German attack on Vimy Ridge, 21 May 1916
In 1932, Edmonds recorded 1,344 German casualties; 615 men in the attack and 729 during British counter-attacks. British casualties in the 47th Division from 22 to 24 May were 1,571, 2nd Division casualties were 267 and the 7th Brigade (25th Division) had 637 casualties, a total of 2,475. In 1936, the official historians of "Der Weltkrieg", the German official history, recorded that 300 British prisoners had been taken.
Mines on the first day of the Somme
During the Allied preparations for the Battle of Vimy Ridge (9 – 12 April 1917) the mines fired on the first day of the Somme became the object of strategic considerations. In order to assess the consequences of infantry having to advance across cratered ground after a mining attack, officers from the Canadian Corps visited La Boisselle and Fricourt where the mines had been blown. Their reports and the experience of the Canadians at St Eloi in April 1916 – where mines had so altered and damaged the landscape as to render occupation of the mine craters by the infantry all but impossible –, led to the decision to remove offensive mining from the central sector allocated to the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge. 
William Orpen, an official war artist, saw the "Lochnagar" mine crater in 1916 while touring the Somme battlefield, collecting subjects for paintings and described a wilderness of chalk dotted with shrapnel. John Masefield also toured the Somme, while preparing "The Old Front Line" (1917), in which he also described the area around the Lochnagar Crater as dazzlingly white and painful to look at.