A day before the British Army suffered its worst ever casualties, my thoughts always turn to the men of the South Down Battalions (the 11th, 12th and 13th Battalions, Royal Sussex Regiment) and their disastrous diversionary attack on the Boar's Head fortifications at Richebourg.
Edmund Blunden (pictured), an officer with the 11th Battalion, held back in reserve, sums up the debacle with a few well-chosen words:
"So the attack on the Boar's Head closed, and so closed the admirable youth or maturity of many a Sussex worthy.
"Even now, we apprehended that a fresh forlorn hope might be demanded of the Brigade. What the Brigade felt was summed up by some sentry who, asked by the general next morning what he thought of the attack, answered in the roundest fashion, "Like a butcher's shop." Our own trenches had been knocked silly, and all the area of the attack had been turned into an Aceldama. Every prominent point behind, Factory Trench, Chocolate Menier Corner and so on, was now unkindly ploughed up with heavy shells. Road and tracks, hitherto securely pastoral, were blocked and exposed. The communique that morning, when in the far and as yet strange-seeming South a holocaust was roaring, like our own experience extended for mile upon mile, referred to the Boar's Head massacre somehow thus; "East of Richebourg a strong raiding party penetrated the enemy's third line". Perhaps, too, it claimed prisoners; for we were told that three Germans had found their way "to the Divisional Cage"".
Edmund Blunden continues:
"Our affair had been a catspaw, a "holding attack" to keep German guns and troops away from the great gamble of the Somme. This purpose, previously concealed from us with success, was unachieved, for just as our main artillery pulled out and marched southward after the battle, so did the German; and only a battalion or two of reserve infantry was needed opposite us to secure a harmless little salient."
Today, 99 years after those catastrophic events, a day still recognised as "The Day that Sussex Died", I remember the men of the South Down battalions.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.
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