Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
Have a thought for the wretched fellows who are getting out a wire on a dark and snowy night, troubled perhaps by persistent snipers and frequent shells! Shed a tear for the miserable linesman sent out to find where the line is broken or defective.... When there was no chance of "a run" we would go for walks towards Kemmel.
I asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill. "Not yet," said one of them, and then they all left the table at which we were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them ardently. They were touching wood. "Take this with you," said an Irish officer on a night I went to Ypres. "It will help you as it has helped me. It's my lucky charm."
The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men.
In the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this is the Menin Road. How it haunted the war news for months and years, like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west a faint line with a few trees on it Passchendaele! Passchendaele! name of sorrow and of glory.
There was an incessant tumult of guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country of the salient and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the Wytschaete Ridge. There was a white frost over the fields, and all the battle-front was veiled by a mist which clung round the villages and farmsteads behind the lines and made a dense bank of gray fog below the rising ground.
The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg.
I felt that each point of interest ought to have been labelled in Mr Frederic Villiers' handwriting "German shrapnel bursting over Kemmel our guns this is a dead horse." I first saw Ypres on the 6th November. I was sent off with a bundle of routine matter to the 1st Corps, then at Brielen, a couple of miles N.W. of Ypres. It was a nightmare ride. The road was pavé in the centre villainous pavé.
The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success.
The wee grotesque man and his immense white cat were not with them. Perhaps they still live on Kemmel. Some time I shall go and see.... If we did not play Bridge after our walks, we would look in at the theatre or stroll across to dinner and Bridge with Gibson and his brother officers of the K.O.S.B., then billeted at Locre. Not all convents have theatres: this was a special convent.
A few days later those who lived on Kemmel were "evacuated." They were rounded up into the Convent yard, men and women and children, with their hens and pigs. At first they were angry and sorrowful; but nobody, not even the most indignant refugee, could resist our military policemen, and in three-quarters of an hour they all trudged off, cheerfully enough, along the road to Bailleul.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking