On I May there was another gas attack in the jumble of broken ground known to the British as Hill 60, the Dump and the Caterpillar, south of Ypres, where a railway line runs through the spoil heaps of the cutting near Zillibeke. Today the pockmarks and tumuli of this tiny battlezone still exude an atmosphere of morbidity sinister even among the relics of the Western Front.
On I May, when the soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Dorset Regiment clung to the firestep of their trenches as gas seized their throats and the German infantry pounded towards them across no man’s land, the scene must have been as near to hell as this earth can show. The situation was saved by a young officer, Second Lieutenant Kestell-Cornish, who seized a rifle and, with the four men remaining from his platoon of forty, fired into the gas cloud to hold the Germans at bay.
Another officer who devoted himself to those gassed reported that “quite 200 men passed through my hands… some died with me, others on the way down… I had to argue with many of them as to whether they were dead or not.” In fact, “90 men died from gas poisoning in the trenches; [and] of the 207 brought to the nearest [dressing] stations, 46 died almost immediately and 12 after long suffering.”
Source:
Keegan, John. "Stalemate." The First World War. New York: A. Knopf :, 1999. 198-99. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
W. Aggett, The Bloody Eleventh, III, London, 1995, p. 121.
Edmonds, 1915, I, p. 289.
Further Reading:
Première Bataille des Flandres / Erste Flandernschlacht (First Battle of Ypres)
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