Only Two Officers Left
“By this time we had penetrated the German front line, and were on the flat ground where the village once stood, surrounded by a wood of fairly high trees. There was no holding the men back. They rushed through Ginchy, driving the Germans before them. The German dead were lying everywhere, some of them having been frightfully mangled by our shell-fire. As I was clambering out of the front trench, I felt a sudden stab in my right thigh. I thought I had got a ‘blighty’ [a wound serious enough to send him back to Britain], but found it was only a graze from a bullet, and so went on.
“I managed to find my men without difficulty. They had rushed through the ruins of the village and were almost a hundred yards beyond the wood, where the ground dips down slightly into a shallow valley and mounts up gradually to a ridge about half a mile away. We were facing south here, having Delville Wood away to our left and Leuze Wood on our right. —— and I were the only two officers left in the company, so it was up to us to take charge. There were not more than half a dozen officers in this part of the line, and so we had a great deal of work to do. We could see the Germans hopping over the distant ridge like rabbits, and we had some difficulty in preventing our men from chasing them, for we had orders not to go too far.
“We got them—Irish Fusiliers, Inniskillings, and Dublins—to dig in by linking up the shell craters, and though the men were tired (some wanted to smoke and others to make tea), they worked with a will, and before long we had got a pretty decent trench outlined.