West Kents and K.O.S.B.’s were again to furnish the storming parties. It was a pitch-black night. Not even a flare rent the inky curtain which had descended on the hill. Craters and holes innumerable, dead bodies, fragments of timber, splintered barbed-wire posts, miles of barbed wire in inextricable tangles, made a forward rush impossible. But the hill had to be taken, and the army had entrusted the gallant “Half-Hundred” and the lads of the Kilmarnock bonnets with the task. So on the stroke of ten they were ready to go, the West Kents on the left, the K.O.S.B.’s on the right. It was a desperate undertaking, and it failed from the outset. As the first files of men clambered out over the parapet, the Germans, as though they had been waiting for the attack, opened a storm of shell on them, while the air fairly whizzed with machine-gun bullets. Only a few officers and a handful of men reached the German trench, and were there shot down or took cover in the numerous shell-holes dotted about. With the first light of daybreak another attempt was made to gain the hill. The Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Cheshires attacked, supported on either side by the bombers of the Irish Rifles and the K.O.S.B.’s respectively. Two companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry, despite a murderous fire, fairly burst their way into the Zwartelen salient, a very strong German redoubt, and were never heard of again. The Germans in their stronghold enfiladed the Cheshires on the right, and after a desperate struggle we had to fall back to our trenches. Throughout the night heavy fighting, often at close quarters with bomb and bayonet, went on amid a terrific bombardment, whilst from the north the guns thundered incessantly. That was our last attempt to capture Hill 60. Honeycombed with mines, eviscerated, battered, and blasted, the summit of the hill lay abandoned and desolate when I visited the positions in July. The dead were still lying in the craters, huge yawning chasms of crumbling brown earth, the edges strewn with a wild jumble of rags of uniform, haversacks, splintered rifles, and barbed wire. Just below the summit the German trenches, with sandbags of brown and blue and red and green, wound their way round the side of the hill, seeming to tower above our narrow trenches which clung to the lower slopes. II. THE FIGHT FOR THE SALIENT.