Headstones in the Anglo-French cemetery behind the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. The white headstones in the foreground are for the British soldiers, the crosses in the background the French. © 2013 John M. Shea
A Soldier of the Great War
"I went to see them on the morning of the attack, and I remember chiefly the voice of G. Salter, as he emerged from a rough shelter, stretching his stiff arms and trying to move his eyebrows like a man awake, cursing the frost; I remember the familiar song of my old companion Doogan, now for the last time. 'Everybody's doing the Charlie Chaplin walk.' He broke off, and without self-pity and almost casually he said, 'It's the third time, they've sent me over. This is the third time. They'll get me this time.' Nor would it have availed to use in reply one's familiar trench tags, or to speak out the admiring friendship which never fully found words; Doogan seemed to know, and he was tired."
Edmund Blunden, English writer, recipient of the Military Cross, second lieutenant and adjutant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, writing of the attack on Stuff Trench on October 21 and 22, 1916. The engagement between Thiepval and Pozières in the Battle of the Somme devastated Blunden's batallion. Of the location, Blunden wrote, 'Thiepval was vaguely gestured at on our left. Pozières had once been a village on our right.' On the 20th a German reconnaissance plane had flown 'thirty yards' over Blunden and his men while they prepared supplies for the attack. The 1915 song 'That Charlie Chaplin Walk' was written and composed by Wm. A. Downs.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, page 122, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
1916-10-21, Stuff Trench, October, 1916, Somme, Battle of the Somme
