The early hours of the night of the 25th were unusually quiet about the Bluff. Artillery was silent. Snipers and machine-gunners seemed half-hearted in their activities. The 7th (British Columbia) Battalion was engaged in preparing for a relief which was to be completed by midnight.
At ten o'clock the quiet was shattered by a tremendous convulsion. Earth, fire, rock, and smoke belched to heaven. Trenches vanished, engulfed. Instantly the S.O.S. rocket went up. Our machine-guns responded like crackling echoes of the explosion.
Within thirty seconds of the rocket-signal for help the guns of Dodd's Group commenced a crushing bombardment of the German positions which threatened the new crater. Our counter-attacking parties advanced, armed with rifles, grenades, and machine-guns. They occupied the forward lip of the crater, the flanking shell-holes overlooking its raw depths, certain points commanding the canal, and a ridge running between an historic old crater and the new.
The Germans, reinforced and ready for the dash from cover and the occupation of the Crater swarmed to their parapets, and swayed and seethed there for a little while like a headed wave about to break and flood forward. Then the wave broke and subsided--backward instead of forward.
The great attack was dead, dead in the first half-minute of its furious and painful life, killed by the smashing fire of our artillery and the whipping hail of our machine-guns.
Within one and a half hours of the blowing of the mine the O.C. the 7th Battalion reported to his Brigadier that the menace was past, and that the new crater was being swiftly absorbed by our defensive positions. Our artillery reduced its fire by one-half. Five minutes later the German artillery retaliation ceased, the fire of our machine-guns and artillery dropped to normal, and the relief of our infantry--which had been interrupted and delayed for nearly two hours--was calmly continued.
Owing to the precaution of thinning the garrisons in the threatened locality, our casualties were wonderfully light--less than fifty all told in killed, wounded, and missing. It is safe to say that the enemy casualties, caused by our artillery, machine-guns, Stokes and trench-mortar batteries, were much heavier; and, in addition to their loss of life and limb, the Germans lost their adventure. The months of toil devoted to the laying of the mine and the tons of explosive which comprised it failed to strengthen their position by a tittle or to weaken ours by a jot.