• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was true that, at first, the Germans had been completely unbalanced by the explosion. From the high ground at Zandvoorde their guns were firing anywhere and everywhere. It was hours before the situation was appreciated, before the guns settled down to shoot accurately and in earnest, before the shocked survivors rushing back from the hill had been rallied and incoherent reports were understood and evaluated at German Corps Headquarters. By midnight reserves had been hurried to the front and the first counter-attack was launched. It was the first of dozens.

The Germans attacked by night, they attacked by dawn, they attacked by day, making desperate efforts to recover the hill. The fighting and the line swayed back and forth. The shells of both sides pulverised the hill until it was hard to believe that this tortured mound of devastation had ever been a hill at all. Trees and dug-outs were swallowed up. Trenches were obliterated as fast as they were dug through the mangled bodies of British and German dead. The stench was overpowering. Once they had recovered from the first assault the Germans had the advantage, for the British advance had thrust a wedge into their line and machine-guns and snipers concealed on the high ground on either side could sweep their foothold on the hill with deadly accuracy. It was such a small foothold – only two hundred and fifty yards long, and two hundred yards deep – that the enemy hardly needed to take aim and even the most haphazard shots could not fail to find a target.*

The first British troops to be pushed back from the hill in the early stages of the assault had caused some disquiet. Although their position had been quickly recovered in a counter-attack it had had to be made by other troops, for the men who had been forced off were finished – choking and gasping, overcome by fumes, they were convinced that they had been gassed, and they were right. But it had been an accident. It was true that the Germans had been planning to attack with poison gas, but they were not yet ready, and the conditions had not been favourable. Nevertheless gas cylinders had been dug into the side of the hill and the Germans soldiers who panicked and ran when the British stormed it, shaken though they were by the explosions, had been less afraid of British troops than of British shells shattering the cylinders and releasing the poisonous gas on friend and foe alike. Only a few had been damaged and the cylinders cracked so that the gas escaped slowly and covered only a small area on the right of Hill 60. It should have been enough to alert the staff to the danger, but so few soldiers were affected, there were so many fumes from the mines and from exploding shells and, since the enemy was known to have fired tear gas shells in the past, the significance of the incident paled against the magnitude of the continuing battle for the hill.

But for those who were not immediately involved in the struggle there were other clues and hints that something unusual was afoot. Strange clanging noises had been heard near the enemy’s trenches and patrols were sent out to investigate.

Trpr. P. Mason, 1/1st Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry.

There was Captain Foster, Lance Corporal Armond, Trooper Mason, Trooper Heslop and Trooper Hutton. There were five of us. Our object was to get a prisoner, if possible. It was very, very nervous work, I can tell you, crawling about No Man’s Land, you know. Captain Foster said, ‘If anybody has the slightest suspicion that he has a cough he’s not going.’ He had this rule and thank God he did. We would suffocate ourselves rather than give a cough. Well, sometimes when I felt I was going to cough I used to push my face into the ground to stop me. I daren’t, you know, because it would give the game away. We got a bit nervy, I don’t mind telling you. One night Captain Foster went out carelessly with a luminous wristwatch on his ruddy wrist and Tom Armond said, ‘For Christ’s sake, take it off.’ I