Walking the Somme: The Devonshire Cemetery

Mametz, or Mamet to the locals, they pronounce it both ways there, and having asked many locals over the years which is the correct way, they shrug their shoulders in that classic French way and just say both. But certainly to the troops who were there in 1915 and 1916, as the British began to take over this sector of the Somme battlefields, it was always Mamets.

And the veterans that I interviewed back in the 80s and 90s who fought in this area, that's how they always referred to it, and that's how we'll refer to it in this podcast. So on the high ground above Mametz, we're looking down onto a battlefield heavily fought over on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916. And it's a story really of one battalion that we're going to look at in this podcast, the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment.

Before we get to that point, a little bit of background to Mametz itself. It saw fighting in 1914 when French troops clashed with the Germans here, and then both sides established their positions. The French occupied a rather strange line really that wove up onto the high ground here looking down onto Mametz.

In this area dominated by some small pockets of woodland the high ground didn't seem to really afford the French much of an advantage and the front lines were pretty close here and a lot of tunnelling warfare, mining operations took place first with the French and then with the British when we took over this sector. The village of Mametz itself was behind the German lines.

They were on some of the slopes above the village and also wound around the village, going across towards the next location in their defences, which was the village of Montaba.

The Germans built up their defences in and around Mametz in that period from the establishment of the front lines here in the autumn of 1914 in the lead up to the 1916 Battle of the Somme and the sloping ground around the village gave the defenders, the Germans, an advantage here because there were good fields of fire for any machine guns they might place at different points around the battlefield.

So Mametz was not necessarily a formidable part of the German defences but it would not be easy to overcome. And when the Battle of the Somme was planned, and the great advance, the big push, was to take place here, it was one of many villages in this area that was scheduled to be taken in the early phase of the attack. And one of the battalions that would be involved in that attack was the 9th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment.

The 9th Devons were raised at Exeter on 15th September 1914 as part of the 2nd New Army, the 2nd Hundred Thousand.

So these were the men who had responded to Lord Kitchener's call originally in August of 1914 and the response being so great that the New Army expanded and the men of what quickly became known as Kitchener's Army flooded in such great numbers to recruiting offices that right across Britain and Devon was no different, battalion after battalion and the 8th and the 9th Devons became twin battalions really that would serve alongside each other for most of the war Initially, they were posted to the

20th Light Division, which was unusual because the Devonshire Regiment was not a light infantry regiment. They were kind of out of place in that unit. But they did their training with them at Aldershot. There was a great lack of equipment within the battalion at that time, which was really characteristic of much of Kitchener's Army in those early months from the autumn of 1914 into early 1915.

There was a lack of uniforms, so they wore a blue serge tunic kitcheners blues many of them felt that it looked like a prison outfit prison uniform and they really hated wearing it but despite its blue surge color they were able to make it look like a proper military uniform by the addition of brass shoulder titles and cap badges to the little forage cab they wore as part of that uniform eventually car key arrived gradually bits of leather equipment the 1914 pattern leather equipment that a lot

of men in the new army wore the The odd bits of webbing equipment arrived as well and gradually the battalion went from a bunch of civilians who had stepped into uniform not really looking much like soldiers in the early months to becoming more and more of a proficient military organised unit. And that training then took them from Aldershot to Whitley. All around Whitley there were vast camps during the First World War and then finally on to Salisbury Plain.

And then by the summer of 1915, nearly a year after they'd first been raised, they were ready for active service. And they were sent down to Southampton to take a common route to the Western Front at that time, which was on a troop ship across from Southampton to Le Havre. And they arrived at Le Havre on the 28th of July 1950 Dean. assembled just outside Le Havre, went to the base depot at Rouen and then made their way up towards the battlefield.

They were now no longer part of the 20th Light Division. I think that as that division expanded and more and more light infantry battalions of different regiments had been formed as part of Kitchener's army, there was no need to have two Devonshire battalions in the division.

So when they arrived in France, they found themselves posted to a regular army division, the 7th Division, that had been on the Western Front since October of 19 It had taken part in battles like the First Battle of Ypres and the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in early 1915, and in that summer of that year it was now amassing to take part in another offensive, what was scheduled to be the biggest British offensive to date, and that was the Battle of Loos.

Both the 8th and the 9th Battalions of the Devonshire Regiment fought together with the 7th Division in the Battle of Loos in September 1915, suffered casualties there, had men killed in the battle, in action, many wounded and a large number of decorations for bravery.

They captured some field guns as part of their operation in Loos which were then taken back to England to put on display and I've got a photograph of showing some of the men from the Devons with these field guns which I'll put onto the podcast website. I picked this up in a junk shop in Kent many, many years ago.

It's a big photograph, probably been in a frame at some point and it proudly shows the survivors of these battalions who'd been sent home wounded from the Battle of Loos having now recovered with the guns that their battalions had taken off the field of battle. After Luz the battalions found themselves being part of the British units being sent down to take over the quiet then quiet sector around the Somme in that nearly a year lead up to the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

They occupied this high ground where we're standing now above the village of Mametz and serving close to the 9th Devons was the 1st Battalion the Royal Welsh Fusiliers serving in which at that time was Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon both of who Thank you for watching.

But the 9th Devons had a very similar experience holding the line here in those long months before the Somme, in and out of the trenches, working on the trenches, building up the infrastructure of the line here, digging new communication trenches, working on duct boards and supports, not really doing much fighting, really, just doing labouring tasks, which was a big part of the day-to-day activities of British soldiers right across the Western Front.

So that quiet period in the lead-up to the Somme gave the officers and men of the 9th Devons time to reflect. Originally a Devonshire battalion recruited with Devonians The replacements after Luz came from a wide spread of backgrounds, so the Devon character was diluted a little bit in that period between the end of the Battle of Luz and the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, but still the majority of the men serving in the ranks of the battalion were born or certainly came from Devon.

So having established where we are, and established the units, the story that we're looking at, the men of the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment. What I want to do next, and it's quite hard to really comprehend an entire battalion, but let's look at it through the eyes of three men, three characters within that battalion.

All of them officers, and being officers they're left behind a bit of a legacy that we can research and pick up the trail of their lives and understand the events of the Somme a little bit more through them. Two of them very well known, one not so well known, but all three of them have fascinated me over many, many years of visiting the Somme. So let's have a look at those characters now. within the Ninth Devons.

The three characters that we're going to look at as part of this story are William Noel Hodgson, Duncan Lennox Martin and Harold Leslie Rayner. William Hodgson and Duncan Martin are perhaps better known. William Noel Hodgson Born at Thornbury Vicarage in Gloucestershire in 1893, he was born into one of the coldest winters of Victorian Britain. On the very day that he was born, on the 3rd of January 1893, it was said that over 30,000 people skated on a frozen River Thames.

His father, the vicarage is probably a clue to this, was... an Oxford-educated vicar, parish priest, and in 1897 they moved to Berwick-on-Tweed, and then in 1904 his father was appointed the Archdeacon of Lindisfarne on the Northumberland coast.

During this period the young William Noel Hodgson spent a lot of his time in the Lake District, an area that he loved greatly and featured in quite a lot of his writings and he began to write poetry as a young man, something he would continue to do for the rest of his life.

He was part of that middle class, upper middle class British society that loved the countryside, that had this great connection to the countryside and wrote about it both before the war, during the war and those that survived afterwards. There's a great list link between how the men saw the landscapes of the Western Front and how they connected those to the landscapes they'd known back home in Britain. He was educated at Durham School and then at Oxford.

He was in many respects a classic figure of that generation. a love of the countryside, a love of poetry, a desire to write poetry, an interest in the classics, and a great sportsman. So young men of his generation were almost classical figures in their own right, and it's no surprise that when war came in August 1914, he was amongst the very first to step forward and volunteer. With a public school and university background, he would have attended the OTC, the Officer Training Corps.

So after being commissioned as a second lieutenant, He was posted as one of the earliest officers to the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment.

He served overseas with them in those early months, then at the Battle of Loos where he was a bombing officer, he was the battalion bombing officer, so he was in charge of the men whose specialist task was to use the early hand grenades that they had at that time to bomb their way up the enemy trenches, bomb their way into them, work their way through them, take out dugouts and defensive positions.

It was quite a risky job and the casualty rate amongst bombers was high often from their own bombs these early bombs that they used in 1915 during the Battle of Loos were not the most reliable but at that stage it was the tipping point between the older style of grenades many of them improvised jam tin bombs which were literally tins of plum and apple jam where the jam had been consumed and instead they'd put a explosive often a gun cotton type explosive in there with a wick fuse you lit it and

then you threw it this was that tipping point between those type of bombs and the introduction of the No. 5 grenade, which was what we called the Mills hand grenade, that was used very successfully by bombers and by British soldiers generally for much of the rest of the war.

As a bombing officer in those trenches in the Battle of Loos, he led his men into the attack and for his bravery there, he was subsequently awarded the Military Cross, one of the first MCs to officers of the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment. The poetry that he'd written as a young man before the war continued apace when he became an officer of the British Army.

In those early months of the conflict before he arrived on the Western Front his style was very similar to many poets of that period seeing war as a glorious adventure. But after the Battle of Loos you begin to see a change in the type of poetry that he wrote a lot more reflective and it would result in the poem that would eventually make him famous.

Without spoiling the story Hodgson would not survive the first day of the Battle of the Somme and his work appeared posthumously following his death. And what was probably most remarkable about what he wrote was that poem that was almost a pessimistic prediction of his death on the battlefield. And that poem was Before Action written on the Somme on the 29th of June 1916. So Before Action by William Noel Hodgson.

By all the glories of the day and the cool evening's benison, By that last sunset touch that lay upon the hills when day was done, By beauty lavishly outpoured and blessings carelessly received, By all the days that I have lived, make me a soldier, Lord. By all of man's hopes and fears and all the wonders poets sing, The laughter of unclouded years and every sad and lovely thing, by the romantic ages stored with high endeavour that was his, by all his mad catastrophes, make me a man, O Lord.

I, on my familiar hill, saw with uncomprehending eyes a hundred of thy sunset spill, their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, ere the sun swings his noonday sword, must say good-bye to all of this, by all delights that I shall miss. Help me to die, O Lord. And a few days later, he was killed in action. And that last part of the poem where he describes almost where we're standing now, overlooking Mamet's, watching the sunsets, waiting for the inevitable road that seemed to lead ahead.

There are some great books on William Noel Hodgson. Charlotte Zipvat's most recent book on him really is fantastic. And I'll put some links to these on the podcast website. So that's the first of our characters. The second is Duncan Lennox Martin. Born in Algiers in May 1886, Duncan Lennox Martin is a bit of a mystery, and I'm really grateful to Andrew Thornton in Thirsk for his help with some of the research on Martin that's come to light in recent times.

His father was an ostrich farmer in the Cape Colony in South Africa, but in the early parts of the 20th century, they appear to have had a house in Halsham in Sussex. Later, his parents separated and Duncan Martin was educated at a small school in Somerset. By then, his mother was living in Croba in Sussex. Duncan Lennox Martin then seems to disappear from the record. Very, very little is known about him during this time, from school until the army.

There's no trace of him going to any university, no other education. no civil service and no pre-war military service. It's believed that at some point during that period in the Edwardian years he lived and worked as an artist in St Ives in Cornwall. But one man in his battalion in one of the records that survives for him in his service record describes him as a secret service man. So there's the mystery. Was Duncan Lennox Martin a pre-war spy?

It was believed or perhaps assumed by some of those who served with him that he was widely travelled. And it was known that he spoke French and German fluently. So what he did in those years before the Great War, perhaps we'll never know. But it all adds something to the man himself. A man much admired within the 9th Devonshire Regiment. Like Hodgson, he joins the army right at the beginning of the war. He'd been posted to the 9th Battalion Devonshire Regiment as one of their original officers.

He was mentioned in dispatches twice following the Battle of Loos in 1915. But the thing that really has made Martin famous was not his pre-war exploits, not what he did at the Battle of Loos, but the plasticine model that he made of the Mamet's battlefield. So how do we know about this model? It's mentioned in Martin Middlebrook's First Day of the Somme.

He doesn't actually put a source for this story but some years ago I was looking through the correspondence files of the official military historian for the volumes of the official history that were published in the 1920s and 30s. These are available in the National Archives in London and they're fascinating to read. They're letters that were sent to the official historian commenting on draft chapters of different parts of the official history.

The purpose of these letters was to comment on aspects of the fighting so when a draft chapter for example the attack on the Mets had been written men who were actually there who'd commanded battalions or brigades or perhaps had been company commanders at the time and then later promoted they were asked for their opinion so they contain military details they contain comments on the way the history had been written but less information about individuals but remarkably one particular letter in

those files just just casually mentions, I'm not sure if you're interested, but here's a story you might like and he then describes the story of Martin's model and he made this possibly on leave when he went home and being perhaps that he actually was this artist that worked in St Ives in Cornwall he used his artistic skills to create this 3D model of the battlefield and brought it back with him for the men of his battalion and the other battalions within their brigade and possibly the other

battalions and brigades within the divisions but they could use this model to assess the German defences in a way that they couldn't easily do just from maps or from air photos and it is said that on the model he had predicted that if the machine guns were not knocked out at given places then he and his men would move out into the battlefield and be killed at this point or that point now I don't think we'll ever know whether that aspect of the story is entirely true but certainly obviously this

was one of the purposes of the model was to essentially war game the attack before it took place to try and work out some potential problems and ways they could get round that. The model was said to have survived and there was a record of it in the Royal United Services Institute catalogue and within Martin's service record in the National Archives there is a letter from one of his relatives saying that he was seeking this model out.

And my old pal John Dray, who I often mention in these podcasts a veteran of the Second World War who'd fought at Monte Cassino, a man absolutely fascinated, passionate about the Great War because of his father who'd fought in it and been wounded three times. He, in the 50s, so in the years after World War II, after his war, began to visit the Great War battlefields. And when he read about the story of Martin's model in Middlebrook's book, he then began a journey to try and trace where this was.

Did it survive? But his attempts in the late 70s to try and track it down unfortunately failed from what he could make out the model had survived for many many years but it deteriorated and had been thrown away if it's languishing in a listener's loft when you hear this podcast I'd love to hear about it So we have a poet who almost predicted his own death in his poetry in the lead up to the Somme.

We have a company commander, Duncan Martin, making a model of the battlefield and almost predicting where he's going to die. There's quite a lot of pessimism in the 9th Battalion, the Devons, I think because they were different to many men who fought on the Somme in the early phase of the battle and they'd fought in a major battle before, the Battle of Loos. So when they were told this was going to be a walkover, a cakewalk, perhaps they were a little bit less convinced given their experience.

But our third character, the third one we're going to look at as part of this story, is Harold Leslie Rayner. Now Harold Leslie Rayner is not as well known as Hodgson and Martin, and I came across him because I spent a lot of time in the 80s and 90s going across parts of the county in which I was born, the county of Sussex, visiting places and looking at war memorials and finding war graves tucked away in churchyards in the days before you could easily look them up.

as to where they were and also finding a lot of memorial inscriptions on family headstones. And one place I went to with my old friend Andrew Whittington that I was at school with was Wadshurst in Sussex.

And this little East Sussex village suffered tremendous casualties on the first day of the Battle of Albers Ridge on 9th May 1915 when men from the local battalion, the 5th Royal Sussex, were almost wiped out in the attack there and 20-odd men from the village died in a single day, which for a tiny place like that was absolutely catastrophic.

But walking around the churchyard there I just happened to notice a bit of an inscription tucked under some undergrowth and pulled the weeds back and there was a family grave that mentioned Harold Leslie Rayner an officer of the 9th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

So that piqued my interest a bit and then I realised that he was part of the story and he was buried with some of the more famous members of the battalion in the Devonshire Cemetery which is something we'll look at as part of this podcast So who was Harold Leslie Rayner? Well, he was born originally in Hampstead in London in 1890. His father was the manager of a furniture store, Maple and Company, in Tottenham Court Road in London.

And there's an interesting and somewhat odd connection between his father's furniture store and Duncan Lennox Martin. Because again, when we look at the papers of Martin, we discover that he had shares in Maple and Company. And also, his mother lived not far from Wadhurst. So what was the connection between Rainer and Martin? Was there a connection?

Was it pure coincidence that in all of the furniture companies a man could have shares with, it happened to be one that a father of an officer he would serve with had once managed? It really is one of those things that makes you scratch your chin and wonder a bit, and I'm sure we will never really get to the bottom of some of this. Harold Leslie Rayner was educated at Tunbridge School, and then in 1908 he went to Corpus Christi College at Oxford.

The family was now living in Wadhurst by then, and his father died in 1911, leaving an incredible £82,000, which by modern standards was an enormous amount of money, and Harold seems to have inherited the bulk of it. What he did then was to go off and travel the world. Did he come across Martin during his travels, wherever Martin was? Again, I suspect we'll never know. But he returned to Britain in late 1914 following the outbreak of war.

He came home to do his bit and he applied for a commission in December of 1914 and requested either the Royal Sussex Regiment, his local regiment, or the Devonshire Regiment. And again, why he would do that, who knows? He didn't have any obvious connections to Devon. So perhaps he did know Martin somehow, because by then Martin was already in the 9th Devons.

Whatever, he joined the 9th Devons in the lead-up to Christmas of 1914, and again, just like Hodgson and Martin, fought with them in the Battle of Loos. And also alongside his old university friend, John Upcott, who features very heavily in the story of Hodgson and is very much a key character in Charlotte Zipvat's book on William Noel Hodgson, which, as I mentioned, we'll put a link to on the podcast website. So we have these three characters.

We have the poet, we have the mystery man and the model maker, Martin, and we have the young Edwardian gentleman inherited a fortune from his father, a furniture store manager, who, having travelled the world, came home to do his bit. And by the time of the Battle of the Somme, William Noel Hodgson was still the bombing officer, Martin and Rainer were now company commanders, and there they were, about to do their bit again. on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

So what we'll look at next is the attack on the 1st July 1916. So if we go back to where we were at the very beginning of this episode, we're standing on a junction of tracks above the village of Mametz. Over to our right, below us in the distance, is the village of Carnoy, Connoir as the French call it, and this was just behind the British front line. Ahead of us are some trees, the tops of the trees of Mansell Copse which was just behind the British front line.

Beyond that we can see in the distance the buildings and the houses of the village of Mametz. To our left is a wooded area, an area of intensive mining activity close to what was called the Bois Francais, the French wood.

And then behind us to our left we're going back towards Bracer Somme and the approach to the battlefield leading up towards this area between the village of Fricor and Mametz where it's a The Battle of the Somme Between where we're standing on this junction of tracks and Mansell Copse was a network of trenches, the front line, the support line, the reserve line and on the first day of the Battle of the Somme the 9th Battalion and the Devonshire Regiment were spread out in between those different

trenches with the battalion headquarters just across to our left. The 9th Battalion Devonshire Regiment had two companies up and two companies back effectively. So two companies were going to be part of the assaulting wave and two companies were going to follow up shortly afterwards. They were all going to advance from behind their own front line.

The possible reason for that I would guess is that the trenches here were on a slope and it was easier to get the men up above ground, assemble them here in the open and then make their advance down towards Mametz.

The very front line directly the other side of Mansell Copse was probably not a big enough area to assemble the attacking troops and possibly too close to the potential eyes of the enemy maybe this was something they'd learned from the Battle of Loos but that was how the advance would take place here from behind their own front lines not this classic idea of whistles blowing men scrambling up ladders climbing up over the sandbags and straight into no man's land they were going to advance across

their own trench system to get to the very front line and begin their advance across no man's land from there and I would guess that they'd built bridges across some of the trenches to facilitate the movement of that advance more smoothly otherwise the men would be in and out of holes in the ground. Ahead of them once they got to the area of no man's land it was a roughly sort of L shaped battlefield with Mansell Copp sitting on the corner of that L and the front line pivoting around it.

To the left there was a valley and one side of that valley was the British front line, close to Mansell Copse, and the other side was an embankment, above which was a German trench, Danube Trench, on the British trench maps, defended by the men of the 109th Reserve Infantry Regiment. To the right of Mansell Copse, leading up to the village of Mametz itself, was a much wider open stretch, just beyond what was the Albert to Perron road.

It was in many ways a bit of a complex battlefield, and I would also guess that Duncan Lennox Martin's plasticine model helped them really visualise this battlefield.

They would have seen it through trench periscopes and from the higher positions close to where we're standing now when they were in the reserve lines but could it be that the complexity of the battlefield and the arrangement and where they knew some of the machine gun positions to be was this all part of the pessimism that was building up in this battalion amongst certainly its officers not just because of the Battle of Luz but this big task, this greater task task that now lay before them but

there was a general feeling that somehow despite all this it would be okay on der Tag on the day and that's what the men prepared for in the lead up to zero hour very close to where we are now again in one of the trenches here Hodgson and Martin are known to have stood side by side and watched the British bombardment of the German positions around Mametz perhaps Rayner was very close by too again we'll probably never know But at zero hour, 7.30am on the 1st of July 1916, what Siegfried Sassoon,

who was watching the attack close to where we are now, described as a sunlit picture of hell, the men began their advance. As soon as the whistles blew, as soon as the men mounted the scaling ladders up out into the open ground on the slopes that stretched down before us, leading to Mansell Copse, the machine guns of the 109th Reserve Infantry Regiment open up. and all hell lets loose. One account said, So was Martin killed by the machine guns as he predicted, or was it from rifle fire?

Again, we'll probably never really have a definitive answer to that question, but he was amongst the very first of the battalion to be killed that day. His body was found in a dead bit of ground, very close to where the modern steps are that take you up into the Devonshire Cemetery. Coming up behind was William Noel Hodgson and his men from the bombing section.

The bomber's task was to go forward, cross no man's land and then bomb their way into the German positions to effect an entry for the whole battalion and then fight their way up through that trench system and into the ground close to Mamet's village. The bombers of course were laden down with the gear that they needed. They carried their usual supply of bombs, probably some buckets of bombs that would be required to carry out their work once in the German trenches.

So their movement was pretty slow compared to perhaps some of the infantry rifle sections. and they walked into this wall of machine gun fire, and William Noel Hodgson at the head of his men was amongst the first to fall. So now, in probably only 15 minutes after zero hour, in less than a quarter of an hour, two of our three characters have been killed in action.

The third, Harold Rayner, was now leading a company in the advance, and he blew his whistle, took his men over the top, and by... 7.45, quarter of an hour into the battle he was leading a group of shattered survivors across no man's land.

With the casualties inflicted upon them from rifle and machine gun fire, the two companies that advanced had broken down pretty quickly and got mingled up and he led the survivors up to a position just in front of Danube Trench and it was here that they effected an entry into a sap in front of that trench so a trench coming forward from it to allow the Germans to have some degree of observation over Mansell Cops or the positions around it but it was now being used as a way into the German

defensive positions and in getting in there moving into the German lines they were hit by rifle and machine gun fire again and Rainer was killed instantly so the third of our characters was now gone The leading waves of the 9th Devons were now in a bit of a bad state up against the embankment close to Danube Trench but gradually other surviving officers rallied the men, follow-up waves came forward and they got into the German trenches and through the course of the day fought their way up from

here to their final objective close to Mamet's village. Their sister battalion, the 8th, was also in the advance and the other units around them as part of their division were gradually making progress as well. So eventually the position around Mametz collapses and the village is taken on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. By nightfall on the 1st of July, most battalions had reached their objective.

They'd suffered casualties along the way, some like the Devons more than others, but the positions were taken. This was part of the successful story of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Ground here had actually been taken at some cost, but the objectives were now in British hands. For the 9th Devons, at the time their casualties were noted as 8 officers and 141 men killed in action, 9 officers and 267 men wounded and 63 missing.

We now know from the records and using the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database that 165 officers and men were killed, 112 of these are buried in the Devonshire Cemetery and 43 are commemorated with no known grave on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. Now with the dead and the wounded lying across the battlefield in front of Mehmet's, it was time for the Devons to bury their dead.

We've walked down now from that junction of tracks on the high ground following the track downwards towards Mansell Copse. And in doing so, we note how the terrain here changes around us and the view towards Mamet's village changes as well. As we come up to the wooded area, we're now very close to the spot where Duncan Lennox Martin's body was found. And to our left are the steps that take us up into the Devonshire Cemetery.

And in following those steps, we're following a trench line into what is essentially a trench burial site. The Devonshire Cemetery that we've just come into probably owes its existence to an army chaplain, the Reverend Ernest Cross DSOMC. He was the chaplain to the 8th and the 9th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment and on the 3rd July 1916, three days after the attack, he went out onto the battlefield to begin the process to collect and bury the dead from the advance.

And he began this with a working party of 50 men. Volunteers had stepped forward to go out with the chaplain, recover the dead and bury the bodies of their mates. But where to lay them to rest? Bury them in shell holes like the men of the Gordon Highlanders who had advanced on their flank were doing in what became the Gordon Cemetery, very close to the Devonshire Cemetery. But no, not in a shell hole, in a trench, a trench that these men had once held, Blood Alley Trench.

on the very edge of Mansell Copse overlooking the battlefield where they'd made their attack. It was quite a symbolic location in many ways and still is. The dead that could be recovered from both the 8th and the 9th Devons were brought here and later the graves of two gunners from the artillery were added to the burial site as well.

Martin, Hodgson and Rayner all have their resting place here and there are 163 burials of which 10 are unidentified Whoever they are, their names will be on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing. Today, the cemetery is long lines of headstones. At the far end, the headstones have multiple names on. At the time, it was a series of wooden crosses, a dozen wooden crosses, which would have had boards on with multiple names commemorating the men buried in that row.

And I would guess that they collected the dead on stretchers, brought them up in small groups, buried them side by side in a section of the trench, gradually filled that in, and that's how the cemetery then developed. It was officially marked by the graves registration units, and it was a cemetery that survived the war.

This ground was overrun by the Germans in March of 1918, but the cemetery seems to have suffered no damage in that period of the war or when the fighting swept through here again in August of 1918 of the same year.

When you enter the cemetery today, having come up the steps following the line of Blood Alley, there's a gate ahead of you, but to your left is a modern memorial from the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in 1986 that recounts the story of what was said to have stood above these graves during the war. And that was a cross that bore the legend, the Devonsheers held this trench, the Devonsheers hold it still.

And that simple but very powerful statement sums up really what this cemetery is all about, because as you push the gate open and go in, you see that same cap badge go off to the far end of the burial site, the same badge, the same repetitive statement, Devonshire Regiment, and the same date, 1st July 1916. This was truly a comrade cemetery.

Men who had fought together, who had served together, lived and ate food in the trenches together, had gone into battle together, and having sacrificed their all, they now lay here in an old trench, side by side, together on this corner of the battlefield forevermore.

It's a quiet corner of the Somnus, with the birds in the trees above you, with the register, the cemetery register in your hand, you can sit at the base of the Cross of Sacrifice and flick through the names of the men buried in here and see that About two-thirds of them were Devonians. Others, post-Lew's replacements, came from a variety of places. But comrades they were, and comrades they remain.

And perhaps here in one of the tiniest cemeteries of the Somme, rather than the great expanse of graves in places like Delville Wood or Sayre Road No. 2, the vast silent cities of the dead, perhaps here in this quiet glade, with a handful of friends around us, and those three characters, Martin, Hodgson and Rayner, perhaps here we can get a more powerful insight into the scale of loss, into what loss meant, and to what loss to a community meant following a battle like this.

My old pal John Dray, that I mentioned, who searched for Martin's plasticine model, was interested because he was born in the village of Lustley in Devon. Men from his village served in these battalions on the first day of the Somme. and when John bought a plot of land there in the 1960s he had it officially registered as Mehmet's in honour of the lads of these battalions who fell here on the first day of the Somme.

For John that was an important connection and we all have these connections that we take with us whether it's a bit of soil in a plastic container from a battlefield that fascinates us or we have a personal connection to whether it's through our photographs through what we see and what we remember, and through the stories of the men who served in places like this.

A poet like William Noel Hodgson, a young man who'd lived and loved the countryside, watching the red glow of a som dawn as the sun rose above the trenches, foreseeing, perhaps, his own death, a death immortalised not just here in stone, but in the simple words of a poem written on the eve of battle. Or a man like Martin, Duncan Lennox Martin, a great adventurer, perhaps, who had chanced his luck once too often, and here in the opening moments of the Battle of the Somme, his luck ran out.

And Harold Rayner, the inheritor of a family fortune, a man who'd gone off and explored the world, seen the world, and came back to serve the country he loved, only to die here too on the slopes before Mametz.

And as we leave here and go back down the steps, walk down the road past the crumbling quarry on the edge of Mansell Copse and see the faint traces of trenches amongst the trees we come out in the valley to our left where Danube Trench was where Rainer led his men in through the sap and where he was killed and ahead of us is the route into Mametz village we take that and walk up those slopes to the edge of Mametz where the shrine is located a small cemetery a civil cemetery where one of many

German machine guns was located and here we can sit on the banks and look back to Mansell Copse and in our mind's eye we can see the figures of men emerge from those trenches on the high ground beyond. All those lives, all those men, not just Hodgson, Martin and Rayner. In that sunlit picture of hell, all those lives converged on this one place. their corner of the old front line. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid.

You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast.

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