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, and sieved by the explosive action and the effects of the melting snow that it was almost impassable. A staff officer, among others, who went up to help, had to be pulled out of the morass as he was carrying away one of the wounded. There is no fighting so terrible and so condensed as crater fighting. The struggle is a veritable graveyard, a perfect target for bomb and grenade and the slower attack of the enemy's mine. The British held a circle of German trenches on a little ridge of ground north of Loos. The capture meant that they could overlook the plain beyond and win a certain projection. At 6.00 p. m. on March 2, 1916, the engineers exploded four mines under the nearer arc, and within a few minutes, while artillery thundered overhead, the British infantry advanced in spite of terrible mud and occupied each crater. Not a single machine gun was fired at them as they charged--probably the mines had destroyed them all--and their casualties were very small indeed."