The Windmill site, near Mouquet Farm and Thiepval. After the village of Pozières fell in August, 1916, three Australian divisions sought to capture the Windmill site and Mouquet Farm. In seven weeks, the Australians lost suffered 23,000 casualties of whom almost 7,000 died. © 2013 John M. Shea
"Another day arrived, and the men in Stuff Trench had to eat their 'iron rations,' for we could not supply them. We had also lost touch with our battalion doctor, who was somewhere towards Thiepval, that slight protuberance on rising ground westward; the bearers of the wounded had to find another way out; yet we were in possession of Stuff Trench, and the Australians southward held its continuation, Regina."
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.' Of Stuff Trench itself, he wrote this: 'Stuff Trench—this was Stuff Trench; three feet deep, corpses under foot, corpses on the parapet.'
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, page 124, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
1916-10-22, 1916, October
