On the night of
3/4 July a small patrol from the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment (7th Division)
entered Mamertz Wood and reconnoitred the southern areas.
North of the road
from Mametz village to Montauban, the ground falls away, gently at first and
then more steeply, until it reaches Willow Stream. The final descent is down a steep chalk bank,
or 'cliff, varying from about thirty to fifty feet in height.
From Willow Stream
the ground rises for more than a mile northward to the ridge which runs
from Pozieres, through the Bazentins, to Longueval on which lay the deeply fortified trenches of
the German second line. Mametz Wood 'a menacing wall of gloom',9 lay on a slight spur on the
far side of the valley, flanked by two small re-entrants rising up towards the ridge. Because of
these undulations an attack on the wood, whether from the south, the east or the west, would
involve the movement of troops down the slope of a valley and then up rising ground on the far
side, exposed all the while to rifle and machine gun fire from the wood and the nearby copses.
The wood itself
was very large and overgrown. From north to south it measured about a mile
long, the northern face being about 300 yards from the German second line (from which it could
quickly be reinforced), the southern extremity dipping down almost to Willow Stream. East to
west, it measured about three quarters of a mile at its widest point, although a large open space at
the southwest corner considerably reduced the width of the southernmost portion. The total area
of woodland was about 220 acres.'°
The patrol reported
that the wood was dense with undergrowth which would make it difficult for
infantry to move. It found Strip Trench (see Map 8) strongly wired and well traversed.11 The
wood was a mixture of oak about nine feet in girth, with some beech and ash. The average height
was estimated to be between thirty and forty five feet.12 The wood, which had been untended
for at least two years, was traversed by a central ride running from north to south, and two cross
rides more or less at right angles to the first. These were clearly marked on the operational maps
used by the XV Corps but they were suffering from neglect and were less easily discernable on
the ground.
To the west of
Mametz Wood the keystone of the German defences was a well-constructed
trench known as the Kaisergraben which ran south of Contalmaison towards the western face of
Mametz Wood. Behind it lay a network of subsidiary trenches protecting the whole of the
southwestern flank of the wood (see Map 7). Some of these were connected to the wood and, so
long as this remained in German hands, the trenches could be readily reinforced or evacuated as
the situation demanded. The Kaisergraben itself had been constructed well before the opening of
the Battle of the Somme and was provided with good dug-outs cut twenty feet down into the
chalk.13 Not surprisingly, it proved difficult to capture but on the night of 4/5 July the 17th
Division, in cooperation with the 7th Division whichattacked Wood 'French, captured the portion
of it between Pearl Alley and Wood Trench, and renamed it Quadrangle Trench. Wood Trench
itself - the site of Siegfried Sassoon's 'reckless brandishes' - remained in German hands.
There was no similar defensive network to the east of Mametz Wood; nor was one necessary.
At
this point, the German second line sloped down the face of the ridge and from this position, and
from Sabot and Flatiron copses, German machine guns could easily command the eastern
approaches to the wood..
