GASSING HITLER

Just a month before the end of WWI, the future Fuhrer was blinded by a British shell and invalided away from the frontline. Over a century later, has the artillery brigade that launched the fateful attack finally been identified?

- DAVID ORR AND GLYN TAYLOR

Just after dawn on 14 October 1918, after a night of heavy bombardment, a German Army despatch runner staggered back to his regimental HQ at Wervicq-Sud near France's border with Belgium.

His eyes were burning red and his voice was no more than a croak. It was clear that he had been gassed.

By the time he reached a first aid station in a mansion called the Château Blanc, the 29-year-old could no longer see. The diagnosis of gassing was confirmed when he was transferred to a clinic in German-occupied Belgium and then to a hospital in Germany. By the time he was released the following month - and had regained his faculties - Berlin had capitulated and the First World War was over.

Adolf Hitler recounted this experience in Mein Kampf (1925): "The British opened an attack on the front south of Ypres," he wrote. "They used the yellow gas whose effect was unknown to us, at least from personal experience. I was destined to experience it that very night. On a hill south of Wervik [Wervicq], in the evening of October 13th, we were subjected for several hours to a heavy bombardment with gas bombs, which continued throughout the night with more or less intensity."

This hill lies on the French side of the Belgian border where, to this day, it is grandiosely called La Montagne (The Mountain). At the outset of the Battle of Courtrai - one of a series of engagements during The Final Advance in Flanders when the Allies had their enemy on the run - the Belgian town of Wervik on the River Lys was in German hands. It was quickly taken by the British Second Army as the Allies pushed relentlessly across northern France and Belgium.

By "yellow gas", Hitler was referring to mustard gas, not because of the colour it can have when deployed but because of the yellow cross with which the Germans marked their shells containing the chemical agent. It earned its name because of its faint smell of mustard.