At the entrance to the Devonshire Cemetery, it states,

The Devonshire's held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the lives of three officers of this regiment

came together here on the slopes of the ground around the village of Mometz.

As we begin season three of the old Frontline podcast, we find ourselves once again on the Somme

battlefields, this time outside the small village of Mometz. Mammets or Mamei to the locals they pronounce it both ways there

and having asked many locals over the years which is the correct way they shrug their shoulders in that

classic French way and just say both but certainly to the troops who were there in 1915 and

1916 as the British began to take over this sector of the Somme battlefields, it was always Mammets.

And the veterans that I interviewed back in the 80s and 90s who fought in this area, that's how they always referred to it, and that's how we'll refer to it in this podcast.

So on the high ground above Mammets, we're looking down onto a battlefield heavily fought over on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916.

And it's a story really of one battalion that we're going to look at in this podcast, the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment.

Before we get to that point, a little bit of background to Mehmetz itself.

It saw a fighting in 1914 when French troops clashed with the Germans here

and then both sides established their positions.

The French occupier a rather strange line really that wove up onto the high ground

here, looking down onto Mometz. In this area, dominated by some small pockets of woodland,

the high ground didn't seem to really afford the French much of an advantage and the front lines

were pretty close here and a lot of tunneling warfare mining operations took place first with the French and then with the British when we took over this sector.

The village of Mametz itself was behind the German lines.

They were on some of the slopes above the village and also wound around the village going across towards the next location in their defences, which was the village of Montobar.

The Germans built up their defences in and around Mehmetz in that period from the establishment of the front lines here in the autumn of 1914 in the lead up to the 1916 Battle of the Somme.

...