The gallant “Duke’s” were overwhelmed. The ordeal was too severe. They were forced to give ground. Alone they stood the full brunt of the attack, officers and men sticking to the trenches until the sandbags fell in upon them, until there was no room to move for dead and wounded men and débris. Standing at the entrance to his dug-out in the rear that morning, the Adjutant of “The Duke’s,” as he afterwards told me himself, saw an officer and an orderly staggering towards him. The officer spoke in a gasping voice. “They’ve gassed ‘The Duke’s,’” he said. “I believe I was the last man to leave the hill. All the men up there are dead. They were splendid. I thought I ought to come and report.” The officer was new to the regiment, having been detached from the 3rd East Yorks for service with “The Duke’s” after the heavy losses of the latter at Hill 60 on the 18th. The high spirit of duty that impelled him, a dying man, to struggle down the hillside and make his report is characteristic of the British regimental officer. He died at the field ambulance that night, a hero if there ever was one. He was Captain G. U. Robins.
The situation was highly critical. The Devons in support at the foot of the hill collected every man they could find, and lined them up in anticipation of a German rush. It never came.
The British Army has passed through some stern trials in this war, but I doubt if any were more terrible than the ordeal of May 5 at Hill 60. The sun shone hotly out of a cerulean sky on the slopes of the hill, where the dead lay in thick clusters on the grass stained yellow by the gas-fumes. The railway cutting was a shambles, dead and wounded lying in places so thickly that men had to move them out of the way in order to pass. Our soldiers, who went along the cutting where the shells were crashing with reverberating explosions, were positively sickened at the sights they saw, and filled with fierce anger against the fiends who had perpetrated this nameless crime.
The men at Hill 60 had their fight to fight out alone. Farther to the north one of the greatest battles of the war was raging. The horrors of the hill and the railway cutting were but an incident in the mighty struggle of nations which was swaying to and fro in the fields and woods about Ypres. Yet it had cost in lives many more men than the costliest battle of the South African War.
Now the 13th Brigade, which had shortly before come out of the inferno about Ypres, returned to Hill 60 with orders to counter-attack and recapture it if possible. We were back in our old positions on the lower slopes of the hill. The work had to be begun again. It was tired men who had to do it. Such is the fortune of war.
West Kents and K.O.S.B.’s were again to furnish the storming parties. It was a pitch-black night. Not even a flare rent the inky curtain which had descended on the hill. Craters and holes innumerable, dead bodies, fragments of timber, splintered barbed-wire posts, miles of barbed wire in inextricable tangles, made a forward rush impossible. But the hill had to be taken, and the army had entrusted the gallant “Half-Hundred” and the lads of the Kilmarnock bonnets with the task. So on the stroke of ten they were ready to go, the West Kents on the left, the K.O.S.B.’s on the right.
It was a desperate undertaking, and it failed from the outset. As the first files of men clambered out over the parapet, the Germans, as though they had been waiting for the attack, opened a storm of shell on them, while the air fairly whizzed with machine-gun bullets. Only a few officers and a handful of men reached the German trench, and were there shot down or took cover in the numerous shell-holes dotted about.
With the first light of daybreak another attempt was made to gain the hill. The Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Cheshires attacked, supported on either side by the bombers of the Irish Rifles and the K.O.S.B.’s respectively. Two companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry, despite a murderous fire, fairly burst their way into the Zwartelen salient, a very strong German redoubt, and were never heard of again. The Germans in their stronghold enfiladed the Cheshires on the right, and after a desperate struggle we had to fall back to our trenches. Throughout the night heavy fighting, often at close quarters with bomb and bayonet, went on amid a terrific bombardment, whilst from the north the guns thundered incessantly.
That was our last attempt to capture Hill 60. Honeycombed with mines, eviscerated, battered, and blasted, the summit of the hill lay abandoned and desolate when I visited the positions in July. The dead were still lying in the craters, huge yawning chasms of crumbling brown earth, the edges strewn with a wild jumble of rags of uniform, haversacks, splintered rifles, and barbed wire. Just below the summit the German trenches, with sandbags of brown and blue and red and green, wound their way round the side of the hill, seeming to tower above our narrow trenches which clung to the lower slopes.