"It was a bright, moonlit night. My way to the stongpoint on the right took me along the Bazentin-High Wood road. A German Sergeant-Major, wearing a pack and full equipment, was lying on his back in the middle of the road, arms stretched wide. He was a short, powerful man with a full black beard. He looked sinister in the moonlight: I needed a charm to get myself past him. The simplest way, I found, was to cross myself. Evidently a brigade of the 7th Division had captured the road, and the Germans had been shelling it heavily. It was a sunken road, and the defenders had begun to scrape fire positions in the north bank, facing the Germans. The work had evidently been interrupted by a counter-attack. They had done no more than scrape hollows in the lower part of the bank. To a number of these little hollows wounded men had crawled, put their heads and shoulders inside, and died there. It looked as if they had tried to hide from the black beard. They were Gordon Highlanders.
Thank you very much, Ian, hugely appreciated. They are all of various locations on the Somme battlefield mentioned by the various poets, writers, musicians and warriors in their writings and letters. I have posted a number of them on here before, a couple of years ago, so please forgive me any repetition.
I find all those towers quite terrifying, though I guess I need to get used to it as London is beginning to look rather similar.
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