On July 22nd the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low, horribly afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by a gust of flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon them.

“I thought I had been blown to bits,” one of them told me. “I was a quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, ‘Christ!⁠ ⁠… Christ!’ ”

When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the enemy’s redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had been a crisscross of trenches and sandbag shelters for their machine-guns and a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps which had blocked up the enemy’s trenches on either side of the position, so that they could not rush into the cavern and take possession. It was our men who “rushed” the crater and lay there panting in its smoking soil.