A French engineer officer joined us. He told us General Lefebvre, the French General in command of that section of the Salient, had issued most elaborate written instructions for the joint explosion of the two mines. The French mine, he said, had been ready for two or three days, its charge lying at the end of a tunnel but two metres from the German trench. The hour for the discharge of the French mine came, but no sound or shock of explosion came with it. The hands of the Allied watches, carefully synchronised, crept round to 7·50, then to 7·55. Just before eight o'clock a huge bang was heard by the British sapper who was waiting in his tunnel, ready to fire his mine. "At last," he murmured. "Now I must count off the five minutes to the second." A squadron of the Queen's Bays was ready to rush into the enemy's trench. Ten of them, the forward storming party, were waiting in a saphead. One, two, three, four, and at last, _five_. Boom! The whole earth seemed thrown skyward. The shock was terrific. Nearly one thousand pounds of blasting powder had tossed fifty yards of German trench, not two hundred feet in front of our line, high in air. The great smash came as a complete surprise to the Huns, but, alas! an equal surprise to French and British. 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.