Reed - COURCELETTE: SOMME

Puchevillers Cemetery in 1919, where many pre-Courcelette Canadians were buried.

Canadians fighting at close quarters in front of the sugar refinery at Courcelette.

The Somme continues to remain one of the most popular areas along the old Western Front for pilgrims to the battlefields. Come the summer almost every other car on the Albert-Bapaume road is British, tracing grandfathers and, increasingly, great grandfathers who served in the battle. Time and again such visitors see the same places - there is almost an accepted list of them. And one date obsesses them all - 1st July 1916. At times the casual visitor might be forgiven for thinking that the battle began and ended on that date. But the Somme slogged on until November 18th; beginning in the heavenly weather described by Siegfried Sassoon and ending in a snowstorm which blotted out the landscape.

Courcelette is one of those places on the Somme battlefields often overlooked by the summer visitors. Indeed, a member of the Western Front Association asked me during the research for this book, Did anything ever happen at Courcelette? He went quiet when I mentioned 24,000 Canadian casualties, three Victoria Crosses and over two months of fighting.

Courcelette was indeed primarily a Canadian battlefield, but today few Canadians have either heard of it or come this way. Vimy overshadows the sacrifice on the Somme, and there is nowhere near the interest in things Great War in North America as there is, for example, in Britain or Australia. One can only hope this changes.

The joy of the Battleground Europe series of guides is that they provide answers to the sort of questions my WFA friend posed. Here the Courcelette volume covers the fighting for the village from the first attack with tanks on 15th September to the murderous fighting for Regina Trench to the final push on Desire Trench at the end of the Somme Battle.

Today the fields around Courcelette are silent. Occasionally, staring across the chalk downlands on the Ancre heights, one might hear the faint whisper of echoes past on the wind; talk of Jimmy Richardson piping his men into action, of Lieutenant Howard alone and surrounded, fighting to the last, or of Canon Scott making the long search for his sons grave at Regina Trench. There are countless stories. Many have their memorial in stone - what they did has never before appeared in print. So here, at last, I would like to hope the memory of them and the other 8,000 Canadian soldiers who fell on the Somme is not forgotten.

Paul Reed, Sussex & The Somme. Autumn 1997