Current Information:

Age-29

40, Enbrook Street Queen's Park

Epehy Wood Farm Cemetery, Epehy, France

By mid-September, 1918, the Allied offensive that had begun a month earlier, had pushed the enemy back almost to the Hindenburg Line. The task now was to break through this formidable defensive system and in order to gain possession of its outlying defences and obtain good observation over it before launching a general attack, a series of operations, some large scale and others more modest in nature were launched by the British Third and Fourth Armies.

12th Division had been heavily involved in the fighting on 18th September when they captured the village of Épehy. 9th Royal Fusiliers of 36 Brigade had played a leading part in the fighting that day, advancing 1500 yards and establishing posts on Malassie ridge. However, this was a limited success and none of the units involved were able to capture the final objectives. They were withdrawn on the following day but were brought back into the action on 21st September when a further attempt was made to capture these objectives, lying to the east of Épehy. They reached their assembly positions at 5am and forty minutes later, under cover of an artillery barrage, they advanced with 7th Sussex on their left and 6th Royal West Kent on their right. Very soon they came under extremely heavy machine-gun fire and were unable to get any further than Mule Trench, the first objective. They tried to advance once more at 1pm but this time the accompanying artillery barrage was very weak. Again very heavy machine-gun fire was opened up and no progress was made and what was left of the battalion took what shelter they could in Mule Trench. This had been a very costly operation in terms of casualties for 9th Royal Fusiliers with 270 officers and men either killed or wounded. One of these was Henry Hill, who was killed in action.