The Road to Pozières

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The Road to Pozières

The whole earth heaved

The Lochnagar Crater. [DVA]

Along the D20 in La Boisselle a sign points to the right to ‘La Grande Mine’. High on a hill outside the village is ‘La Grande Mine’, a great crater known to the British as the ‘Lochnagar Crater’, caused by the detonation of a British mine at 7.28 am on 1 July 1916, just before the opening assaults of the Battle of the Somme. Second Lieutenant C A Lewis, Royal Flying Corps, saw the explosion from the air:

The whole earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up into the air. There was an ear–splitting roar, drowning all the guns, flinging the machine sideways in the repercussing air. The earth column rose higher and higher to almost 4,000 feet [1,220 metres]. There it hung, or seemed to hang, for a moment in the air … then fell away in a widening cone of dust and debris.

Lewis, quoted in Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, London, 1977, p.120

No sooner had the mine exploded than German and British soldiers hurled themselves across no–man’s–land to seize the lip of the newly formed crater. Men of the 10th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, got there first and held this vital position.

On 3 July 1916, Australia’s official war correspondent, Charles Bean, with other journalists walked up out of the town of Albert to a hillside between La Boisselle and Fricourt. From there, they had a view of the British attacks that day on those two villages. As he watched, Bean saw British soldiers advancing across the skyline:

And presently they came out, running just beyond the shoulder of that hill. We could only see their heads at first, tucked down into it as a man bends when he hurries into a hailstorm. Presently the track on which they were advancing ‘I don't know whether it was originally a road or a trench, but it is a sort of chalky sandhill now’ brought them for a moment rather to our side of the hill into partial shelter. Each section that reached the place crouched down there for a moment. Spurts of shrapnel lashed past them whirling the white dust.

Charles Bean, Letters from France, Melbourne, 1917, p.84

Lochnagar Crater, July 1916. [AWM C00830]

Lochnagar Crater, July 1916. [AWM C00828]

Bean later realised that the ‘little sandhill’ was the upturned edge of the great mine crater. It is a dramatic sight and not surprisingly it is one of the most visited places on the Western Front. It was also a battlefield landmark well known to the men of the AIF as they made their way up to the front at Pozières in July and August 1916.

Lochnagar Crater

Autumn, Lochnagar Crater. [DVA]

The Road to Pozières

The whole earth heaved

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