, and the shells have blown all into pits till the earth is all tettered with the pox of war. Here and there, the approach may still be made by trench. The grass and some of the hardier weeds have begun now to grow in some of those furrows; in others even the earth seems to have been killed, like the men buried there. From these gullies of dried, broken, pitted, and blasted mud, torn into holes, often twenty feet long, ten feet across, and seven feet deep, like nothing else on earth, one goes up the slope to that little Troy upon the hill. Presently one passes into an array of ram-pikes and stumps over which the hand of war has passed. It is like some Wood of the Suicides. A few trees in it are still recognizable as trees; some even push a few leaves from their burnt stumps. There are ashes, nuts, limes, and hawthorns. The others are stumps, with bunches of splinters at their ends, or erect hags, or like the posts of some execution corner where men are garotted and shot and hung on the cross. Here the ground is so gouged and blasted that the shell-holes run into each other like sloughing sores. The trenches run for a little, are blasted into the landscape, emerge again for a few yards, and again disappear in some long lake of water or mud. All the ground is littered with the waste of war – tins, equipment, smashed weapons, shells, bombs, bones, rags of uniform, tools, jars, and boxes. In one place, above the wood, in the village itself in what was once the road to Contalmaison, are the traces of an enemy battery position, with broken wheels and many of the wicker panniers used for carrying shells. This road was once hedged, but fire has trimmed the hedge. There are brambles in it still, and dwarf beech, young elm – which will never grow to be old – and the wayfaring-tree. From this point one can enter the village. It was near here that the English-speaking race first entered the village, in the summer night’s charge of a year ago.
On both sides of the village street the shells dug confluent pits, then filled them, then dug them again, then dug others, then more, then more, till the ground became a collection of holes with mounds among them. The shells fell thus, on all that ground, for hours and days and weeks and months, till in all the squalor of mud and smash that was once Pozières no sense was left of the home of men. One can see that a village once stood there, for there are broken bricks in the mounds, and old iron farm implements in some of the shell-holes, and the road has been made like a road again. The houses lie in heaps of rubble and small bits of brick, and where the buildings were important these heaps are bigger than elsewhere.
Three or four landmarks remain on one side of the village and one on the other. On the western side of the road, north of the village, is the mound or hump of the windmill. This is now a heap of earth, cement, and broken concrete stuck about with railway girders. Further south, on the same side, is a part of a single wall of reinforced concrete. This strange grey fragment, which stands on a mound, and was once a part of a very strong enemy fortress built of concrete and iron girders, stands on the site of the school. At a distance it has (to myself) something the look of a loaded camel lying down; but some observers describe it as three flat anvils in a row. It can be plainly seen for many miles in nearly every direction. Further south again, on this side, is the biggish heap of powdered brick, riddled iron, earth, hewn stone, bent metal, and filthy papers that was once Pozières church. At the southern edge of the village on this side, above a lane which straggles round to the cemetery, is another grey concrete fragment, famous in its way. It stands well up on the bank above the lane, overlooking the spur, Mash Valley, and the distance of France, with the trees of the Amiens Road upon it. It is a little observation post, which could, on occasion, be used as a machine gun emplacement. A concrete stair near it leads down to a cellar twelve or fifteen feet below. This little post, barely big enough to hold two men, is less conspicuous from a distance than the school-house fragment, but being in the line of our attack was more of a landmark to our soldiers, who called it Gibraltar. Beside it, almost sunk into the mud, are two old enemy gun emplacements covered with balks of timber.
On the eastern side of the road there is only one landmark. About the centre of the village, close to the road, is a hollowing in the mud, as though there had been more shells all together there than elsewhere. This filthy hollow holds water even when most of the shell-holes are dry. At one side of it, low down, are four or five rows of brick where the foundation of a wall once stood. This place is what remains of the abreuvoir or watering-place for stock.
None of these places gives an
y feeling of the habitation of man. No one, looking at the site of the village, can feel that the place was once the home of 300 human beings, who were born and married there, who lived in that street and got good out of those fields, and heard the bells of the church, and went up and down to market. Looking at the place, one can only feel that it has suffered, and that all round it human beings suffered, in hundreds and thousands, from agony and pain and terror, and that it has won from this a kind of soul.
On the western side of the village, beyond the hedges which once closed the gardens at the backs of the houses on that side, the ground slopes into the head of Mash Valley in a slope so mild that it is almost perfect as a field of fire. If you turn your back upon the village, walk for half a mile across the Mash Valley-head, and then look at the village, it appears as a skyline or ridge, with a few tree-stumps upon it, and those other heaps or marks: the windmill, the school, and Gibraltar. Looking round, from that point, one sees only a markless wilderness of shell-holes, full of water or ice in the winter, and of dryish mud at other times, between which, in the summer, a coarse grass full of weeds thrives knee-deep. From the west through the north to the east the land is all this wilderness as far as the skyline. It is a desert of destruction, with no mark to guide upon it. Up those slopes, all looking alike, on to those plateaux all looking alike, our men advanced upon trenches all looking alike. In that desert they had to advance upon objectives which were indeed points on a map, but in the landscape were like every other place in sight. The sea has more natural features than that battlefield. The difficulties of the battle were not wholly those of shells and machine guns, but of keeping touch and direction during an advance.
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 41