SINISTER HILL 60

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16506, 5 October 1915, Page 6

SINISTER HILL 60

VISIT BY A CIVILIAN. (Feom Odr Own Cohuesfokdent.) LONDON, July 30.: Mr G. Valentine Williams, the correspondent in France for certain London dailies, has just visited the famous Hill 60. He sends through a vivid pen-picture of th : s deadly position:—, " A flat-topped ridge on which mine and shell craters form Uyo or three low humps, a forest of barbed-wire posts, endless coils of broken barbed who on which .fragments of clpthing flap lamentably in the wind, fuch a multitude of pits and holes as are only seen after days of heavy shelling, and, finally, two curving lines of multicoloured sandbags winding round,the slope towards our lines—that is the picture of Hill 60 as it is to-day. " On Friday latt Renter's correspondent and myself were privileged to be the first war correspondents—and, indeed, the first civilians —to visit the famous hill since the heavy-fighting which marked its capture and loss, and precipitated the second battle for Ypres. ■ " The hill is indeed a sinister place, doubly so in the conditions in which I saw it in streaming rain, which turned the trenches on both sides into quagmires. The hill is seamed with trenches new and old—German trenches constructed outl of our old trenches and old communication trenches formerly kading to our front line, now helcl by both sides and solidly barri-. caded with sandbags across. I was in one such communication trench, where our barrier is separated from the German by only six yards, a bare stretch of rough ground with a confused pile of. sandbags in between.

"The situation on Hill 60 is unique. The Germans hold the hill with two lines of trenches which curve round it near the top. It is a moot point whether our trenches are on the hill at all, but I think they may be said to skirt its foot and the lower edge of the slope: They would thus be dominated by the German lines were it not for the very high, strong parapet of sandbags which shield our men from view But in these conditions, with the German lines in some places' only 20 to 40 yards away, an unconsidered -movement, exposure of the head for a fraction of a second, means almost certain death. Indeed, as I crawled bent almost double along the trench at one of these dangerous corners I had perchance to walk through the blood of a man shot through the head and killed instantly but a minute before as the price of thrusting his head above the parapet for a few seconds. THE DESERTED RAILWAY.

"I saw famous railway cutting which skirts Hill 60 and which after the fight, in the words of one who was present, was a perfect shambles of dead and dying. The railway from Ypres to /Commes runs clear through our lines and the German. Now it lies silent and deserted, the metals all twisted, the sleepers splintered and broken by shell fire, the little redrbrick culvert dented and chipped. Below the culvert in a large pool of rain water which, had collected there, stained a vivid yellowish green from high explosive shell, were still floating grisly relics of the fight in the shape of dismembered limbs and portions of equipment, while lying at the bottom of the pool the outline of a uniformed figure coald 1 be dercried.

"Notwithstanding the streaming Vain, the constant sniping ' whizz-bangs' (small field gun shells) that were coming over and the general nerve strain of living thus cooped rin close under a savage and indefatigable enemy, the men in the trenches were of good heart. Most of them had been up all night, and many were trying to snatch, a brief sleep lying under their waterproof sheets in the rain. Other were catching Tain water for washing in all kinds of receptacles, and cracking jokes 'as they did so. Their overcoats and uniforms were sodden with water,- and the rain made the cooking of hot food a difficult matter, but they were unalterably cheerful. As one said, they had at least the conrolation of having seen the Germans eppopite busily engaged in baling out their trenches."