After last years trip around the Ypres Salient, this year along with 3 good friends I again made the short hop across the channel on Flying Legends weekend to pay my respects to some real Legends.
An hour and a half drive from Calais the Somme Battlefields were very different from the Salient. Instead of being flat below sea level, they are quite hilly and mostly chalky. Like the Salient they are rural in nature.
The Somme has been fought over for years, there is a spot just outside Delville Woods where Julius Caesar is reported to have addressed his troops before giving the Gauls a good kicking. Later the Prussians invaded then of course there was the Great War. Afterwards the area of course came under the jackboots of the Nazis before liberation in 1944.
The Cemeteries’ themselves differ from those on Passchendaele because they are mostly what is known as “concentration” cemeteries. This means that they were created from scratch after the war when the battlefields were cleared, there are several notable exceptions to this as we will see later. Those on the Salient are similar but more often the concentration element is centred around an original cemetery. This does not detract from them one iota, they are still very moving places to visit. One major point that both the Somme and The Salient have in common is that the Germans nearly always held the high ground. In the case of the Somme they had held it for 2 years and because of the chalky ground they had dug in and created quite considerable fortifications.
Our plan was to tour the Battlefields from North to South.
Day 1
Our journey through the battlefields begins in the North at Serre. Here we visited Sheffield Park which is centred on the site of 4 small Copses, Matthew , Mark, Luke and John which today are now one wood. In the wood are several memorials. The first of which is to The Accrington Pals who attacked here on the 1st July 1916.
At the edge of the wood are the remains of the trench the 31st Division attacked from
The view from the Trench towards the front line. The cemetery beyond the farmer is Queens Cemetery which is situated roughly mid way in No Mans Land. You will notice that the attack took place up hill, this will become a common theme.
A couple of the other memorials in Sheffield Park.
Heading through the park towards Railway Hollow Cemetery the land is as it was in 1918, with remains of trenches pock marked with shell holes.
The Cemetery contains 107 UK burials and is on the line of the old military railway which ran through here.
About 100 yards north of Sheffield Park is Like Copse Cemetery. A small cemetery of 72 burials of Sheffield City Battalion men. Including brothers L Cpl F and Pte W Gunstone, this marks the furthest north of the attacks on July 1st 1916. The men are buried in 1 long grave (a trench?) with the headstones staggered so that each man has his own.
If you turn and look the other way, its just possible to make out the line of the trench system in the bean field beyond. This view looks back towards Sheffield Park and I have marked the probable trench line on it.
Up the hill as we saw earlier lies the Queens Cemetery. It contains 311 graves many of which are Accrington Pals a large proportion of which are unidentified as this part of the battlefield was fought over between July and November with little or no chance made to clear it of bodies.
Walking up the hill about as far again and you come to the German Front line, looking back gives you and idea of what the Pals were up against. One machine gun could have/did mow them down.
The final Cemetery in this locality is Serre Road Number 3. Here we found some of the Iron Harvest waiting to be collected, in this case and Artillery Shell that doesn’t appear to have been fired, or was a dud. We didn’t touch it, but some got closer than others!
Heading back towards the main road, on the corner of a farm building is a memorial to the lost.
Back on the main road we stopped at Serre Road Cemetery Number 1. Here 71.6% of the 2412 burials are unidentified, one of the highest proportions on the Somme. The original burials are to the rear with the remainder being concentration after the war.
An interesting burial here is Lt Major William Booth (Major was his Christian name) who was a Yorkshire County Cricketer who twice played for England. He was killed by a shell on July 1st 1916.
Serre Road Number 2 Cemetery just up the road is the largest on the Somme
An unidentified German
During WW2 the CWGC gardener (an Englishman) used his shed at the rear of the cemetery to hide downed aircrew. By the wars end Mr Ben Leach had helped 32 airmen escape the clutches of the Nazis.
The next day we donned our walking boots to walk the front line.
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