" Orders were drawn up on the basis
of that decision and passed down to brigades, who read them as their
sentence of death, and obeyed with or without protest, and sent three
or four battalions to assault a place which was covered by German
batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open out a tempest of
fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, and to tear up the
woods and earth in that neighborhood if our men gained ground. If the
whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been
dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood
and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration
of explosives which plowed up our men.
So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and
became "Devil's" Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of
massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious
brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by
another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil's caldron, or
to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had
followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen
trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their
dead to keep them company.
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