Geotrupes

“ Here men are posted, while all work is for a time stopped, to listen for the first sounds of the enemy's sappers—the thud-thud of the picks or the "cough" of the man whose lungs seek this relief in the stuffy air of the cramped tunnel.
If the enemy is not found, progress is continued forward from both ends of the cross-gallery and the game goes merrily on.
About this stage the mining officer will, if you happen to be holding the trench under which he is grovelling, wax eloquent over a crumpled sheet of tracing linen that he presents to your view as a diagram of the workings. ”

“ What is called a field company of Engineers is, roughly, of the same strength as an infantry company. It carries with it shovels for digging trenches, axes for cutting down trees, wire for making entanglements, sand-bags for protecting men firing from trenches, explosives, carpenters' and smiths' tools, water-supply stores, signalling apparatus, and the materials for making maps. All these things are carried in four-horsed carts and on the backs of pack animals. Six-horsed wagons are laden with the materials for building bridges, such as pontoons, trestles, planks, and so forth. ”

“ Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. [Pg 61] The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not more desolate. ”

“ A new defensive system had to be established, and there were no R.E. dumps of tools and material, very few maps available, very little information of any kind. Reconnaissance for tools and material, of bridges and streams and water supply, was thus of the highest importance, and was put in hand early. Other work, more important than trench digging, soon developed for the sappers. The map will show how important in this sector were the river-crossings, and accommodation for various commands was urgently required. ”

“ Well, the tunnel was started about the middle of January, 1916. Some of my men—Italians who had hurried home to fight for their country when the war started—had had some previous experience with hand and machine drills in the mines of Colorado and British Columbia, but the most of our labour had to gain its experience as the work progressed. Considering this, as well as the difficulty of bringing up material (to say nothing of food and munitions) , we made very good progress. ”

“ Perhaps the next war will be fought not merely underground, but deep in the bowels of the earth, and victory will rest, not with the finest shots or the expert swordsmen, but with the men who can dig a tunnel most quickly. The trenches may be cut by some herculean plough, deep tunnels may be dug by great machines, and huge pumping engines may keep them dry. ”

“ The trenches were swarming with soldiers, the reliefs who were going back to billets, and the reserves who were taking their places; the sappers and pioneers, with their picks and shovels, who, protected by the machine-guns, repair the shelters wherever they have given way; the ambulance men and the stretcher-bearers; the grave diggers; the supplying sections, who bring up the cases of grenades, before ever they appear with food. This crowd of dim men, ten feet underground, moved like a silent river. ”

“ It must be always borne in mind that mining is not an independent service, but is employed in connection with the other arms of the service.
Underground activity, either offensive or defensive, is first observed from those points in our lines nearest the enemy. All enemy trenches facing salients of our lines will be the object of particular attention and closest daily observation. This observation of the first-line and support-line trenches should disclose the presence of enemy underground works and their approximate location. ”

“ His journey might be a long or a short one, he might only have to find a company commander in the trenches one or two hundred yards away, he might on the other hand have a several hours' long trudge ahead of him, a bewildering way to pick through the darkness across a maze of fields and a net-work of trenches, over and between the rubble heaps that represented the remains of a village, along roads pitted with all sorts of blind traps in the way of shell holes, strings of barbed wire, overturned carts, broken branches of trees, flung stones and beams ”

“ So intense was the fighting below ground in our operations on the Vimy Ridge that we would explode sometimes as many as 4 separate mines a night on our own small company front, only 500 yards in length of sector. In one of our clay galleries we reached the enemy trenches and, passing under them, ran into the timber of one of their mining-shafts. Carefully cutting a small hole through one of their timbers we listened there, relieving each other from time to time for nearly twenty-four hours. We would carefully crawl up to our listening-hole and sit tight in the dark, hardly daring to breathe. ”

“ We looked out above the mine-craters, a chaos of tumbled earth, where our trenches ran so close to the enemy's that it was forbidden to smoke or talk, and where our sappers listened with all their souls in their ears to any little tapping or picking which might signal approaching upheaval. The coats of some French soldiers, blown up long ago by some of these mines, looked like the blue of the chicory flower growing in the churned-up soil... ”

“ Those officers who could get horses rode round to look at the country which for nine months we had been watching through telescopes, and the concrete emplacements of Monchy and Le Quesnoy Farm were all explored, while No Man's Land, the only place free from wire and shell holes, provided an excellent canter. The Companies were largely employed in road mending, filling up German mine craters, and making tracks across the trenches for our Artillery. ”

“ Thus, although a bore, originally sunk on comparatively high ground for the purpose of irrigating a particular area of land, might through one cause or another have ceased to flow, it could still be made available for any low-lying area farther afield by the simple expedient of tapping it below the surface by means of a trench or tunnel. ”

“ Almost everywhere on the western front the enemy are intrenched in deep, well-constructed trenches, and in nearly every area these trenches are further fortified by numerous deep dugouts and underground galleries, in most cases close-timbered with four-inch oak and other hard woods. The German mine systems are also almost invariably close-timbered. ”

“ Careful observation may show that a number of men come up the communication-trenches regularly to certain spots and there disappear from view. One may notice carrying parties coming up with timber, by catching sight of the timber above the trench. Infantry listening patrols, who have been listening in "No Man's Land" at night may have heard the sound of machinery or ventilators at work, or some other sounds which go to prove the existence of enemy mining, or the location of mine-shafts, etc. ”

“ All we had to do was to crawl out into No Man's Land, lie on our bellies with our ears to the ground and listen for the tap tap of the German engineers or sappers who might be tunnelling under No Man's Land to establish a mine-head beneath our trench. ”

“ Those two labourers are on the other side of the German trenches.
The setting sun is glinting on the little crumbling village two or three hundred yards ahead, and as you walk towards it in the still evening air your steps ring loud on the pavé. On each side the flat, neglected fields stretch away from the road; the drains beside it are choked with weeds and refuse; and here and there one of the gaunt trees, split in two half-way up by a shell, has crashed into its neighbour or fallen to the ground. ”

“ We fire our mines under their trenches and the infantry raiding-parties immediately cross and clean up any Germans we might have missed with our attentions. As a result of our noiseless work below in the clay, we would occasionally break through into each other's galleries. ”

“ Land mines are placed in the line of the advance of the enemy and exploded either by electricity or fuse from the defense. They are made by digging holes from 2 to 3 yards deep, either by excavation or by boring. ”

“ Both the Germans and ourselves used huge mine-charges ... and the effect of the explosion of many big mines is spread over a large area.
Most of the craters, big and small, were more or less consolidated by building narrow, winding trenches out to them from the front lines, and then cutting trenches in the rims. Sentries would be posted at good observation-posts overlooking these craters, and it was an unhealthy practice to take your evening stroll there. ”

“ The earth is shaken for miles around, trenches are entirely buried with the débris, while companies of men are engulfed, and immense mine-craters formed.
During the progress of this war there has been a constant increase in the number of engineering troops and development in engineer equipment. While the organization of the German troops at the outset of the war included large numbers of engineer soldiers specially trained for military purposes, the number of engineer units in the British forces as well as those of our other allies was comparatively small. ”

“ We dug places for the artificers, kitchens for the cooks, walled-in places for forage, and but for the timely arrival of a battalion of Indian infantry we should have dug the trenches round the camp; we were mercifully spared that, however.
By way of a change we dug holes: big holes, little holes, round holes, square holes, rectangular holes; holes for refuse; wide, deep holes for washing-pits; every kind of hole you can think of and many you can't. ”

“ The major's dug-out is situated near a fairly wide cross road. A forest alley prolongs to right and left a level perspective; the sun, which at this hour is directly overhead, appears as a magnificent avenue cutting right through the heart of the forest. The company in reserve is stationed here, but not a man is visible in the sunlight. When one gets nearer, however, heads pop up out of a trench among the brambles which cover it. ”

“ Swamps, soggy undulations formed by the trenches and the convoys, a wet, clayey soil, into which one sinks to the waist. Mud everywhere. Slime everywhere. One must slide down the funnels and holes that the shells have made. Thus the waves of the assault gather for their onset. The Germans had constructed defences formed of five lines of trenches, each alternated with at least three rows of barbed wire entanglements. ”

“ When a valley is to be swept in course of punitive operations, an adequate force should be left to secure the entrance, if the column is to leave by this route.
Troops, as has already been suggested, should, in respect of ammunition, food, and warm coats, be independent of transport animals, and it should be understood that units are always to be prepared to remain for the night away from camp. The men should be trained to economise water, which is often scarce across the border. ”

“ If the breadth of No Man’s Land was not considerable, they were frequently blown with a view to destroying our trenches with their garrisons. If, however, the breadth of No Man’s Land was great, or his system of defensive galleries were good, he would blow his mines in No Man’s Land with a view to occupying them as a line of observation and snipers’ posts. By the frequent blowing of this type of mine, he was able to cover his front with a screen of craters which denied the British observation of his front line, and created for him a chain of commanding mounds along our front. ”

“ But here, from the top of the hill, we saw on a hill a mile or two away long lines on the hillside, where the chalk had been thrown up in building the trenches, and opposite them other white and brown lines, where the German trenches were, white lines in all directions—a sort of maze upon the hillside our trenches and their's—and behind that hill other hills in the distance, much like Salisbury Plain and Aldershot. There is a very noticeable difference in the country here in districts occupied by the English. Civilians here are in their farms right up to the firing line. ”

“ An important branch of sapping and mining is the listening for the sound of the enemy’s subterranean operations in special “listening galleries” running out at intervals from the main sap. A precise indication of the locality where a mine was exploded, or rather of the trench from which the shaft of the sap was sunk, might not only intimate to the enemy that our sappers and miners were active in that particular sector, but might give him valuable assistance in testing the efficacy of any special apparatus or means he employs for listening underground. ”

“ In view of the possible destruction of our fleet and disaster to our army, a complete plan of earthwork defence must be surveyed and prepared, behind which an army might stand for six weeks, or as long as it would be required to prepare a second fleet and another army. The possible defence of every large harbour by torpedo or otherwise must be organized, and some three or four great earthwork strongholds made, or prepared to be made, at such points as shall be decided on, such as round the capital and round our chief arsenals. ”