Page 35 - History of War - Issue 30-16

THE SOMME: 1916–2016

they were being viewed badly because of the had suffered were enormous. 3,993 men from under machine-gun ire”. He was right to feel
initial attacks and became determined to take the Welsh Division were recorded as dead, cynical because within weeks the Germans
Mametz Wood, even though they also knew missing or wounded, and the Swansea Pals lost recaptured the wood but the 38th Division’s
many would die in the attempt. Lieutenant more than half their battalion in one day with heroism was not forgotten. One oficer
Colonel Hayes said to ofi cers of the Swansea 452 casualties. Sassoon felt that the eventual remembered the attack of the Welsh as, “one
Pals, “We are going to take that wood, but we success was not worth it and called the battle, of the most magniicent sights of the war,” as
shall lose our battalion.” “a disastrous muddle with troops stampeding men were seen, “advancing without hesitation.”
As predicted the attack on 10 July was
extremely violent. By mid-morning the Welsh
had gained a solid foothold in the wood but A German
throughout the day they were hampered lookout post at
Mametz Wood.
by poor visibility, thick undergrowth, well- The i ghting
established machine guns and accurate devastated the
sniper i re. This made progress extremely local landscape
difi cult and the Welsh fought for ground yard
by yard. Captain Emlyn Davies described the
terrible events that unfolded, “Gory scenes
met our gaze. Mangled corpses in khaki and
in i eld-grey, lumps of torn l esh half way up
the tree trunks; a South Wales Borderer and
a German locked in their deadliest embraces
– they had simultaneously bayoneted each
other.” Captain Llewelyn Grifi ths was similarly
horrii ed, “There were worse sights than
corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here
and there a detached head, forming splashes
of red against the green leaves.” Grifi ths’
brother, Watcyn, was killed in the battle.
By daybreak of 11 July, the Welsh Division
was scattered throughout Mametz Wood with
many battalions severely depleted. A decision
was made to for the Welsh to be withdrawn
from the wood and be replaced by the 21st Images: Alamy
Division. Their replacements cleared Mametz
Wood by midday on 12 July and encountered
little resistance. It was a sad irony that the
Welsh could not stay to see their hard-fought
victory completed and the casualties that they

“A CERTAIN CURE Below: The Welsh Memorial Dragon at
Mametz Wood. The battle was Wales’s
perience during World War I
FOR LUST OF BLOOD”

THE BLOODLETTING AT MAMETZ WOOD MARKED THE WELSH PSYCHE –
LARGELY HELPED BY TORTURED WAR POETRY BY THOSE WHO FOUGHT
Although the i ghting at Mametz Wood formed only a small part of the wider battle,
it came to be well-remembered thanks to the heroism of the Welsh Division and
the eyewitness accounts of war poets and artists. The disproportionate amount of
memoirs and poems that were written about the forested killing ground sealed its
fame for posterity. Robert Graves described the wood after the battle, “It was full
of dead Prussian Guards, big men, and dead Royal Welch Fusiliers and
South Wales Borderers, little men. Not a single tree in the wood remained
unbroken.” He later reworked this description into his 1917 poem, Dead
Boche, which included the lines, “Today I found in Mametz Wood/A
certain cure for lust of blood.”
Siegfried Sassoon was another famous poet who was becoming
tired of war by 1916. He wrote afterwards, “Up in the trenches
opposite Mametz it seemed as though winter would last forever.
I had made my mind up to die, because in the circumstances
there didn’t seem to be anything else to be done.” Two days
before the battle started he wrote a poem called At Carnoy,
which described the despairing trepidation before the attack,
“Tomorrow we must go/To take some cursed Wood… O world
God made!” Literature was not just coni ned to oficers like
Graves and Sassoon but also wounded privates like David Jones
who in his poem, In Parenthesis, described a shell-burst as, “A
consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-renderings
and rivings-through… all barrier-breaking-all-unmaking”.
These literary works, despite being written mostly by
Englishmen, contributed to Mametz Wood becoming the deining moment of WWI
for the Welsh, in the same way that Thiepval was for Ulster and Gallipoli was for the
Anzacs: a sense of national courage in the face of mortal peril.

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