Cofio'r hogiau

On our trip to the Somme battlefields in July, the place with the most atmosphere by far was Mametz Wood. The site where the 38th (Welsh) Division was cut to ribbons between the 7th and 12th of July 1916 is marked by a statue of a belligerent red dragon, gripping barbed wire in its claw. The Welshmen advanced past this point towards the wood. In the hours before the assault they had been in their starting positions behind the ridge here, singing hymns they would have known from chapel and sunday school. Even by the standards of the Somme, taking Mametz was a hideous task - The 14th Welsh (Swansea) Battalion alone suffered almost 400 killed or wounded from some 680 men. Any who survived the open ground in front of the wood, swept by machine gun and tangled in the wire, faced a stubborn enemy dug into a natural fortress of fallen trees and thick undergrowth. Fighting in the wood was primitive and desperate - bayonet, grenade and rifle butt. A few days after the Germans had been forced out, the poet Robert Graves entered the wood to find a greatcoat for the unseasonably cold nights. He found the wood full of the dead of the South Wales Borderers and Royal Welch Fusiliers, looking pitifully small alongside the corpses of the big Prussian Guards.


Comparing maps from 1916 with the site today, Mametz has more or less the same 'footprint', though all the trees are post 1918. The wood is a brooding presence, glowering at you across the valley. I'm not the first visitor to feel like I was being watched by many unseen eyes. It was almost as if the wood gave out some sort or radiation - like being at the other end the room from a large fire. We considered walking up to the fringe of the trees, but both admitted later that we were relieved when the sudden sound of a hunter's shotgun from within the green dark made us return to the car.

An Unfortunate Region

Our visit to that field in Picardy was part of a trip we cobbled together after the work stuff mentioned below was postponed. Better still, the roof was sorted quicker than I expected, and the computer seems to have fixed itself. Nothing else for it but to get away for a bit. It turned out to be quite a journey, but as there's nothing duller that reading about other peoples' holidays I'll spare you the details. Well, most of them. For our visit to the Somme battlefields we were holed up at Hotel Basilique in Albert, an old fashioned place where the staff always seemed to be having lunch. Considering the town was all but erased from the map during World War One, and rebuilt from scratch it's not a bad looking place, and a perfect base for exploring the region.



In the area there are two things that can be seen from almost anywhere. One is the Golden Madonna on the spire of Albert Basilica, famously knocked horizontal (and later knocked off) by German artillery. The other is the brooding Thiepval Memorial. Wherever you are, the arch of this massive structure seems to watch you like an unblinking eye. It's also surprisingly hard to get to. Despite being well signposted, it jumps around the landscape, always in the middle distance until - suddenly - there it is right in front of you. It's a moving and desperately melancholic place. There are more than 72,000 names carved here - all men without a known grave. Here and there, a name has been removed after the remains of a long lost brother, son, uncle or father have been discovered and carefully exhumed from their hurried battlefield grave, identified, and given a proper burial.

Modern agricultural methods have turned the Somme area into miles of luminous prairie, broken up by the glowing Portland stones of the immaculate Commonwealth cemetries - 188 in this area alone - but there are some patches where the war is still very evident. There are woods with no trees more than 90 years old. Near the site of the former Kiel trench is a paddock with three horses living among a series of trenches and craters. Farmers around here are still using British and German iron pickets for their original purpose - to hold up barbed wire and the amount of ordnance still brought up by the plough means a regional bomb disposal squad is on permanent standby. In the first week of the Battle Of The Somme nearly two million shells were fired by the British alone. A third of these were duds, and a lot of them are still out there.

The scale of loss and sacrifice is at the same time humbling and overwhelming. Each day we were glad to get back to Albert for a glass of Loburg and a steak haché, and after three days we were relieved to move on. Driving up the arrow-straight road from Albert to Bapaume on our way to Lille we followed the direction of the British advance - which cost 3 lives for every foot of land captured.