The and Portsmouths at Flers, 1916.
THE YPRES TIMES
75
WE, as a people, are not given to celebrating, or even, as a general rule, to
remembering anniversaries of great events in our annals. Battles have
been fought and won by men of our race, that have altered the whole course
of history, but for the most part their anniversaries come and go unheeded by the
general public. But there is a special reason why we people of Portsmouth should
remember this day, September 15th, for this is Flers Day, the day on which men of
our city, by dint of sheer courage and bitter fighting, achieved the well-nigh impos
sible and carried the British line forward past the ugly skeleton of Delville Wood
till it gripped, and gripped tight, the battered ruins of Flers.
Many battalions of troopsEnglish, Scottish and Irish, Australians and New
Zealanders, and away to the right a score of French regimentsmoved out to the
Imperial War Museum] [Crown copyright
FRICOURT, 1917 TROOPS MOVING UP TO FORWARD AREA.
attack on this ever-memorable morning twelve years ago, but we, whilst paying
all honour and grateful remembrance to them all, are interested primarily in the
fate of one battalion. This battalion was drawn almost entirely from men of our
city and the surrounding country districts, and its survivors are living in our midst
to-day, going about their ordinary daily tasks as we are.
The 2nd Portsmouth Battalion (15th (Service) Battalion Hampshire
Regiment) had seen other fighting before they entered into the great Somme
battle. Proceeding to France, as part of the 41st Division, on May Day, 1916,
they went, almost immediately, into the trenches before Ploegsteert Wood and
suffered their first casualties in the German attack of May 13th, when the enemy,
after penetrating the British line in one or two places, was driven back, before
dawn, with heavy losses. Throughout the months of May and June the battalion
remained in Ploegsteert Wood. And when, in the course of a few weeks, they
moved a little farther north on to Hill 63, there were many who thought with regret
of the old trenches where they had fired their first round at the enemy. Early in
August the Portsmouth men moved again, and this time it was a longer trek, a
journey south to the rolling hills of Picardy, whither the great blood-bath of the
Somme was drawing almost every division, sooner or later.
Early in September the battalion reached Albert, whose ruined tower, with
