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O Christ! and the little mother in a Sussex cottage!... Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial. Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face. "Sorry I had to keep you," he said. "Tomorrow there will be one swine less in the world." "A death sentence?" He nodded. "A damned coward.
April 16 Germans capture Messines ridge, near Ypres; Bolo Pasha executed. April 23 British and French navies "bottle up" Zeebrugge. April 26 Germans capture Mount Kemmel, taking 6,500 prisoners. May 5 Austria starts drive on Italy. May 10 British navy bottles up Ostend. May 24 British ship Moldavia, carrying American troops, torpedoed; 56 lost.
The advance here was checked for some weeks, but it went steadily on along other fronts. The salient on the Lys was melting away: Bailleul fell on 30 August, Mount Kemmel on the 31st, and Ploegstreet wood on 4 September. Lens was evacuated on the 3rd. South-west of Cambrai the British were approaching their old lines, and east of the Somme the Germans were retreating to St. Quentin.
Their advance here was slower, but by the 16th they had mastered Wytschaete, Wulverghem, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, and Meteren, and were facing the line of hills running from Mt. Kemmel to the Mt. des Cats. British and French reinforcements were now arriving in considerable numbers, and Ludendorff would have been prudent to rest on his laurels.
Again in a thin House, during some discussion on Estimates, Willie Redmond got up and spoke out of the fullness of experiences which had profoundly affected his imagination. He told the House of what he had seen in Flanders, where the two Irish Divisions had at last been brought into contact, so that the left of the Ulster line in front of Ploegstreet touched the right of ours in front of Kemmel.
This indicated the probability of an attack on the front held by the Portuguese, which occurred on 9th April, Blue and Green Cross being used in the preliminary bombardment." The Portuguese front lay between the two Yellow Cross regions. Journal of the Royal Artillery, February, 1920. Fixed Gas Barrage at Kemmel.
But we soon found that we had come out of the frying-pan only to go into the fire. The battle that was still raging at St. Eloi about a mile to the north was destined to alter the character of the once peaceful Kemmel area. I had now changed my mess. All the old officers of A Company had disappeared since I first joined the battalion; so I accepted an invitation from Capt.
May 19th, 1915: From the hospital we went to one of the most wonderful places in the theatre of war, a place of which I had heard a great deal, but not a word too much, from my guide. This was the Scherpenberg. Directly overlooking the plain in which Ypres stands are two hills, Scherpenberg and Kemmel.
During the whole of our three months in the Kemmel area we never once saw a German aeroplane cross our lines without being instantly attacked, and on one occasion we watched a most exciting battle between two planes, which ended in the German falling in flames into Messines, at which we cheered, and the Boche shelled us.
I received a paper of instructions as to what to do in case of alarm. We could tell that the Germans were causing trouble up the line, for we heard a heavy bombardment going on beyond Kemmel.
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