Beneath Hill 60: The Extraordinary True Story of the Secret War Being Waged Beneath the Trenches of the Western Front

The extraordinary little-known true story of the cat-and-mouse war waged beneath the trenches of the Western Front and the subject of a major new film."Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one -- fire! Down goes the firing switch. At first, nothing. Then from deep down there comes a low rumble, and it is as if the world is splitting apart."On June 7th, 1917, nineteen massive mines exploded beneath Messines Ridge near Ypres. The largest man-made explosion in history up until that point shattered the landscape and smashed open the German lines. Ten thousand German soldiers died. Two of the mines -- at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar -- were fired by men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, comprising miners and engineers rather than parade-ground soldiers. Drawing on the diaries of one of the key combatants, Beneath Hill 60 tells the little-known, devastatingly brutal true story of this subterranean war waged beneath the Western Front -- a stygian battle-ground where men drowned in viscous chalk, suffocated in the blue gray clay, choked on poisonous air or died in the darkness, caught up in vicious hand-to-hand fighting.