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.
On the right of the London troops were some English county regiments of the 41st Division--the 60th Rifles (King's Royal Rifles), West Kents, and others--men who fought a great battle in the Somme fields that day when a Tank waddled up the high street of Flers with cheering men behind.
On the night of June 6 they lay by St.-Eloi, in the salient opposite the Mound, a famous heap of earth taken over by the glorious old 3rd Division, and lost when the Canadians were violently attacked a year ago. This mound had been cratered by deep mines in those bad old days of fighting, but the enemy did not know that new shafts had been tunnelled under them, and that explosive forces enormously greater than in the first mines were about to be touched off. When the metal discs were fired by tunnelling officers the sound of thousands of our men cheering with the wild madness of enthusiasm could be heard even above the deafening uproar of the explosions. Then waves of riflemen ran forward, round the vast craters that had been flung open and across the first line of German trenches, frightfully upheaved and shattered. There were not many living Germans here, and they were dazed by the shock and terror of the mines and made no kind of fight. Beyond them was a strong place known as the Damstrasse, a street of concrete houses built of great blocks six feet thick, and so enormously solid that not even heavy shell-bursts could do much damage to them. This position had given great anxiety to our officers, who knew its strength, but as it happened, the violence of our shell-fire was so amazing that many of these blockhouses were blown in, and the garrison of Damstrasse was utterly cowed, so that they were captured by hundreds.