#25526 Lance Corporal Henry Bellis
17TH ROYAL WELSH FUSILIERS
FOR THE WELSH, THE TORMENT of Mametz Wood was still not over. Henry Bellis was an ironworker from Mold, Flintshire, who enlisted at Llandudno comparatively late for a New Army man on the Somme. Apart from suffering from scabies as a somewhat inevitable result of the squalor of the Western Front and once being admonished for losing his rifle, Henry had had an uneventful war in terms of personal injury since arriving on the Continent in December 1915.
Like the Hardwidge brothers, Henry had already been fully embroiled in the desperate fighting at Mametz Wood. On 7th July he moved up to attack. Going forward at 8am, the 17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers suffered slight casualties that day when compared with some of their countrymen’s battalions. Throughout the 8th, Henry remained in the line, entrenched in thick mud, tortured by the miserable weather engulfing the battlefield and waiting for others to come and relieve him. They never arrived. Henry did not get back to the camp until late afternoon on the 9th when exhausted, he and his comrades were at last ordered to rest until early morning.
Henry’s respite was curtailed. By 3am on 10th July the 17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers had been ordered back into action and were ready to march off. Frustratingly, no orders came for a further five hours when they moved up to support another attack in the wood. By the end of the day they had been sent in to assist their fellow Welshmen and by 6:30pm, Henry and his battalion had got to within 30 yards of the edge of the far side of the wood, where they began to dig in. It had been a costly day, despite their supporting role. The battalion’s commanding officer was wounded, the adjutant left with shell shock, and 200 men were lost.
The inside of the wood was traumatic, to say the least:
Detail from the Welsh Division Memorial at Mametz Wood. (Alexandra Churchill)
Heavy shelling of the southern end had beaten down some of the young growth, but it had also thrown trees and large branches into a barricade. Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf.
Early on 11th July, as the various Welsh battalions scattered throughout Mametz Wood reorganised and took up a coherent line, orders were received for the advance to be pushed forward again. Already exhausted, Henry’s battalion went forward at 3:30pm. By the time that they were relieved on the 12th, another 200 men were casualties and more officers had been lost. Such was the chaos that nobody knew precisely when Henry Bellis had died. Sometime later, a battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers reported they had come across his body and buried him. His date of death was marked down as 12th July.
The Rhondda Valley, Swansea, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Gwent, Glamorgan; the whole of Wales mourned their dead in the aftermath of their battle for Mametz Wood. It would take more than a year to rebuild the Welsh Division and for it to be capable of fighting again. Some 4,000 Welshmen lay dead in and around the wood after just a few days’ fighting. The exact location of Henry Bellis’ grave was subsequently lost and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 4a. His brother Samuel, 35, died with the 10th Battalion of the regiment a month later elsewhere on the Somme and his name was also inscribed on the memorial on the same panel as Henry’s.