Hill 60 - a Retrospective Part I

Monday 26th April 1915: We hear from the adjutant of the 1st Battalion, Bedfordshire Regiment that they are back in the front line, near Hill 60, for which the savage, but ultimately fruitless, fighting took place earlier this month. Very heavy artillery and rifle fire has taken place on the battalion’s left as V Corps counter-attack German gains made north-east of Ypres. Some of this has strayed onto the Bedfords’ position and Second Lieutenant Fawcett and a number of other ranks have been killed.

With this as a back-drop it seems reasonable to pass on the story of a Londoner serving with 1st Battalion who was wounded in the fighting. He told us: “This is the biggest thing of the war. This is the biggest thing this war has given us yet and I have been in it all from the time when we fell back, yard upon yard and mile upon mile from Mons, with lumps of lead going into every other man and the men who didn’t get it falling down and going to sleep because he couldn’t march any further”.

“But this business of Hill 60 beat the lot. Think of batteries trained on a front of six miles and doing their worst. Then you will understand what our artillery was like. We went deaf, but it was splendid”.

“We knew it was coming and we were anxious that it should come our way. We’d had so much of the deafening overture from the guns that we wanted to be in the play itself. And we of the Bedfordshires had been in front of Hill 60 for days and terrible nights and days again”.

“In fact, they thought we were so worn out that when the hour came for the assault they told us to get out and give place to fresher men. But we held on. The place was ours by right of endurance. We would rather have mutinied than gone back, so they let us – we who had waited so long – go on with the others and take the crest of that hill”.

“Hill 60 isn’t really a hill at all. It is just what we should call a little mound. It’s a sort of pimple on the face of the earth, but it was the little gateway we wanted and we meant to take it and hold it”.

“It had been in front of us for days and for weeks, sometimes obscured by misty rain, sometimes quite clear in the sunshine, but always the point from which the Germans were firing upon us, and always the point against which we could never reply, except with the hope of digging our bullets into the earth”.

“We all know that Hill 60 meant to us long before we took it, long before we ever attempted to take it, long before we ever made that charge. We had gone to work underground. We had been sapping and burrowing under Hill 60 for weeks. We knew it had to be taken even at a great sacrifice of life”.

“And while the men underground dug their way slowly along we nodded to each other and wondered when the time would come when Hill 60 would go up in the air and be no more”.

“All sorts of rumours spread amongst us. We were always going to blow the hill up. We heard so much about it that the sight of Hill 60 got on our nerves. Then the time came when we didn’t believe it was going to be true”.

“I am talking for the men of the Bedfordshires who lay in the trench in front of that hill and watched the Germans fire day after day, night after night”.

“It was early on Saturday morning, the 17th that we heard at last our preparations for attack upon Hill 60 were completed and the attack itself was to be made at any moment”.

“Our coffee tasted different that morning. We felt different men. We shook off our trench weariness as by a miracle”.

“The time for advance had sounded and there was not a man in the lot, caked with mud or rotten with rheumatism, who was not inspired by the news”.

“The Bedfords had been in the advance British trenches at Zillebeke, only 180 yards distant from Hill 60, for days. We had been there so long that we thought they had forgotten us”.

“It was only eight days, but it seemed an eternity, and a cheer went up that must have surprised the Germans on the hill when the news came round that the West Kents were coming to our relief”.

“We were a pretty bad lot at that time, pretty well done up, but two of our companies, under Major Allason, volunteered to remain in the trenches and do the double with the West Kents when they went up that hill”.

“We knew what they had come for, and we wanted to see that little bit of ground go up in the air”.

“I have said that it was like a pimple on the face of the earth, but it was near us. It overshadowed us; it might have been a mighty mountain”.

“I don’t think you people in England can realise what Hill 60 meant for the men of the Bedfords, who had been lying under its fire for eight days in the British trenches”.

“We had been in the trenches eight days. The two companies, as I have said, stuck it out on that misty morning”.

“The rest of the Bedfords went on to Ypres, a mile and a quarter away, and got a bit of rest in the place that people in England still think to be a town, but which is really now only a bit of a cathedral”.

Source: