Open Writing

The Battle of Delville Wood was short and bloody. It occurred during a rainy, muddy summer in France: an appalling battle, trench warfare at its worst. Three thousand, one hundred and fifty-three South African soldiers entered the wood on Friday morning, fifteenth of July, 1916; only a hundred and forty-three men walked out six days later.

During a trip to France, I visited the site of the battle. The drive from Paris took me through thick spring mists. Once at Delville Wood, I walked along a grassy avenue between double rows of oak trees. Dew lapped over my shoes, thick, ice-cold and silver. The air was fresh and cool and the only sound was that of bird-song floating from the woods, green-touched-grey against the pale sky.

Built in the shape of a star as a miniature copy of Cape Town’s Castle, the Museum displayed the inevitable battle relics: a German ‘Piclehaube’ or tin helmet, unexploded shells, hand-guns, rifles: all the debris of a bitterly-fought battle. There were bronze murals, depicting the South Africans’ contributions to both the First and Second World Wars. The inner walls were glass, etched with the names of those who died in the Battle of Delville Wood; they looked out on a bright, white courtyard containing The Cross of Consecration.

Later, I stood at the edge of the wood. During the battle, the green and shady canopy of birch and oak trees was reduced to blackened stumps standing in craters. Trenches and shell-holes filled with mud, splinters and bloating corpses. Blood-rusted barbed wire lay tangled everywhere. The Germans, who occupied trenches on three sides of the wood, bombarded it with up to four hundred shells a minute. The wounded and dying writhed under the effects of mustard gas and shrapnel, lungs foaming, bodies burning and bleeding. The South African troops, who had been ordered to hold the wood ‘at all costs’, soon knew it as the Devil’s Wood.

Miraculously, one lone oak – its trunk pitted with bullet holes – withstood the onslaught. It still stands at the edge of the wood, a monument to Peace in Spite of Man.

Delville Wood's Last Tree

Alone in springtime
On shores of blue-flowered wood,
It stands.

Gazing towards once-decimated,
new-planted,
regimented ranks,

Where flying shells shrieked death -
In cool blue shade it stands.

Deep are the scars
Of this fragile survivor.

Alone it stands,
Misty as the morning -
A glimpse,
A promise -
Of peace.

In 1926, the South African Government purchased Delville Wood. It was replanted with oaks grown from the acorns of trees in Stellenbosch – which, in their turn, were grown from acorns taken to South Africa from France by the Huguenots, centuries earlier.

Where there were craters in 1916, trees now stand again, tall and slim, their branches starred with spring green in the silver light. The ground beneath them is a pool of blue crocuses.

Red deer inhabit the wood, together with unexploded shells and the sad spirits of thousands of young men who died ‘for King and Country’.

Across the road from the wood lie the graves of those whose bodies were found for burial. Hundreds of regimented white headstones grow from the chalky ground, surrounded by rose bushes, yellow and purple wild-flowers and spring-green grass. A few carry names, dates, companies and ranks; most are engraved, “A Soldier of the Great War, known only to God.”

Perhaps it’s odd to look back to that war, which did not ‘end all wars’; to a battle that was fought ninety-one years ago; to grieve again for those who died so needlessly.

The young men who died in the trenches of the Devil’s Wood surely look on in dismay at the wars which rage today, massacring their great-grandchildren. “Why?” they surely cry, “Why can you not learn from our mistakes? War is abomination!”

Until next time, ‘here comes Treble!’

By Isabel Bradley copyright reserved ©