KEMMEL.

Hokitika Guardian, 5 July 1918, Page 4

KEMMEL.

ONE OF THE CALAIS DEFENCES.

Keinmel is only an abrupt little hill rising to the modest height of 512 ft out. of the Flemish plain. Eighteen Kemmels piled atop one another would he scarcely higher than Monte Nero in the Julian Alps, where one day last year 1 saw Austrian shells bursting and leaving behind them what looked exactly like miniature cumulus clouds in nature — and Nero is by no means the highest mountain fop on which this war lias been waged. Kemmel is the most eastern spur—not counting the ridge or Mcssiiies and Wytsehaete —of a six miles range of hills running due west from the Belgian border towards Cassel. The range terminates with Afoul des Cats ; thence we drop into the plains for another six miles due west, when Cassel Hill is reunite 1. Gassel, Mont des Gats and Kemmel Hill are all about, the same 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 Kemmel. Cats, with (Tie Trappist Monastery, may be a trifle higher than either, but theie is practically nothing in it between the three. Between them are packed several other hills of the same character and of about the same, height; distinct, abrupt, and offering serious menace to any army which ventures to pass without first gaining them.

An advantage of the Kemmel range of little hills lies in the fact that they, rise out of a plain hardly averaging more than a hundred feet above sea, level. Besides, they are in. places singularly steep—notably Cats and Kemmel as anybody who has walked up them .on a hot day will admit, and in several instances well wooded. As to their woods, Cats had not suffered at all when the present offensive started. Kemmel church tower was half intact even after the battle of Messines and Wytschaeta. and its clock—whereby hangs a quite famous tale—could still be seen clearly from the hill, while the wooded height, except for a broken tree here and there, might have been a hundred miles beliind the battle line.

When 1 last sat on Kemmel Hill and looked clown from the wood into one of the huge craters on the Messines Llidge near by, I thought I had never heard the willow warbler’s faery thread of song running quite so sweetly through the loud, rich music of a choir of blackbirds The guns were lively at the time; and, as many people must know by now, there is hardly a surer stimulus to bird song than battle sound. This is not less true of the willow warbler and the blackbird in France than of the nightingale—it took many shells finally to silence the nightingale, I believe, in “ Hug-street ” Wood, near Kemmel.

The Butte de Waileneourt was an amazing illustration of the power of a mere hump in the ground, a ghastly bale excrescence, to hold at bay thousands of storming infantry during man}' weeks. Barbed wire, machine guns —above all The Spade : together they are more deadly in defence than are even the heaviest howitzers in attack. Some of the most triumphant forts around Verdun —for example, Yaux—what are they but meie humps or protuberances in the soil, with caves beneath and popholes above from which machine guns can play fo their hearts’ content? The Kemmel range lends its sandy soil to the spade. It has covert coigns of vantage in all directions for the machine-gunner—a small thing in hills even for Northern France or Belgium but a big proposition iu war,