The work of this mining under the German lines has been carried on for a year or more by a number of tunnelling companies from Australia, New Zealand, and our mining districts. It was hard, dangerous toil, for the enemy was down counter-mining, and there were frightful moments when the men who heard the working of picks very close to them had to be rushed out lest they should be blown into the next world. Their own work was done quickly lest the enemy should discover the secret of these borings beneath their lines before the ammonal with which they were packed was detonated on the morning of the battle. It was in darkness that the miners relieved each other lest enemy aircraft or eyes that always stared down from the ridges should see and suspect. Some of our English troops took Hill 60 after this explosion, which flung some of them to the ground as they rose at the signal of attack. From the craters they dragged that dazed and terror-stricken officer, who had lost all his company after that vibration of an electric wire in contact with hellish forces. Just south of these men, astride the Ypres-Comines Canal, a number of London battalions of the 47th Division were fighting forward to the ruins of the famous White Château, south of the canal, on the west of Hollebeke. It is the Château Matthieu, once a noble mansion, with a park in which a stream flowed from a lake to the canal, and fine stables south of the lake, surrounded by woods. For more than a year only ruins of the château stood, and the wood was like all these woods of war, lopped and torn by shell-fire, with black, dead limbs. Some of the London men were having a hard fight north of the canal in face of machine-gun fire sweeping them from two triangular spoil-banks, as they are called, where earth from the canal sides has been stacked, forming strong points for the enemy above their tunnelled defences. They took one of these heaps of earth with eighty prisoners, but fell back from the other holding the canal bank opposite White Château, where their comrades, London men all, were fighting heavily. The Germans here did not yield without a desperate resistance. A company and a half of men held the ruins of the château, and flung out bombs to keep our assaulting troops at bay. A gallant platoon crept round the château walls, and hurled bombs over these bits of brickwork, and after some time of this fighting the enemy hoisted a white flag of surrender, and sixty prisoners, survivors of this garrison, were taken. The Londoners still had a hard way to go across the stream from the lake, twenty feet broad at points, and past the stables and through the old stumps of the wood, but they kept to the time-table of the battle and added 450 prisoners to the great captures of the day. It was an historic day in the record of the London men of the 47th Division, who have fought with such glorious valour since they first came out to France. * * * * * JUNE 10