Monday 18th September 1916

Billets at Millencourt

There was heavy rain throughout the day and the ten march from Millencourt, which began at 10.10am, was a miserable experience. The route took the Battalion through Albert and on beyond Becourt Wood, where a halt was taken for the men to be fed. From there the men marched, via their old battleground at Contalmaison, on to their new positions in reserve trenches in Lancashire Trench and Bacon Trench, east of Pozieres and just a few hundred yards south-east of Munster Alley, where there had been such fierce fighting at the end of July (see 29^th July). The relief was completed by 7pm, by which time the men were thoroughly soaked. The Gordons’ War Diary described the situation, “Rained persistently all day and the men have no shelter … relief under wretched conditions, otherwise without incident”. For 10DWR they found the trenches here to be in very poor condition with few dugouts in what was described as “a comfortless position”. This difficulty was made much more acute by the fact that they found themselves under frequent shelling from the German lines which were by then just north of Martinpuich.

The conditions were described graphically by Brig. Genl. T.S. Lambert, commanding 69^th Brigade, in a letter to his wife, “We have had most awful weather for our restart. It poured steadily all day which we had to spend sitting about in mud and rain, soaked through with no chance of changing. Of course I was much better off than most but it was beastly cold and miserable. I got under shelter to a dugout towards evening and was more or less comfortable. The men had nothing. We none of us got much sleep as we who were in comparative comfort had to sit up very late until about 5am. The men of course could not sleep in the muddy trench and the shell fire was pretty heavy”.

(I am greatly indebted to Juliet Lambert for her generosity in allowing me to reproduce the letters here).

 

Brig. Genl. T.S. Lambert

Image by kind permission of Juliet Lambert

The Battalion's move forward was part of a larger relief by 23rd Division, taking over from 15th Division who had attacked and occupied the village of Martinpuich on 15th and had held it ever since, despite a number of German counter-attacks.

Pte. William Kershaw (18282) (see 12^th June) was admitted to one of the local Casualty Clearing Stations (details unknown), suffering from “P.U.O” (pyrexia, or high temperature, of unknown origin).