The French on our right got within a mile or two of Péronne, but its defences were too strong and it was not actually captured until 1918. Trones Wood (Plate 54) was cleared early in July. Here a small body of 170 men of the Royal West Kents and Queens[23] held out all night, completely surrounded, until relieved the next morning. Delville Wood (Plate 55) was captured the next day. The fighting in these woods has left nothing of them but churned-up ground and a few bare stems, although the rank undergrowth makes some of them appear quite green from a distance. Combles (Plate 56) was not taken until the 26th of September, when the British and French entered the town simultaneously (from the north and the south respectively), and captured a company which had not been able to get clear away in time. The little town is not so entirely wrecked as many other places, but the house which is shown under reconstruction in the photograph is perhaps one of the least damaged. [23] Haig's Despatches, p. 29. Thiepval and the redoubts on the Thiepval plateau were not finally secured until November. The Germans had said beforehand that we "would bite granite" in trying to take them. We did bite granite, but our teeth proved the harder. Along the Albert-Bapaume road the villages of Pozières and Courcelette have disappeared altogether. Sometimes a big iron gate, or half a gate, or a stone gatepost, shows where an entrance once existed to some more or less pretentious mansion, but the building itself has gone entirely, and its site is grown over with rank herbage, which hides every indication even of where the house once stood. The whole Thiepval plateau is now a wilderness of weedy vegetation, and the weeds seem to have swallowed up the redoubts altogether, as well as Thiepval itself. The defences on the Upper Ancre still barred the way to Bapaume along the road by Le Sars and the Butte de Warlencourt (Plate 57).[24] The Butte was the centre of the German position, as strongly protected by trenches and wire as even the Thiepval plateau itself. Fierce attacks in October and November, 1916, failed to secure it, and the chalky hillock was only finally taken in February, 1917. It now carries five crosses erected in memory of the units which fought there. [24] This view is taken looking eastwards towards Bapaume, with the Butte on the south side of the road.