After the First Battle of Ypres in October-November 1914, the British line came to rest in a shallow curve around the village. The Chateau de Hooge, an old country house belonging to a local family, became the joint headquarters of the British 1st and 2nd Divisions. On 31 October 1914 a German shell came through the roof. Major-General Samuel Lomax of the 1st Division was mortally wounded; Major-General Charles Monro of the 2nd survived. Several staff officers were killed in the same blast. The chateau was reduced to two standing walls by June 1915. The men holding the line in 1915 - the Suffolks, the Honourable Artillery Company, the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Welch Fusiliers - lived in trenches so close to the Germans that hand grenades could be tossed between them. Snipers worked both sides at all hours. Trench raids killed in ones and twos every night.

In June 1915, men of the British 175th Tunnelling Company began a tunnel from the ruins of a gardener's cottage in the chateau grounds. They drove it 190 feet under a German strongpoint. The clay was waterlogged, so they had to load the explosives upward against the ceiling of the chamber: 3,500 pounds of ammonal supported with gunpowder and guncotton, the largest British mine of the war up to that day. At seven in the evening of 19 July 1915 they fired it. The crater was 120 feet wide and 20 feet deep. Two companies of the 8th Brigade went forward and took the lip, then had to fall back when their bombers ran out of grenades. Of the German garrison directly above the chamber, mostly young men of the 126th Infantry Regiment from Wurttemberg, very few were ever identified. The crater was filled in after the war, with hundreds of bodies still inside it. The Hooge Crater Cemetery now sits beside the spot.

Eleven days later, at 3:15 in the morning of 30 July 1915, the stables exploded. The Germans had brought up new equipment, large metal cylinders carried by special pioneer troops, the Flammenwerferpioniere of the Garde-Reserve-Pionier-Regiment. Jets of flame covered the British forward trenches in a single coordinated discharge. It was the first use of flamethrowers against British troops. Most of the 8th Rifle Brigade, holding the line, were overrun before they could understand what was happening. A second attempt with the flammenwerfer that morning was broken by rapid rifle fire when the British in the support line learned to aim at the men with the tanks on their backs. The Rifle Brigade lost more than 700 officers and men in a few hours, most of them killed by burning. Their officers were almost all university men from Oxford and Cambridge who had volunteered together in 1914.

After 1915 the underground war at Hooge spread into Railway Wood, just north-west of the village, where the 177th Tunnelling Company arrived in November. For nearly two years they ran galleries beneath the Germans and the Germans ran galleries beneath them, fighting in the dark with picks, pistols, hand grenades and camouflets - underground charges meant to crush an enemy tunnel without breaking the surface. On 28 April 1916, a German camouflet killed three men of the 177th Tunnelling Company, including a young officer, Lieutenant Charles Geoffrey Boothby. His body, and theirs, were never recovered. The wartime letters that Boothby wrote to his girlfriend Edith Ainscow were published in 2005 as A Love Story of the Great War; the volume covers the months before he was buried in clay he had helped to dig. The RE Grave, Railway Wood, marks the place where Boothby and eleven other men of the 177th and attached infantry remain underground, their twelve names cut into a small stone in the field.

On 6 June 1916, during the Battle of Mont Sorrel, the Experimental Company of the Prussian Guard Pioneers blew four mines under the British trenches at Hooge held by the 28th Canadian Battalion from Saskatchewan. A company of those men was annihilated in the explosions. The Germans held the position from then until the late summer of 1917, when the Third Battle of Ypres swept the area. They retook it in April 1918, and lost it for the last time on 28 September 1918, seven weeks before the armistice. Today the most visible relic in Hooge is a calm pond beside the Bellewaerde theme park, fashioned after the war by Baron de Wynck out of three mine craters from June 1916. The Hooge Crater Museum sits opposite the Hooge Crater Cemetery on the Menin road, and the small white headstones of the cemetery cover the ground where the chateau stables once stood. Walking the field above Railway Wood, you can find old crater rims softened by ninety summers of grass, and the small grey stone with the twelve names below it.