Cocks letter diary, 1916-1919 / Verner Cocks - Page 569

[Page 569]

bearers.   This road was lined with our 18 pounders and Fritz often made it very lively.   We used to wheel patients down this road past the guns and often got a move on when they were firing and in return drawing the crabs.   The "Five Trees" was also often a hot spot - under direct observation.   It was a cross roads right up against the sky line and on the sign of any kind of life there Fritz used to strafe it.   We used to live in some dugouts there in a trench.   Just before the 8th August stunt we started to build an underground dressing station but it was never finished.   During that stunt it was a main collecting point for wounded where they picked up the cars leaving this we wandered over to Vaire Wood where the R.A.P. was.   The old dugouts still remain with many others sheltering under a bank like a lot of rabbit warrens.

I walked up into Vaire Wood.   It is terribly desolate - all the trees are dead and shattered but ground vines are covering the grim relics of the great battle there.

"Huns walk" the main communication trench still leads through the wood but is gradually falling in and filling up.   All was lovely and quiet the wind rushed through the trees and two birds broke into flight screeching frightedly as I disturbed them.   It felt frightfully weird.   I felt that I was intruding into the sepulchre of the dead and their buried glories and I hurried out of the place down to the village of Hamel.   Here the feeling of deathliness prevailed again.   The village is the most desolate I have seen only the wooden frameworks of the houses broken and jutting in all directions show to any extent above the ruins bleached white with rain and weather like a huge skeleton of the dead city as also are those of several dead horses lying along the road side.   What a wonderful story this dead old village could tell - the objective of an Australian & American attack on 4th July 1918.   It is awe inspiring in its kind of sacred desolation.   Sacred to the memory of those who fell amongst the ruins.   And some family had even come back to this.   Not a house had been left on its foundations & the family had built a humpy out of the debris amongst the ruins.   It looked like an early pioneers settlement amongst a forest of dead stumps.

We found what was once the church with some difficulty  and photographed it.   It was a heap of stones with an irregularly shaped piece of wall jutting into the air as if to form a monument to that at its feet.

The sight of the whole place with its wonderful  and  awful memories was saddening in the extreme. I felt as if I were being hunted by the ghosts of the dead for disturbing their rest. And this was Hamel and all that it meant. I shuddered  and left.   Passing on to the old Hamel R.A.P. now a hole in the bank we passed several "Dressing Station" signs along the old track. I remember actually putting these signs in the ground with a Yank one afternoon.   We passed along the old stretcher bearing track to "Dud Hill" famous for the remarkable amount of Hun  dud archie shells which dropped round about.   But what a change now.   Our old dugout in the bank still remained but the flat in front had been cleaned up, trenches filled in  and the plough was at work for ever obliterating the signs of the great war here. It seemed sacrilege. What did these old farmers care for or know of those who had fallen here or the wonderful traditions  and unwritten glory of these parts. The land was ours we fought for it lived on it suffered on it  and some died on it  and were buried there  and the last relic of their fame was gradually being removed from the face of the earth.

The tide of retreated civilization is gradually creeping back over these parts and covering the signs of a recent gigantic horror with life.

That this dead zone should be springing into life seemed unearthly to me.   But who else than those actually there knows anything of what went on there.   No one else will ever know for they were sensations experienced the scenes enacted on that stage.   We dinnered at Hayes Post and plodded across the muddy roads to Villers-Bret.   I loved this old place once where we used to get wines and champagne galore merely for the excitement of running the gauntlet of shells.   And now civvies have intruded and presume to sell you a glass of vin blanc for half a franc.

All the old memories come back to one vividly.   One is thrilled with the old time sensation again and expects to hear a shell any second.

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