The valley was traversed day and night by a constant stream of traffic. The infantry used overland tracks well clear of the road, and marched in platoon or section groups. All wheeled traffic was, however, restricted to the single road, so that periods of great congestion often occurred.
When the German barrage opened, men, animals, and motor vehicles broke into their best speed. Great columns of white dust, due to the intensity of the summer heat, rose up, choked everything, and made seeing a matter of difficulty. Guns and limbers moved at a stretch gallop, lorries bounded from shell-hole to shell-hole, and every effort was concentrated on getting out of the zone involved in the barrage with as little delay as possible.
The heavily-burdened infantryman on his way to and from the line, however, carried too much on his back to make him think of doubling. He used to plod along at his regulation three miles an hour, trusting that his luck would take him through.
It was no uncommon sight to see direct hits scored on gun-teams, limbers, and groups of infantry. When the barrage ceased and it was possible to take stock of the result, appalling scenes were often disclosed. Teams with their riders lying in a heap, ammunition dumps on fire, riderless and driverless horses and waggons bolting in all directions, and coming down in the midst of old wire entanglements, were daily spectacles in the Happy Valley.
At each pause in the barrage all haste was made to complete the work of succouring the wounded and collecting the dead, and filling in the latest shell-holes in the road before it reopened.
In this valley the conduct of the Royal Army Medical Corps was superb. Other troops could at least make some effort to make their way out of the danger zone as fast as possible, but the bearers of the field ambulances and the regimental stretcher-bearers could not. They slowly pushed their wheeled stretchers from the Crucifix at Bazentin to the dressing station, heedless of the shell-fire and their own security, and careful only to evacuate the wounded with the minimum of discomfort to them.
Similarly ambulance car-drivers could not join in the helter-skelter for security on the road to Fricourt. Day and night they plied slowly along the damaged road with their burden of wounded, returning again and again through the valley as soon as their cars had been cleared.
Had the Germans in those days been in possession of the instantaneous fuze which bursts its shell before it has had time to bury itself in the earth and thus lose much of its missile effect, this road could have been made almost impassable. Happy Valley, with its dust and its flies and its stench of half-buried animals and men, will remain to all who knew it an ineffaceable memory.
The trench lines taken over by the Division consisted of odd, narrow, and shallow trenches which had gradually evolved from the connecting of posts in which troops had dug themselves in during previous engagements.
By means of saps running into High Wood from the trench dug along its southern and western edge, a footing was held in the wood. Between High Wood and Delville Wood the British trenches were hidden from the Germans opposite them and vice versa by the crest line of the upland.