It was a horrible wound in the stomach, and all the bleeding was inward. In ten seconds this fine big fellow, who was as strong as a lion and always had a beautiful ruddy colour, was writhing on the ground and his face was green in hue and he was in awful agony. I knew there was no hope for him from the first, but told him the usual lies about it being nothing serious, etc. I got an old wire bed out of a deserted billet near and we carried him to the dressing station half a mile [800 m] away.64

Greenwood died later that afternoon. Revd Montague Acland ‘Monty’ Bere was Anglican chaplain to the 43rd Casualty Clearing Station, part of the 3rd Army. After Marlborough, Oxford, and sixteen years as a vicar among the slums of West Ham and Leytonstone in London’s East End, he volunteered to be a field chaplain aged fifty. ‘One has had the chance of shooting a beam of light in the darkness’ was how he summed up his service, during which time he contracted diphtheria.65 On 28 June 1916 he wrote to his wife back in Bovington, Dorset: ‘The shell-shock men are sad. One is an officer who has forgotten his home address, another is dumb and so on.’66 The next day he added:

There is nothing much to be done with dying people in this sort of place—they come in and stay unconscious. The wounded are practically all Londoners so far and are wonderfully entertaining even if they are short of an arm or a leg.*8 A convoy of wounded on arrival is an extraordinary sight, particularly the walking cases. They beggar description—rags, dirt and bandages, trousers torn off at the knee, unwashed and without any expression… The men come in apparently stark naked from time to time. One was sent to the train with nothing on but identity disc and small bandage.67

Siegfried Sassoon recalled Wednesday 28 June as ‘miserably wet. Junior officers, being at a loss to know where to put themselves, were continually meeting one another along the muddy street, and gathering in groups to exchange cheerful remarks; there was little else to be done, and solitude produced the sinking feeling appropriate to the circumstances.’68 That same day the Lonsdale Battalion, part of 97th Brigade of 32nd Division, paraded in fighting order to go over the top, but on the 29th word came postponing the attack until further notice. The British preliminary bombardment was supposed to have ended with the Z Day attack on 29 June but it was extended forty-eight hours after the very wet weather on the 26th, 27th and 28th. The Lonsdales then heard nothing till the night of 30 June when they were told they would be going over the top at 7 a.m. the next morning.*969

‘A little rain made a big difference to life up there,’ Siegfried Sassoon recorded, ‘and the weather had been wet enough to make the duckboards wobble.’70 He added: ‘In spite of the anti-climax (which made us feel that perhaps this was only going to be a second edition of the Battle of Loos), my personal impression was that we were setting out for the other end of nowhere.’71 ‘In the evening’, Gunner Gambling recorded in his diary on 29 June, ‘Fritz opened fire with some of his gas shells, dropping them dangerous near a battery in our rear, and of course, the wind blowing in our direction, we got a good amount of the gas, but he finished up having done no damage at all (as per usual.)’72 There is a terrible irony to this last comment, as Gambling was himself to die from the effects of gas poisoning a few years after the war.

Cpl. Appleyard also remembered 29 June: ‘The Thursday was spent in bayonet fighting and bomb throwing [practice], and in the afternoon we had an enjoyable game of cricket, which helped to take the weight of coming events off our minds… According to a report from the 8th Middlesex, our guns were effectively smashing up the Huns’ positions. A patrol who successfully entered the trenches reported that the first two lines of German trenches had already been evacuated.’73 Like so many rumours swirling around at that time, it was wildly over-optimistic. ‘Everybody seemed anxious to dispose of their remaining cash,’ Appleyard wrote of 30 June, ‘so we bought champagne, which put us all in good spirits and everybody was merry and bright when time for parade was called.’74 That night just outside Souastre, ‘an excellent view of the artillery duel was witnessed, and the flashes from the guns and the bursting of the shells formed a grand spectacle, and it was very fine to watch this from a distance but totally different when we entered the inferno.’75

In the days just before the assault, Sassoon also noticed how:

There was harmony in our Company Mess, as if our certainty of a volcanic future had put an end to the occasional squabblings which occurred when we were on each other’s nerves. A rank animal healthiness pervaded our existence during those days of busy living and inward foreboding. The behaviour of our servants expressed it; they were competing for the favours of a handsome young woman in the farmhouse, and a comedy of primitive courtship was being enacted in the kitchen. Death would be lying in wait for the troops next week, and now the flavour of life was doubly strong.76

As the regimental servants wooed the pretty farm girl, their officers played tug-of-war against the officers of the 9th Battalion.

Going up to the front on 30 June, Capt. Harold Bidder of the 1st South Staffordshires noted, ‘By way of a cheerful send-off, a gramophone in one of the houses I passed was playing the ‘Dead March’ in Saul!’77 That same day Pte. Frank Hawkings of the 1st/9th London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles) noted: ‘Today is my birthday, and anyone will concede that it is hardly an appropriate time to have one. We suddenly got order to move this afternoon.’ He was eighteen. ‘Am feeling dreadfully tired,’ he wrote at 1 a.m. once he reached the front-line fire trench, ‘so I’m going to try to snatch a little sleep, though I don’t expect to be very successful.’ Gunner Gambling noted in his diary that day, ‘At 6 p.m. a chum and myself were taking a stroll after coming off duty in what was a nice small village just behind our positions and there we realized what war really was, as we watched ambulance after ambulance go slowly by, filled with the wounded.’78 And that was the night before the big attack.