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By Root 1849 0

to enclose the remnants of Hooge Chateau, left in No Man’s Land after the fight on 16 June. All that was left of the chateau was a few tumbled walls, little more than fifty yards from the furthest point of the British front line where it reached out round the ruins of the old stables. The chateau was the original objective, for it was suspected that the Germans would regard it as a stronghold. But every day, as his men worked in the lengthening tunnel below, Lieutenant Cassels made a point of visiting the front-line trench and peering through a periscope at the German line, looking for the tell-tale signs that would show that the ruins were being fortified. After several days of close observation, he concluded that they were not. But he spotted a still better target – two newly completed concrete redoubts, a little way apart, each big enough to hold a company, and pierced with threatening apertures, wide enough to provide machine-guns with a deadly field of fire.

The plans were changed, and the tunnel was diverted to run towards the new objective. It was to be a Y-shaped tunnel now, with a subsidiary arm running from the main passage and two chambers packed with explosive, one under each of the redoubts. But the time was short, the work was necessarily hasty, and on the left, the minor tunnel deviated so far from the second redoubt that the charge was bound to miss it altogether. This was a severe blow. There were only days to go. The plans had been made, and the infantry was standing by to follow up the explosion, to consolidate the crater while the enemy was still staggering from the shock, and by breaching his stoutest stronghold, to pave the way for the capture of the ridge.

In desperation, Cassels came up with a bold plan and managed to persuade his superiors to agree to it. He proposed to pack all the explosive into a single charge beneath one redoubt in the hope that the force of a single mighty explosion would also destroy the other. To make quite sure of success, it was also decided to use an explosive not commonly used by the Army. It was three times as powerful as gunpowder and, knowing perfectly well that there was a stock of it in France, Major Cowan sent an indent to GHQ for three and a half thousand pounds of ammonal.

This request caused consternation, and not a little puzzlement at GHQ. No one was familiar with ammonal and the indent was passed to the V Corps Quartermaster, with a request for clarification. He was equally at a loss, but he was struck by the idea of consulting the Medical Officer at Corps Headquarters, and the MO replied without hesitation. Ammonal, he informed the startled Quarter-master , was a sedative drug prescribed to subdue cases of abnormal sexual excitement. He added, thoughtfully, that so far as he knew, no such cases had yet occurred among V Corps troops.

This provided food for thought. It was hard to fathom why 175th Company was demanding almost two tons of the stuff, presumably for the use of its two hundred men! The Quartermaster might have been forgiven for wondering in bafflement what manner of men they were.

Further inquiries disclosed the difference between the use and effect of the explosive ammonal and the drug ammonol and cleared up the misunderstanding, but it all caused delay. The mine was to be fired just before the infantry attacked on 19 July. Three days before the deadline, the ammonal had still not arrived and Cassels frantically set about begging and borrowing whatever explosive he could lay hands on from neighbouring companies and local stores, which – for obvious reasons – did not hold large stocks of such dangerous material so close to the line. He scraped up less than fifteen hundred pounds, and although it contained a small quantity of ammonal, the rest was conventional gunpowder and gun-cotton – poor stuff by comparison. It was nowhere near enough, but the attack could not be postponed and it would have to do. But he doubted whether it would do the job. The miners worked all through the night of 16 July, pulling the heavy bags of explosive down the long