It was by that
listening instrument, more perfect than the enemy's, that we had
beaten him, and by the grim determination of those underground men of
ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they worked, who
coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who packed high explosives
at the shaft-heads--hundreds of tons of it--for the moment when a
button should be touched far away, and an electric current would pass
down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown into dust.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the
Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June
7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired
in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-
shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill. I
saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as
though the fires of hell had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of
men against their fellow--creatures.
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