The loss of the hill was a bad shock for the enemy. He did not recover from it that evening at any rate. After a rather feeble bombardment with “whizz-bangs,” he attempted three counter-attacks in the small hours of the morning, but they were easily smothered by our machine-gun fire.
As the night wore on, however, his bombardment began to increase in violence. The K.O.S.B.’s, who came up to the relief of the West Kents about 2.30 a.m. (April 18), came in for it badly. It was pitch dark, and the going was made difficult by the holes in the ground, the dead bodies scattered around, and the innumerable strands of broken barbed wire strewing the Hill. Major Joslin was killed, so was the company commander of the relieving party, while Major Sladen, the commanding officer of the K.O.S.B.’s, was wounded and his Adjutant mortally wounded. It was a subaltern who finally took the K.O.S.B.’s into their new trenches on the hill-top.
By this time the German bombardment was extremely severe. High-explosive shells were bursting in regular volleys on the exposed slopes, and the Germans, whose trenches in some places were but a few yards distant from ours, separated by only a sandbag barrier thrown across a communication trench, kept up a merciless fusillade of bombs. The flares broke in a gush of green light over the battered hill, showing the green and yellow eddies of smoke from the bursting projectiles. But the K.O.S.B.’s, swathed in choking smoke, their trenches clogged with the dead and wounded, kept a brave heart. Some of them actually whiled away the night in song, shouting in chorus that ditty which is, above any other, the song of our fighting-men in Flanders:
“Here we are! Here we are!
Here we are again!
Tommy, Jack, and Pat, and Mac, and Joe!”
Dawn stole with lemon streaks into the sky, and found them there amid the bursting shells. But they had had to give ground a little and abandon the trenches on the far side of the crater on the extreme left of our position.
Their condition was rather precarious, and the West Kents sent a company up in support. The officer commanding the company described how he found the K.O.S.B.’s Captain dead in the crater between the British and German trenches, on top of a pile of dead and wounded men so thick that “hardly a portion of the ground could be seen.”
At 11.30 a.m. the Duke of Wellington’s (The West Riding) Regiment, 2nd Battalion, arrived to relieve the K.O.S.B.’s and West Kents, who by this time had been able to retain possession of only three of the craters on the near side of the hill (the three right-hand craters in the map). “The Duke’s,” as they are called, did magnificently that day. “The Old Duke would be as proud of you to-day as he was when he commanded you,” the Brigadier said afterwards in addressing the shattered remnant of the battalion that came away from the hill. Despite the rain of shells and bombs, they held on grimly all through the day. By the early afternoon the Germans had recaptured the whole of the hill save only for a section behind the second and third craters (counted from the right in the map), where “The Duke’s” still resisted. Their General saw them clinging to the brown, scarred ridge “like a patch of flies on the ceiling.”
The day wore on and “The Duke’s” still held out. It was decided to relieve the pressure on them by a counter-attack with artillery support. The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were brought up, and at six o’clock “The Duke’s,” their numbers thinned, it is true, by heavy casualties, particularly in officers, were over the parapet and away, their fellow county men of Yorkshire at their heels. Behind came some of the K.O.S.B.’s and the “Q. Vic.’s” (the Queen Victoria Rifles, that well-known London Territorial battalion). These young Londoners covered themselves with glory in this day’s fighting and later. Second Lieutenant Woolley, one of their subalterns, won the Victoria Cross for a magnificent display of endurance and gallantry.
“B” Company of “The Duke’s,” on the right, reached the German trenches, and established themselves there with slight loss; “C” Company had to cross open ground, got badly hammered, and only Captain Barton and eleven men reached their objective. They never stopped to see how many men they had lost, however. They went for their crafty enemy with bayonet and bomb, and killed or routed every man in the trench. Their blows would have been struck doubly hard had they known what stood before. “D” Company, on the left, had also a patch of open country to traverse. All its officers were killed or wounded in its passage over the broken ground swept by shell and machine-gun fire, but with the help of the stout-hearted Yorkshire Light Infantry it managed to secure the trench.
Hill 60 was ours once more. It would still be in our hands to-day but for the German crime against civilization and humanity, the nameless horror of the asphyxiating gas. Sir John French said as much in his despatch on the second battle of Ypres (dated “Headquarters, June 15”). Referring to the loss of Hill 60, the Commander-in-Chief wrote: