In 1917 the French had decided that Gommecourt should be
preserved in its battle-scarred state as a national monument, for the
blood of many brave soldiers had there been shed during the fierce Somme
fighting of 1916. Notices were put up, huge white boards with black
printing in French and English, enjoining no one to interfere with the
trenches and wire, etc., but to leave things just as they were. Oh, the
irony of it! Here was the Hun again pounding, pounding with fierce wrath
and insistent desire to smash his way through. Those self-same notices
were shell-shattered, while in his zeal to destroy the dug-outs which he
knew so well in Gommecourt, for he had made them, he dropped, in one
morning, more than thirty 15-inch shells in the village. To the right of
Gommecourt could be seen the naked stumps of Rossignol Wood, a beautiful
name reminiscent of delightful summer evenings. But the song of the
nightingale was now gone, and the only tunes to be heard were the deadly
rat-tat-tat of Boche machine guns and the fierce hissing of our shrapnel
bullets through the decayed undergrowth, the time for this devil's
music being regularly thundered out by the crash, crash, of heavy
howitzers.
East of our ridge, and parallel to it, was a long gentle valley. In the
old days the Germans had been content to build their trenches half-way
up the eastern slope, and the French had faced them on the opposite
side, but now the Huns in the foolish arrogance of their hearts must
needs swarm over the whole valley, and offer themselves and their works
as targets for our searching gun-fire.
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