The struggle for the hill did not cease with the opening of this new battle. Before every big attack which the Germans made elsewhere they delivered a furious assault on the hill. At length, on 6th May, after a series of gas attacks, they won it back, and also some trenches to the north of it. By this time, however, it had been so blown away by mine explosions and artillery fire as to be of little value. A friend of mine, who visited it a week later, "could barely detect the gentle swell among the flat meadows." * * * * * Before I pass on to describe the Second Battle of Ypres, let me relate some soldiers' stories of the fierce fighting on Hill 60. A correspondent tells us that the Scottish Borderers never lost heart during the awful bombardment to which they were subjected. "These astounding men," he says, "holding hastily-dug trenches by the side of a yawning crater full of dead and wounded, with high-explosive shells bursting all around them and often falling amongst them, actually sang as they fired over the parapets or lobbed their bombs over the barriers across the old communication trenches of the Germans. Amid the flares that lit up the hilltop as clear as day, and the shells that burst with clouds of whitish yellow smoke, they shouted in chorus, '_Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!_' Thus a company of the West Kents, sent up in support, found them at daybreak. The Borderers had been obliged to fall back from the trench on the outer lip of the crater to a trench on its near side, so that the chasm lay between them and the Germans. Their captain lay stark and stiff in the crater, which was so full of dead and wounded that, in the words of a West Kents' officer, 'hardly a portion of the ground could be seen.'" "It's dogged as does it," according to the old saying, and never were men more dogged than the King's Own Scottish Borderers during that fearful ordeal. * * * * *