View of the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme 1914–1918 from Mouquet Farm, commemorating the 72,246 British and Empire missing of that sector. It is a monument both to the British Empire and French missing from the Battle of the Somme and other battles in Picardy. © 2013 John M. Shea
". . . the main blow was to be struck northward towards Grandcourt and Beaumont Hamel. Struck it was in the shabby clammy morning of November 13.That was a feat of arms vieing with any recorded. The enemy was surprised and beaten. From Thiepval Wood battalions of our own division sprang out, passed our old dead, mud craters and wire and took the tiny village of St. Pierre Divion with its enormous labyrinth, and almost 2,000 Germans in the galleries there. Beyond the curving Ancre, the Highlanders and the Royal Naval Division overran Beaucourt and Beaumont, strongholds of the finest . . ."
Excerpt from Edmund Blunden, English writer, recipient of the Military Cross, second lieutenant and adjutant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, writing of an attack on November 13, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Of one month earlier, October 13, Blunden had referred to his battalion's position as being 'at the edge of the Thiepval inferno.' The November 13 attack began in thick fog against the villages of Beaumont Hamel, Beaucourt, and St. Pierre Divion on the Ancre River. Hamel had seen the ruin of the Newfoundland Regiment on July 1, the first day of the Battle.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, pp. 136–137, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
1916-11-13, 1916, November, Somme, Battle of the Somme
