KEMMEL HILL

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 229, 15 June 1918, Page 8

KEMMEL HILL

ONE Ol' THE CALAIS DEFENCES. Kemmel is only an abrupt little hill vising lo the modest height of 512 ft. out of the Flemish plain. Eighteen Kcmmels piled alop one another would be scarcely higher than ilonto Nero in the- Julian! a (ps, where one day last year I saw (wye a writer in llw "Daily Mai!") Austrian shells bursting, and leaving behind them wljnt looked exactly like miniature ciunulus clouds in Nature—and Nero is ijy no means the highest rnountaintopi on which this war has been waged. KeniJiiel is (Ih> most eastern spur—not county ing the ridge of Messines and AVytschaeta, —of a six miles range of hills running! due west from the Belgian border towards Cassel. The range terminates with' Mont des Cals; thence wo drop into the plains for another six miles due wesly when Cassel Hill is reached. Cassel. Mont des Cats, and Kemmel Hill are all! about the biuiw height—there is only a' few feet difference between the top of! Cassel, on which the odd little Flemish.' town is perched, and the top of Iveinme!. Cuts, with the Trnppist Monastery,'may .be ii trifle higher than either, but there is practically netting in ifc between the three. Between them are packed several other hills or the same character' and of about the same height; ttistmct, abrupt, and ottering perioua manner, to avy army which ventuws to pass without first gaining them. An advantage of the Kemmel ran;e of little hills lies in the fact that they risec. out of a plain hardly averaging move than a hundred feet nbovo sea level. Besides, they are in places singularly steep—notably Cats and Kemmel, as anybody who has walked up them on si hot day' will admit , —and in several instances well wooded. As to their woods, Cuts li-acl not suli'ereci at all when the present offensive started. Kemmel church tower, was half int.ict even after the Battle of \ Vlessiiies and Wytschaele, and its clcclc— whereby haiigs a quite famous tale —! could still be seen clearly from the hilvwhile the weeded height, except for a) broken tree lion- and there, might have lwen a hundred miles behind the battle.When I last 6i\t on Kemmel Hill and! looked down from the wood into one of the huge craters on the Messines Kidg3 near by, I thought 1 had never heard the willow warbler's faery thread o£ song running quite so sweetly through; the loud, rich music of a choir of blackbirds. The gum- were lively at the time;' and, as many people must know by now,! there is harilk a surer stimulus to bird., song than bat|l» sound. This is not lesa, true of the willow warbler and the black-' bird in Yranue than oJ the nightingale— it took many shells finally lo silt-nee the nightingale,' I believe, in "Plug Street, • Wood, near Kemmel. j Ths Butte el 3 Warleucourt was an. amazing illustration of the power of a; mere hump in the ground, a ghastly^ , bare excrescence, to liold at bay thousands of storming infautry during many, weeks. Barljed wire, machine-guns—9 above all The Spade- together they are] more deadly in defence than are even. , : the heaviest howitzers in attack. Soma I of the most triumphant fort* around. Verdun—for example, Viiux— what are they hut mere humps or protuberances 1 in the soil, wit'i caves beneath and pop-' holes above, from which machinc-pstna can play to their hearts' content? Ihe Kemmel rauirj leads ils sandy soil to, the spade. . It has covert coigns of van-: tage in all directions for .the machine-..; gunner-a small thin? in hills even for; Northern l-'niiico or Belgium but a bigfi proposition in war.