prised Germans with bombs.
The general disorder was increased by the fact that the trench parties
were just being relieved. In a few minutes the lost ground was
recovered, the German line dangerously pushed in and 254 prisoners,
including five officers, fell to the British. At midday the Germans
bombarded the line with fifty batteries for four hours. Then waves of
assaulting columns were let loose against the British. The latter
noticed that the front line of infantry hurled their bombs several
yards _behind_ the British trenches and rushed forward with hands up.
Immediately a hurricane of shells from their own guns burst among the
German infantry. The survivors flung themselves on the ground and
crawled into the British trenches for protection. This action was the
more significant in that the men who thus surrendered were all very
young and belonged to a regiment which, until then, had fought with
conspicuous bravery. At the end of the day the British counted more
than 300 corpses, while their own losses were slight and their entire
gains maintained.

Most of the combats in the Artois and Ypres sectors consisted of mine
springing and crater fighting. What was once the Hohenzollern Redoubt
was particularly the scene of some vigorous subterranean warfare. What
happened there on March 2 is thus described by an eyewitness: "Many
huge craters have been made, won, and what is more, retained by a rare
combination of skill, courage, and endurance. Men who fought all
through the war have seen nothing comparable with the largest of
these craters. They are amphitheaters, and cover perhaps half an acre
of ground. When the mine exploded at 5.45 p. m. on March 2, 1916, a
thing like a great black mushroom rose from the earth. Beneath it
appeared, with the ponderous momentum of these big upheavals, a white
growth like the mushroom's gills. It was the chalk subsoil following
in the wake of the black loam. With this black and white upheaval went
up, Heaven knows, how many bodies and limbs of Germans, scattered
everywhere with the rest of the debris. And the explosion sent up many
graves as well as the bodies of the living. One of the British bombers
who occupied the crater and spent a crowded hour hurling bombs from
the farther lip found that he was steadying himself and getting a
lever for the bowling arm by clinging on to a black projection with
his left hand. It was a Hessian boot. The soil of the amphitheater was
so worked, mixed,