THE STRUGGLE AT MONT KEMMEL

DESPERATE DEFENCE

ENEMY ATTACK IN FOG

FROM PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, FRIDAY.

It was not pleasant in Flanders this morning. I went up there after yesterday on the Somme to get details of the French and British fighting round Kemmel, and I am bound to say that, though I have seen Flanders in every kind of foul weather, I have never seen it more sinister-looking, more utterly evil in atmosphere and spiritual effect than it was to-day. A thick, wet fog enveloped all the flat fields like a London particular at its worst, and the French and British columns, with their transport and guns, moved through it like ghosts in a shadow world. Upon the Mont des Cats, that high hill on our side of Kemmel and round which by Boeshepe and Dickebusch and Goedesverwelde and Westoutre – strange names to you, but as familiar as Clapham Junction, Peckham Rye or Old Kent Road to our soldiers out here – the enemy has been scattering heavy shells and flinging harassing fire. The fields were wreathed round with clouds of fog, through which the great old monastery, where Trappist monks used to live in silence, before the tumult of war surrounded them in the autumn of the first year of the war, loomed vaguely like a medieval castle. The roads down which we used to go with an admirable sense of safety, even when the Ypres salient was full of menace – alas, the menace has come again – bore signs to-day of recent and horrid happenings. The little wooden houses built by refugees from Ypres after the days of terror there in April 1915, and filled with stores which our troops used to buy on the way past, had been knocked to matchwood by the fire, and all about them were deep shell-holes newly made with that beastly freshness which warns one that others may come. All the fields for miles around were punctured by pits made by the German shells.

ORGY OF SHELLING

It was yesterday that the enemy’s gunners flung about most of these shells. They had a kind of devil’s orgy of shelling, and scattered high explosives any old where without aim or object, except that of harassing the whole region. They turned long-range guns on to villages far behind the lines to catch an old woman or two or smash up a school. They fired off the map at poor old Poperinghe again, “Pop” as we call it, with its tall-spired church, Grande Place and narrow streets, and they put high explosives into Westoutre and made targets of “Bosheep” and “Gerty Wears Velvet,” which by those who can pronounce them are Boeschepe and Goedesversvelde. All this was just the gentle embroidery of the decorative scheme of death which had been planned for Kemmel Hill. Kemmel Hill was held by the French, as I have previously told, those gallant men who came up so quickly to our relief when we needed them, and took their places in the line without delay after long marches. On the left of them yesterday were Scottish and English battalions. After several attempts against Kemmel, frustrated, as I recorded at the time, the enemy went all out yesterday to capture this position. Four divisions at least, including the Alpine Corps, 11th Bavarians, 56th and 117th, were moved against Kemmel in the early morning fog after a tremendous bombardment of the Francobritish positions. It was a bombardment that began before the first glimmer of dawn, like one of those which we used to arrange in the days of our great Flanders battles last year, starting to the tick after a period of comparative silence with a stupendous outburst of drumfire from heavies and field artillery. It came down, swamping Kemmel Hill so that it was like one volcano, and stretching on to our lines on the left by Maedelstede Farm and the Grand Bois down to Vierstraat.