The explosion which the British sapper, in his tunnel dug-out, had mistaken for the discharge of the French mine, had been a huge German minenwerfer, or trench-bomb, thrown by a trench-howitzer.
The French mine, inexplicably delayed, had not been fired.
For a moment confusion reigned. Three men of the half-score Queen's Bays in the storming party were hurt. One suffered a broken arm, and the others, hurled aside by the unexpected explosion of our own mine, were badly bruised and strained.
In an instant, however, every man in the line realised what had occurred, and the Bays went forward with a yell, occupying about fifty yards of German first-line trench and the gaping crater left by the mine.
Fortifying the captured position and installing therein a couple of machine-guns, they met the enemy's counter-attacks staunchly.
For three hours and a half they kept the ground won, but at last were bombed out. The Huns threw hundreds of grenades among them, while our poor supply of trench-bombs ran out in but a few minutes.
I chatted with the remnants of the storming party when they came back. Many gruesome tales they told. One German soldier was blown high in the air, over a fringe of trees, and found some distance back of our front line, quite 150 yards from his own trench.
A trooper noticed a movement near a pile of timber, earth, and sandbags. Peering through the dim light, he saw a hand waving about aimlessly. Grasping it, he pulled with a will. A comrade assisted, and soon they unearthed a buried German.
The prisoner was a funny little fellow—a stocky Wurtemburger in green corduroys and a knitted helmet. When rescued, he lapsed into unconsciousness for an hour. He had been through the first battle of Ypres, he said later, in which he was the only one of his regiment to escape death or a wound. Blown high in air, very, very high, it seemed to him, he felt a great mass of débris fall upon him.
He told us, in a spirit of resignation to his fate, that to have lived through the October and November fighting on the Menin Road, and be thrown skyward by a mine, then buried, and still live, entitled him, he thought, to spend the rest of the War, without disgrace, in an enemy prison.