The gallant “Duke’s” were overwhelmed. The ordeal was too severe. They were forced to give ground. Alone they stood the full brunt of the attack, officers and men sticking to the trenches until the sandbags fell in upon them, until there was no room to move for dead and wounded men and débris. Standing at the entrance to his dug-out in the rear that morning, the Adjutant of “The Duke’s,” as he afterwards told me himself, saw an officer and an orderly staggering towards him. The officer spoke in a gasping voice. “They’ve gassed ‘The Duke’s,’” he said. “I believe I was the last man to leave the hill. All the men up there are dead. They were splendid. I thought I ought to come and report.” The officer was new to the regiment, having been detached from the 3rd East Yorks for service with “The Duke’s” after the heavy losses of the latter at Hill 60 on the 18th. The high spirit of duty that impelled him, a dying man, to struggle down the hillside and make his report is characteristic of the British regimental officer. He died at the field ambulance that night, a hero if there ever was one. He was Captain G. U. Robins. The situation was highly critical. The Devons in support at the foot of the hill collected every man they could find, and lined them up in anticipation of a German rush. It never came. The British Army has passed through some stern trials in this war, but I doubt if any were more terrible than the ordeal of May 5 at Hill 60. The sun shone hotly out of a cerulean sky on the slopes of the hill, where the dead lay in thick clusters on the grass stained yellow by the gas-fumes. The railway cutting was a shambles, dead and wounded lying in places so thickly that men had to move them out of the way in order to pass. Our soldiers, who went along the cutting where the shells were crashing with reverberating explosions, were positively sickened at the sights they saw, and filled with fierce anger against the fiends who had perpetrated this nameless crime. The men at Hill 60 had their fight to fight out alone. Farther to the north one of the greatest battles of the war was raging. The horrors of the hill and the railway cutting were but an incident in the mighty struggle of nations which was swaying to and fro in the fields and woods about Ypres. Yet it had cost in lives many more men than the costliest battle of the South African War. Now the 13th Brigade, which had shortly before come out of the inferno about Ypres, returned to Hill 60 with orders to counter-attack and recapture it if possible. We were back in our old positions on the lower slopes of the hill. The work had to be begun again. It was tired men who had to do it. Such is the fortune of war.